Is the Future of Advertising Worth Preparing For? Classic Jack from 1993

The following commentary was originally published in 1993, appearing in Jack Myers' book Adbashing: Surviving the Attacks on Advertising. It is even more relevant today.

Advertising industry leaders such as Jerry Della Femina, Hal Riney, George Lois, Bill Bernbach and others correctly identified breakthrough "creativity" as the advertising industry's primary product for the '70s, and the industry elevated its output to extraordinarily high levels of achievement. The fine distinction between advertising and art was often difficult to detect. Advertising followed the path of Raymond Rubicam's theory that "creative ingenuity" was the primary key to advertising success rather than David Ogilvy's proposition that advertising should sell products and not draw attention to itself.

In the 1990s, the structures, systems and processes by which we conduct business in the media and advertising industries are built upon the precedents established in the era of the "creatives." Ogilvy warned, in 1963, of the penalties that would be paid for an over-indulgence in creativity. In the last 30-years the advertising business has created precedents that are no longer relevant. If we look to the past for direction, we must first gain an accurate vision of the future and regain the capacity to respond to the changes taking place around us.

An inability to respond to change is the most certain path to failure. But before we can change, we must first believe that the future is worth planning and preparing for. We cannot sit back and long for a return to the lost world that Della Femina and his generation mourn.

Dr. Neil Postman, in his excellent book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, points out that the 19^th and early 20^th century capitalists… Rockefeller, Morse, Edison, Astor, Ford and Carnegie… had a vision of what the 20^th century would be. Their greatest achievement, Postman believes, was not the technologies they created, but their ability to convince their countrymen that the future need have no connection to the past.

I believe that the single most important effort we can undertake in the advertising business is to step outside the box of our past. Change is upon us. The future is challenging us to act; to set a new course for how we organize our businesses, how we create advertising, how we analyze media, how we perceive the role of media and media companies, how we evaluate and measure success, how we go about understanding what the future will bring, and how we react to a vision of that future that is totally unlike anything for which our past has prepared us.

It is time to set a new agenda, built upon new principles and a commitment to reestablish advertising as a marketing tool for which we all – advertisers, agencies, media and researchers alike – take responsibility. This is an ambitious undertaking, but forces already are moving in this direction. In Adbashing: Surviving the Attacks on Advertising, I will share many of these efforts with you and set forth a new course for the future of advertising.

Jack Myers has been writing, speaking and consulting on emerging media and advertising industry trends, patterns and economics since 1984. Contact Jack at jm@jackmyers.com