Media numbers are tricky, slippery things. This may not matter much except that they’re important as they provide the currency used to buy and sell advertising space and time. They’re tricky as collecting any type of audience data is both complicated and sensitive. They’re slippery as just when you thought you had a new, improved way of doing it, someone somewhere decides their interests are better served by sticking with the status quo. After all, who cares about getting closer to the truth when the untruth might make you more money?

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A couple of days ago I had one of those moments when you just think: ‘why couldn’t I have said that?’ The moment came when reading The AdContrarian blog (by far and away the best blog on advertising anywhere), where I came across the following: “Self-interest has come into conflict with responsibility. Guess what’s winning?”

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As regular readers of the Cog Blog will know, I have been in this business rather a long time. But even I struggle to remember a time when the needs and desires of advertisers on the one hand, and the evolution and development of the media agency business on the other have been so at odds with one another.

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Here’s an ad.

It’s quite a famous ad, for the UK’s Health Education Council. It dates from 1970, was the product of a young advertising agency called Saatchi and Saatchi and was written by the agency’s creative director, Charles Saatchi (before he went off to reinvent art). It ran in print.

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