Posted on: February 2nd, 2010 by Jeremy Jackson Sytner

Dan Brown’s latest novel, the Lost Symbol, is hardly a marketing text book you’d place alongside Ogilvy on Advertising or Paul Arden’s excellent It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be, yet hidden in the text is a parable for our times.

Apart from being a rattling good read of the comic book variety, its story centres on the belief that the ancients held wisdom and powers far far greater than the ones we have now.

Funny how each generation believes they are wiser than the last, when in fact the opposite is often true. There are countless skills that our forebears had that we are yet to master.

Just because we have superior technology it doesn’t automatically follow that we are in any way wiser. Some would say that recent advances in mass media information have contributed to a decrease in our understanding. Think about the proliferation of gardening programmes, websites, magazines, books, etc. – but I bet our grandparents produced better fruit and veg.

Why do we always seem to trash invaluable skills in the name of progress?

You can probably see where this is going. So lets go straight there.

In marketing not a day goes past when we aren’t told to change or die. New media is in, Old media is out.

Give it a few years, but I’m sure some future marketing guru will stumble upon a secret library deep below the Ministry of Communications filled with dusty volumes of illuminating manuals and pen a lengthy tome highlighting the wisdom and powers of ancient marketers.

Will it be called ‘The Lost Skill’?