“Our last resort is an ad, if we can’t think of anything else.”

Stuart Elliott has written a piece for the New York Times describing an upside-down advertising environment where clients push their agencies to try daring new ideas, and no one wants to work on an ad.

According to Mr. Elliot, "the dot-com bust, the fallout from 9/11 and the explosive growth of technologies that help consumers avoid ads" are among factors driving the changes and causing problems for traditionally minded agencies.

Clients are also pushing their agencies for much less expensive campaigns ("economizing is the new black") and assigning responsibility for agency relationships to procurement.

Mr. Elliot procured the headline quote from Carl Johnson at Anomaly.

Advertisers Want Something Different in the New York Times
Stuart Elliott at The New York Times
Anomaly ad agency (Warning: site navigation entails long, slow animations)