Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Ekrem Dupanović
The exclusive guest of this year’s Days of Communication was Sir Martin Sorrell – former CEO of WPP, and now the founder of S4 Capital. He came to Rovinj for only an hour or two to hold the lecture and to answer briefly some questions for journalists.
I had an important meeting at a time when Sir Martin Sorrell devoted his 20 minutes to journalists. It was before the lecture in the grand hall of the Lone Hotel.
As I did not have time to go and ask the question myself, I asked Asja to ask Sorrell for me whether at least the spirit of the Mad Men series would ever return. I read before he came to Rovinj that he loved the show, so it seemed a nice question to ask. For me, it was the golden age, when advertising was a gentleman’s business.
Here’s what he said:
“No. And quite rightly, it shouldn’t return. Whoever believes in it, it’s nonsense. Today is the golden age as well. It’s only different. It’s very difficult for those, I will call them dinosaurs, to understand, that things have changed. A lot of people in our industry still look back at those days. When they look at data and creativity, they see a conflict. There is no conflict between data and creativity. Data informs creativity. It makes creativity better. That is one thing. The second is how you define creativity, it’s no longer someone who’s been drinking all night, gets up in the morning delivering a brilliant presentation and intuitively selling people on an idea. This is still an important part of it but what is even more important is using the data and the analytic tools that we have, in an effective way. So, it’s a different type of golden era. But there’s no point in us looking back and saying the 80’s and the 90’s were a golden age and we’ve lost it. The new millennium is a golden age and we’ve created a 200 billion USD digital advertising industry. Google, Facebook, Amazon have their strong points and their week points, as everybody has them but they’ve created a major opportunity for the people in our industry. And the young people find our industry far more attractive as a destination for their careers than what we had before. I think our industry is going through what is a golden age squared, tripled, a better golden era than it was before because it is much broader, much deeper, geographical, technological, so we are attractive from both buckets point of view. I think our industry is much more exciting today. It is much more challenging than it was in that gentleman’s era of white Anglo-Saxon protestant agencies in New York City. It is much more varied and much more cosmopolitan. I think it is much more exciting.”
My question provoked him, and even in the lecture that followed after meeting with journalists he devoted much of his talk to dinosaurs, recalling the question from about twenty minutes ago.
That is how I turned from self-proclaimed Methuselah and became a dinosaur.
Yes, we used to drink all night, and “die” in creative ideas together with the clients with whom we used to be friends.
The day before departure for Rovinj, Asja and I had lunch in Ljubljana Pen Club with Jure Apih and Meta Dobnikar. A good part of the evening Jure and I devoted to remembering the late night conversations some forty plus years ago, in that same Pen Club that was a cult place.
Of course I understand the difference between our industry today and that of forty-plus years ago that I lived through. And I do not lament over the “good old days”. And I try every day to learn about new trends and technologies to keep up with the media and advertising industry in which I work. And I don’t mind asking for explanation of everything I don’t understand, so I could grasp things better, and be able to talk to people in the industry. And …
But there was simply something singularly beautiful about those times.