Jimmy Gilmore

Image by c@rljones via Flickr

I don’t know a sin­gle per­son in my pro­fes­sion of adver­tis­ing, or in an ancil­lary field, who isn’t work­ing much harder for the same or less money then they were a few years ago. Most indus­tries have been hit real hard. But mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing pro­fes­sion­als got it right in the teeth.

Mar­ket­ing depart­ments are now expected to func­tion with far fewer peo­ple and also han­dle a pro­lif­er­at­ing assort­ment of media types. Plus they need to be expert on Web strat­egy, ana­lyt­ics, ROI report­ing, project man­age­ment, get social media and Web 2.0 fig­ured out and keep mul­ti­ple ven­dors on task and on bud­get with less then half the work force they would have had five years ago. And did I men­tion the dwin­dling budgets?

Those dwin­dling bud­gets are being passed on to the agen­cies where staffs have been dec­i­mated and pres­sure to pre­form and work­loads have risen. A friend reported an 80% cut where he was working.

Agency ven­dors and media com­pa­nies are now in dire straights. Many have even folded.

There are now thou­sands of tal­ented peo­ple on the street. Many of the peo­ple I know who’ve lost their jobs were among the best. Unfor­tu­nately their salaries lined up per­fectly with what the bean coun­ters needed reduce the hem­or­rhag­ing. I’ve been caught in that sit­u­a­tion before and am so thank­ful it’s not me this time.

Many of the peo­ple left man­ning the mar­ket­ing depart­ments and agen­cies are work­ing at unsus­tain­able rates. Yeah, I know it’s cool for cre­ative types to sleep under their desks when they’re juniors. I did it too but a whole indus­try can’t con­tinue work­ing at a short-term pace forever.

It doesn’t look like lost work­ers are going to be replaced any­time soon either. Econ­o­mists expect slow job growth over the next decade, it may even take 10 years to reach near full employ­ment again. And fears of a double-dip reces­sion are keep­ing staffs ultra-lean.

So is every­one just sup­posed to suck it up for the next decade? Many man­agers are choos­ing that strat­egy. And it may seem like the safest.

But I sus­pect it’s not in the long run. If the value was truly there in our cur­rent mix of ser­vices and the indus­try has not changed for good, then the money would have come back as the stock mar­ket has recov­ered. But it hasn’t come back to the tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing channels.

In fact, dig­i­tal is see­ing some growth and Web 2.0 and social are see­ing sig­nif­i­cant growth. Remem­ber when news­pa­pers ran columns in the busi­ness sec­tions mak­ing fun of the inter­net com­pa­nies like Face­book who couldn’t turn a profit? Yeah, times really have changed.

Well, we’ve all got­ten leaner and meaner. We’re work­ing smarter.  We’re employ­ing project man­age­ment best prac­tices and using soft­ware to opti­mize our work flow. Yet none of these are good enough to restore balance.

What’s really needed is a com­plete re-imaging of the indus­try. We need to break down the all the assump­tions that we’ve had about how our busi­ness works.

That ad agen­cies shouldn’t take respon­si­bil­ity for dig­i­tal strat­egy and analytics.

That mar­ket­ing is dif­fer­ent than cus­tomer service.

That dig­i­tal agen­cies can’t do branding.

That PR shops should func­tion in a vacuum.

That cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions are some­how dif­fer­ent than mar­ket­ing communications.

That mar­ket­ing and sales teams can func­tion separately.

That vir­tual agen­cies just can’t work on branding.

That brand­ing hap­pens at an agency or mar­ket­ing depart­ment in the first place.

That crowd sourc­ing will only hurt our industry.

That adver­tis­ing should always be cre­ated in inte­grated campaigns.

That push mes­sag­ing can’t also be pull (any­one old enough to remem­ber The Great Inter­na­tional Paper Air­plane Con­test knows better).

That a dig­i­tal agency shouldn’t pro­duce a TV spot.

That a cre­ative depart­ments should exist.

That an ad agency shouldn’t be respon­si­ble for the mes­sag­ing and build­ing of a cor­po­rate website.

If any of the above seems risky or scary you’re right. But if you don’t take these points seri­ously, you may find your­self in a rather scary place before this econ­omy has recovered.