Wolff: Whatever happened to advertising?

My friend and long-time colleague at New York magazine, Simon Dumenco, has just been appointed the top editor of Advertising Age, the ad industry's leading trade magazine. This is meaningful to me because I remember with rapt fascination the "ad trades" my Mad Man dad used to bring home in the 1960s, all about the secrets of how clever men got rich thinking up clever things. And, too, because not long ago I did a stint running Ad Age's longtime competitor, Adweek. But most of all, I'm interested in Simon's new job because the advertising business still supports this newspaper and most other media, and yet nobody seems to know what it is anymore.

Is the business about advertising, or is it about technology? Is it a creative business or a number-cruncher business? Is it a partner with the media business or is it its competitor? And if it's not a cool business anymore — and whoever hears anybody say they want to go into advertising? — who actually works in it? And why?

The ad trades themselves have fallen on hard times, in part because they cover a business without a common theme or core to write about (in addition to there being far fewer people in advertising to buy high-price subscriptions after several decades of consolidation in the industry). Making ads, for instance, is no longer the prime function of advertising. In fact, relatively few people in advertising make ads or dream up campaigns anymore.

Much of the business is now oriented toward the digital side. This is a vast area of the business that in itself would be hard to define. One executive at a well-known digital agency — itself part of a larger full-service agency, itself part of the handful of holding companies that dominate the business — told me in a private conversation that the job was no longer about storytelling, or myth-making, or brand building, but about moving the cash register closer to the consumer.

I have been puzzling over that job description ever since. As far as I can tell, what it means is that cleverness and even salesmanship are out, and that what ad agencies do, or what they want to do, is much the same thing that Google and Facebook want to do: get paid for ever more seamlessly, and stealthily, linking buyer and seller.

The emphasis on digital contributes to the identity crisis of the industry because, once, the effectiveness of the advertising business was measured by the fact that the cost, and seemingly the value, of advertising on television and in magazines and newspapers kept going up. But in digital, the cost of advertising space keeps going down, suggesting that digital advertising doesn't work very well. Or it suggests that technology can now so clearly and efficiently identify a likely buyer that the waste and much of the profit is removed from the system.

Advertising used to be about a partnership between a writer and an art director — my father was a copywriter and some of his dearest friends art directors. Their job, which transformed the nation in the many decades after World War II, was to create desire and hence the demand for much of what became modern life. A growing belief fueled by financial types that the magic could be measured, and that it could be achieved in more efficient ways than relying on creativity, made writers and art directors much less important. Instead, the measurers rose to prominence. Measurability rather than creativity became the sine qua non of advertising.

This was a particular attraction of digital — that its results and nature could be finely calculated, curiously creating a world in which everybody has numbers seemingly supporting any point of view and outcome they want, making this theoretically most-measurable type of media the most indecipherable.

One measure for ad agencies was that digital, with all its programmers, product managers, consultants, Web staffers and social media experts, was a lot more profitable than making ads that only required a copywriter and art director. A result was that the particular partnership of ad agencies and magazines, which gave each business much of its flair and its Mad Men culture, faded. There are few ad men or women who actually write ads anymore, although some try to be "content creators," writing "native content" — a perplexing genre. Most have just become part of an amorphous digital blob without precise function or character. Certainly, this is a much less compelling subject for Ad Age than the clever men and women who used to create memorable words and pictures.

Then, too, television, where advertising achieved its ultimate power, turns more and more into a medium without ads. Television's new golden age is paid for by the viewer — ads, when you do see them, seem discordant and peculiar.

After so many years, perhaps we have outgrown advertising. In fact, advertising is still a thriving business in many of the world's newer, fast-growing economies with less jaded consumers.

But here it is not so hard to imagine — just as we look forward to the last episodes of Mad Men — a post post-modern America without advertising, at least not as we have known it. Now the story my friend Simon at Advertising Age must try to make sense of has to do with big data and programmatic buying and the purchase funnel and the ways in which we micromanage the key strokes to complete a transaction, and how we matter-of-factly trade our privacy in some mysterious new deal we have not ever actually agreed to.

Of course, we have all long wanted advertising with its overt demands and cheap seductions to go away and to stop bothering us. Quite possibly another example of why we should be careful what we wish for.