Make things better ! ! !

I took a job in an Advertising Agency because I just loved the field, though the first, second and maybe most of the initial times when I fell in love with advertising, I was thinking of being part of the Creative team, then after graduating, I realized I'm probably more suited for the Account Management, or Client Servicing as many call it. Work has been fun in the past 4 years in advertising but I still feel we can have it better than this...

One of the many issues that the industry is facing today is lack of talent, today it seems that when a student from one of the top universities graduates, he / she doesn't look upon advertising as the most promising career option. There could be multiple reasons for this, will try and cover the primary.
Monies
This industry can't claim to be one of the better pay masters, there are many reasons for not being able to pay their employees, some say it was the international buyouts, a few others think its just the business that's slack.
Stature
Every person after acquiring fancy degrees wants to be in a position where he has the capacity to take decisions, if not be the final decision maker at least be able to drive a decision (with valid arguments, of course) in the direction that makes sense to him. Advertising professionals if I may say are most often (not always) looked upon as suppliers of ads (note, not strategy, just creative ads)

Then there are other issues that the industry faces like, effectiveness of advertising, emerging mediums taking over traditional mediums and hence keeping pace, demanding clients, competition from smaller players doing the job for lesser and a few more...

I believe there is a solution to all these problems, its just about building focus. We are in the profession of ideas, while we may be popularly termed as a service industry, I feel we are also part of the manufacturing industry, manufacturing of ideas. Even our product has to be effective, functionally viable and has to go through the rigors of some severe tests. So if there are a set of principals that benefit the manufacturing industry, they should work of us as well. Let me take the example of Motorola's Six Sigma, what they did was just list down the processes involved in manufacturing and concentrated on making each process robust. This by making the person performing that process more perfect at what he does. So they figured that if a person performs the same function over and over again, he becomes perfect at it.

We may not be exactly the same as manufacturing but we are close. While manufacturing is extremely objective to judge, ideas are slightly subjective. Whether an ideas is good or bad may depend upon the person judging it, but still there are a few things we can do to make us a true ideas industry.

Execution of ideas is most often the most logical next step to coming up with ideas, we invest a lot of our energies in executing our ideas. While I believe we could very well just out source this particular function, why does the idea thinker have to sit and make sure that the 'ts' are crossed and the 'is' dotted? Leave that to the professionals who are good at doing that, we should concentrate on making our ideas better and more robust. We need to adapt to the model closer to a business consulting firm, these are the people who purely give their recommendation, its upto the client to implement these recommendations and because these consulting firms hire none other than the best, the client buys into every theory.

By separating the function of execution, we will make ourselves more focussed and hence would not need as many people, this will allow us to remunerate better, inturn be able to get better talent, better talent means the clients would respect the advertising person's views.

Now doesn't seem to have solved all the problems we spoke about in the start...