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You Can’t Wake Up a Dead Man
By dave_pasternack | May 5, 2008
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick of hearing about conferences where the advertising industry is issued an urgent “wake up call” to become digitally competent and leave its glorious but completely irrelevant past behind. But this is exactly what happened this week at Dana Point, as reported in The New York Times and also in Advertising Age.
Talking “tough love” to an industry whose very DNA is based on opposing change (in order to preserve its fat margins on analog media) is great, and so is the call to “leave the past behind” and “stop your whining.” Substituting boring digital workshops with Eric Schmidt for free golf and tennis is a great way to torture the doomed, but even the toughest kind of tough love is too little and too late: if it happened ten years ago, or even five, Madison Avenue might have had a chance of surviving into the second decade of the 21st Century, but it’s far too late to save this archaic, ridiculously inefficient business, especially when the best advice given to agencies is to “hire young people and don’t tell them what to do: ask them what to do.” If this advice is followed, we’ll soon occupy a world of non-professionals with no competence at anything except playing the latest version of “Grand Theft Auto.”
Topics: And These People Still Have Jobs?, I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Not Clicking on It Anymore, Old vs. New Media |
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