When asked whether the 30-second TV commercial was dying, Catharine Hays, who directs the Future of Advertising program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said
that was “the wrong question.” The right question, she said, is “What’s better than the 30-second ad?”
According to Mr. Essex’s book, airline terminals
Mr. Essex, chief executive of Tribeca Enterprises, the firm behind the Tribeca Film Festival, is a relatively
recent defector from the ad world, where he was a co-founder and the chief executive of the agency Droga5.
So it was on Wednesday night that several guests who work in advertising were at the Greenwich Hotel in TriBeCa, where the wine
and old-fashioneds flowed freely and a new book called “The End of Advertising” and its author, Andrew Essex, were being saluted.