Andy Fletcher got one thing right in his article…. “a half-dozen companies that control our entire industry” . That is the sad state of affairs. We have a 1/2 dozen firms that control the industry..

It pains us when you see some marketing VP at a firm get conned from switching from one Omnicom Group company to another… and says they ‘changed agencies’. Like what Pepsi did… these guys switched phone numbers… not agencies… the VP’s of ‘both divisions’ report to the same idiot..

That’s the problem out there.. it’s that you have 6 guys controlling what they feel is advertising.. 6 people that don’t understand the internet.. not by a long shot. Their lives center around the next pitch for the estimated lifespan of 36 months per client.. use the canned TV spots, billboards, newspaper and magazine ads for the 87% of their massive spending / carbon footprint budget… the rest will go to their new ‘InterActive shop’ which is nothing more than a computer monitor showing Google Adwords and 2 interns that can make flash sites ‘look cool’.

Then these guys have the guts to say they know how internet marketing works. In a former life these guys that make the pitches used to be in used car sales.

Seriously enjoy the mess out there.. It’s only going to get uglier. Perhaps a longer recession will force them to actually understand that the internet is used for more than just sending virtual pink slips to their employees.

Nothing changed. Not with my holding company or anyone else’s that I am aware of. A hindsight reality check reveals the near impossibility of that goal. Was a guy who runs a midsize shop in Atlanta really going to convince a half-dozen companies that control our entire industry to voluntarily sacrifice a quarter of their short-term profits to invest in the agencies that actually earned it? Please.
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