Bloghound

Maybe traditional Madison Ave. businesses need to retire or get out of the office and spend the rest of the summer  on listening tours, learning first hand how deeply people have changed and what that means to marketing and advertising.

 In today's Advertising Age Matt Creamer reports on the "new and improved" Advertising Week focus , to be held Sept. 25 - 29 in New York.  "The schedule, released today,  is a response to criticism from industry observers, Advertising Age chief among them, that the week's first two incarnations featured agency folks speaking to themselves," writes Creamer.

 A look at the schedule makes you wonder whether the adverising industry is in touch with shifts in marketing. It also begs the question whether the industry sees itself  as the people who make ads or as  strategic marketers.  Just as the public relations industry has hurt itself by focusing too much on publicity rather than communications, it appears that the ad industry identifies with ads.

Here are a  few of the agenda highlights that struck me as out of touch.   If you have others, please share them with us.

•  "About 100 are expected to pile into Jeep Wranglers in the procession from DDB's Madison Avenue headquarters to Times Square," reports Advertising Age.   That's right, a gas-guzzling, smog-hogging testosterone-laden kick off.   A great spectacle and a three-hour buzz for the Wrangler brand. 

• "In Search of the Big Idea: Top CMOs share insights on getting the job done."  Pssst. It's not about the big idea any more; it's about listening to the customer, providing lots of useful and sometimes entertaining information through channels customers prefer,  and delivering product/service  experiences that consistently knock their socks off.  They don't really care about the big creative idea. 

• "Blurring: A Truly Intgegrated Approach to Multichannel Marketing. A stellar panel discussing a revolutionary marketing model. This executive panel will decipher the challenges of today's marketers in collaborating efforts bewteen advertising and direct marketing."  Yikes.  Aside from the decidely old hypey language style, the fact is that Web 1.0 blured the lines of advertising and direct back in the 90's.  (And some say we're in the Web 1.0 or 3.0 phase.) Marketers get that digital marketing does double duty and have been doing consistenly innovative "blurring" work for over a decade. 

• And my favorite.  "The 3rd Annual Stars of Madison Avenue:  The Business of Celebrities will honor popular celebrity and athlete endorsers and the big name marketers they represent."  Honor them for what? Being really smart about cutting $10 million endorsement deals and never having to be held accountable for whether the endorsement moves the sales needle?  How relevant is this to marketers?

I hope advertising is evolving, but this conference signals that the industry is stuck. The good news is that there are huge opporutnities for the new breed of marketing services agencies — and they've already eating the ad industry's party appetizers. Lunch is next.

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