Future focus

In just four weeks it will be 2010.

The internet has long since shifted from being the information superhighway to an easily accessible tool on our mobile phone.

Prime time is no longer just evening TV. It also includes daytime internet use on popular media properties.

The advertising landscape is almost unrecognisable from when I first decided to toss in my career as a Weights & Measures Inspector and try my luck as a Copywriter.

So why oh why am I still hearing or reading the following terms on an almost daily basis?

Above the line

Mainstream campaign

Digital agency

Is it because people who use the term above the line think what they do is more important?

Is it because people who use the term mainstream don’t realise that what they consider the mainstream is now just one channel among many?

Is it because agencies that don’t get digital think it is a specialisation or is it because agencies who only do digital think it is a specialisation?

Regardless of the answers the question remains – As we approach 2010 why are terms that should have faded from use in our industry still being used?

Ch..ch..ch changes

When I first started out in the ad biz I went to show my homemade folio to the Grand Dame of Melbourne adland - Claire Worthington of Apple.

She smoked furiously throughout the fifteen or so minutes she spent with me. Bits of ash falling on my folio pages as she spoke.

As you can imagine I was incredibly nervous at the time. Yet she made me feel like I had something to offer.

She remarked on the fact that I was the only Weights & Measures Inspector she had ever met. Then gave me a list of agencies and CDs in Melbourne.

She circled names like Ted Horton and Nick Trumble and told me that they were people similar to myself in that they had had careers in an unrelated field before they got into advertising.

That meeting with Claire seems like a lifetime ago. So much has changed in my life and also the industry that I had chosen for my next big adventure.

On the weekend I was clearing old papers and junk from the cupboard in my study and I came across the list of agencies and CDs that Claire had given me.

As you can imagine the paper had yellowed and it was kinda dog-eared.

The big surprise for me was just how many of the agencies on the list were no longer a part of the Melbourne scene.

Names like Masius, Monahan Dayman Adams, Saatchi & Saatchi, DDB Needham, Wunderman Cato Johnson and dozens of small local agencies.

It's funny how we all talk (a lot) about how much our industry is changing. Yet we never really stop to think about how it always has. And probably always will.