If he joined the business today, what would Don Draper, the brilliant creative director of the fictional ad agency Sterling Cooper in the show Mad Men, do? Chances are, if he were catapulted back into advertising agency future in a souped-up DeLorean, he wouldn't recognize the industry: there's no cigarettes, no sexism and no three-martini lunches. It's a lot duller now for the frat boys.
I got into the business on the tail of the Bernbach creative revolution. I was fortunate enough to work with the late Roy Grace and Diane Rothschild, both of whom were at ground zero as the industry changed. I was at a magical agency called Wells, Rich, Greene, which epitomized the creative revolution from the moment when Mary Wells got artist Alexander Calder to paint the fuselage of Braniff Airways planes. We didn't have labels like "nontraditional." We just called them ideas.
The creative revolution was mainly about TV and about image. And although at first we didn't notice it happening, it petered out. Cable killed broadcast TV and advertising was slow to adapt to a more democratized landscape. We lost our mojo because we got fat and lazy, and shoved our commercials down consumer throats by doing the same old, same old. The consumers took control -- first with their remote controls and DVRs, and later with their keypads.
To paraphrase Norma Desmond, the mad, decaying heroine of Sunset Boulevard, "The consumer didn't get bigger -- the agencies got smaller." They clung to traditional solutions in TV commercials, for a long time ignoring the evolution of an interactive, interconnected world around them, at best paying lip service to clients' needs to integrate their communications and find new ways to reach their customers and measure ROI.
Enter the media agencies.
We are now in the early stages of a new creative revolution, one that's media driven. Much of the hoopla in the press is on one aspect of the creative media revolution: digital, especially social networking and blogging. This is understandable. Digital is new and social networking, in particular, is growing fast. It's also good "copy" in terms of media coverage. How the damn thing gets monetized is another matter.
But the revolution is much broader than that, though this is often ignored. It's in music, gaming, PR, customer services, video, design as media. Everything is media today.
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