Telling the Heavyweights They Have to Be Agile - New York Times

I started reading this article on the train home and something struck me as odd. All of the talk about how the ad industry needs to work so hard to change how the business is done. Well, that makes sense. Change happens in all industries. That's not really all that new, exciting or different.

What struck me was the discussion about how hard it is to make those changes. Hard because there's such a history of how we've done business that it's really hard to make changes.

But then I started thinking about how long our industry has been doing what we've been doing and thought "Hey, it's really only been since like the late '50's and probably the early '60's and that's not really that long."

We whine like we've been doing this for centuries and generations and therefore it's just impossible to make any changes. Like it's been passed along genetically from ad person to ad person. When really it's been what, 50 years? And the ad industry says this every time something new comes along. After a relatively short time of being in the radio business, everyone whined when TV showed up. And there were probably a lot of newspaper ad people who complained when radio showed up on the scene. Worse then thinking about everything from the past is knowing that in the not-to-distant-future, we'll be holding onto the internet like we're holding onto TV today.

So let's stop all the complaining about how hard it is to change. We haven't been doing traditional advertising that long to be this stuck.

LIKE Cher in the movie “Moonstruck” ordering Nicolas Cage to “Snap out of it!” — and slapping him across the face to emphasize her point — speakers at an advertising conference urged the industry to stop wallowing in self-pity and get on with the challenges ahead.

“We should just stop talking about what was,” Tom Carroll, president and chief executive at TBWA Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, said here on Tuesday at the start of the leadership conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

“It’s like driving in the fog,” said Mr. Carroll, who is also the chairman of the association, known as the Four A’s. “You’re not sure what’s ahead of you, but you have to keep driving.”

Mr. Carroll acknowledged that it would be hard work to “change the way we do our business,” but called it a necessary response to the profound shifts in media, consumer behavior and technology that are remaking the advertising landscape.

“All industries recalibrate themselves,” Mr. Carroll said, illustrating his point with a rhetorical question, “How’d you like to be in the CD business?”

Mr. Carroll’s tough-love talk was echoed by a colleague, Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative at TBWA, who in wearing onstage his trademark garb of a T-shirt, jeans and sandals was perhaps the most casually dressed speaker in the 90-year history of the conference.

“Stop whining,” Mr. Clow told the estimated 380 attendees. The new realities “shouldn’t be scary,” he said, because they offer “a huge opportunity for us” to become far more useful to marketer clients as they seek more effective ways to sell products.

“If you want to participate, you’ve got to start hiring young people,” Mr. Clow said, “and don’t tell them what to do — ask them what to do.”

Link: Telling the Heavyweights They Have to Be Agile - New York Times.