The AICP added a committee of 15 persons to judge a new category called Advertising Excellence/Next for the upcoming 2008 AICP Show, which arrives in Chicago five months after the New York presentation.
In scanning the list of judges, I was again struck with the deplorable lack of Chicagoans on the committee.
Maybe that’s because East and West Coast counterparts are nationally known. They consistently blow their own horns for recognition, whereas dead silence is mostly what’s heard from Chicago.
The lonely Chicago ad/production executive appointed to the Next committee was Don McNeill, Digital Kitchen’s president/executive producer.
(In all fairness, a Lake Forest-based Brunswick bowling company executive with new media experience is on the committee.)
Just as discouraging?and telling?is that out of the 15 judges, only one was a woman: New Yorker Elizabeth Talerman, founder/CEO of Talerman + Partners, advertising and branding strategists.
So 1-in-15 is a Chicagoan and 1-in-15 is a woman.
Maybe you’ve noticed, too, that Chicago is no longer even a blip on the radar or map or whatever you want to call it. The Martin Agency of Richmond, Virginia gets more media attention than Leo Burnett.
Rarely does Ad Age or AdWeek carry a Chicago-datelined story. And then it is only to report an agency’s big account is in trouble or an agency honcho opts to return to New York after (the implication is) toiling away in the sticks, among the cornfields, unappreciated and unheralded.
Agency PR departments, once so large and busy they had their own organization are virtually non-existent, with a few standout exceptions. Only two smart visual media companies employs a PR firm to keep their name out there.
Yes, information about companies and their clients is cleverly contained on a company’s website. But the problem is: You have to have heard about a company before you visit their site.
We have returned to the embarrassing age of the Second City Syndrome that once gripped the city like a plague. Back then, no one in Chicago, or outside of it, had heard of anything going on here, because no one wanted to talk about it. Or even if they did, there was no news vehicle to convey it.
The first thing I did when I founded the Original Screen Magazine (not to be confused with the present incarnation) was to quantify the market. I began the tradition of publishing lists of companies by category.
When we published a list of 32 production houses, no one could believe that so many production companies existed and were actually doing business.
They began to realize that the Chicago market was substantially bigger than anyone dreamed.
Today’s market hasn’t shrunk; it has simply changed. It has fragmented and grown exponentially with the almost daily explosion of new media and new opportunities it presents.
Points being:
*Tooting our own horn is good for business?our own business and that of the community at large.
*We don’t have to suffer from the Second City Syndrome, because Chicago is a big and thriving production center, and local talent is on as good or better than anywhere else.
*When we let people know who we are and what we do?in this monstrously huge communications universe?we will have a more equitable position, say, 5-in-15 on panels, instead of the nearly invisible 1-in-15.
*Of the 15 Next committee members, nine are New Yorkers; one each from Chicago, Lake Forest, Minneapolis, Boston, San Francisco and Cape Town, So. Africa.
