I was just thinking that maybe the ad industry needs more bastards when I went to see George Michaelides at Mindshare.
Not that George is a bastard, of course. In fact, he’s a very smart and very nice bloke. Although our meeting in the “Stockholm room” at 40, The Strand was hampered by the fact that George sat on the single comfortable sofa while I perched on a precarious object from a sci-fi sit-com from the 1970s which someone had decided (wrongly) might be construed as a chair.
We were both pondering the parlous state of affairs in the industry. WPP, George’s parent, had recently announced that its profits were down by half for the first half. Which, while being lexically pleasing, is fiscally less fortuitous.
George declared that the industry was going through its “Fleet Street” period, a very good analogy I thought. The newspaper industry went through a massive upheaval in the 80s which saw a whole host of old practices and skills swept away.
Although we both struggled to name the equivalent of Eddie Shah for today.
So – what to do about it ? George is doing various radical things which sound great – but
faced with this crisis, a lot of people (including one half of me) crave a return to old-style industry chutzpah.
It used to be that the industry was full of charismatic bastards. They'd charm the pants off the clients and then go and shag their best friends' wives while indulging in bouts of drug-taking so wide-ranging that Hunter S.Thompson would hold up his hands and say "Whoa, boys. Enough is f*cking enough."
Then somewhere along the line the industry got nice.
And boring.
Polite, smiley people meet polite, business-like people in beige rooms, and anything spiky is surgically removed from ideas which get 64% in Millward Brown hall tests, and nobody remembers the work or the brands, or even why they're there in the first place.
The edges get taken off, the ideas are neutered, and then a year later the account is put up for review because the work didn't bring about the results which everybody hoped for.
But, while this may all be true, a part of me wonders if I’m just indulging in Don Draper nostalgia. Because it’s not enough to get chutzpah back, we’ve got to get what is happening. We’ve got to get all the changes going on.
As Gaston Legorburu, from digital agency Sapient, has said, “trying to turn an old-school Madison Avenue institution into something different is (hugely) difficult.”
In fact, is it even do-able ?
As Jim Stengel, formerly the chief marketing officer of P+G, has said of all this change: “In the long term, it’s positive because I think it has opened people’s minds up to different ideas and models, and to taking more risks.”
Now Jim Stengel is one of the most widely-respected people talking about the watershed in the industry right now, but I wonder exactly who he’s talking about here.
It doesn’t sound like many ad agencies I’ve seen recently.
As a point of comparison, look at this recent story from the music biz:
- Radiohead manager Brian Message is co-launching a new music label called Polyphonic, focused on innovative digital releases.
- The label will be funded with over $20 million in its first year, with the money being used to give artists the ability to operate without seeking out traditional record companies.
- Co-chief executive of the MAMA Group Adam Driscoll said: "We will do whatever is most effective to get an artist noticed. Giving an album away for free may get one million people listening to a new artist."
What a great story. It’s got creativity and ingenuity and innovation and entrepreneurialism and chutzpah running through it like words in a stick of rock.
And what a bastard it didn’t come from the ad biz.
