I suppose this moment had to come eventually. This blog has steered away from the ‘Is YouTube TV or not’ debate on the basis that to me it makes as much sense as arguing whether or not a direct mail piece for my local pizza place is a newspaper, given that both are printed on paper.

But here we are. The debate rumbles on, an example of how the great debates of our industry have degenerated from things that matter to things that really don’t.

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.