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Opinion: On the Campaign Couch ... with JB.(Column)
Q: As today's media shops are all now getting 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?
A: Let us pray that history doesn't repeat itself. The first advertising agency cycle lasted from 1864 to 1990. It started with media broking - which became so price-competitive that agencies had to add value. So they offered clients not just space but stuff to fill the space with.
It wasn't called creative work but that's what it was. It came free with the space, thus implanting the poison pill that has bedevilled the business ever since.
Writing stuff meant having to think first, so the agencies also got into strategy; 100 years later it became planning. By now, the media buying bit, the bit that had started the whole thing off and the only bit that generated serious income, had been relegated to the servants' quarters.
Cheerfully forgetting to whom they owed their origins and salaries, the suits, the creatives and the planners patronised media persons, restricting them to the last ten minutes of a three-hour presentation and then over-running.
The media mutiny began to rumble. Two other factors made a Declaration of Independence inevitable. Media owners coalesced into vast, single selling bodies, their scale making them impossible for the miniscule media departments to haggle with. And the media departments found their own ability to grow restricted not by the media function, where scale was of value to clients, but by the creative function where scale was not. Within a few months, the full-service agency was dead.
This time around the cycle will accelerate. Once again, most of the initiative will come from the media companies - for three reasons. They have greater weight; they have an acute commercial need to differentiate themselves; and they are less mindlessly anchored than their creative equivalents to a misconception about creativity.
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