Many aspects of your articles on the future of advertising ("Is Advertising Finally Dead?," Wired 2.02, page 71) were exciting, depressing, and eye-opening. However, the sidebar on George Lois and Richard Kirshenbaum was simply dreary. Surely author Michael Schrage or Adweek's Andrew Jaffe could have directed David Dix to more worthy subjects for interview.
Why did your magazine opt to talk to a couple of self-important Luddites instead of the many advertising professionals who embrace and champion technology?
Advertising is overflowing with people who are at the vanguard of using technology to improve business efficiency and film and print production. It would have been interesting if you had talked to innovators in those fields, people like Peter Farago, the founder of the first completely Mac-based agency; Jeff Cahn, a tester and pioneer in the use of Avid to edit commercials; or Jay Chiat, who has radical plans to restructure his agency around personal digital assistants and laptops.
When someone says, as Lois did, "I'm the wrong guy to talk to about technology because I don't think it matters," he probably should be blindfolded and zapped for good. But justified or not, such a scene shouldn't clutter up the cover of an important magazine like Wired, a chronicler of the true frontier - the one that thinking people know matters very much.
D.O. Gregory
dog666@aol.com
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Where's the Beef?
