Standing On the shoulders of absolutely fucking nobody

Advertising’s been going for a long time, so long in fact that it’s often called the world’s second-oldest profession.

But even if we discount the early years of BBDO Pompeii and DDB Londinium, there’s now been a good half-century since Bernbach’s creative revolution kicked in. Since then, we’ve been able to see how the greats have scaled incredible heights: from John Webster to Juan Cabral, Tim Delaney to Tom Carty, David Abbott to Dave Trott, the list of people who have shown us the way forward and tickled the public’s balls is long and distinguished.

So why is it that we’re not getting any better at it? When Webster was telling the country to Watch Out There’s a Humphrey About, or Follow The Bear he didn’t have nearly as many previous greats to learn from and progress; he was just feeling his way in the dusk. But now that we’ve seen the kind of things that can work and the ways to success you’d think we’d all be creating even better stuff than he did.

And are we?

Are we fuck.

I do understand that no one has bettered Hendrix or quite reached the peaks of Citizen Kane, but this is advertising. Hundreds of briefs get answered every day with the benefit of the knowledge of what has gone before, but the overwhelming mountain of dismal dross out there would seem to suggest that either the lessons never get learned or they are not actually learnable (or we’re all a bit thick).

I suppose it’s the unending quest for the new that leads us to discard the old with an indecent lack of respect. Perhaps the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater – warm charm being rejected at the same time as the odd overused filmic technique.

But whatever the reason, I get the distinct impression that very few people in the industry are sufficiently aware of what’s gone before to be able to have a crack at surpassing it.

Instead, we just start from scratch over and over again, leaving the greats of the past further and further behind.

What a stupid bunch of cunts we are, eh? (Smiley face made of punctuation).