In a 2002 television ad for Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, a shopper brings an item of clothing to the checkout counter to ask for a medium size. The woman behind the counter smiles.

“Just a moment, please,” she says, and taps a button on her keyboard. Elevator music suffuses the store. She gazes at the shopper with a pleasant, blank expression. Twelve seconds pass. She taps the button again, pausing the music, and says, “Your question is important to us. Thank you for waiting.” Tap. Music. As the shopper fidgets in frustration, these words appear on the screen: “Life isn’t this complicated. Why should your health plan be?”

The full-service agency Hill Holliday produced this spot with a generous six-figure budget that “got us a lot of talent, and a lot of support,” says Doug Gould, the creative director behind the campaign.

Since that ad ran in two 13-week television cycles, the internet has exploded advertising opportunities. “It would be unheard of today for a majority of brands to spend that kind of money on a one-year video campaign,” Gould says. Now, brands must continuously create fresh content in different formats, particularly on social media, where a campaign “has a shelf life like bread,” he adds. As a result, agencies are producing more content than ever before, often with less money.

“You constantly have to launch more fireworks,” Gould says. With resources spread thin across an increasingly fractured advertising landscape, creative work is suffering. And if you believe the headlines, the industry is ailing. Over the past decade, the media has been proclaiming that ad agencies are done for: “The End of Traditional Ad Agencies,” Harvard Business Review, “Are Agency Careers a Dead End?,” MediaPost, “It’s the End of Agencies As We Know It,” Adweek.

But is the situation as dire as it seems?

“The short answer is no,” says Gould, who joined COM’s full-time faculty as a professor of the practice in 2017, though ad agencies are struggling to keep up with the ways in which technology is transforming media. Gould spoke to COMtalk about the biggest challenges in advertising, how the industry is evolving to address them and what agencies can do to stay relevant.

Watering Down the Work

Gould, a 35-year veteran of the advertising business, has worked in agencies of all sizes, including Hill Holliday, where he spent nearly 16 years developing campaigns for companies like Bank of America, Staples and Dunkin’. For Anheuser-Busch, he helped create the famous Super Bowl commercial following the September 11 attacks in which the Budweiser Clydesdales kneel to the New York City skyline. That ad earned the number-three spot in AdAge’s “Super Bowl Top 50 Ad Countdown.” Throughout the last three decades, Gould, who now freelances and consults while teaching full time at COM, has witnessed what he calls a revolution of an industry that is trying to stay on top of rapid advancements in technology.

Thirty years ago, there were two Adobe software tools: Illustrator and Photoshop. Gould learned a few other programs, and “for the better part of 15 years, those were fine,” he says. “But today, I have 22 software programs, and I can’t possibly know them all.” That’s true of every other aspect of advertising. Today’s major campaigns typically require sizable teams of experts in print design, web design, coding, writing, social media and other skills.

“Fifteen years ago, you would find more people who could do almost everything, and that’s just not possible anymore,” says Gould, whose expertise is coming up with big ideas that can work across multiple platforms. That type of expertise costs money. International agencies like Ogilvy, Crispin Porter Bogusky and MullenLowe Group can hire experts they may not already have in-house. But smaller agencies often can’t afford all of the assets required to produce widespread campaigns, which waters down the work and erodes agencies’ relationships with their clients, Gould says.

That’s changed the way clients hire agencies. Ten years ago, a client would sign an agency for a long-term partnership that allowed the agency to develop an understanding of that business and its needs. “The value in client relationships was that when a client said, ‘I want great advertising,’ you understood their definition of greatness, and you could work to succeed for them,” Gould says. Now, agencies are jockeying to pitch to clients on a project-to-project basis. “Clients hold up a project like a piece of meat in front of hungry dogs, and we all fight for it.”

Advertising Moves In-House

In response to rising costs and the need to produce content constantly and quickly, many companies are bringing advertising work in-house; since 2008, the number of in-house agencies has risen 22 percent, according to a study by Forrester Research and the In-House Agency Forum. While there have always been in-house and traditional agencies, Gould says, “when I was breaking into the business, the line between the work in-house agencies would and wouldn’t do was much clearer.”

In-house agencies tended to take on projects like company catalogues, for instance, because traditional agencies were too expensive. These days, they’re also doing their own social media. “Every ad is an extension of your personality, but your social media brand is your everyday communication,” Gould says. If it were shuffled from agency to agency, the effect would be “like if your coworker comes in every day wearing cowl neck sweaters, then one day they walked in barefoot with orange hair. You’d wonder, ‘What just happened?’”

