Here’s a thought: The ad industry still needs big personalities

You can tell a lot about an industry from the names and personalities associated with it in the public imagination. It says something about today’s tech industry, for example, that the names that come most readily to mind, for many, are Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos.

It says something else about the newspaper business, to take another example, that the equivalent list of names includes many who are now dead (Howard Hughes, Robert Maxwell), or reaching the end of the road (Rupert Murdoch) or fictional (Succession’s Logan Roy).

When it comes to our own industry, it says something about us in particular, that almost all the big names most casual observers can come up with today made their mark 20 years ago, or longer. Ogilvy. Bernbach. Lowe. Hegarty. Delaney. Saatchi. And, indeed, Saatchi.

In some cases, their names linger over the doors of their offices, but they themselves have long since left the building. When you try to think of who their up-and-coming equivalents are today, chances are you would draw a blank.

Before we go any further, we should get the cultural thing out of the way.

There are some who say that an obsession with names and personalities in an article like this reflects a particularly Western mindset. That it is the product of a deep-rooted tradition you can trace back, ultimately, to the barren shores of ancient Greece, where it took a certain sort of rugged individualism to survive. Hence the celebration of self-centred, duplicitous grifters like Achilles and Agamemnon. And hence, fast-forwarding a few thousand years, the fame accorded to Western business mavericks like the Saatchi brothers and, latterly, money-man-turned-adman Martin Sorrell.

Whereas, those same people would say, Asian culture, formed in the broad, fertile plains of China and India, has long favoured large-scale joint enterprise, which makes it more collectivist in its outlook. Asian culture, they would say, does not go in for the cult of personality.

This might be true, up to a point. But then again, Shahrukh Khan. And then again, all the individual members of BTS. And then again, Jack Ma. And then again, Lakshmi Mittal.

Because when it comes to business—whatever kind of business it is, and wherever in the world it happens to be, from Bollywood to K-pop to Chinese fast-fashion—the industries that are most alive and kicking always tend to be the ones that attract the big names and larger-than-life, highly-driven personalities.

It is a self-perpetuating circle. People with talent and drive are drawn to ‘happening’ industries. And when those driven and talented people arrive, they shake things up, and they bring with them the charisma that makes their industry the one to watch.

Big personalities inspire their teams with their ‘follow-me-over-the-hill’ leadership qualities. They instil their belief that the old rules are there to be broken and a whole new world—a better world—is just waiting to be created.

It is no accident that the three words Maurice and Charles Saatchi set as their agency’s guiding principle was ‘Nothing Is Impossible’. It is no coincidence that BBH took as its mascot, the renegade black sheep, from its award-winning ‘When The World Zigs, Zag’ poster for Levi’s—a brand which, in itself, had long been associated with the wide-open spaces and lawless ‘frontier spirit’ of the American West.

But you will be aware that things have changed.

Back in the days when advertising was dominated by glossy, uber-creative brand theme TV, clients paid big budgets for big campaigns built on big ideas sold to them by those big personalities. That was the deal.

That is no longer so. Today, thanks to big-name tech bros like Zuckerberg and Musk, we have a hyper-fragmented digital environment teeming with countless separate pieces of comms activation. Our industry must navigate a world of influencer marketing, user-generated content, and worldwide real-time online critique, where audiences, invested with the power to talk to each other, quickly dissect brand messaging and wise up fast to adland bullshit. There has been a blurring of boundaries between brand and audience, such that it’s not always immediately clear who the lead communicator is, and who the recipient. Or even whether that model still makes any kind of sense.

What all of this means is that our industry has become less of a natural home to big ideas, big campaigns, big budgets, and big names. Our agencies, which once felt like free-spirited pirate-ships, have largely transformed into corporate supertankers.

In consequence, the next generation of big personalities are being tempted away to other industries. It’s easy to lament the past, as it’s a feature of the human condition. It’s easy to say, things were better back then. But it’s not helpful. All things, and all industries are subject to change.

Our industry, like all others, goes through times when radical change leaps us forwards. It also has quieter periods of assimilation and incremental improvement. And, as well, there are times when its energy slowly fades, and its status diminishes.

It is in the times of change when the personalities emerge, both drawn to change and driving it forward. It has been maybe forty years since we were last there. We have done the assimilation and improvement bit too. Right now, we are on the downward slope.

What we need is not a way back to 'back when'. The world is different now, and we need to get used to it. What we need desperately, today and tomorrow, are new ways to break the new paradigm, to change the rules we live under, and to take back control of the course of our history. And for that, we need big personalities.

In reading this article up to this point, you may have noticed that of the 26 names mentioned in full or in abbreviated form, all are men. There are no women. There were, and are, trail blazing women in advertising, but in the main, their names either haven’t remained above the doors of modern-day agencies (e.g. Mary Wells Lawrence) or they were never put there in the first place—and that is a subject all in itself, and something we will return to soon in this column.

Warwick Cairns is strategist and Mark Stockdale is strategic partner at The Effectiveness Partnership, and Kathryn Patten is a marketing communications consultant.