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The March issue of ��������pk10 is out this week. Alongside our coverage of the Agencies of the Year (online at 5pm on Wednesday and in print on Thursday) we have asked a very important question: if adland has lost its purpose, how does it find it again?

��������pk10 wants to be at the forefront of the debate on the future of the industry. How can adland help the UK recover from the financial devastation wrought by the pandemic? How can brands tackle the man-made biases hardwired into marketing?��What is the impact of TV trading practices?

Gen Kobayashi, chief strategy officer of Engine, interviewed renowned planner Paul Feldwick on his new book��Why Does the Pedlar Sing? What Creativity Really Means in Advertising for the March magazine.��In the conversation,��Feldwick contrasted the industry's view of populist agencies like��Allen, Brady and Marsh and Leo Burnett with its lionisation of CDP and BMP (where he worked as head of planning).

Then Feldwick��drew an analogy between different types of advertising and the TV shows Fleabag and Mrs Brown's Boys, which inspired the ��������pk10 art director Chris Barker's cover.��

Feldwick said: “Everybody talks about how wonderful the TV show��Fleabag��is and they are quite right. But the audiences for��Fleabag��are tiny compared with the audiences for��Mrs Brown’s Boys, which is a programme that the��Fleabag��fans probably wouldn’t touch with a bargepole.

“But judgments about what is cool, or high or low art are quite illusory, and they’re certainly very illusory from the point of view of what advertising should be trying to do.”

Tomorrow, the conversation continues with a provocation from Steve Harrison, the author and creative director. He believes adland should stop trying to save the world and start selling stuff.

In an article that follows his book Can't Sell Won't Sell,��Harrison argues that unless the industry focuses on flogging its clients' products it will "drift��further to the margins of British business and the collective consciousness".

We have asked some of advertising's brightest minds to respond to Feldwick and Harrison's treatises and will publish those views tomorrow too. If you'd like to be part of the conversation, please get in touch.