The late great English comedian Kenneth Williams (1926 \u2013 1988) once gave an interview in which he said: \u201cEveryone’s becoming better and better at less and less. Eventually someone’s going to be superb, at nothing\u201d<\/i>. Sadly perhaps, LinkedIn wasn\u2019t around then, because if ever there was proof that Ken was wrong it is to be found in LinkedIn\u2019s endorsement facility.<\/p>\n
As Jeffrey Merrihue, now heading Mofilm but previously at Accenture and Kellogg\u2019s (amongst others) put it recently in a post: \u201cI\u2019ve just been endorsed for a skill I don\u2019t have by someone I don\u2019t know\u201d<\/i>. I know exactly how he feels. I myself have been endorsed by any number of people for possessing 50 (or maybe even more) skills. It\u2019s very kind of them, but really chaps I am not that multi-skilled.<\/p>\n
Of course we all know where LinkedIn is coming from \u2013 I\u2019m sure they make a reasonable penny from recruitment agencies and consultants \u2013 and if this community finds the endorsement notion valuable then\u2026.well, maybe I would look elsewhere for my recruitment needs.<\/p>\n
There is a more serious point about all of this \u2018being an expert\u2019 thing. Look around the advertising eco-system. It\u2019s so complicated, so crowded with so many specialists all overlapping with each other and all no doubt specialising in less and less. No wonder the average marketing director is confused, and looks back longingly no doubt to a sepia age in which full-service agencies did everything for a fixed level of commission.<\/p>\n
I would be the last person to argue for a return to those days \u2013 in fact I\u2019ve argued that today\u2019s media professionals should pay a tithe to the likes of Chris Ingram, Ray Kelly, Paul Green, Allan Rich and the rest of those pioneers who took a risk by setting up the first media independents thus creating the media agency sector as it is today.<\/p>\n
But perhaps things have gone a bit far.<\/p>\n
If everyone, me included is an expert in advertising, or copywriting doesn\u2019t that devalue the real skill required to create great ads? If everyone (me included again) is an expert in market research then why bother with anything except Survey Monkey?<\/p>\n
There has never been a greater need for big, stand-out ideas; and to be fair if you look for them you\u2019ll find them out there, struggling to be heard above all the crap and mediocrity. But the crap and the mediocrity increasingly seem to dominate. If this continues it diminishes the role that advertising, and indeed marketing plays in building business success. Now would be a good time to make more noise about the real expertise that exists in this industry, and the benefits brought to \u00a0their clients by these real, as opposed to LinkedIn experts.<\/p>\n
Once the mythical Chairman\u2019s wife stops saying \u2018why can\u2019t we have ads like that\u2019 we\u2019re on the way to proving Kenneth Williams right, and becoming superb at nothing at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The late great English comedian Kenneth Williams (1926 \u2013 1988) once gave an interview in which he said: \u201cEveryone’s becoming better and better at less and less. Eventually someone’s going to be superb, at nothing\u201d. Sadly perhaps, LinkedIn wasn\u2019t around then, because if ever there was proof that Ken was wrong it is to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":218,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions\/218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}