Advertising’s confidence problem, according to the man who used to price its stocks

At an IAB Europe forecast panel yesterday (July 7), Ian Whittaker — a former City equity analyst who now runs Liberty Sky Advisors — dropped the kind of line that tends to go quiet in a room full of ad execs: “Advertising has lost its way.” His reasoning is that four or five decades ago, there was a straight line from a business’s needs to what its agency did on its behalf. That line is gone. Advertising, he said, has become “self-absorbed” — an industry that talks to itself more than it talks to the businesses paying for it. It’s a blunt assessment of a widespread practice — one that’s never short of example: Ad tech vendors spend entire…

This is a curated summary. The full story was reported by Digiday.