No, Al Gore did not (re) invent the ad agency today when he said, in effect, that the only sustainable advertising model will be one where clients buy yeoman produced spots for as little as $1000. He did make some valid points, however, and backed them up with facts like ‘Viewer produced spots on his new Current TV network are preferred by his viewers 90% of the time.’

Al Gore is just one of many voices lately who have said we’re in uncharted waters.

• Dan Wieden has no idea what’s coming in advertising, although to his credit he doesn’t think the sky is falling, he sees this as an exciting time and I admire, and choose to share his point-of-view.
• Bootb (yes, I thought it said Boob the first time I read it too. FAIL on the name) in the Netherlands is crowdsourcing the ad agency and turning everyone into a marketer (or so they think). This model had marketers of every stripe with their hackles up this past March at SxSWwith a lot of the wrath focused on Crowdspring by the likes of David Carson and others. Mostly around the sticky spec work issue.
• Accellteon says “Today’s marketing problems will be solved by people with diverse skill sets” and I have to agree with the opening statement of the press release–although I haven’t read the ebook they’re hawking yet.
• Scott Goodson of Strawberry Frog has said “Why not give clients the opportunity to put teams of cherry picked talent together to work on their business and generate the best ideas? If a client decides , “I don’ want an agency, just want that particular team, made up of top talent across these areas” why wouldn’t we agree to collaborate on shared business with shared reward?” 

None of this means the end of the ad agency but it certainly signals the end of the ad agency as we know it. The decline of traditional advertising is a reality that’s been with us for a while now–it didn’t just happen when Oprah got on Twitter.

So what does this all indicate? The rise of classes in marketing? I think, yes. The end of the industrial revolution of marketing as Gore said in the above article? Probably not.   So, what does this new marketing society look like? Dare I say, marketing social democracy! I’ll explore this in part 2.

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