Claire Beale on Advertising

To make a model millionaire adman, take one smart suit with his name above the door of a fashionable London ad agency; fast car on the drive; yacht in Cannes for the ad festival; glamorous wife; rich influential friends. Add membership of some exclusive clubs, expense-account skiing trips, lavish parties, a telephone-number salary. You get the picture: the flash-adman cliché.

On the face of it, Johnny Hornby, below, ticks all the boxes - more so now since, with his partners Simon Clemmow and Charles Inge, he's just become adland's newest minted star.

C, H and I have just made a packet. They've sold 49.9 per cent of their six-year-old agency for an eye-watering £30m. In a shock move (because weren't they canoodling with Havas?), they've divvied up with Sir Martin Sorrell's WPP. The adland village is buzzing. And as the agency's most visible and charismatic figurehead, Hornby is the one in the limelight. This is Hornby's play.

Son of Sir Derek Hornby (the former chairman of Rank Xerox), half-brother to the novelist Nick Hornby, and one of adland's endearing characters, Johnny would probably hate to be thought of as the rich-adman stereotype. He's far too dishevelled to fit the smooth identikit: his charm is too roguish to be slick, and his New Labour creds (Peter Mandelson was, at one time, a director of CHI) constantly undermine any danger that you'll think he's flash-posh.

And to the bloated stereotype you'll need to add the following, rather more defining attributes: industry-beating client servicing, a solid creative partnership, a compelling strategic proposition, and a passion for the advertising business. Of course, he's got great partners: big thinker Simon Clemmow, thoughtful creative Charles Inge. But it's around Hornby that relationships seem to revolve. The biggest, and the one that helped to inflate CHI's value, is with Charles Dunstone, the Carphone Warehouse boss.

When CHI launched, Dunstone signed with it. Back in 2001, Dunstone's companies spent about £10m on advertising. Now, that's more like £50m, and growing; no surprise that CHI has grown with it. And this is not just your regular client/agency relationship, this is real friendship and there aren't many clients who give their agency that sort of loyalty and support these days.

So, this is what Sorrell's paid for: for Hornby, his team, his blood-brother clients, a solid but unexciting creative product, a track record in integrated advertising, and a new business hit rate that has driven CHI's revenues to more than £17m in six years, with profits almost a third of that. CHI gets to keep its independence(ish) and to leverage some of the juicy bits of the WPP empire: particularly its media muscle, perhaps the most impressive in the market.

And, sweetly satisfyingly, Sorrell has stiffed the French by snaffling CHI from under the nose of Havas. Oh, and he's also deftly U-turned from the embarrassing demise of his United London shop earlier this month by plugging the resulting gap in his UK portfolio with one of the UK's most successful agencies. So, not a bad result for his £30m.

So, how does the CHI sale affect other independent agencies. There aren't many of them, or rather, not many worth sniffing. Havas, which owns Euro RSCG, has its chequebook ready, but must now be wondering where to woo. Mother has the best creative reel in town and some of the best senior talent, but its founder Robert Saville has always insisted that it's not for sale.

With CHI out of the equation, Mother's price-tag just inflated. I wonder how long Saville can keep his fellow-founders true to the independent ethos with the prospect of such a tempting pot of money in the offing. That stereotype of the millionaire adman can actually seem quite appealing, once you have a very real chance of being one.

HOW MANY ads do you read these days? Not just see but actually read. Probably not many. Because not that many ads require you to read anything. Play spot the syntax: the days of artful, persuasive copy in print advertising are long gone.

Every time adland's creatives judge the best press ads, there's lengthy debate about whether they are press ads at all, or simply big, bold posters squeezed down to fit into your daily newspaper.

Posters, of course, don't have much copy because when you're on the A4 you don't have a lot of time to read reams of finely chiselled words. And you can't fit many words on a poster anyway, if they're to be big enough that people can actually read them.

Why the poster approach has infected print advertising is hard to fathom. But it has. Despite all the lovely words in your newspapers and magazines, the ads in between are often bereft of them. Indeed, the big award-winner at last week's Campaign Press Awards was a beautiful, striking ad for Nike by Weiden & Kennedy. You'll remember it: Wayne Rooney, arms outstretched, daubed in the red and white of St George's Cross. Just three words, "Just Do It", and the Nike Swoosh. That's it. The ad's called St Wayne and it won last year's poster awards, too.

So is it a press ad, or is it a poster? It's both, of course, and brilliantly so. But the debate still stands: why is the creative work for the two media morphing into a single treatment, when the media themselves are so distinct? Are creatives getting lazy? Or are budgets getting too tight to stretch to different creative approaches? Or has the ad industry simply lost the art of writing elegant and palatable commercial messages that entertain as much as they persuade?

The answer, probably, is a mix of all of these things. And there's no doubt that the decline in the requirement to write long copy press ads means that younger creatives are not as skilled in the art as their forefathers (David Abbott, now retired, was our God of copy). But the truth is that we live in a visual world. Where we are served words, in our newspapers and magazines, there are more words than ever: as competition for readers has become fiercer, newspapers and mags are fatter as they fight to provide an enticing package. Who's got time to read the ads as well?

So, what's the future for words in ads? They need to be pithier and visually coruscating. And this means that the art of copywriting needs to be more honed, more valued than ever. As the philosopher Pascal wrote: "This letter is long because I didn't have the leisure to make it shorter."

BEALE'S BEST IN SHOW PASSAT (DDB)

For such a relatively young business, adland still manages to have its fair share of men going through a midlife crisis - just count the paunches sitting astride a Ducati (as a nice alternative to the Aston Martin on sunny days). And this is a lovely ad for midlife crisis-ers everywhere. It's for the Passat and comes from DDB, which has a long history of brilliant work for Volkswagen, though the campaigns have lost some of their zing over recent years. I'd say this one is a real return to form.

We see a procession of middle-aged men struggling to cope with ageing, worrying about fancying their secretary, convinced they look younger than their wife, raving about their new bike ("not so practical for the school run, but the walk'll do the kids good"). The therapist, of course, has a Passat. "When all around are losing their heads, keep yours" is the endline.

In a world where car ads are often fuelled by testosterone but manage to be bland, predictable and utterly indistinguishable, this is warm, distinctive and entertaining. It's beautifully scripted and lovingly directed. And oh so true.