Sources report that Bob Garfield, long-time ad critic for Advertising Age, is preparing to exit the trade publication in early April. Garfield's departure will leave critic Barbara Lippert of competing trade pub Adweek as the only writer regularly critiquing advertising for the industry's trade publications. Garfield reportedly will still be an occasional contributor to Ad Age.

Garfield has been writing advertising critiques for decades, though his work for Ad Age seemed to have taken on a somewhat lower profile in recent months -- perhaps a prelude to his departure. Like some others who have covered the ad industry for a lengthy period of time, Garfield, in his reviews in recent years, seemed to reveal a growing disdain for the increasingly subpar creative efforts of many ad agencies -- that is when he wasn't being overly and smugly self-referential, a characteristic of his writing for which he was well-known.