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With inflicted media the consumer had no choice. With immersion he has all the power.

Also interesting isn’t just that the winning creative seems light-years away from anything we used to consider advertising, it’s also the types of places that are creating it.

No one, it seems, wants to make ads or work at an advertising agency anymore.

During the past eighteen months, much of which was spent on the road visiting what I had thought were advertising agencies, I couldn’t help but notice how many companies have increasingly taken to defining themselves by articulating not what they are but what they are not. And more and more, what they do not want to be called is advertising agencies.

For instance, I saw the following quotation, attributed to Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative officer of TBWA\Worldwide, on a poster taped to the office door of Kristi Vandenbosch, president of TBWA’s digital shop, Tequila\, in Playa del Rey: “Who wants to be a fucking ad agency?”

And this: the first words one sees on the agency philosophy section of the Web site for the San Francisco digital marketer EVB are “We’re not an ad agency.” And on the Web site for the heralded New York–based creative boutique Droga5 (owned by the global advertising holding company Publicis) is this subversive tease: “We believe that all agency rhetoric (including ours) blows.”

Why do so many advertising agencies, once one of our biggest codifiers and manufacturers of cool, seem to be saying: Old, evil, out-of-touch people work at advertising agencies, making (yawn) TV commercials with (ugh) product demos and benefits, and jingles and unique selling propositions. Probably in black and white, with 800 numbers and a voice-over that says things such as “Act now,” and “That’s not all,” and “Results may vary.”

The answer, of course, is that advertising agencies are brands, too. And the sexiest selling point an agency can demonstrate for a prospective client right now isn’t a big-budget TV show reel. It’s the capability to do everything else. The great TV reel is cost of entry (not to mention still the top revenue generator at most agencies). The other stuff, though, is where the heat is.

Would you rather work for or with a company that makes traditional print and television ads or one that sparks, as David Droga of Droga5 likes to say, “cultural movements for brands”? Would you rather tell the hot-in-a-quirky-way person you’ve just met at a party at the hotel Majestic that you work for or with (a) an advertising agency, (b) a media-neutral agent of change, or, my favorite, (c) an idea factory?

Why work at an advertising agency owned by a soulless global holding company, a place with the names and/or initials of humans on its door, when you can work at a place (often, by the way, still owned by a soulless holding company) called Mother or Strawberry-Frog, Toy or Tequila, or Naked?

Of course this rejection of the advertising label isn’t all about image and vanity. It’s also a reflection of the changing of the guard from traditional (TV, print, radio, and outdoor) to the new frontier (digital, interactive, viral, 360, integrated branding—whatever you want to call it). Hence so many shops branding themselves as entertainment marketers or idea factories or whatever else implies the transcendence of the old and the embracing of the new.

Frankly, it had all begun to feel like so much digital bullshit. But, just when all the industry buzz had reached unprecedented levels of tedium, I started to see some tangible proof in Cannes. Maybe there was something to it. With almost every conversation I had, every seminar I attended, and every award given, it was becoming clear: after years of hype and unfulfilled promise, a new advertising paradigm was finally coming of age.

Consider the fact that the work that captured what has become the most prestigious prize at Cannes, the Titanium Grand Prix (for branding that transcends media categorization and, in this instance, description),