The year 2008 may be remembered as the one when numbers finally lost their capacity to shock. At the beginning of the year, two billion dollars was a lot of money. By the end of it, two trillion dollars was rather less: or so it seemed.

I once launched an advertising agency with the snappy name Delaney Fletcher Delaney Slaymaker Bozell. Naturally this appellation was the result of intense negotiation and compromise. Five egos had to be massaged.

It is no use using the language of the past to talk about the business of marketing for the future. We have to recognise that marketing has to catch up with both the businesses it supports and the people whose behaviour it seeks to change.

Some opinion on measuring marketing effectiveness, of course, is extremely valuable and has done much to move marketing forward, but some of it is, well, less so.

Derek Williams, former Managing Director of Cadbury Schweppes, and veteran of recessions past, takes a look at the current scene and offers some tough advice.

Every agency wants to be bigger, to offer new services, to attract better staff and to serve more demanding, high-profile clients.

JUDIE LANNON: Let's start by talking about how you got into marketing in the first place? Was it by design or by luck?

THERE ARE SOME subjects that don’t get talked about because they’re not worth talking about. And there are some subjects that don’t get talked about because they have no commonly shared vocabulary – often no familiar name.

In today's world, companies increasingly find themselves under similar pressures and scrutiny as politicians. To win in these circumstances, political strategists developed a new kind of research to drive a new kind of campaign.

Whether it's the way you define your business, the style in which you serve your customers, or where you look for new ideas and inspiration, the chances are that you are still on the inside looking out, rather than the outside looking in.