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?

In my office hangs a six-word, framed message. It was given to me in 1990 at a Leo Burnett company strategy meeting at which I had spoken about the threat to the traditional advertising ecosystem posed by what were then known as media independents. The message was written by the agency’s creative leadership, after Ogden Nash. In its entirety it reads:

“Don’t worry media. We need ya.”

Back in the day when newspapers were newspapers a good media quiz question was: Who has the most upscale male readers? ‘The Financial Times’ or ‘The Sun’?

In April, Nick Manning and I started a grassroots movement called ‘Advertising: Who Cares?’ (AWC) because of a number of serious, even existential, threats to not only the craft but ultimately the business of advertising.

About a month ago (September 12^th) we launched the Advertising: Who Cares? movement with a 4-hour long event at London’s Royal Society of Arts. We had an exceptional speaker line up; we sold every seat; we paid no-one and spent nothing. We took no sponsorship money. We raised money for NABS, the advertising industry charity.

This all demonstrates a few things to me. Not least on the importance of encouraging free debate and discussion, something that rarely happens at sponsored conferences where speaker selection and sponsors are intertwined – but that’s for another post.

Advertising reflects society, it doesn’t drive it, which would go some way to explaining why the industry today is so divisive. Everything is black or white, you’re for me or against me. You love or you hate. Compromise is for wimps. Discussion wastes time, debate is the enemy of progress.

In April, Nick Manning and I had one of our regular two-old-guys-in-a-coffee-shop-moaning-about-the-state-of-the-ad-industry sessions. This one was a little different – for two reasons.

Elon Musk’s decision to start legal action against the World Federation of Advertisers (the WFA) and their working group the now-sadly-departed Global Alliance for Responsible Media (X was a proud GARM member) on the basis that advertisers are not advertising on X is, to use a word of the moment, ‘weird’.

Last week the ad business came together to celebrate creative excellence at the annual Cannes Festival.

Or: last week the ad tech giants along with a number of circling bankers and assorted money men came together in Cannes to celebrate the takeover of the ad business by a combination of machines and mathmen.

Since Nick Manning and I started what has become the Who Cares? movement we have been asked by various people what our motivation is, and why such a thing is necessary.

Prose.

It’s about a month since a Cog Blog co-authored with Nick Manning appeared, and kicked off what has become known as the ‘Who Cares?’ movement.

… at the very beginning. A very good place to start”. [Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers]

The last Cog Blog post, co-authored with Nick Manning created a stir. Described by some as a ‘call to arms’ and no doubt by others as ‘two old blokes desperately seeking relevance’ (which by the way we neither need nor want), the point we were, and are making is that for many in the advertising industry the advertising itself has become an after-thought.

The craft of advertising faces a crisis. And without the craft the business per se is in trouble, adrift in a sea of creative and media sameness without verifiable, solid data to cling on to.

During a video interview with Havas Global’s Managing Director Jon Waite (soon to be released as an asiCast, watch this space) Jon referenced an event he had been at during which a poll of the audience revealed that 79% were familiar with attention metrics. When members of the audience were asked how many adopted an ‘always on’ approach when it came to using these data the number dropped to 1. Not even 1%, just 1.