The stricter schedule in advertising vs work whenever probably has little to do with it. Advertising by its nature is more predictable, it doesn't have long term, world changing impact. The ultimate problem of selling is easy enough to crack, even if a campaign flops you try again. They're satisfied with their efficiency so no need to invest in neuroscience yet.

In software/science/math there is more variety, some problems are hard to crack. There is also more motivation to improve efficiency by orders of magnitude, to disrupt the market, like Google/Facebook do. Ad agencies don't develop new tech, only adapt to it, so they're vulnerable to obsolescence. At some point advances in neuroscience, behavioral economics and tech will outpace the rate at which most agencies can adapt.

There are agencies that spend crazy hours polishing up their work, or more often mismanaging. But the end result of such effort is more polished work, not necessarily effect, or a larger quantity of work thrown out on a whim. In technology the end result of crazy hours has more potential impact.

How are agencies threatened by Google and Facebook? They aren't creative ad agencies. They provide publishing media (Google's AdWords, PPC ads, Facebook ads, fan pages, etc) and tools (Google Analytics) that agencies use to advertise more effectively. If anything, I'd say Google, Facebook and the like are helping ad industry grow.

In the short run, yeah. In the long run, the Internet has fundamentally changed the value proposition of ad agencies, and their old core competencies aren't that useful anymore.

I'm reminded of how in high school and early college, every teenager thinks that the way to get your ideas heard is to shout louder. But if you actually look at effective leaders, ones that change the world, the quality they share is that they listen more. That's what the Internet provides us: a way for brands to listen more to their customers. And when you have that, you don't need an industry that grew up around being able to shout louder.

Simultaneously the print industry is dying. Ad agencies are not used to the new mediums. You can advertise on Google and Facebook without the overhead of designers and rich media production. Big old agencies are cutting staff and outsourcing to smaller "techy" shops. The number of total employed and revenue may have fallen, I haven't seen the numbers.

Either way, there will be significant reorganization of the industry, with new specialties like SEO/data mining/brain science taking on a larger role.

Not so sure, allot of internet advertising still looks allot like traditional advertising to me.

When I watch stuff on youtube it's very often prefaced with a 10-30 second video advert for something. I'm assuming these adverts were designed by people with "traditional" advertising skills. Not to mention image/flash animation based ads that have been around for even longer.

Allot of advertising works simply by forcing your attention to it, such as "you can't watch the video you want until you watch this" or more annoyingly "this box is going to obscure the text of this website for the next 10 seconds".

A growing trend in adverts seems to be "interactive" ones, for example playing 10 seconds of video than forcing the viewer to make a choice which will affect the next 10 seconds of video. These things literally force you to acknoledge the advert. I can see this becoming more common, pherhaps even to the point where you get something like "You can watch this episode of Dexter for free but first you must watch this clip and answer correctly this short quiz about the brand of washing detergent featured".

I doubt that simple text based adverts such as google adwords will totally trump old school loud obnoxious stuff (although I wish it would).

I think it will be a very long time before we have good enough data mining/AI programs that can magically generate perfectly targetting adverts for products without any creative input. If that world did come to pass we would probably be mostly redundant anyways.

That type of crud is done by people who come from old media companies and think of the web as a hot new thing in 2011.

Agencies charge for how much production work they can do for the commercial - video shoots, retouching, flash, etc. This doesn't necessarily deliver conversions but no one is taking it seriously because the web is seen as secondary to print and TV.

Bad user experience is just that, bad. On TVs it's tolerated because you don't have as much choice as you do online. TiVo's major selling point was it let you skip commercials.

Apple's iAds have good UX, so do many ad network startups like http://decknetwork.net You don't need to be annoying to use targeted display advertising online.

The advertising business is blooming with new technologies, in all the fields you mentioned (just take a look at sample projects of any of the major agencies right now). Designers for websites, interactive ads display, apps, and much more. The pie has just gotten bigger with more technology, with new positions.

And believe me, the ad industry has known about brain science since the 1920s. Google "A Century of the Self" and Edward Bernays. And direct marketing has had astounding data mining capabilities for decades ("Being Direct" by Lester Wunderman is a good reference here).

Well again I haven't looked at the job/revenue numbers, I wouldn't go by personal impressions.

The gimmicks in Century of Self are the standard of today's obnoxiously annoying advertising. It's hard to say how well those tricks worked in their heyday, but they're certainly less effective in today's over-saturated markets. Those approaches relied heavily on guesswork because data gathering and analysis wasn't always available. Focus groups can't keep up with brain scans and behind the scenes data gathering like Facebook's.

The industry certainly knows about brain science but most people don't have a good grasp of it. Most are involved in shmoozing clients and doing production work. This work is then judged subjectively by clients and art directors. A/B testing hasn't gained much popularity in that process.

Considering this is obviously and forthrightly shown to be a very unusual method of managing employees in the first few paragraphs of the article, common sense would tell you that this could not be evidence for anything like that.