At an IAB Europe forecast panel yesterday (July 7), Ian Whittaker — a former City equity analyst who now runs Liberty Sky Advisors — dropped the kind of line that tends to go quiet in a room full of ad execs: “Advertising has lost its way.”
His reasoning is that four or five decades ago, there was a straight line from a business’s needs to what its agency did on its behalf. That line is gone. Advertising, he said, has become “self-absorbed” — an industry that talks to itself more than it talks to the businesses paying for it.
It’s a blunt assessment of a widespread practice — one that’s never short of example: Ad tech vendors spend entire conferences debating whether agentic AI will transact media autonomously. Brand-side finance teams haven’t been asked if they want it to. Holdcos tell Wall Street a story about AI-driven margin expansion and organic growth. Clients get a very different story about why their budgets keep getting squeezed. Agencies report up CPM, viewability and engagement. The CFO wants to know what it did for revenue.
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