From my late teens through my late twenties, I was a part-time radio DJ. It was a hobby and I never wanted it to be my profession. But I enjoyed it very much.
When I started DJ-ing, it was
at a pirate radio station -- an illegal radio station that broadcast from a secret location and did not pay any dues or taxes… or salary. It was purely a hobby effort from a group of
like-minded friends and enthusiasts. It became very successful, and eventually the law caught up with it. Some of my friends from back then developed professional careers as radio presenters, with a
few even in TV. Some continued to be a part-time DJ, as a hobby on the side of their actual career. And many more, like me, just didn’t.
Why am I telling you this? Because when you talk
to older or former DJs today, they will lament that in the olden days, everything was better. Better music. Better DJs. Better radio stations. More fun. Less rules. But when I think back objectively,
was it really better? I feel you can’t really compare an era that has gone by with today’s world.
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Technology has changed everything. Public morale has evolved. The world order is
different today than it was 20 or 40 years ago. And that matters. Was there great music 20, 40 or 60 years ago? Of course. Was it fun to make radio back then? Absolutely! But was it objectively
“better”? I don’t know.
If I think about our industry, I have the same ambivalence. In the past, the media, creative, client and cultural environment were obviously
dramatically different from today. Some things were terrible, like the role of women and minorities in campaigns and in the marketing industry as a whole. Other things were perhaps better, like a less
complex and more transparent media environment, and the desire for creative excellence.
Sure, there are still many creatives striving for, and often reaching, creative excellence. But we
should also acknowledge that with the advent of always on campaigns in a digital AI world, a lot of content is just merely “there” in the pursuit of clicks, likes and transactions.
I am sharing this, because Brian Jacobs (former executive vice president at Millward Brown and various agencies before that) and Nick Manning (founder of Manning Gottlieb/OMD and former CSO of
Ebiquity), both of whom I admire very much, have launched an initiative to address some of the issues they see with the industry today. As Brian put it on his website: “The craft of advertising
faces a crisis. And without the craft the business per se is in trouble, adrift in a sea of creative and media sameness without verifiable, solid data to cling on to.”
They have invited
anyone active in the industry to join them in a yet-to-be-formalized event that hopes to create an open platform to address some of the issues they see, such as “low levels of viewability and
attention, ad fraud, MFA sites, unverified (and often unbelievable) audience data, agencies who make more money from their suppliers than from their clients (thus threatening the very objectivity
they’re hired for in the first place), bland creative generated by AI, and an audience that increasingly resents our work.”
That is one hell of an agenda. But I think it is a
worthwhile one, because all these issues should be addressed, and they are not. But what do I know? I am just comparing the way things are now to the past.