A great post from Leigh Muzslay Browne a Butler Bros collaborator. She’s a copywriter finishing her graduate degree at The University of Texas at Austin.
This is the best, most exciting time to get into the ad business.
That’s what I keep hearing at least. And, since I’m about to graduate and start agency life, it’s what I choose to believe.
Sitting at the Transformation 2011 conference on Tuesday, it was both refreshing and scary as hell to hear agency heads say that only 20% to 45% of their work was great. (For those who weren’t there, when asked how much of their agency’s work in the last year was great, Gotham chairman-CEO Peter McGuinness said 45%, Claudia Batten of Victors & Spoils said 30%, GSD&M president-CEO Duff Stewart said 20% to 25%, and DraftFCB chairman Howard Draft said 20%.)
I was struck by how big the challenges are and how similar they feel to the ones I thought I’d ditched when I left journalism, another industry trying desperately to transform itself. Much like agencies, newspapers struggle with a declining economy and rapidly changing technology. Many cut back on groundbreaking but labor-intensive projects in favor of churning out more average work as cheaply as possibly because that’s what they thought they had to do to survive. And it stopped being fun.
Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at USC, said Tuesday that he thinks paper newspapers will disappear within five years (troubling considering they haven’t figured out how to make money online). But I have no doubt that advertising agencies will be around and stronger than ever.
But how do we get there from here?
I don’t have the answers. (If I did I probably wouldn’t post them for free.) I don’t run an agency. Hell, I haven’t even finished ad school yet. But it’s the people in my shoes who are going to have to “invent the future” as moderator extraordinaire Cindy Gallop advised. (She’s the former head of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, New York, founder of startup IfWeRanTheWorld, and the one who suggested panelists get into fistfights if so inclined.)
So, here’s what I took from the conference and what I think we need to keep in mind as we get to the exciting work of inventing tomorrow. Read More…
All The Butler Bros staff received our tee shirts and stickers this week proving that we’re members of the 
