Even though I openly criticized Advertising Week to my peers I felt the need to go and check out at least one event so that my words would be founded on some type of experience.

Today Panasonic featured a noon lecture by well quoted futurist Faith Popcorn and I thought 'what the hell! I may learn a few things!'

First though, a 20 minute opening full of self-promotion on how well Advertising Week has gone [I did note there was no mention of the Jon Stewart debacle]

Another 7 minutes of self-promotion from Panasonic

And voila! Faith Popcorn entered stage left and for the next 20 minutes told the audience of 200 folks about 'The Future of Advertising.'

She told us about e-opinion sites. She told us about how the customer was controlling the landscape. She told us about the creative economy. How culture was driving consumer opinion. And about wild things people were doing like making an iPod case out of an Altoids tin.

I looked around me and tried to figure out what I was learning in this hour of my time. And here's what I came up with:

1] The people on this site are a bunch of smarties. We’ve been talking about this stuff for months now….

2] Big agencies are falling more and more behind. Judging by the sheer number of agency executives taking scrupulous notes on every word she said – the fact that this was new news to them? Said so much more than her speech ever could.

3] Big companies will never signify change [as much as we want them to]. She used P&G as an example of one company who was creating change. Spending less money in TV because you shift the $ to print and online does not demonstrate innovation.

4] If people are hinging the future of advertising on the words of Faith Popcorn we’re all in big trouble.