• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, October 13, 2015

For more than a few years we've been hearing an endless litany of bloviated pontifications as to why ad agencies must transform themselves into something...anything new. It doesn't really matter what as long as agencies no longer act like nor call themselves an ad agency. Because, well, many believe there's simply no reason for advertising to exist any longer. 

That may be an overly simplistic assessment of the situation, but it's not far off base. However, all this talk of agencies morphing into entities that make watches or open coffee shops or distill bourbon -- or according to some, make software -- at times detracts from the genesis of the thing that used to be called an ad agency. 

Hey, there's nothing wrong with tearing down the silos to break new ground, but in doing so, it seems some have forgotten something very important: someone still has to make shit that helps sell products for brands. 

Now one could certainly argue that these product development efforts in their various incarnations do, in fact, help sell stuff for brands. And one could also argue that the list of shit agencies need to make to help brands sell stuff has grown exponentially. The internet and social media, for the most part, can be "blamed" for that.  

But increasingly, these pontifications of "we must change" become tiresome and distracting from the real issue at hand -- which is that people hate to be interrupted, have been trained that interruption is no longer the quid pro quo it once was, are sick of the increasing assault by marketers on their time and enjoyment of life, and can very easily block all this junk out of their lives. 

So what's the answer? Some say it's content marketing or its cousin, native advertising. The IAB thinks it's ad blockers. Some think it's programmatic. Some think it's affiliate marketing. Some say it's content marketing's sister, inbound marketing. 

Some think the answer is to roll back the clock to a time when a workable tacit agreement between consumer and marketer was firmly in place and before the internet killed all that making everything free and just a click away. Look at Playboy's recent announcement it will no longer publish nude photographs in its magazine...because 50 billion are available for free one click off a Google search. 

So what's the answer? 

I'm not sure anyone has a clear answer. But unless the 319 million people in America are willing to cough up approximately $596 each annually to cover the cost of the $190 billion spent on advertising in exchange for the free content advertising provides, advertising is going to continue to play a very important role in funding the creation of content we all so want to consume. 

We have to get it right.