There’s a lot of focus today on technology, metrics and social media in marketing departments. Given the pace of digital innovation, it's inevitable. However, it’s also directly responsible for a lot of really dull and often juvenile marketing gimmicks and advertising.

In a Business Week article, titled “The Demise of the Mad Men,” Jeff Bussgang, a partner at a venture capital firm, says that the nerds are taking over advertising.

With the rampant digitization of advertising and the explosive growth of performance-based marketing, the nerds are taking over advertising...

The advertising agencies are thus in a structural box, a classic case of Innovator's Dilemma. Meanwhile, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs smell blood. Young companies are going directly to CMOs to mine their marketing budgets. And marketers are more aggressive about experimenting with new media with the help of niche consultants and technology providers.

The problem with this scenario is you can’t bore people into buying stuff.

When applied to advertising, technology still requires creativity to connect with people and persuasion to sell product.

In a previous post, “The new creative revolution: Is the writer, art director partnership coming to an end?” I argued that the new creative team should be an idea and tech team.

The system is no longer efficient, effective, or valid. As with so many other things, technology is making it redundant.

In this day and age, doesn’t it make more sense that an advertising idea person is teamed with a technology person?

We think so and that’s what we’re doing. We team a strategic planner with a creative idea person and a technology person in what we call a cell. The cell is the key contact and collaborator with our clients. Integration is achieved at the point of planning and each person in the cell is free to collaborate with whoever they need to execute. This is the foundation of our structure and what we believe is a more relevant model for the 21st century. We also recognize that not many agencies can do this. Especially the large ones, organized as they are around silos.

Heavy investment in an outdated organizational model makes it difficult, if not impossible for large agencies to react and change based on the new realities of marketing. However, that doesn’t mean all agencies. Smaller innovative agencies and younger start ups are not encumbered by the old way of doing things and can structure themselves accordingly to take advantage of all the digital opportunities out there. And by doing so, offer marketers something they can’t get from either digital agencies or the large traditional agencies: A seamless merger of both, resulting in far better and more effective ideas.

Referring to the same article, Ad Pulp doesn’t agree with much of what Bussgang has to say either:

The reality is ad agency holding companies can go away and the ad agency business will be fine, no, better than fine. For one, there are thousands of independently owned agencies today. Wieden + Kennedy, The Richards Group and RPA are the biggest and most well known indies, but as Bussgang suggests, "young companies" are increasingly being invited to the big time marketers table.

It would be easy to deduce from Bussgang's article that "young companies" and "niche consultants" with "big ideas" are ready to rock. Given the rise of shops like Wexley School for Girls and Creature in Seattle, and countless others around the world, I have no fear for the marketing communications industry. Like media itself, the agency business has exploded into a multi-channel offering. The trick is to know where to look, and to have a knack for assembling teams from a variety of disciplines.

In fact, Bussgang doesn’t seem to agree with himself:

The only saving grace for the industry may be that their remains great power in the Big Idea. Great creative can still move the needle and provides the direction for all that whiz bang, targeted, performance-based execution.

Tactics, technology and the nerds that come along with it can help make advertising better, but will never replace experience, knowledge and good old fashioned creative ideas. Why? Because, although technology may change, people don’t.

"There is this default assumption that return on investment is the correct measure for everything," says Susan Etlinger, senior vice-president at Horn Group, a San Francisco consultancy.

It's good to finally see a growing backlash against many of these self-appointed social media gurus, mavens and sherpas. How can anybody claim to be expert in a field that's still attempting to figure itself out? To make matters worse, it appears the majority of these people have zero prior marketing background. So, it's not surprising that:

Consultants often use buzz as their dominant currency, and success is defined more often by numbers of Twitter followers, blog mentions, or YouTube hits than by traditional measures, such as return on investment.

Just as aggravating is the lexicon that's springing up around the whole thing. Words like "authenticity," "eco-system" and "conversation" are endlessly bounced around the echo chamber. In the process, "selling" has somehow become a filthy word. Oddly enough, check any socmed stream and you'll realize everybody seems to be selling something. Typically, themselves. Which is now called, "personal branding," I suppose. Though, given the nose pinching around selling, it's a bit of an oxymoron.

Business Week wisely warns:

Hordes of marketing "experts" are promoting the value of wikis, social networks, and blogs. All the hype may obscure the real potential of these online tools.

I agree. There is great potential and some pretty good case studies so far. I just hope it isn't damaged before it really gets started by the "hordes" of socmed grifters.