CLOSE-UP: On the Campaign Couch ... with JB.(Jeremy Bullmore)(Interview)

Q: It's the New Year and I'd like to kick-off with an uplifting message to those staff that escaped redundancy. Unfortunately we lost so much business last year we're now a mere shadow of our former self. Do you see any positive signs in the ad market that I could use in my morale-boosting speech?

The most positive point you can make about the market will leave your shell-shocked workers stoically unmotivated. Nevertheless, you might like to remind them that, as long as much of the world suffers from a glut of production, producers will be forced to compete for more than their natural share of consumption: and that means active, sustained presentation and publicity. I have absolutely no doubt that when business historians come to look at expenditure on marketing communications, in real terms, over the 100 years 1950-2050, they will be able to plot steady average growth.

As a morale-booster, however, this fact is seriously deficient in three respects.

Your people are unimpressed by averages. They do not sympathise with the statistician who drowned in a lake whose average depth was seven inches.

They want more now and you can't offer it to them.

Secondly, a steady average increase in marketing expenditure doesn't guarantee a steady average increase in advertising expenditure. I wonder if you've yet rumbled the fact that what you're selling isn't necessarily what the clients of the next 50 years are going to want to buy? (It's entirely possible that your staff are ahead of you on this one, which will only add to their discomfiture.)

Finally: your staff are not stupid. They will know their (your) agency currently occupies less than half of 1 per cent of the traditionally measured UK advertising market and what they will be wondering is this: Why can't their management (you) stop bleating about the state of the market as a whole and start improving their market share?