The great Bob Hoffman referred in his AdContrarian blog to ‘informed guessing’. His point being that despite wrapping ourselves in scientific-sounding words and phrases there is precious little in the advertising world that a qualified scientist would recognise as ‘science’.

What there is, what we do, is informed guesswork.

An old golf joke. A wealthy tourist is playing one of the iconic Scottish courses, accompanied by an ancient caddy. The golfer hits a truly awful shot. Silence from the caddy. ‘Funny old game, golf’ says the player. ‘Aye, but it’s not meant to be’ comes the caddy’s reply.

A couple of weeks ago the Cog Blog published ‘Thought Leaders; Thought Followers’ highlighting how rarely our largest media agency leaders participate in open discussion. Several commentators duly discovered the American author (and failed politician) Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”.

The fact is our largest agencies, the very organisations who should be leading the industry, are conflicted. Who at the end of the day is their client?

A substantial disconnect (one of many to be fair) between advertising people and financial commentators and investors is the degree of (dis)comfort with the old notion that 70% of an agency’s assets go up and down in the lift every day.

Ad people naturally enough believe this to be true. The greatest asset they have is their people, and the reason for that is that they’re convinced, as am I that advertisers buy people. Plus it’s always reassuring to be described as an asset.

I don’t much like this time of year. In London it’s wet, dreary, cold, dark, that’s true, but far worse this seems to be the time of year for memorials and saying goodbye.

Just in the last two or three months (and only in my world) we have lost Denise Turner, the IPA’s Research Director at an unfairly young age, my old agency colleague Bryan Smith, and the peerless Dominic Proctor, CEO of JWT, Founder CEO at Mindshare. As I wrote in another place, Dom was loved not only by those who worked for him and with him but by those of us who competed against him.

The fact that the ad industry is in a mess isn’t in doubt. We operate a business model no longer fit for purpose. We face substantial job losses. Creativity in advertising is in retreat. Original content creation is under threat. Direct political interference in how budgets are spent is real. Audience definitions and numbers are no longer verified.

With hindsight this has been brewing for decades; ever since media excellence was defined as delivering the biggest numbers for the lowest cost.

I once managed to persuade Rupert Murdoch into Leo Burnett (I was Media Director) for ‘The Chairman’s Lunch’. This was held every month or so, hosted by the late great Richard Wheatly for senior clients. My job was to get a ‘media character’ along. I invited Murdoch; this was in the early days of Sky. He said yes. Amongst the clients present was someone senior at Kellogg’s.

Last month Advertising: Who Cares? (AWC) the movement started by myself and Nick Manning in 2024 held its second event – a Summit.

My LinkedIn feed filled with lovely posts, not just around the content created by our workstream leaders and their teams over 8 months, but with praise for the whole notion of a volunteer movement.

There’s a saying: ‘Everyone’s an expert in two things. His or her own job, and advertising’. This implies two things. First, there is a defined thing called ‘advertising’ and second that it’s something you can become expert in, without expending too much effort.

‘Planning’ is having a moment. There are posts on measurement, on MMM, on Origin, on cross-media, on using data, on owning data, on what we mean (or should mean) by outcomes, on where we’re all going wrong and from when. At least it makes a change from the horrible mess that is ‘buying’.

Victor Meldrew is a fictional cantankerous character in the BBC sitcom, ‘One Foot in the Grave’, played by Richard Wilson, whose catchphrase is often misquoted as ‘I simply don’t believe it’ (the word ‘simply’ is simply incorrect).

Fake news is (according to Wikipedia) ‘false or misleading information … often (with) the aim of making money through advertising revenue’.

Once upon a time if you wanted to talk about broad industry matters (beyond the vertical specialisms) you went to lunch. Or to the golf course. Now you go to a conference / event. The change from eating and golfing to meeting and talking doesn’t seem to have helped much. We’re still not solving the industry’s biggest problems.

It always used to be said that you could sit through any number of agency presentations, take the company logo off the deck and struggle to tell one from the other. Not any longer.

It’s been a strange few weeks in what some of us still see fondly as ‘adland’.

It is 2008. At the asi Advertising Effectiveness event, Professor John Philip Jones (ex JWT, at this time at Syracuse University) is presenting early findings on the impact that advertising on the new ‘social media’ (Facebook was in the foothills with somewhere around 100 million users) by his client P&G has on their brands.

The ad business, and most particularly the media bit of it is balanced. We have chips on both shoulders. We are loathe to lift our eyes from spreadsheets and management edicts the better to see our clients’ needs. Heads down, shoulders slumped.

There are good reasons for adopting this ungainly position.

For decades we’ve been told how unimportant and insignificant we really are. Marketers spend a tiny proportion of their time worrying about advertising; and a small fraction of that tiny proportion on anything to do with media. So runs the stated wisdom.

