Telling the heavyweights they have to be agile

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Like Cher in the movie Moonstruck ordering Nicolas Cage to “Snap out of it!”—and slapping him across the face to emphasise her point—speakers at an advertising conference urged the industry to stop wallowing in self-pity and get on with the challenges ahead.

“We should just stop talking about what was,” Tom Carroll, president and chief executive at TBWA Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, said at the start of the leadership conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. “It’s like driving in the fog,” said Carroll, who is also the chairman of the association, known as the Four A’s. “You’re not sure what’s ahead of you, but you have to keep driving.”

Carroll acknowledged that it would be hard work to “change the way we do our business,” but called it a necessary response to the profound shifts in media, consumer behaviour and technology that are remaking the advertising landscape. “All industries recalibrate themselves,” Carroll said, illustrating his point with a rhetorical question, “How’d you like to be in the CD business?”

Carroll’s tough-love talk was echoed by a colleague, Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative at TBWA.

“Stop whining,” Clow told the estimated 380 attendees. The new realities “shouldn’t be scary,” he said, because they offer “a huge opportunity for us” to become far more useful to marketer clients as they seek more effective ways to sell products. “If you want to participate, you’ve got to start hiring young people,” Clow said, “and don’t tell them what to do—ask them what to do.”

Those frank remarks were par for the course at the opening general session of the conference. Or perhaps the golf expression is inappropriate because the golf and tennis tournaments usually held during the conference were canceled, replaced with hands-on demonstrations of digital media from companies like Apple, Google, MS and Yahoo.

The conference is getting an extreme makeover, Madison Avenue style, in reaction to complaints that the programme last year was not substantial enough. So loud was the criticism that some members broached the idea that it had outlived its usefulness.