Gideon Spanier: Digital is a great chance for advertising creatives to up their game

Advertising is changing rapidly and some of the industry's Mad Men and Women are struggling to keep up. Lemon, a new book published by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, the trade body for ad agencies, paints a gloomy picture about "how the advertising brain has turned sour".

Technology and globalisation have transformed advertising "from dazzling art form to dreary science", according to the book, which warns: "Advertising creativity is in crisis."

There are plenty of things to dislike about poor creative work, intrusive targeting and excessive ad frequency online, not to mention election rigging, fakery and unaccountable algorithms. But reminiscing about the days when advertisers could reach half the nation with a 30-second spot during ITV's Coronation Street is not much help for an industry that needs to renew its creative mojo in the digital age.

However, there are reasons for optimism. Most forecasts suggest UK ad expenditure is set for an 11th consecutive year of growth in 2020 if a no-deal exit from the EU can be avoided.

Brexit aside, there has never been a better time to set up a business because technology has reduced barriers to entry, and digital marketing such as search and social media allows a start-up to build its brand fast.

The number of small and medium-sized enterprises in the UK jumped by 2.2 million, or 63%, to 5.7 million between 2000 and 2017 and these SMEs have driven a boom in self-service online advertising, according to a report by Enders Analysis and think-tank Credos for the Advertising Association. "The digitalisation of British advertising has been a true modern revolution" and "should be a source of pride", Keith Weed, the president of the Advertising Association and former marketing chief of Unilever, said.

If agencies are sour about the state of advertising, it's because they are not sharing in all the upside.

The rise of Google and Facebook has allowed advertisers from multinationals such as Unilever to SMEs to buy and target ads directly, without depending so much on agencies. What's more, brands can make some of their digital creative themselves in-house, rather than outsourcing it to an agency.

Some of the big agency groups have been suffering for the past couple of years with no end in sight. Publicis Groupe, the owner of Saatchi & Saatchi, blamed clients making cuts in "traditional advertising" for a 2.7% slump in quarterly revenue this month.

The naysayers complain the quality of the creative is suffering, that things aren't what they used to be.

Yet the reality is that the nature of creativity is changing as data, personalisation, automation and augmented reality open up new, extraordinary possibilities.

Technology is also empowering consumers who now have almost unlimited media choice and the ability to skip ads (which is why many of the new streaming services such as Disney+ and Apple TV+ will, like Netflix, be ad-free).