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The great thing about the blogosphere is the way like-minded individuals can hook up and discuss complex ideas with their peers. Sometimes it's people who talk to their cats, which is worrying. Sometimes it's people who think their cats talk back, which is frankly terrifying. But occasionally it's something really useful.

I subscribe to Adliterate.com, run by planning guru Richard Huntington, where agency planners discuss ideas from his initial 'provocations'. For anyone...

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... in need of strategic thought-starters, it's a goldmine.

Huntington recently identified a trend towards 'identity-rich advertising' in which the 'principle focus of the communication is always the identity rather than a bigger thought about the brand'. He cites recent campaigns for O2 and the iPod.

As I pointed out last month in reference to the Honda ad, these huge-budget productions are gorgeous to look at and create a strong emotional response but carry no complicated message. Ad agencies - at least the good ones - earn their money by successfully communicating complex messages.

Identity-rich ads shift the power base away from the creative agency towards the identity and media specialists. Traditionally before and after the ad agency in the communication chain, their growing importance cuts out the middleman.

This is neatly supported by the theory of low-involvement processing - a dark art covered in previous columns. The idea that advertising can be effective at lower levels of engagement than previously considered has caused a fair bit of panic across the industry. The nervousness stems from an interpretation that simple direct messages at high levels of exposure are the most effective. This leads to the suggestion that creativity is more often than not a barrier to communication, or is, at any rate, less important than media planning and spend.

There's clearly still a pressing need for creativity in advertising, just not so much at the ad agency.

In the same article Huntington points out another phenomenon at the opposite end of the advertising spectrum: the way Google Adwords legislates to produce typographically and aesthetically identical communication where success is about relevance and creativity has no place. He characterises this as a return to classified advertising.

It's good to see planners talking like this because, if they follow Huntington's arguments, they'll have to conclude that the need for agency-style creativity is disappearing at all levels. And the sooner the ad industry starts to question its attitude to creativity, the sooner it can pull out of its current death dive. But there's a greater challenge on the horizon. Googleisation must seem an immediate and real problem, but the true endgame comes as the communication process democratises and trickles down. Community-based communications like Craigslist show us how people talk directly to people in an environment where advertising elides seamlessly with consumer feedback.

Big, simple brand communication will still support big, simple brands, but the vital and remunerative process of changing consumer attitudes to a product or discussion of its benefits will only sit credibly in the hands of other consumers.

The idea that there's a decreasing need for creativity in advertising is worrying. The idea that there's a decreasing need for advertising is frankly terrifying.

Tim Hayward is a facilitator and trainer specialising in inter-agency idea generation; tim@ideopraxis.com