WHEN wrestling with all the problems of managing the digital revolution, it’s instructive to talk to advertising people who remember 1955.

Just over fifty years ago, British advertising agencies were preparing for the advent of what was then a new medium, television; and in theory, it shouldn’t have been much of a problem. The fundamental principles of good advertising hadn’t changed. All that agencies had to do was acquire the same skills and confidence in the production of film as they possessed in print.

But few of them found it easy. And although parallels with digital are far from perfect, there’s real value to be gained from looking back.

In the early 1950s, the most sceptical agency people were the most senior. This was not just stupidity on their part; there were good reasons to be sceptical. Authoritative voices were confident that the British public would never accept television with advertisements. Setting up a television capability was a significant extra cost with little possibility of immediate equivalent return. Personal confidence was low: senior agency people found themselves ill-equipped to recommend the television medium or even to debate it with clients. And, of course, in the early years, television in the UK enjoyed nothing like national coverage, which made it of doubtful (and totally unproven) value to national advertisers. To all of that, we can add an all-too-human resistance to novelty and change.

Some agencies responded by setting up quite separate TV departments, with their own creative people, most recruited from film and entertainment. They knew little about advertising. Their output, by and large, was technique-driven; if something was technically possible, it was used, whether or not it made marketing sense. There was a lot of animation and singing. Jingles reigned.

Other agencies did their best to absorb the new medium into existing account groups — but were hampered by simple ignorance. Not many print writers were natural writers of narrative, and art directors were demoted to the laborious process of drawing storyboards.

The work produced by these agencies was worthily relevant, yet made very little imaginative use of the wonderfully persuasive qualities that the new medium offered. It was really only when television advertising stopped being thought of as new that the medium began to be used both imaginatively and relevantly.

In advertising and in the newspaper world, some of these responses are to be seen in the emergence of the new technologies. Again, it’s proved hard for traditional organisations, comfortable with established techniques, to embrace the new. Again, this hasn’t been simple bloody-mindedness. The new technologies seemed difficult to master, were largely unproven and showed little sign of being profitable. Even worse, more often than not, they clearly threatened to cannibalise their older siblings’ businesses — and at a time when those businesses were being set ever more demanding profit targets. Furthermore — and here the parallel with the advent of commercial television falters — it seems entirely probable that the internet will permanently reduce the profitability of traditional businesses run on traditional lines. It’s hardly surprising that established managers didn’t rush to embrace these strange, expensive and threatening new forces.

Those who did embrace the new technologies with most enthusiasm tended to be those for whom the digital age and the internet were of absorbing interest in themselves; so again, basic principles of good advertising sometimes took second place to addiction to technique. There was an age gap, a knowledge gap and a vocabulary gap. Two quite different languages were spoken and there were few who were truly bilingual.

The answer to this management dilemma, I suspect, is likely to be not dissimilar to the way that the agency business finally sorted out absorption of commercial television.

Existing, traditional businesses will continue to develop digital expertise. It will take time, because it clearly takes longer to effect change in a big, established company heavily dependent on the success of its traditional business for the foreseeable future. Start-ups — the digital-only specialists — will continue to develop their advertising expertise. The language barrier will gradually be lowered and interpreters will thrive.

There will be constant competition between old and new. Slowly, the new media will cease to be thought of as new media; they will simply be additional channels of communication. And like all media that were once new media but are now just media, they’ll earn a well-deserved place in the media repertoire, perhaps through reverse takeovers — but will almost certainly displace none.

Sir Martin Sorrell is the chief executive of WPP Group

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