In the days when newspapers set the daily news agenda much was made of the ‘church and state’ argument. This made clear that advertisers had zero impact over the judgement of Editors, that Editors’ decisions were sacrosanct and not for sale.

The same rule applied to TV – advertisers had no right to pressurise those responsible for content.

Consumers bought, read, and believed the newspapers they chose not on the basis of who was advertising in them but on the editorial content.

Deep breath, it’s time to open up and share my media habits. Why? Sometimes a sample of one can bring a dose of real life to numbers on a page. Most of us aren’t particularly unusual, and it can be revealing to examine one’s own behaviours as an indicator of why a certain type of person does what he or she does.

These are not happy times for agencies, or indeed for the ad industry as a whole. Wherever you look you fall over issues: agencies not trusted, META et al offering to handle all activities, in-housing on the rise, creative slop, fraud (both consumer and advertiser), local CEOs being thrown in prison. It’s hardly a laugh a minute in adland at the moment.

It may be useful to look back at the mistakes of the past in the hope that at least we might avoid them in the future.

During her presentation to the Advertising: Who Cares? event last month, IPSOS’ Samira Brophy quoted Charles Vallance, Founder of VCCP in a piece he called The Tyranny of Targeting:

“Modern media analytics is in danger of reducing the medium back to being the medium alone. If we continue down this path, we may end up on a fool’s errand, mistaking accuracy for effectiveness and precision for persuasion.”