Are Advertising Agencies the Next Computer-Age Casualty?
Many offline businesses and jobs have been eliminated by the technologies of the computer age. Telephone receptionists were amongst the first, and shortly thereafter the film-separation and typesetting industries within the advertising community collapsed. With film separations now being one click of a software program, agencies and clients no longer pay hundreds of dollars to have each color photograph separated into Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black (CMYK) negatives or plates. And headlines once costing hundreds of dollars for typesetting can now be produced on even the most basic computers that use the Windows or Macintosh operating systems, with thousands of fonts available for free online. Even controls once used only by typesetters and not available on typewriters, like kerning and leading, are now simple checkboxes or form fields accessible and usable effectively by even those only slightly trained in the software. But not only did that drop production costs for ad agency clients, i
