On March 24, 1982, I resolved to step into the world of advertising. Forty-two years is a lifetime spent on a vocation that an 18-year-old art student had resolved to master. Since then, I have seen it all, from the glory days to advertising now playing (perhaps) the last crescendo of its swan song.

Almost all ad agencies in the seventies were family businesses whose owners sat alongside mill, factory and business owners (their more affluent friends) and gave them advice on how to run their businesses ‘creatively’. Advertising was done mainly through print campaigns, although some of the bigger advertisers (as they were referred to at the time) opted, once a year, for a TV commercial (TVC), radio spots and OOH was thrown in from time to time. The print ad was king. TVCs were few and far between, and brand names had the power to become family favourites. Newspapers and magazines were the rage and the campaigns that appeared in them became conversation pieces in drawing rooms, clubs, ballrooms and neighbourhoods.

What else could one expect from a single TV channel (PTV) and a handful of publications? Apart from the morning editions of the newspapers, there were the eveningers, and as a young lad, I remember waiting eagerly for my father’s return from work carrying his three favourite eveningers: The Star, Daily News and The Leader. They mainly covered entertainment, light news, comic strips and horoscopes, carrying more ads than news. They were the ‘social’ media of the time.

In those days, ad agencies were a force to reckon with. The owners, their sons and daughters, would walk into boardrooms as if they were sopranos who knew how to turn up the ‘notes’ of the business. They ruled marketing and their word was sacrosanct. How dare the ‘sales manager’ even raise an eyebrow at their presentation? Advertising was the new way to make money. It was a three-way street with gold at the end for the agency, the advertiser and the publication house.

‘How would you like to fall in love with an ice cream?’ ‘A Woman will always be Lyla’, ‘Aey Khuda Meray Abbu Salamat Rahain’, ‘Subha Binaca, Shaam Binaca, Sehat Ka Paigam Binaca’, and ‘Peek Freans: The Legend Leads’. The lines go on and on; such was the power of writing. Copywriters were prima donnas and no one dared to disturb them. The art director would walk into the room and there was pin-drop silence. Revered, respected and rejoiced in. (Alas for creatives, those days are almost over.) Fast forward to today, and the content writer has to be a copy-vending machine who might be ChatGPT’s bestie. The art director is too slow if he fails to churn out 20 posts a day.

The digital campaign is here and everything has to be done at the speed of light. Every brief has an insane deadline. Among the mandates is “We needed it yesterday”. The CEO, the CCO, the creative director, the art director, the account director, the strategy people, the content writers – are all focused on one thing: the content calendar. It is the content calendar that sustains the business. It is sad, but the heart of the agency has boiled down to this. A content calendar. Really?

Herein lies the paradox. The advertising (or creative) agency was a culturally sensitive sort of organisation. But today it has to don the garb of a digital agency – a media house, almost. In other words, a rational, numerically driven, analytically-focused outfit. Creative agencies used to attract people who were not naturally rational, and a lot of their work was derived from intuition, instinct and gut feel. They have an abstract way of working and thinking, and managers have to be sensitive to these personality types. In a digital agency, it is about performance, numbers and churning out content like a printing press. It is fast-paced, insensitive and time-crunching, unlike creative agencies, where a week’s deadline is both cruel and unreasonable.

Creative agencies now talk about disruption and diversity, whereas digital agencies are about influencing with hard facts, cold truths and measurable effectiveness. Are these two sides of the same coin?

Rewind to when we saw attention as a measure of advertising effectiveness. Is it so today? Most local and global award academies certainly believe so. Not so digital agencies. To them, performance is about the performance of the product, not the brand. Is the product selling to the people they want to sell it to (not the agency head’s family)? I have always been a strong believer that advertising is a reflection of the social climate, cultural shifts and changing habits. The family business of advertising is no more; not all the children have followed suit. This is also true of families in normal households. Families have dispersed. The family TV lounge is silent because every family member is consuming their media in their own time and space – very often in the shape of someone who ‘influences’ them. Weren’t the paid ads of the past also influencing mechanisms?

So who is driving the change? The consumer, always, the consumer.

Technology surrenders and brands follow and converse in whatever medium the consumer is hooked onto. As I said before, advertising is the mirror of the shift taking place within the consumer journey. From the time they wake up to the time they fall asleep and every moment in between, technology is now part of this journey, with the consumer in the driving seat. The change that is happening is intertwined with technology, consumers and brands.

Agencies are some of the most legacy-entrenched and conventional businesses that exist, and the way they have been operating for almost three decades has not changed much. The channels and the formats have changed, but the foundational architecture and structure of the business, the culture and the thinking are disturbingly similar to what they have always been. As we traverse the shifting landscape of the advertising industry, it is clear that while many elements and factors have undergone significant transformation, the agency’s adaptation to these changes has not kept pace. The advertising ecosystem and the channels and platforms we use have evolved, dramatically reshaping how clients and marketing teams collaborate. Similarly, in the last 25 years, advancements in technology have revolutionised the way data and systems integrate, fundamentally altering consumer behaviour, preferences and purchasing habits.

Yet, despite these shifts, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Because, unfortunately, as an industry, we have failed to adapt, disrupt and evolve the spiel that we have been giving our clients for years. We have limited our ability to achieve sustainability and profitability while remaining relevant to our clients. The 15% agency commission died a long time ago, and I do not see the retainer model surviving longer than five years. To survive and thrive, the industry must embrace a mindset of continual evolution and align its strategies with the realities of a digital-first approach, positioning and integrating the brand’s profits with its performance in promoting the brand and thereby making the agency indispensable to the consumer journey.

This will require reimagining, rethinking, and refreshing our tools, our goals and our approach to what creativity is and truly understanding collaboration and enforcing client engagement. The consumer demands that we not only catch up but that we lead the charge in this new era.

Oswald Lucas has spent over four decades in Pakistan’s advertising industry. oswaldlucas@gmail.com