On laptops and boardrooms across the world, the buzz is about the future of all mass communication boiling down to three screens: The television screen, the computer screen and the cellular phone screen.

PowerPoint topography is rife with the stimulating possibilities thrown up by this neatly packaged nomenclature. And as potent clouds of black coffee brew across the corporate hemisphere, the stage is being discreetly set for the battle of the eyeballs. Through all the posturing and heavy talk however, one little screen lies forgotten The screen within; the time-to-call-one's-own-bluff moment; the honesty pill; or as my friend, the Director Ram Madhvani likes to call it, 'the man in the mirror'.

What is it that makes advertising, the only industry where the biggest clients with the most money have to fight and claw to get the agency's worst work; while the smallest clients with the least work have to meekly settle for the agency's best?

The future of advertising in the next decade lies in a return to that most basic of human values The return of The Truth. For, if the craft has to return to its former splendor to the days when communication drove belief, and belief, in turn, drove human progress, then the industry will have to banish the joke, well told to its true home the entertainment industry.

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