VIEWPOINT: Lighting a candle for a better future

Have another 12 months passed already? This time last year, a lot of us were secretly convinced the world was going to end ... and then it didn't. We proceeded into the new millennium with considerable relief that we'd been given a "second chance", determined that we were going to do things differently. Have we? Or - as is more likely - do we continue to make the same mistakes, take the same shortcuts and fall into the same traps that we always did? The biggest events of this year in terms of the industry has to be the scandal over scam ads, and the dotcom implosion. Once again, both demonstrated the best and the worst of all our tendencies. On the plus side: scams allowed us to exhibit our creativity, our passion, or commitment to the art of advertising ("art" in its purest sense). The dotcoms showed that despite the jaded cynicism that is typical of our generation, we could still get excited and hopeful about the potential and possibilities of a whole new medium. On the minus side: scamming revealed the greed and selfishness of the industry, where some of us will do anything - at whatever cost - to win shiny lumps of metal. Ditto for dotcoms, where hordes of people thronged for no apparent reason other than that they were having buckets of money thrown at them, with the promise of millions more to come. So what hope for the year 2001? In an ideal world, these would be the priorities: - Training and nurturing a long-term, sustainable talent pool; - Doing good work for all clients, no matter how tough or restrictive the brief is; - Shunning hype and hyperbole in favour of simple truths; - Growing the courage to admit mistakes; and - Revelling in the freedom to say "I don't know", instead of claiming to know it all. Over to you.

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