Nothing's Changed and Yet Everything's Changed.

I read a lovely article by Mark Whitty the other day about how while Adland is wrought with panic, anxiety, and a constant sense of impending doom, this is in fact nothing new and has been the same since he started in the mid 1980s. I see Paul Feldwick (the first Head of Planning I ever worked with) has also commented, citing evidence that it's been pretty much the same since the 1950s. The only thing that's really changed is a lot less lunch. Mark suggests a return to core principles would be the most effective approach everyone could take – as he puts it, "memorably expressing the truth is the best strategy'. You can tell it's good piece – almost everyone you'd respect from the ad industry from the last 40 odd years has liked or commented or been cited in the commentary. Do read it here.

Now, having joined BMP in the late 1980s and stayed 20 years before moving into Brandland, I sort of match Mark's career timing and it really made me think. I joined Adland just as media and creative agencies split apart – it was going to be the end of the industry as we knew it, then it wasn't. 10 years later the first dotcom bubble arrived - I was the Account Director on Boo dot com, a debacle of such magnitude that they even wrote a book about it, yet agencies survived. 10 years more – the financial crisis – ditto. And ever since it's been Virtual Reality that, Metaverse this, AI the other, it's all meant to be the end of the industry as we know it, yet it never is.

So I do largely agree with Mark but I think that two other things have changed, other than lunch disappearing.

Which is the loss of time and money.

It's not that clients are paying less for marketing today. But they are paying for an awful lot more things. When Mark and I started they paid for advertising (in 5 limited streams – TV, Poster, Press, Radio, Cinema); maybe PR, a touch - but only a touch – of DM. Perhaps a packaging agency if they were FMCG. That was pretty much it. Not today. They are paying for all of that, plus the separate overheads of media, social, 2 or 3 digital agencies, SEO, influencers, Creators, yada yada yada.

But their business models haven't changed – they'll still be dedicating (in a well run business) about 10–15% of their turnover to marketing. Just spreading the amount rather more thinly around 12 agencies instead of two and three. Plus bigger marketing departments to run all those agencies. And do a load of stuff in house.

So each agency has less money – which means less people per se or less experienced people on each brief. And no lunch.

And of course, it's all needed, well, immediately. I remember once at BMP the 10 storey office block opposite burned to the ground one day. It took 14 months to rebuild. A planner told me he'd written a brief on the day of the fire, and the client bought a script from that brief - not made the ad, just bought the script – the day the new building opened. Now - that's properly gestating a creative baby.

When you need to procure everything in 5 minutes to hit impossible timelines, a lot of the thinking time is lost. As of course, is lunch.

So while panic, anxiety, and a constant sense of impending doom have indeed been constants throughout my time in advertising, I can't help but think that maybe less money and less time has been the great change in the industry.

The great BMP account man John Mcknight used to say – 'The glory always belongs to the client. Your reward is in the car park'

What days they were.