Agencies need to start being as honest about what they don't do well as they are about what they do well. Sure, it's much harder than it used to be in the ad business. Back in 'the good old days' when we had just a handful of TV channels (I sadly can remember the birth of Channel 4) and a well defined selection of well read press titles to chose from, our job was much simpler. You just needed to be bloody good at making ads and your work defined you. Agencies used to say no all the time. 'No' if they didn't like the brief. 'No' if they felt the client was making a mistake and 'no' if they were being asked to run work they didn't believe in. Perhaps most interestingly though, 'no' if it wasn't their core area of expertise. And that earned us respect as agencies.

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I don’t think my children have ever been more visibly impressed with their father than when we were upgraded on a flight to New York. Admittedly they were young and impressionable but when the head steward came over to introduce himself, to ‘personally’ welcome us on-board and assure us of any assistance we might require on the flight, their jaws dropped. They had no idea that Daddy was such a VIP. Of course it was simply the precious metal status of my frequent flyer account that did it. As a global planner I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time on airplanes - when you know that the best business seat on a 747 is 64A you know you’re travelling too much.

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