Since advertising is more about finances and the stock market than advertising, I decided to enlist the aid of former high-flying investment banker who owns an apartment on the top three floors of the 38-story building I live in. He is using a "pen-name" for purposes of anonymity.
In the Stocks by Bernie X.
Let me start this way, there isn't much difference between the word asset and the word ass. And you advertising people are what we call assets--asses for short. You're asses because you make big money for big people but don't take much of it home for yourselves.
Look, me and the money boys bought the advertising business for a very simple reason. There's a lot of money in it and you need no capital plant. You aren't like an airline or an manufacturing company where you need machinery, factories, silicon chips and huge work-forces. Nope, you all only need some fahkahta desk and an airy-fairy macbook and that's it. You can charge a million bucks for a line of copy and a small-breasted model riding a white horse on the beach, to be remembered, a fragrance he'll never forget. You worry about finding a great "dp." Me? I've got Brioni suits that cost more than Pytka makes in a year.
You are a cash cow. And me and the money boys like to milk cash cows, we like to pull the teat of the cow until it's dryer than the lint inside Marty Sorrell's cashmere socks.
Listen, this Lowe which was subsumed by Deutsch in what used to be America has world-wide revenues of $572 million dollars according to Advertising Age. What do they have across the globe, probably 23 copywriters, 19 art directors and three teenagers in Bangalore who know flash. $572 million those dopes bring in. Us Wall Streeters are 21st Century alchemists--we spin your sweat into gold. Our gold.
All you really have to know about our M.O. down in Wall Street is this. We expand to the point of collapse. Think about fast-food franchises or Starbucks. You throw one on every corner and it gives the investors--the asses whose assets we glom--the illusion of growth. Obviously the market has no need for 40,000 dispensaries of $5 cups of coffee and accompanying pretension, and the chain will then crumble. But what the F do the money boys care? We came, we glommed, we conquered.
The same thing, we're doing the same thing in the advertising industry. We've bought up agencies like a fat man buys cheetos. Then we merge them, lay off 50% of the people, keep grabbing the dough, lay off more people, keep grabbing the dough, and when the whole thing is burnt to a fine, post-nuclear ash, we're out in the Hamptons polishing our Bentleys with your newborn's diapers.
Get wise, asses. You are mere prawns in the mu shu of life. Wise up ass wipes, it's as clear in the ice in a dry martini it works like this: You bring money in and we take money out. That's the way of all flesh.
Don't like it? Go get a job at Starbucks.
