Advertising, ad campaigns, ad agencies, and the people that make it happen

I just came across this interesting piece by Harvard Business School Professor, Andrew McAfee where he sites the use of essayist Stanley Crouch’s “flip test” when considering all these bloody paradigm leaps we are constantly bombarded with by gurus and pundits as being the next big thing. As he so brilliantly puts it…  "Let's say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called 'paper.' It's cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries. You can't write over it once it's been written on, but you buy more very cheaply. Wouldn't that be a technology that would come to dominate the market?" To which I have to say, yes, yes, yes. Think how people have been talking about the “paperless office” for over thirty years, and yet we are destroying the world’s forests to make more and more paper faster than we’ve ever done. As he says, we should pause and apply the “flip test” to anything currently making the digerati swoon because it happens to have “2.0” attached to its back end!