Claire Beale on Advertising

Today's first lesson, boys and girls: history. A brief romp through adland's annals. In the very slim volume that records advertising's contribution to history, there is a special place for one agency that redefined the business. Collett Dickenson Pearce (CDP).

If you know anything about what CDP is today, ignore it; the CDP of the 21st century is an irrelevance. But the CDP of the 1960s and 1970s, well, that's another thing altogether: see grown admen go misty eyed at the memory.

Because CDP produced some of the most famous commercials in UK advertising history: Heineken's "refreshes the parts" campaign, Hamlet's "happiness" series, the Hovis "heritage" ads. All guaranteed to give you warm, smiley, proud-to-be-British feelings.

This is advertising as culture, infecting as well as reflecting the society around it. And this is advertising that played a pivotal role in establishing a particularly British style of creativity, a style that still informs what we see in the breaks between our television programmes today.

CDP really was a product of the 1960s, and reflected a wider social change towards a new egalitarianism. Back then, adland had a reputation as a slightly vulgar profession, though one populated by public-schoolers. CDP, though, became a magnet for bright minds whose lack of formal education was more than made up for with creative flair.

There are plenty of important reasons why any of this still matters today. One of the most important is that, while CDP produced some of the ad industry's best-loved ads, it also produced some of its best-loved (or at least most-feted) patriarchs: Charles Saatchi, Paul Weiland, Alan Parker, Frank Lowe, Robin Wight, David Puttnam. Although some of them have gone on to other things, they all remain powerful advocates of the business.

And last week, 40 years after quitting CDP for the movies, Puttnam marked his return to his roots (21st-century style) by hooking up with digital agency Profero as its chairman. Now, it's not an obvious union: a real grey hair and pimples pairing.

Puttnam, 66, has become something of a éminence grise in media (he's a regular speaker on the adland circuit and deputy chairman of Channel 4), and a safe but powerful pair of political hands (he chaired the scrutiny committee examining the Communications Bill). He's got a contacts book as thick as a BlackBerry is long and can open the door to more important people than the man in the hat outside Claridges.

On the other side, we have the young Turks. Profero's co-founder Wayne Arnold, the chief architect of the Puttnam deal, is less than half Puttnam's age. Actually, as digital agencies go, Profero is one of the better-established (nine years old, offices in 11 countries and a mature, full-service positioning). But it also has a touch of that youthful gaucheness that characterises so many digital agencies.

Nine years in digital is several lifetimes (literally, in the evolution of the web). But if digital agencies are to get out of their specialist box and play survival games with the traditional agencies, then they need to invest in more marketing experience and business nous at the sharp end of the offline world. It's embarrassing, sometimes, to see how many professionally naive and one-dimensional people there are in senior positions in some of the brightest digital agencies.

As all the old-hand agencies go digital, the specialists are going to have to grow-up quickly to compete. Puttnam is certainly a part of that for Profero: a seal of the stature, informed experience and sheer gravitas that so many other digital agencies desperately need.

More than that, though, Puttnam is also a guardian of quality, of a wavering advertising heritage that the digital world is in danger of trampling under foot. It's incredibly reassuring to know that some of adland's golden-age thinking will infect what's happening in today's digital advertising space. And I think Puttnam will have a lot of fun back in the thick of the business.

TODAY'S SECOND lesson: sport. And now that so many of our schools have been forced to sell off their playing fields to buy books, it seems rather appropriate this particular sport requires very little physical activity at all: adbashing.

You could almost hear the anti-advertising pressure groups straining at the leash as they slavered in anticipation of a new blood-hunt against adland last week. On Wednesday, the ad industry unveiled its own rules on how to advertise so-called "junk food" to kids in newspapers, magazines and on posters. The self-regulatory code reflects the sentiment of Ofcom's clampdown on TV ads for junk food products that target children and it's designed to ensure that similar punitive measures are not deemed necessary in other media. But within hours of the new code being published, health lobbyists had sunk their teeth in, claiming the rules don't go far enough, failing to address the frequency and volume of food and drink advertising to children.

Which might be more easily dismissed, if it weren't for the fact that advertisers are still undermining their own cause. The problem is that adland is still failing to present a united front and the lobbyists have become adept at chewing chunks out of this particular Achilles heel.

So, at the same time the ad industry was trying to underline its responsible approach to advertising, Bernard Matthews (BM) unveiled its biggest ever on-pack promotion, backed by a TV and poster ad campaign, using the Spider-Man character.

Apparently, BM's "core cooked meat and frozen family favourite" products are "Superfood for Superheroes". Balls, of course. But dangerous. Because this is exactly the sort of overt marketing appeal to kids, using popular cartoon characters, that the industry is trying to move away from. And so another chunk was chipped away from all the good work done by responsible advertisers to quell concerns about advertising and marketing's impact on childhood obesity.

By the way, in case you missed them, there were a couple of adbashing sporting spectacles over the bank holiday weekend. The National Union of Teachers called for more restrictions on TV advertising, mobile messaging, sponsorship and celebrity endorsements that target children. And the Institute for Public Policy Research called for environmental "health warnings" on travel ads to flag up the damage caused by carbon emissions from air travel.

Clearly, adbashing is becoming something of a national pastime. If only adland played a better defence.

Claire Beale is editor of 'Campaign'; claire.beale@haynet