This morning I read in The Wall Street Journal where Johnson & Johnson is busting the balls of its ad agency, putting media buying and planning accounts up for bid and "looking to agencies ... to improve the model," as J&J's media chief Kim Kadlec puts it.

She wants ad agencies--rather than media-buying agencies--to create a special division to handle consumer research. Why? So the consumer research propeller-heads can work more directly with the ad agency's creative types.

Kadlec sounds like a typical corporate squarehead who wants all ads to precisely and scientifically address consumers' vastly complex feelings and infinitely subtle ideas about shampoo.

You know why ad agencies don't do consumer research? Because ad agencies aren't good at consumer research. Ad writers should read consumer research of course--the most and the best they can get their hands on.

Then, they should forget everything they read about how human beings feel about shampoo and write an ad that addresses how humans feel, period.

But for an ad agency to distract itself from doing great creative by trying to create a big, elaborate, credible research division--that would be like Murray's Freelance Writing creating the internal capacity to calculate and mail our own invoices.

The idea is preposterous!