Did you know that there are more than thirteen thousand advertising agencies in the United States?
These agencies employ 189,000 hard-working people working people in the U.S. today.
In total, U.S. ad agencies are expected to generate over $45 billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 2020, a $5.5 billion dollar increase over 2015.
Clearly, the ad biz is far from imminent death.
Paul Caiozzo, founder and chief creative officer of Office of Baby, is tired of all the whining and self-flagellation.
I was recently chatting with a well known VC we work with, who joked that he’d love if more of his portfolio companies were able to operate at the profit margins of a marketing agency. We’re not dying. Far from it.
Our fixation on our own demise is dangerous, the constant public airing of our issues counterintuitive to our own success and probably self-fulfilling if we keep trying hard enough.
We need to start talking more about what’s going right. About what there is to love about advertising right now. Not in the future, but right this very second. We need to start celebrating ourselves and each other.
I have to laugh at the idea that people in advertising need encouragement to celebrate themselves. There are fortunes being made in Cannes and beyond that rely exclusively on the vanity of ad people. Yet, I understand what Caiozzo is saying, and I agree that people in this business are far more deserving of praise.
Adpulp largely exists to offer this praise to working practitioners on a daily basis—something we’ve been doing since October 2004. Naturally, there is another side to the critical coin. We also point out soft thinking and poor execution from time to time, but when we do, the intent is to encourage better work.