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.”