It has never been so easy in our industry to be a smart ass. With one click of a button you can read what all the foremost thinkers in modern communication believe about certain ads, agencies, the landscape—anything really. We are all too willing to air our views on Twitter, blogs, podcasts, even newspapers and magazines. Is that a bad thing? What am I doing right now?

In theory this abundance of thinking should be a great boon for everyone. But sadly what is happening is the regurgitation of the same old stuff over and over again. Everyone follows the same people. Everyone re-Tweets the same links. Everyone reads the same blogs and comments on the same crap on AgencySpy. Everyone checks in at the same events and angles for the same party tickets in Austin and the South of France. Why? Why does everyone do this? Because it’s easy. It’s easy and it’s fun. And because people get paid quite handsomely to do it.

What’s more fun than sitting around a conference table with some dudes trading stories and things you have read on the internet, sounding smart and getting paid? No wonder everyone is at it. You’d be a sucker not to be. But just like anything that seems good for you but actually is not, this addictive behavior—what I call the digital disease—is both debilitating and highly infectious.

Over the years we have been conditioned to think. To try to think our way out of our clients’ problems. Clearly thinking is a good thing. But thinking without doing, without making, is, I believe, the biggest threat facing most agencies right now.

When everyone is tweeting the same stuff and all agencies are talking about changing models, the only way to truly distinguish yourself as an individual and as a business is through output. By that I don’t mean PowerPoint pictures and pyramids. I mean creative work. And to be clear, everyone is responsible for the creative work. Agencies should exist to make work.

Yet why is it that even though the means of production have never been cheaper and more readily available, we seem to be making less and less stuff? Perhaps you do make lots of stuff—kudos—and perhaps I got used to making a disproportionally high amount of stuff when I was in London and it was always this way in the US. But I think not, not to such an extent anyway. No doubt the shitty economy of a few years back—we are still in that right?—doesn’t help. But it doesn’t make sense to produce less work when it costs so little.

“Testing!,” I hear you cry. The client wants to test everything. Fair point. At JWT we were fortunate enough to win the Lean Cuisine pitch a few months back. The incumbent agency had a campaign that scored through the roof in testing and then hemorrhaged in the real world. Those great testing scores got them fired. And for every story like that there is the script or idea that bombs in testing but goes gangbusters after some brave soul sneaked it through. So testing is imperfect, we know that, but what’s the alternative?

Well, as I said, it has never been cheaper to make ideas. Call my naïve but we are now at a stage where it makes more sense to make three or four things and put them in the market and see what happens. What could be simpler than putting three things on Facebook, or whatever, and seeing what gets more hits (or favorable comments or whatever it is that you want to measure)? Subservient Chicken was a test. It wasn’t going to go live until it started doing well. This ‘test’ went on to be the most successful piece of digital marketing in the last decade and effectively launched Crispin. That’s got to be worth a shot hasn’t it?

And yet we don’t. Not often enough anyway. One reason is fear. There is a growing number of people in agencies who face stasis. With the proliferation of different types of work it all becomes a bit overwhelming. Where once people were at the top of the game—they knew how to write or produce a spot better than anyone—they are now forced to think up ideas for games or to produce software. It’s all a bit damaging for the ego. But it shouldn’t be. With all this proliferation you can be sure of one thing: No one knows everything. It’s simply impossible to be a Mr.-Know-It-All anymore. I wrote a chapter in the Creative Social book: Digital Advertising Past, Present and Future that goes into this in much more detail. People seem to like it, I get nice emails every now and then. I’m supposed to be a digital expert. But I know nothing about coding, can’t use Photoshop and I’m not a gamer—unless you count Words with Friends. I’m fine with that, there are people around me who do, and I trust them.

It used to be that seeing is believing. Now I think doing is believing. You have to make stuff to appreciate how to make stuff. No matter how small or insignificant, every time you make something you’ll get better and braver. A good way to start is to take a course. There are a number of theoretical courses out there, but recently a few that actually concentrate on making things have sprung up. One is the digital production course run by SheSays. There are also workshops and tech start-up incubators that hold hackathons or you could even join a start-up in your spare time. There are tons of people making stuff out there.

Whatever you do, do something. Because increasingly there are only two types of people in our industry: the makers and the fakers. I know who I want to be and who I want to work with.