Specialising to Extinction

09 November 2026

Kenneth Williams was a brilliant comedic actor, best known for the ‘Carry On’ films. He died in 1988 aged 62. In 1987 he was interviewed on The Michael Aspel Show and said this about increasing specialisation in the medical profession: “Everyone’s becoming better and better at less and less, and eventually someone’s going to be superb… at nothing”.

Within the ad business we have moved from the generalist to the specialist, with all that that means for losing a sense of both place, and perspective.

Ad agencies used to run training programmes within which account management newbies would spend time in different departments. The thinking went that if your job involved selling the agency’s expertise to a client then at least knowing what the various departments did would be helpful.

Clients felt the same – we used to have clients spending time with our media people; indeed some clients repaid the compliment and invited us to spend time with them (which is how I came to be serving fries in McDonald’s Putney, a story for another day).

This was all good – understanding the mechanics even if at the most basic level helped with a sense of perspective. On both sides.

By way of a contrast here’s Mark Zuckerberg (a man of obvious talents none of which qualify him to pontificate on the ad business) on how META sees the future of advertising: “You don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out”.

In other words, give us your money and we’ll do the rest. Who needs all those expensive specialists?

We keep inventing specialisms the majority of which will either become extinct or automated. Who benefits?

Online advertising and within that social media has opened up ‘advertising’ to a whole new sector. Smaller businesses can advertise locally or at scale, representing a major opportunity for agencies of all shapes and sizes.

Alongside this amazing media evolution, we’ve seen the massive growth of the ad tech industry, the explosion in specialist services bought (often unknowingly) by the many, understood by the few. Measurement techniques have multiplied, regardless of whether what they purport to measure is of any value.

And after all that is the advertising the industry produces more attractive, more effective? Is the industry healthier?

We are producing more slop, and more fraudulent ads designed to cheat consumers than ever before.

It would be unfair to lay every wrong at the door of the platforms. ‘Private Eye’ this week reports: “Local paper giant Newsquest has been using a new tech tool on its sites. The bot automatically adds ads to stories by picking words at random, then creating an affiliate link that can take readers to various external web pages. …. A recent story on Newsquest’s Kent Online about a woman who is battling incurable stage four liver cancer was linked to an ad for lingerie firm Ann Summers.”

So much for “legal, decent, honest and truthful”.

Who stands up for these basic tenets? The Advertising Association, an organisation responsible for much good work over many years on the industry’s behalf, is facing an unenviable dilemma. If one of your main members and event supporters, META, is making (by their own admission at this year’s Ad Association LEAD event) around 4% of total revenue (a mere US$9 billion) from illegal ads, then where do you go in your lobbying on behalf of the ad business?

A couple of weeks ago I argued here for a more Keynesian approach to marketing regulation. Those responsible for the industry’s basic principles can no longer apply a laissez-faire approach.

Intervention is needed, by those who can see the massive benefits of a healthy UK creative services industry as well as the risks posed to our media sector by the US-based platforms. We need to spread the argument outside our industry, to the likes of regulators, activists, policy think-tanks and Government.

We could, of course continue talking to ourselves, and convince ourselves we can square a circle.

But to do so is to accept that our ultimate goal is to be specialists in absolutely nothing.