But the question still remained, why consume the content? When we want clients to understand what content can be, we show a film clip from the early 1980s of David Ogilvy. “It is content that we will produce in the future, not advertising, direct-mail pieces, or whatever.” What, really? Yes, really. “It seems to me that [print] editors must know how to communicate [better] than we admen,” he says. “We admen have an unconscious belief that an ad has to look like an ad. Ad layouts signal to the reader, ‘This is only an ad, skip it.’ So always pretend you are an editor.” This is the mindset that is required for content online. In 2010, Ogilvy & Mather began hiring journalists, people who understood how to engage content beyond the confines of 30-second TV spots, not just in length but also in depth. Journalists expand investigation into a subject; the traditional creative team (a copywriter and an art director) compresses it. These are two very different things. And then we started looking for people with curatorial skills: collecting, representing, showcasing, and acknowledging the source of material we did not originate ourselves – and doing it with pride. These skills are not common. They require subject matter speciality, even scholarship, combined with a generalist bent, as well as a broad network of other curators and experts to call on. Curators are, in the ponderous words of the American Alliance of Museums, “information brokers who, through learned and creative interpretation, create meaningful experiences for people”. All this betokens a shift in the business of agencies, which is still not recognized or even expected – namely, they are becoming publishers. It is content that we will produce in the future, not advertising, direct-mail pieces, or whatever. As such, agencies will – or should – cease behaving like agents (who used to get paid by the media in a system invented in the mid-eighteenth century) and act more like the media itself. We have, if we want it, the chance to break the shackles of our past. And brand owners also need to think of themselves as publishers.