This is a message for Marc Pritchard.
Thanks for putting agencies on notice. It's long over due.
Our product has lost its value. It's generally an overpriced, under-cooked, slow to market relic from a forgotten age when CMOs weren't yet invented and, apparently, we used to have long lunches and play golf with the CEO.
Strange as it may sound, there is a whole community of dedicated creative people who completely agree with you. They've been calling for a fundamental change in how we price our product and how companies like yours buy it, for a decade or more.
Beautiful, rebellious thinkers are putting their life's work into fodder for focus-groups.
You say we need more creativity. Thanks for your vote of confidence; not many are talking about more creativity. But you're also missing a vital part of the problem. Right now our best creativity - the gift that is realised through a private struggle against the status quo - is focused on finding a line item for itself on the gondola end of cut-price creativity.
Our obsession with Cannes and the like has pushed our best work to the fringe of relevance. We have changed our true measure of creativity from the real world to an Alice in Wonderland theme park where our peers judge our work in a vacuum of self indulgence.
Sir Martin and others deserve to shoulder some blame, as do I and other creatives. And so do you. P&G, along with other global clients are equally responsible for the state of advertising. Our broken business model is a reflection of the economics global clients have forced us to adopt.
The truth is that P&G does not foster nor encourage creativity. It's just not part of your culture.
Don't take it personally. Nestle. Unilever. Reckitt's...global FMCG brands are pretty much all terrible at creating environments that encourage creativity. Product and distribution are of far more importance. I understand. But if you really want to bring the consumer back into the centre of what you do and harness creativity to drive a measurable, meaningful result, you really need to take a long hard look at the way you work with agencies and creative people.
How is any agency supposed to be dedicated and immersed in your business when they are one of six roster agencies all working on a project fee?
What relevance can me and my team bring to your local briefs when we're dubbing and recutting work from Thailand? Or worse: sanitised, disconnected Eurocentric work that is done in one of the hubs in London or New York.
Can we really expect to break through and connect on an emotional level with consumers when the approval processes and research required to produce work that 'fits with the global key image' actively destroys and removes any unique quirks or personality.
When your marketing team briefs in a quarterly volume driver, even Elon Musk would find it difficult to deliver anything but a 'Buy Two and Win' Promotion.
I've spent almost 20 years working in every corner of advertising. I am obsessed with creating environments where clients and creatives can challenge each other, assumptions and the status quo, to create work that brings consumers and products closer together. I've got my own pile of mild-steel trophies from around the world, but it's all worthless when it comes to convincing global brands to embrace work that matters.
It's now harder than ever to sell work that is brave and comes from a place where consumers are people rather than personas in a data mining strategy. Our business model is broken because it avoids any form of risk, financial or creatively. But it was built to deliver to your spec.
If you're serious about changing the game then I challenge you to look beyond the 'agencies are out of date' narrative and consider the realities of working for P&G on the ground, in markets like mine, around the world.
I'm pretty sure that us advertising folk can fix the advertising model and focus our weapons-grade creativity on what matters to you and consumers. All we need is for you to fix your creativity model. Deal?
Matthew Barnes is the executive creative director of Ogilvy Johannesburg