‘We need to join the dots’ rings out the cry around the industry. Whether the dots in question are creative and media, research and modelling, planning and buying, procurement and marketing or any and every combination of the above, they have to be joined.

This is a little like Miss World contestants calling for World Peace. Or politicians calling for An End to Poverty.

Sometimes I think this blog is turning into a veritable grump-fest. Nothing’s as good as it used to be; ads suck; social media is destroying democracy; ad fraud is funding drug cartels; pitches are badly run and anyway are all about saving money. And on.

A week or two ago, Marc Pritchard, Procter and Gamble’s Chief Brand officer took to the ANA stage to give a keynote speech. He chose to call this ‘Resetting the Bar’; you can find the article he published to go alongside his remarks here.

One of my pet peeves when it comes to social media (and believe me I have a lot of them) is the deliberate confusion between opinions and facts. This usually takes the form of: ‘I know that many agree’ or ‘I speak for many when I say..’ when the reality is that the writer spoke to some bloke in the pub who shrugged and said something like: ‘Yeah, seems like a good idea.’