My two cents.

Do you remember when advertising executives were the stars in the entertainment firmament? When I first went to work at Television/RadioAge in the late '70s, our most in-demand interviewees were execs from ad agencies, local TV stations, syndicators and hardware companies, in that order. Today, our stars--those who command $50 million-a-year salaries, those who are featured in consumer and business magazine articles--are network programming executives. Back then, ad executives were featured even in TV trade and consumer advertising.

Funny how times have changed. In the '80s, ad executives were the ones who owned the glamorous waterfront villas on the East Hampton, N.Y. beaches. The gossip columns featured the likes of Jerry Della Famina, Al Masini and Larry Lamattina. Before them, there were superstars such as Leo Burnett, Ted Bates, and Russell T. Gray, just to mention a few.

At the height of this celebrity status, BBDO's Bruce Barton was quoted as saying that "Jesus was the world's greatest ad man." In the '80s, ad executives, like Ted Bates' Robert E. Jacoby were making the $100 million salaries, which, adjusted for inflation, would even make Bill Gates blush nowadays.

That was the time when ad execs were featured in movies (e.g. How to Get Ahead in Advertising and Crazy People), in TV series (e.g. Bosom Buddies) and novels (e.g. The Virgin (Queene).

At that time, all TV trade publications ran feature sections about "Commercials" and "Buyer's Opinions," where a "buyer" was an advertiser. Today, the buyer means exclusively a program buyer, without any need to explain.

Phil Dougherty's "Advertising" feature, which appeared Monday through Friday in The New Fork Times, was one of the hottest columns in the universe: One could almost forget about world news events; the column was the first thing that everyone in the media read.

Ad agencies with the greatest clout (such as DellaFemina, Travisano and Partners) were the "Dream Teams." The ad agency was the message, the medium was a mere transport mechanism, and the content just a conduit to the audience. Everyone bowed to the kings and queens of advertising.

Cut to the new century: Now try to search the Internet, or leaf through media encyclopedias published in the '90s for any advertising name from the '80s and '90s, and most likely nothing will appear. Trade magazines don't even acknowledge the existence of ad executives, and TV trade show organizers barely invite them to speak at all anymore.

This is the greatest mystery of all ... perhaps after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

What happened? How could these superstars--the "Masters of the Universe," the creme de la creme of the industrialized world--so easily fade out and become replaced by their clients--most of them bean counters, MBAs, speculators and corporate bureaucracies?

Of course, the TV business has changed over the years: it has become comparable to the direct-marketing business: very targeted, with plenty of ways to eliminate the commercial messages.

Also, content became king, and with the kings came the courtier of princes and princesses, who--while the ad executives were busy basking in their glory, money and power--slowly took over the business, by leveraging their ability to create value by shifting money.

That's when money became the business of television: vertical integration and consolidation replaced the old world order, causing the fat and idle advertising dinosaurs to fade to black.