In Advertising, All We Can Plan For Is Chaos

Do you have a Flip camera? Yeah, they were huge…for a year or two.

But with the way things change these days, you certainly can’t plan for much, can you?

Whether our clients are in a technology-related industry, or simply the technology we use to do our jobs, the evolution is happening faster than most of us can keep up with. And businesses, as institutional entities, will always lag behind no matter how much the people inside them push for change.

While the advertising business gets a reputation for being slow, most agencies work pretty fast these days. Even so, we’re reactive, not proactive. The creative we produce comes at the very end of the cycle — after all the client input, planning, research, and strategic thinking has been done, picked over, signed off on, and dropped into numerous PowerPoint decks. It’s no wonder everything’s due yesterday and behind schedule before the work even starts.

It’s the subject of my new column on Talent Zoo.