• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, November 8, 2013

As the Australians love to say, "Oh for F&%k's sake!" Even after the Publicis Omnicom merger became a done deal (at least most Adlanders think so, seeing that it’s cleared U.S. regulatory hurdles) Havas CEO David Jones is still spouting off  about his holding company's "innovative, agile, entrepreneurial" culture and why Havas is in a much better position to better serve brands' advertising needs. (Although you wouldn’t know from the company’s less-than-stellar Q3 performance.)  Give it a rest, dude. Maurice and John are kings now. Give Sire Martin a call. Maybe the two of you can stop bitching, merge and then maybe we all can be done with this "it's not the size that matters, it's how you use it" crap. And come on, seriously? Like you don't want to be as big as Maurice and John!

And speaking of things of we’re sick and tired of hearing about in the way that only Adland can over-hype, over-use and erase all sensible meaning from, why can’t I get through an hour without hearing the term programmatic--WTF? What the hell happened to the days when ad agencies just created cool shit that sold stuff for clients? Why has it all become so scientific with programmatic and DSP and RTB and pick-your-silly-acronym-of-the-week? When I started in advertising, people spoke with people. Oh yes, we had computers but we didn't let them talk to each other without supervision. Yeah, I get that there are far too many media options for a single human being to deal with when making a media buy but this exchanged-based programmatic crap just wreaks of Minority Report and ill-aligned optimization factors. Call me old school but when something becomes too automated or, ahem, so easy a caveman could do it, something's broken.

Hey guess what? TV isn't TV anymore. Cable isn't cable anymore. Now, along with online video, it's all just video and 57% of advertising agencies claim they will focus on video in the second half of 2013. Now if we were talking old school commercials, that number would sound about right. But combining TV and cable and online and only coming up with 57%? Now that's just wrong. After all, it's all about content these days, right? Content, content, content! With that in mind, one would assume that 57% should be 100%. I'm right, right? Are there really that many agencies out there that haven't yet picked up a video camera?

Did you know that according to a recent study conducted by the Online Marketing Institute along with Kelly Staffing and ClickZ that advertising agencies face a critical shortage in digital staffing talent? While it's quite clear Kelly Staffing thinks this is awesome, I think it's irrelevant. After all, we're getting closer and closer to the Singularity (Google it) when all those programmatic computers get sick of humans inefficiently trying to optimize stuff, wake up and SkyNet our asses.

If Don Draper saw former Wieden & Kennedy New York Exec Creative Directors Ian Reichenthal and Scott Vitrone walk into Barton F. Graf 9000 to become executive creative directors wearing what they wore for their press photo  he'd tell them to tuck in their shirts, take off the t-shirts, get rid of the stupid sneakers and send them to Barney's for some proper attire. Then again, if Don Draper were walking around Madison Avenue today, he'd probably trip over the internet and get swallowed up by a big ass SkyNet-powered programmatic ad server.

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