dying like coal, not like dinosaurs

The cliche about the future of the ad agency business is to look up at the lumbering beasts and networks and condemn them as dinosaurs. I don't think this is an especially precise or useful metaphor.

The dinosaurs were a fantastically successful species, dominating the earth for over 160 millions of years. They were wiped out by a singular impact event that they couldn't possibly have predicted, or done anything about. So I don't think that's a particularly good parallel with most ad agencies.

Maybe a more useful comparison is with the coal-mining business.

Mining died in the UK because it was uneconomic, not because all the coal suddenly disappeared. In many parts of the world it's still a thriving business, it's still economic. That seems quite like the ad agency business.

Extracting attention using advertising agencies isn't suddenly impossible, it's just gradually becoming uneconomic in the West. This is predictable and it's possible to prepare for it - through retraining and re-skilling. Whether that will actually happen is debatable. There may be for a future for some specialist businesses and for a few heritage ones, but that's about it.

I guess you could even argue that mining was closed down prematurely because Thatcher hated the miners, and that the agency business is being closed down prematurely because everyone hates advertising.

Is that it for parallels? Is that a better metaphor? I don't know. Maybe. I haven't thought about advertising for ages but I have some mental itches to scratch about it so there may be some more posts about it. Sorry about that.

Comments

I don't think I'm suitably placed to comment on how good the analogy is, but I am enjoying imagining the news footage of the running battles between police and ad-men in the resulting advertisers strike...

[Dave]

I'm reading a book that fits under this topic. It's called The Black Swan. The author talks about how change happens by massive and mostly unpredictable events and that these Black Swans underlie almost everything about our world. It is blowing my mind - mostly because he talks about things like Negative Empiricism and that despite our increasing knowledge, the future will be increasingly unpredictable.

[Jeffre]

Whenever I've looked into an argument that "tv doesn't work anymore" or "broadcast doesn't work anymore", what they're almost always actually saying is not that it doesn't work, but rather that it's simply too expensive.

[Richard Stacy]

Here is grist to your advertising scratching mill - if that makes sense

http://richardstacy.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/the-future-of-advertising/

[CJ]

One agency revolution answer I believe is totally flawed and already being actively pursued by many is 'to make digital the centre of the agency'. After battling for 30 years to stop making 'TV the centre of the agency', isn't this just as bad?