welcome to the new world of planning.

The energy in the advertising community has been dulled the past year or so.  Quiet.  A little afraid to make any sudden movements.

At the risk of sounding overly optimistic, there is something in the past few weeks/months that has started to shift. Something in the air that faintly hints at something new. That something new is a revival of the creative spirit and yes, change (hate to use that word because it is now SO incredibly cliche).

My first, very real hint of this came at the planningness conference where change was abuzz everywhere– but there are many, many more indications of a shift, as highlighted in the article from the NY Times yesterday (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/business/media/29adco.html?_r=3)   From Maurice Lévy, at the Publicis Groupe, who predicted on Tuesday that “the advertising market is starting its recovery” as Publicis begins to see organic revenue growth in the second half of 2010 to the amazing new innovative agency Victors and Spoils starting up.

The beauty of all this is that it’s not just about agencies making money again (which from the perspective of a person in the industry IS a good thing!) but in a bigger sense, these “bad times” have come at possibly the BEST time possible. The power of the “digital” world has really started to come into fruition. People are finally using the principles of connectivity to COLLABORATE and CREATE–with or without the aid of us marketing types. This coupled with strained budgets taught us all to push our thinking in new ways. Was it perfect? Absolutely not. There were a lot of mistakes to be had. But now it feels like we’re coming together COLLECTIVELY and saying “OK, times are changing. We need to change with them. Let’s do it”

An agency like Victors and Spoils is absolutely the definition of what this means in our world. It’s groundbreaking and will take us to the next level. Other similar agencies have existed (like Genius Rocket), but perhaps it’s the buzz John Winsor and team have (John just coming off the successful release of his book Baked In-HIGHLY recommend BTW) And yes, it is absolutely a controversial method. Some people will love it and see it as the most liberating model the agency world has ever seen, others will feel like it is utter blasphemy. A great place to see the debate is at Edward Boches exquisite blog, Creativity Unbound:  http://edwardboches.com/a-crowdsourcing-ad-agency-can-it-work

After reading some of the comments it’s easy to see that this is definitely a step in the right direction for the industry. It’s gotten us all thinking again. And as we all wake up from the Rip Van Winkle year or so past, let’s stretch out and surge forward towards something new and fabulous.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 3:52 pm and is filed under BRANDS, TECHNOLOGY. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.