Dear agency, wake up!

Is the Golden Age of advertising over? Reading today’s article by Stuart Elliott on The New York Times, I guess the answer is YES and I should probably look for a job in another industry.

To tell the truth, the situation is not yet dramatic, but agencies need to wake-up and understand they need to develop a new approach. Clients have smaller budgets and look for new, better ideas. Certainly not the best situation for an advertising agency, but this is it: adapt or die.
The article reports the opinions of several advertising experts, more or less complaining about the changes in the industry (I liked Linda Kaplan Thaler, saying that “Creativity used to be, ‘Think inside the box.’ Then it was, ‘Think outside the box.’ Now, there’s no box“).
But there is also something positive to read: it’s the BBDO experience with the GE account. They understood (and GE explicitly told them) that something was going wrong, so they changed their approach (and also their senior creative leader) and adapted to General Electrics was looking for: interactive campaigns.