The New York Times reported yesterday that Y&R will be moving
out of its iconic headquarters at 285 Madison Avenue in favor of
a new building at 3 Columbus Circle. While a number of large
agency headquarters remain on Madison Avenue, including DDB and
TBWA, the irony is that the “Madison Avenue” commemorated by Mad
Men no longer exists; few agencies hold Madison Avenue addresses
these days. Yet as an industry, advertising is stronger than
ever. Despite turbulent economic times, aggregate agency
billings are at an all-time high. So why did agencies first
congregate on Madison Avenue, and why have they now moved away?
In his bestseller, “Where Good Ideas Come From,” Steven Johnson
argues that the key to innovation is presence of a “liquid
network” where ideas can combine and recombine to form new
things. For example, researchers have found that a city of 1
million produces far more than 10X the innovation of a town of
100,000; innovation is a logarithmic function of network size,
which is why industry clusters