disintermediated the booksellers; Grindr, the gay bars; Uber, the taxis. Yes, they’ve all taken a hit, some more than others. But the story is always more complicated than it seems. And some of the disintermediators are less of a threat than they are a market expander. That seems to be the impact of Airbnb, for example. I keep this dinosaur, sculpted by Sui Jianguo and given to me by colleague TB Song. One of our (great) clients, Tony Palmer of Kimberly-Clark, had described traditional agencies as dinosaurs, doomed to extinction. So, from 2008, it lived on my desk reminding me that this needn’t be. Since then we became the world’s largest digital agency network – and Kimberly-Clark is an “at heart” digital client. Google was seen (and certainly saw itself) as the disintermediator of advertising. It has been joined in that doubtless pleasant illusion by Facebook. Hiring distinguished creatives; building a sales force which talks to clients directly; hiring from the clients themselves to make their pitch even more compelling; offering a range of services usually provided by advertising agencies: none of these could be construed as friendly acts. And yet this is a medium – digital advertising – that receives some $6.9 billion and growing a year from the advertising business worldwide. I can remember, at various conferences over the past few years, all the polite denials from Google and Facebook speakers. “Some mistake, surely?” Well, at the time of writing, not one of the offerings proffered by the digital platforms competing with us has resulted in anything like disintermediation. The reality is that they have just not been able to demonstrate an ability to do what we do, which is to build brands on the principles of best advice. Meanwhile they do have a data reservoir, with all the pent-up leverage that brings, which we could never replicate. The truth is that we need each other. The Digital Revolution is complex enough to require both them and us. We can