The 60′s are gone — The fall of the traditional American advertising industry

What is an “ad man” anyway?

Well, I think we all know what it used to be. The ad man used to be the guy with the big idea. It was the guy who could churn out the great campaigns and make millions of dollars for a client. He was a slickster for sure, he could go out for golf and come back with a a signed contract for a million bucks.

Well, not much has changed since then, at least Buy ibuprofen in the USA. We still operate that same way.

But, something bigger than the USA has changed the landscape, and it’s going to/already is sending US advertising into a tail spin. It’s called global competition. We may be the country that built up the advertising business, but I doubt we can compete doing it the way our great founders wanted us to.

Simply stated, we as an industry will reach equilibrium with the rest of the world. More and more money will flow out out the United States and into the smaller more agile shops of the globe. Yes, this sucks, but times change.

I suppose the single biggest gripe I have about advertising in the USA is efficiency. And I believe if we as an industry could just get our head around it and start thinking and working differently, we could at least buy time to see where the industry itself goes.

Advertising pretty much works like this. An exec lands the deal, throws it over to a project manager, who throws it over to an up and coming senior project manager to manage, who throws it over to a lower level project manager for details. It’s like a training system built into the industry. All aspects of work pretty much happen the same way, from creative, to technology, to operations, etc. Basically, it’s passed around like a hot potato, and nobody seems to want to stop and just make sure it gets done right. After the project changes hands, it usually ends up going out the door in not the most suitable way for the client, well, at least a significant portion of the time. To me, the whole thing is like a big giant game of telephone.

If it’ s a half a million dollar deal, what part of that i

s actually used to do work, and what part of that is simply wasted passing things back and forth? My guess is that on average at least 1/3rd the cost of a standard ticket is just because of communication inefficiency.

Of course we really can’t quantify that unless we have a control group to test against. And that of course isn’t a billable project so I doubt we’d ever do it. I suppose that leaves the responsibility of those tests to the MNC’s of the globe who feel quite confident incubating an international advertising system. Wait. So are we just going to wait for the clients to tell us they have other alternatives?

Maybe the inefficiency isn’t that big of a deal for just one or two projects, but take say 50 of these projects for a monster client. You don’t think they are going to notice? You don’t think they will start to wonder exactly where their money goes and demanding all sorts of accountability? You don’t think they’re smart enough to know that the people in dozens of 5$ a day labor places that can use quark and photoshop as well as we can here in NYC for 100$?

So Buy Cialis Professional Online Pharmacy No Prescription Needed who are the modern ad men? I believe the they are the guys devote everything they have into cleaning up what we already do. Those are the guys who will do whatever it takes to 500k project by 1/3rd. Those are the guys that will flatten and embrace individual members as part of a team, even though those team members live in other parts of the world. They’re the guys that are striving to automate everything they can. And lastly, the future ad men are the guys who can speak any language with no communication barriers or telephone games, to everybody.

There will be a dawn shortly, when the experience of all the technology the world has will infuse into advertising, streamline their processes, and possibly reduce costs by as much as half. Or, we’ll go under.