It's fashionable in some quarters to declare advertising dead.

But reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. After all, people will always buy apples and the green grocer will always polish them. Perhaps it's better to divide advertising agencies into 'dinosaurs' and 'mammals'. The former became extinct (so one hypothesis would have it) because they couldn't adapt to their climate, whereas the latter laid low, adapted and survived.

True, traditional advertising looks moribund. Her traditional channels blocked, she has been bellowing in her swamp of late. But amid the undergrowth, the mammals are thriving, shunning traditional approaches and taking more unusual paths so as to grab people's attention.

Of the new landscape Tom Himpe, author of 'Advertising is Dead: Long Live Advertising,' says: '...agencies need to recruit people with a broad and open mindset,' for 'there are many old crocodiles out there.' He further recommends that in the age of two-way conversations with the consumer all brands should engage in guerilla warfare. By this he means, instead of one 'big bomb', it's wiser to invest in an array of smaller bombs, i.e. in smaller creative ideas.

He takes the view that  off-beat and truly original actions or initiatives should be the heart of a campaign. Rather than being the cherry on the cake, they should be the cake. All of which of course is music to Libertine' s ears.