At OMMA West, Publicis Groupe Media's Rishad Tobaccowala outlined six issues that could collapse the online ad industry if not addressed.

Hubris, short-sightedness, and plain old lack of planning could spell doom for the interactive marketing world, but the operative word is "could," not "will," Rishad Tobaccowala told several hundred attendees in Monday's OMMA West morning keynote, "What Could Destroy Us."

"Business is back, consumer usage is up, everyone's mood is up," Tobaccowala, the chief innovation officer of Publicis Groupe Media, announced to the Online Media, Marketing and Advertising (OMMA) crowd in the ballroom of San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel. "So what is this 'destroy us' crap?" Simple, he continued: The industry needs to address certain issues squarely and fearlessly if it doesn't want to risk a replay of its earlier collapse.

At the top of the list is what he called "Inner Dinosaur Disease," the fear of change. Because change can be painful, he said, we resist it, hang back and let others do it first, and blame our desire not to change on everyone from bosses, clients and employees to Wall Street. Alternatively, agencies and clients alike chase after change in meaningless increments, like issuing a press release, going 100 percent digital on a brand no one knows about or launching a task force that discusses more than it acts.

Tobaccowala called the second big issue "optimizing the wrong things." Focusing on inputs, such as how much the client spends, instead of outputs, like the results achieved from that expenditure, is one classic example. Another is to drown the client in numbers, tossing out so many charts that the sheer volume makes a project look successful. This is closely related to issue number three, "data wars," in which marketers pay more attention to obtaining metrics than to determining which metrics are most relevant and how best to use them.

The fourth menace to interactive marketing is that scourge of 2000 -- the arrogance of success. Tobaccowala dubbed it the Napoleon complex, noting that the French emperor could have held on to his military successes had he not overreached by trying to take on Russia. An agency that believes it can or must do it all, that digital is going to take over everything, is an agency that sees everyone else as the enemy. That kind of attitude makes productive partnering next to impossible, Tobaccowala pointed out, saying, "There's no cooperation when you think everyone's going to eat your lunch."

Without the right partners, though, nothing gets done -- which leads to issue five, "creative conflagration." Data is powerful, but without creative, the numbers don't turn into anything interesting and compelling, Tobaccowala noted. Marketers can't find the perfect balance of creative and contact unless they think about how these two groups should work together, from keeping ideas within the given budget to determining which ideas will be most effective.  

Finally, the sixth issue that threatens the industry today is a dearth of talent. Superior talent is the only way for interactive firms to set themselves apart, he pointed out, but if everyone wants to work for Google and Yahoo!, other companies in the interactive space have to work twice as hard to attract, retain and motivate employees.

This may seem like a bleak prognosis, but Tobaccowala quickly pointed out that his company and others can take steps to fend off disaster, starting with the simple (though not easy) step of facing the truth. These are real problems, he insisted, the current upswing in the industry notwithstanding.

He delivered the rest of the prescription briefly:

• Treat clients with integrity; be willing to tell them what does and doesn't work, not just what they want to hear. Tobaccowala foresees a time when agencies will choose and refuse clients, much as clients today pursue and reject agencies, based on the clients' willingness to listen to the agency's recommendations.
• Respect and study the competition.
• Develop and nurture partnerships, both in content/creative and in data/analysis, instead of trying to do everything in-house. Tobaccowala scoffed at vertical integration, saying, "The best media people will never work for the best creatives" and vice versa.
• Finally, he recommended, "Seek out talent" -- closing advice he emphasized by announcing his email address and asking the audience to send him their resumes, saying, "We're desperate."