• by Jack Feuer , June 13, 2007

Four or five beers into the chill. Warm breeze blowing in from the Pacific, nine miles to the right over the Santa Monica Mountains. Gentle Southern California hills nuzzling up against my apartment complex.

Early Saturday evening on my balcony, burgers sizzling on the little black barbecue. XM Radio beaming in from the living room, the opening notes to "Love Is Blue" dancing up my arms like rippling satin. I offer this quiet time to every media agency leader. Come on over to my place for a brew and a burger and a safe place to think about a new act.

Because you are boring, dudes.

Upfront? Same shtick, different year. Super Bowl? Please, who cares what a: 30 costs? The money is wasted, regardless. Business babble? You've already invested, ignited, channeled, integrated, monetized and digitalized. How much more skin can you really put in the buzzword game? I mean, we're down to "360" and "pre-roll" now, right?

Boring.

I'm not expecting you to suddenly start getting Alex Bogusky's press. (He's pretty, and most of you, ah, not so much). But you do frequently command more than your fair share of attention in the news -- unless there's something spectacular going on, like a momentous shift in Kraft's cracker business. And you continue to aggregate power with clients.

Now what you need to do is stop treating Irwin Gotlieb and David Verklin as entertainers in the Media Lounge and really start listening to what they say about the future. This is not a new plea from me -- Gotlieb even quoted me about it in a 2004 speech -- but the boredom's reached the tipping point. I'm begging you to take their advice and start doing creative.

It's time to bundle creatives into your own agencies, not just partner with sibling shops that think you're all geek losers anyway. PHD's experimented with this. All of you should.

Here's a heresy: You're good at it.

Branded entertainment, which you already control, proves the hypothesis. Everybody says content creators hate it, and it cheapens the creative product. Why, then, are we in a golden age of creativity in television?

I'm not saying planners should start sketching out storyboards. "Choose an experienced, cross-functional team to manage the process, like you would with any specialist area," counsels Bill Hilary, president of Magna Global Entertainment and a pretty smart guy. He also says you need "a smoking great idea for content" and those are flying out of media shops every day.

Look, for every Lingerie Bowl or Budtv.com, there are 10 "Gilmore Girls" and Dove campaigns out there for media agencies and advertisers to create or, at the very least, produce. You make the message work. Why not make the message? Let Bogusky star in the trade ads.

And when you're done, you can all come over to my place, crack a cold brew, and pay me back for giving you the idea by washing the dishes.