Opinion: On the Campaign Couch ... with JB.(Jeremy Bullmore)

Surrey Garland, the head of copy at Masius, writes: Dear Jeremy, 100 years or so ago, enterprising media brokers began to offer thoughts on strategy and creativity to add value to the space they brokered.

As today's media shops are all going upstream into strategy, should we be looking forward to them inventing 'creative teams' in about 2063, the 'planner' in about 2066, and to a flowering of advertising creativity from around 2072 to, say, 2100?

Dear Surrey, nice to hear from you and thank you for your question. You're half-right, I think.

In fact, it's at least 140 years since those pioneering media brokers started offering their clients free thoughts on strategy and creative content. Their motives were entirely selfish.

Up until then, they'd competed with each other on price alone: so bangs were costing fewer and fewer bucks. This was good for the clients but bad for the brokers, whose margins were getting thinner by the day. So they began to offer advertising content as a sort of on-pack premium: a media schedule planned and bought - And Now With Your Own Tailor-Made Words and Pictures Absolutely Free!

And so the full-service agency was born; but because it was media-based, it was born with a terrible, genetic flaw called the commission system.

For 140 years, the most valuable ingredient of an advertising campaign - its Idea - has been provided to clients free of charge. So when creative and media were finally decoupled, nobody had the faintest idea how to put a value on the creative bit. Did it depend on input or output? On the number of man-hours devoted to its creation - or on its beneficial contribution to the client's bottom line? The first is manifestly daft; the second impossible to calculate.