It’s a truism that everything a brand or company puts out there is in effect an ad. To quote William Randolph Hearst (as opposed to his alter ego, Citizen Kane): “News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising.”

In recent weeks I have had some small insight into what it must be like to be a world-renowned epidemiologist, seeing your field diminished to ignorant tweets and online comments from those with a fraction of a fraction of my decades’ worth of knowledge and expertise. The reason? Suddenly it seems that everyone is an expert in media placement.

The more I look around, the more I read our trades, the more research I see the more I come to the conclusion that the ad business is not an industry at ease with itself. Doing strange things. Making decisions based solely on media metrics. Ignoring the biggest issues.

We are a tone-deaf business sometimes. Consider the following unrelated facts. One, advertising is not trusted or liked by most consumers. Two, we are facing an unprecedented upheaval in the media available to advertisers, who owns these media, and how they’re used. Three, the debate on how to assess the value of the different media choices, singly and in combination is a live one. Four, the main industry protagonists have just spent a large chunk of change entering for and ‘attending’ the annual Cannes festival.