A pal of mine, Mark Gorman, has a blog.
He's a very good writer, very well-connected, and has a lot of great stuff about the Scottish Advertising industry.
Recently, he posted about an article in the English Regional Advertising section of the border sprawling magazine; the Drum
A bloke who used to work in Scottish advertising, was reflecting on a decline in the market north of the border.
He wrote: “I think in order to sort Scotland out what you should do is find all the people who have any connection with that old, famous agency Hall Advertising and put them out to grass. Scotland needs younger people and new ideas.
Too many people in Scotland are still trying to emulate the glory days of the 80s and 90s. The work Scotland is producing has not changed.
The big agencies are just playing lip service to new disciplines and have not really embraced areas such a digital and direct marketing."
The collective response from the great and the good of Scottish advertising was a pretty unified.
Ranging from: "Oh dear, ouch, and what's that you say ya bas?"
The original post seemed a bit too self-serving and pr-stunty for my taste.
Whereas Mark's post itself makes for a good read.
However it's the comments, all 45 of them, that are priceless. (They are also proud, passionate and highly relevant to the debate.)
Hell hath no fury like a Scottish adman scorned.
ps. Like I say, Mark's post spawned 45 comments. In the interests of balance, I went to read the comparable comments on the web site of the original article.
I found, er, just one comment there. (Schurely Schome Mishtake. Ed?)
When, a day or two later, I went back to check my sources before writing this post, even that solitary comment seemed to have disappeared off the radar.
This in itself raises an interesting point: That one man's modest blog (est Oct 2006), has, in this instance generated more in terms of response, outrage, clout, buzz, and debate that the supposedly recognised 'industry organ' of decades standing.
Of course the debate would never have started without the magazine article in the first place, but once the conversation started, most of the dialogue migrated elsewhere.
If I were a magazine publisher, I'd be worried about that.
