History has a tendency to repeat itself, and, just like the change media agencies underwent in the 1990s, we’re heading for another industry split, argues Dominic Mills.
Historians will know that a schism is defined as a formal breach of union within a religious body, for example the 11th century division of the Church into the Catholic arm (in the west) and the Orthodox arm (in the east, including Russia), or the subsequent split into Catholicism and Protestantism driven by Martin Luther.
These days, the term can also be applied within a secular context, such as the formation of the Social Democrats when the ‘Gang of Four’ split from the Labour Party in 1981. Or Zayn Malik and One Direction.
Adland too has its history of schisms, the most notable (and, you could argue, shattering) being the split in the 1990s of media agencies away from their creatively-dominated, full-service, brethren.
Further back, we could argue that the rise of independent research and direct marketing agencies is also evidence of adland’s propensity to schism (ok, I know schism is a noun, but it makes a good verb too).
Believe it or not, there was a time when full-service agencies really did everything: media, research, direct mail, sales promotion (aka shelf-wobblers), design, PR and new-product design. It’s hard to imagine now.
But are we heading for another schism?
This time, it could be the data scientists who decide that, hey, they’d be better off ploughing their own furrow, masters of their own destiny.
This would lead to the rise of independent data science agencies (let’s call them that, for want of a better term). They might be part of the large holding companies (inevitably, some would), but there would also be space for many outside as truly independent entities.
Why do I say that? Well, re-reading my column last week on the M&C Saatchi initiative about art and science – video here and text explanation here – it seemed to me that many of the conditions that provoked the media agency schism are present again.
The most potent of these is a sense of condescension. You can almost sniff it in the air across adland. You can see it in the way other agencies – including media ones – boast about the way they have invested in data scientists, platforms and tools.
It’s like they’ve all gone: “Fu*k, these guys are hot, we need to get some of this action otherwise we’re going to be stale toast. Let’s shower them with love and flattery, let’s tell them we’re better together, let’s bind them into our cause.”
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Yet talk to mainstream agency executives and it is clear, from the language they use, that they don’t really get what the data scientists do, or how they think.
I took a tour of an agency with a senior executive recently. He waved airily in the direction of a bunker-type area with no natural light and said proudly: “Those are our pet geeks, but you don’t want to talk to them, do you?”. It was as if they were second-class citizens.
And this was exactly how full-service agencies treated their media departments in the early 90s. Catherine Becker of adconnection touched on this earlier this month when she talked about how, during pitches, the media team got the last ten minutes, or less if time was running over.
But that wasn’t the half of it. The media team really did work in the basement, were viewed as cowboys, their work considered menial and boring, and generally under-represented at senior level.
No wonder they thought they’d do better – and so it has been proven – running their own shows.
As with media departments, so with data scientists.
In fact, if you really want to turn the clock back, you could argue that we have already seen the first ‘data science’ schism.
Paul Feldwick’s brilliant book, The Anatomy of Humbug, describes an earlier era when advertising was dominated by practitioners who really thought it was a science.
The most influential of these was Claude Hopkins, whose 1923 book Scientific Advertising started a whole trend based on analysis of response data.
Hopkins wrote: “Advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science. It is based on fixed principles and reasonably exact. The correct methods of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective and we act on basic laws.”
M&C Saatchi talks about “predicting cause and effect” and unlocking “a specific relationship between art and science that correlates with success. Applying the new model gives marketing directors an ability to know where to invest in the brand so they can build their market share.”
Crikey, for a moment I thought Claude Hopkins was alive and well and copywriting M&C Saatchi promo scripts.
So you could argue that the Hopkins school of advertising was the forerunner of the data scientists. The practitioners he begat turned into direct marketers, and many of the skills they practised – A/B testing, split runs, response analysis and constant iteration – are among those that modern-day data science has to offer, albeit in a digital context.
And what happened to those direct practitioners? Why, they too suffered years of condescension: even the collective term for them – ‘below the line’ – conveys, like the term ‘below the salt’, an inherent status insult.
Not surprisingly, they too split off to become the direct marketing agencies of the 70s-90s, specialising in ‘second-class’ activities of mail- and coupon-based advertising.
So there you have it: a history of advertising schisms in three minutes.
And as historians know, history has a tendency to repeat itself.
Personally, I’m in favour of these schisms. I think they’re good for the industry. They allow talent to flourish and determine its own course, and they raise the industry’s collective game.
