Jeff Goodby wrote a much commented upon piece in Ad Age this week. In it, he attacks the industry for becoming "irrelevant award chasers" and challenges that fame should be the acid test of work. A lot of people seemed to be agreeing with this but there were some fairly interesting naysayers. Their arguments ranged from fame being irrelevant currency in a world of fragmented, one-to-one communications (which I think is absolute BS) to a bizarre post from Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown that seemed to suggest that fame was an irrelevant goal for communications if they are to achieve commercial success (I would suggest there's a ton of data that Millward Brown have collected that proves otherwise).
"We have become connoisseurs of esoterica. And in the process, we're becoming more about us, and less about changing the world."
It's an uneasy feeling I've had for a while, and one that's been magnified by the narcissistic echo chamber that exists through blogs, twitter, etc. It seems that we are increasingly obsessed by what our peers think, not what real people think. By changing the output of our industry, not culture or the world. By ideas that win gongs, not ideas that influence culture in favor of our clients' brands. And I fear that we may deafen ourselves into an untimely demise as long as we keep living in an alternately self-congratulatory and snarky advertising echo chamber.
On a related note, I found this great piece of film where Jeff talks about the brilliant, and nowhere near famous enough, ad man Howard Gossage:
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