Advertising Is Dead. Ok, Let's Be Ghosts.

The first time I heard advertising is dead, I was a junior art director at DDB Barcelona, previously known as Tandem Campany Guasch, yet to be called DDB Spain. Someone said it over coffee. Half gossip, half prophecy. The place felt haunted. It had stories. It was the real deal.

I didn't believe in ghosts then. But I should have.

Because that's what we were becoming. Not dying. Haunting. Still present, but no longer solid. Working in an industry that everyone kept saying was over, yet somehow we kept showing up, kept making things, kept believing in ideas even as the walls became transparent around us.

The agency back in those days still smelled of ambition and short Marlboro Reds, five euros a pack back then, mixed with the sticky sweetness of Ratafia, a nice Catalan drink you start to love if you stay in Barcelona long enough. That was our perfume. Nicotine, sugar, and the hope that one of our ideas might just change something, somehow.

We were already ghosts. We just didn't know it yet.

Because here's the thing about ghosts: they're not gone. They're just operating in a different realm. They move through walls instead of doors. They don't follow the rules of the living because they've already died once and survived it.

Advertising is dead. Good. Now we can finally haunt properly.

At that time, Alex Bogusky had just left CP+B. The guy who made burger chains feel punk and tiny cars feel like rebellion suddenly walked away. He didn't quit creativity. He just stopped believing in the building.

He moved to Boulder, Colorado and started something new. The first piece of work was haunted. The Real Polar Bears—a campaign that hijacked Coca-Cola's beloved icon to expose the truth about soda. The irony was brutal: his former agency had worked for Coke for years, and now he was using their own imagery against them. Go and look for it if you haven't watched it before.

But here's the thing. Even after that, the world outside didn't act like advertising was dying. There were still rockstars around. The myth was still pretty much alive. Agencies were temples, and we were the congregation.

The second time I heard it, the death felt more real. A wave of layoffs hit Spain. The old guard disappeared almost overnight. The well-trained, ad-cultured creatives, gone.

It was the pseudo-digital era coming fast. Not to confuse with the real deal happening in Silicon Valley. Suddenly, people who knew how to make ads were replaced by people who knew how to make websites. "Advertising is dead! Long live digital!" That was the anthem.

Chaos followed. Those same creative directors who were pushed out started opening their own small shops. Brave, independent, full of character. The big networks went from dreams to nightmares.

And the funny thing? The new digital kids could build a website blindfolded but had no clue how to make a campaign that made you feel something.

I remember walking through those years half-excited, half-lost, not sure if we were building the future or just burning incense for the past.

Then came all the other small deaths. Tiny funerals disguised as trend reports. Every time a new platform appeared, or a new job title was invented, someone would say it again. "Advertising is dead." Until the phrase itself became background noise. A drone. A mantra we stopped hearing.

But the third time, that one cut through. Because this time, it came from inside the house.

Nils Leonard said it. Not a cynic. Not a client. A creative who actually makes work that still feels alive.

When Nils wrote "Advertising is Dead, Long Live Creativity," it wasn't a complaint. It was an exorcism. He wasn't blaming the world; he was looking straight at all of us and naming what we'd been doing since the beginning as he shook an aspergillum of holy water over all of us.

We killed it when we invented "client services." When we started selling time instead of ideas. When we stopped asking why clients came to see us in the first place. We killed it every time we said "creative" like it was something soft, something optional, something separate from the money.

We've been killing advertising since day one. Nils just finally wrote the autopsy report.

And he's right. But here's where it gets interesting.

Because that realization doesn't feel like a tombstone to me. It feels like a seance.

Maybe that version of advertising is finally dead. The one we kept murdering slowly, meeting by meeting.

But something else stayed behind. A restless spirit that never signed the timesheet. A creative force that doesn't care about your process deck.

So yeah, advertising is dead. Good.

I'm done trying to revive the corpse.

Now we do something darker. Something older.

We summon what's been waiting underneath this whole time.

Ghosts don't ask for permission. They don't follow process. They just appear. Unforgettable, unexplained, terrifying. They drift through walls, slip through systems, and make strange, brilliant things that don't fit any format you've seen before.

Witchcraft doesn't work in conference rooms. It works in the dark. It works when you stop asking and start conjuring. When you trade the template for the spell. When you light something on fire just to see what the smoke reveals.

If advertising is a corpse, creativity is the demon we should have been summoning all along.

And tonight, the veil is thin.

Somewhere, in one of those DDB corridors that smelled of ambition and Marlboro Reds, you can still hear Bernbach's words echoing through the walls:

"Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling."

That's the ghost we keep. The one that reminds us this was always supposed to be simple, human, brave.

So here's the ritual: Light a candle for the old ways. Then blow it out. Step into the dark. And make something so brilliant it scares them.

In honor of Mr. Bernbach. And in defiance of everything that killed what he helped built.