• by Jack Myers , March 30, 2007

I recently pulled out my first book, Adbashing: Surviving the Attacks on Advertising, published in 1993, to reread it and see if any of my ideas and forecasts for the future were right, wrong, relevant or maybe even downright embarrassing. I was actually stunned by how so many of the chapters and paragraphs could have been lifted right from the 1993 book and transported to 2007 as if they were written yesterday. In the same context, I have been attending conferences and events where industry leaders give speeches that could almost be taken, word for word, from presentations made by their predecessors 10, 15 and 20 years ago. For all our discussions and commitment to change, we remain locked into old paradigms in so many parts of our lives and businesses.

Here's one section from my 1993 book:

"An inability to respond to change is the most certain path to failure.But before we can change, we must first believe that the future is worth planning and preparing for. We cannot sit back and long for a return to the lost world that [agency legend] Jerry Della Femina and his generation mourn.  

"Dr. Neil Postman, in his excellent book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, points out that the 19^th and early 20^th century capitalists… Rockefeller, Morse, Edison, Astor, Ford and Carnegie… had a vision of what the 20^th century would be. Their greatest achievement, Postman believes, was not the technologies they created, but their ability to convince their countrymen that the future need have no connection to the past.

"I believe that the single most important effort we can undertake in the advertising business is to step outside the box of our past. Change is upon us. The future is challenging us to act; to set a new course for how we organize our businesses, how we create advertising, how we analyze media, how we perceive the role of media and media companies, how we evaluate and measure success, how we go about understanding what the future will bring, and how we react to a vision of that future that is totally unlike anything for which our past has prepared us.

"It is time to set a new agenda, built upon new principles and a commitment to reestablish advertising as a marketing tool for which we all -- advertisers, agencies, media and researchers alike -- take responsibility. This is an ambitious undertaking, but forces already are moving in this direction."

Frankly, reading my words written 15 years ago freaked me out a little, because they are so similar to words I am writing and delivering in presentations today. The message hasn't changed, although I have a sense that the world around us is responding more proactively to the need to change and restructure business models.

I'm realizing, however, that far more effort is being made to squeeze new media technologies and advances in advertising into traditional business models, and there seems to be very little progress in developing new, truly innovative approaches to the ways marketers, agencies and media actually conduct business. We might perceive that we are changing, but in reality we are not.

The debates and discussions about commercial ratings are eerily similar to discussions in the early 1990s focused on pattern recognition for advertising and debates between Arbitron and Nielsen over two competing technologies, called MediaWatch and Monitor Plus. Generating more data doesn't advance our knowledge, it only generates more data.

There are many in our industry who are truly seeking to explore, identify and expand the development of new paradigms and enhanced marketing capabilities. Carat's Mitch Oscar (also a TV Board writer) hosts media, technology developers and even agency competitors at quarterly Carat Exchange meetings. This past week, a Virtual Worlds conference in lower Manhattan was sold out. At NBC, a new management team appears focused on exploring new business models (although hiring AOL's Advertising.com unit for the NBC/News Corp video venture seems to commoditize the enterprise). At ABC, a restructuring of network commercial breaks is being considered.

The greatest danger we face in business today is not our inability to change. It's our belief that we are changing, when in fact we are only adapting old and outdated models to new technologies. What do you think?