Some in-house agencies are creating exceptional work. Adweek recently pointed to Spotify’s in-house ad team, which continually churns out creative campaigns, from taking over a New York subway station as a tribute to David Bowie, to a series of fake movie trailers. The company has racked up awards for its advertising work, including the 2018 Media Brand of the Year award at Cannes Lions.

“Yes, money is being siphoned away from traditional agencies to in-house operations,” Gould says, “but does that mean it’s going to work everywhere? No; it’s only going to work where companies are hiring the right people and spending the right money. Everything comes down to these questions: What’s your business plan? And can you follow through?”

The Silver Lining

The state of traditional advertising is not all grim, and in some cases the quality of the work is on the upswing, Gould says. One of his favorite examples of an agency that’s doing it right is Chicago’s Energy BBDO, which created the 2015 Extra Gum campaign “The Story of Sarah & Juan.” In the two-minute digital spot, Juan saves the gum wrappers from his dates with Sarah and uses them as mini canvases on which he sketches their most significant moments. He mounts them in a private gallery exhibition, where he proposes to Sarah.

“The Extra Gum spot is touching,” Gould says. “I’ve watched it just for the sake of watching beautiful filmmaking, and it’s a commercial for gum!” Audiences clearly felt the same; the video had 74 million views in its first week alone.

Not all social media campaigns have to be as polished as the Extra spot, Gould says. “In fact, there are many who would argue that if it’s too slick, people will instantly recognize it as an ad and turn away from it.

“So, it’s not that work is degrading, it’s that there are so many platforms and so many opportunities that brands have to ask themselves: Which iteration of our personality do we need to be in each of these different places?”

What Agencies Can Do to Stay Relevant

Gould offers five tips for staying relevant—and for creating memorable work.

1. Scale Your Work

If you can’t afford all the assets you need for a campaign, ask yourself: Which part of the campaign do we want to do best? “Every concept has a heart,” Gould says. “What makes the idea, the idea. Whatever you do, you can’t compromise what makes it work. So if great performance matters, you can’t compromise on talent, but maybe you can on location fees or props.” Gould likens today’s media to a roulette table: “Big companies like Bank of America, McDonald’s and Amazon can bet on every number, but there are a lot more companies that can’t. So which ones do you bet on, and why?”

2. Keep It Simple and Versatile

A campaign must be able to live in traditional and digital spaces of all sizes, so develop a concept that’s easy to modify across platforms. A two-minute spot on YouTube has to translate into a single social post, so make sure your idea is versatile before you start rolling it out. “If the palm of my hand is the idea, the fingers are all the places the idea can go,” Gould says. “You have to have the palm first before the fingers work.”

3. Forget Going Viral

Everyone wants to produce the next big thing, but don’t start out with the intention to go viral. When a client requests a viral campaign, Gould sets their expectations: “Let’s focus on making great work and having a distribution plan, and then let’s hope,” he tells them. “Going viral doesn’t happen just because you want it to; distribution has to happen first.”

4. Take Risks

“People share things that are on the far ends of the spectrum, whether in humor, pathos or fright,” Gould says. But, “you can’t be on the edge for the sake of being on the edge; you want to be on the edge with logic.” One of his favorite examples of an edgy spot that went viral is the PooPourri ad, “How to Poop at a Party.” In the four-and-a-half-minute spot, a woman who’s meeting her boyfriend’s family for the first time saves herself from humiliation in their bathroom by using a toilet spray she’d stowed in her purse. “What’s great about this ad is that it features a very proper woman talking about pooping,” Gould says. “It’s easy to go into the gutter with poop—pun intended—but they took it in a direction we hadn’t seen before, to the tune of what’s now 22 million views.”

5. Make a Connection

The latest trend in advertising is programmatic media buying, when artificial intelligence uses algorithms to target audiences online in real time. If you visit a site that sells shoes, for example, you’ll become inundated with internet ads for shoes with the simple message that you should buy them. “There’s no soul in that,” Gould says. “That’s the broken promise of artificial intelligence, because it assumes all we want to do is click.” Never choose transactional advertising over creativity; “make sure you have personality, because if you go all brain and no heart, you just become a transactional brand that nobody cares about,” Gould says. “The best advertising leaves an impression and makes you lean toward a brand. We’re people; we’re looking for a connection.”