At a highly-attended agency conference this summer, a well-aged agency founder next to me lamented, “I’m old enough to remember back when it was about the magic, the creative, not the money like it is today. This business just isn’t the same. Now it’s all about finance.” Our industry has plenty of headline-grabbing woes these days. Neanderthal executive behaviors, the ANA transparency investigation and ongoing brouhaha, dizzyingly frequent agency reviews, aggressive procurement organizations squeezing the last dollar, and the flight of talent to other industries – all talked about over and over. But this grizzled agency vet mentioned our real problem, the one that nobody is talking about – how and why our business lost its way. What he’s talking about is a seismic shift several decades ago – quite possibly before you were part of advertising – that turned many agencies into de facto financial instruments. As the surge in TV ad spending pumped billions of dollars into th...