Out of the Box - Rethinking Advertising

Tim Bradshaw & Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson:

In 2008, the only advertisement any marketer could talk about was Cadbury's drumming gorilla. The advert was made for television but was also viewed millions of times on YouTube.

Agencies were delirious at the crossover success to the video sharing site. Here, finally, was proof that traditional agencies could conquer the web with old-school marketing skills. Gorilla scooped the grand prix in film at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

By June this year, Cannes was a very different festival. For a start, the Croisette - normally packed with partying ad men - was deserted as agencies stayed away to nurse their shrinking budgets. But in any event, rather than television adverts winning awards for online work as Gorilla had, it was the online campaigns that impressed the judges across every category.

The campaign that won the most awards was the web-led Tourism Queensland contest to fill "the best job in the world" - a caretaker on an "island paradise". This word-of-mouth hit generated press coverage, including a BBC television documentary on the search for the winner, worth an estimated $100m (€70m, £62m) from a budget of just $1.2m.

This digital discombobulation, combined with the recession, has taken its toll not only on advertising budgets and fees but also on the self-esteem of a vast industry, in which the top five global agency groups are expected by Jefferies, the investment bank, to earn revenues of $45bn this year, with the marketing services industry as a whole turning over $80bn.