This is either nonsense – in my long experience most clients worry, a lot – or it should be.

Not being concerned about where multiple millions of dollars are spent would surely be a gross dereliction of duty to any business and its stakeholders.

Agencies are professional advisors; we exist to help clients get the best results for their money, to spend those dollars wisely. Yet how we act isn’t always in line with this.

For example:

• There is solid evidence that for those whose primary concern is to build or maintain brands, advertising on television is peerless, delivering the high attention needed to build brand stories.
• And yet brand marketers keep spending huge sums on lower attention, social media channels.
• There is solid evidence that where you advertise matters. Which is why every agency worth the name hires skilled strategists, comms planners, analysts etc.
• And yet some agencies buy media as principals, seemingly regardless of whether what they’re buying delivers the carefully built plan.
• The online ad industry has spawned a criminal enterprise under the generic title of ad fraud.
• And yet we keep pretending we are cutting out fraud – even if it mysteriously keeps growing. It’s almost as if we don’t really want to look too closely.
• Advertising can play a huge role in driving brand growth – and there are volumes of data and case studies to prove it. Clients want growing, successful brands that build and improve their margins.
• And yet we spend our time being judged not on the growth we deliver but on the cheapness of what we’ve bought.
• Advertisers hire procurement professionals whose job is to procure what’s best for the business at the lowest available price. They hire consultants whose job is to assess the value the agency brings to the business.
• And yet we blame these people for not judging us against the ‘right’ criteria. Without telling them consistently, and comprehensively how they should be measuring us, and on what basis they should value us.
• This business is full of bright, creative people. People wired to think differently, persuasively. People who can convince Cadbury that the best way to sell chocolate is to stick a guy in a gorilla suit behind a set of drums without once mentioning the words ‘chocolate’ or ‘Cadbury’.  (Other great examples are available).
• And yet we give credence to those who apparently want to destroy any semblance of craft in advertising. Listen to Mark Zuckerberg on how he intends to do away with the need for any form of ad agency. Or the owner of X threatening to sue advertisers for not using his platform.
• How do we react? We take their money sponsoring our conferences and put them on the biggest stages to be interviewed (ever so gently) by our top leaders.
• We have spent decades building up thoughtful measurement systems through collaboration and compromise.
• And yet we are prepared to believe what suits the largest vendors without question and without any hint of criticism. Indeed, we build what suits them into our thinking, with scant regard as to whether it fits with what we know.

We are in a crisis in large part of our own making.

This crisis is what prompted Nick Manning and me to start Advertising: Who Cares? just over a year ago.

We see the industry as a whole in a hole. Not one hole that could easily be fixed but a whole warren of interconnected holes.

The problem with warrens is that they weaken what’s above them. They may be nice and warm and safe until the structures above them crash through.

This has nothing to do with harking back to some golden age or wishing for a long-gone era.

It has all to do with an existential threat.

If we continue to fail to convince our clients that what we do is worth paying for, if we spend disproportionately in channels that don’t work, and if we encourage those whose criteria for success are self-defined and out of reach of any validation, we deserve what’s coming.

We should challenge more, starting by talking about these issues. We need to do a far better job bringing all the evidence, dispassionately and objectively to the attention of advertisers, their marketing teams, their CFOs and their Boards.

This is what Advertising: Who Cares? is trying to encourage, and it seems to be happening, slowly.

By attending our summit and putting your point-of-view on October 16^th in London you can help us all do our bit to make things better.

Seriously.

George Bernard Shaw famously commented that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language”.

For as long as I can remember the UK and US advertising industries have run on parallel but distinctly different paths.

Given recent events in the US, a debate on ‘what is the ad business for’ is overdue. Is it about creating messages and experiences (including ads), designed specifically to help drive clients’ businesses and placed in environments that will help achieve that aim? Or is it about producing ads quickly, and cheaply, to be placed automatically, using spurious metrics, regardless of client needs?

The ad industry has always been framed by different factions shouting ever louder – from the pages of the trades and conference platforms. No change there then – from the days of arguments around commission versus fees, to the ‘no longer a need for account people’ and the merits and demerits of social media this has always been a business fuelled by strong, imaginative opinions.

Taken from ‘The Attention Economy: A Category Blueprint’ by Dr Karen Nelson-Field. What follows is based on my 1½ page contribution to an excellent 371 page book

If a week is a long time in politics, and a day is an age in the wacky world of online media, I’m not sure what 266 years and a week is. On the 20^th January 1759 Dr Samuel Johnson published an article in the 40^th Edition of The Idler (insert your own joke here as to the modern equivalent of The Idler; maybe it’s the WPP Work-from-Home Manual). In it he said:

“Whatever is common is despised. Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick.” 

Leo Burnett is no more, the agency now part of Publicis Groupe is being merged with Publicis Worldwide to form Leo.

So what?