Not to be outdone in the arena of pandering to the public by Time’s Person of the Year, Advertising Age has named “The Consumer” its Agency of the Year. Seems they were on the cusp of naming DraftFCB but then decided that didn’t have quite the headline value.

What’s the point of this? Are we as either media producers or consumers so needy and insecure that we need this sort of validation? I don’t think so. Which means these publications are doing this, embracing the general public so that they might be embraced in return.

As Joe Jaffe and others say, there’s still a lack of marketers who, as Mack Collier puts it, are willing and able to walk with their communities. To often CGC is co-opted by big companies or people are asked to create ads or something like that. There’s not enough genuine interaction between marketers and the people who are talking about them. Regardless of how many times we’re given the tacit endorsement of big publications like this it’s not enough – there needs to be action there for it to really mean something.