Personifesto.

Last week, I posted a manifesto I had written for the advertising industry. Immodestly, it might be the late 2020s version of Bob Levinson and Len Sirowitz's seminal ad "Do This or Die." [Spoiler alert: we didn't and we did.]

Within minutes, my friend Rob Schwartz  wrote a note to me with facts in it. 

He said:

"Loved your piece today. 

I was thinking about how scared clients would receive it. 

Clients these days are fearful of “we believe.” They buy when they hear “we know.” 

So just for kicks, and working quickly, I asked ChatGPT to add some data to your elegant and emotional manifesto.

Here’s some data..."

I adjusted my manifesto accordingly, with facts supplied via Rob:

Advertising has created trillions in wealth. It’s built important businesses. The global advertising industry contributed over $780 billion to the world's economy in 2023. This year, despite prevailing headwinds and economic uncertainty, advertising is expected to chip in more $850 billion to national economies. Not to mention the contribution the industry makes to culture and its creation of thousands of careers. 

But as an industry today, we run on infinitesimal margins. According to Ad Age, they're just about a dime on a dollar--down by about 25%-50% from just two decades ago.  And industry attrition is at 30%--more than a third-higher than the US national attrition average.

More than ever, clients are questioning the importance of what we do and are doing more and more of it themselves. Today, almost seven out of ten clients have in-house creative capabilities. 

Those in-house arms might be biting the hands that feed them. The Effies notes that external campaigns are 21% more effective than those created entirely in-house. So dollar for dollar, you get a 21% greater return thanks to the independent and outside perspective an agency provides.

What's more, McKinsey--hardly a company that endorses profligate spending--reports that companies that invest in brand and advertising strategy through external experts grow 150-percent faster than those that don’t. 

We, the people behind Working Class love advertising. We believe in it. It’s power for good. It’s economic verve. 

We are forming Working Class because we believe. And we want to spread our belief to others. 

More than just belief, we have facts. We have today's shibboleth: data.

According to Warc, Advertising does more than just drive short-term sales. Going beyond "performance marketing" builds brand equity, which accounts for 18-25% of a company’s total market value. So, if a company like Apple has a market cap of $3.5 trillion, its brand equity--created largely by advertising agencies, might be worth between $700 and $900 billion.

What's more, Nielsen reports "businesses that invest in consistent, well-crafted advertising can experience ROI as high as $5.84 for every $1 spent." Where else can you spend a dollar and get almost six back?

At Working Class our mission is simple.

To lead agencies and advertising people to believe again in what we sell. So, clients believe again in what they buy. So, the people of the industry believe again in themselves. So, we all believe again in our future. Starting now. 

We have the facts.
We have the belief.
We have the skill to help companies.

The question is, Do we have you?

Because advertising works.

And advertising isn't just good for the ad business. 

We're bigger and more important than that.

Advertising your business is good business. 

Or die.

The Concrete Club.

About 50 years ago, when I left the stalag my parents called home for points south, then college, I was all alone in the big city.

Worse than all alone, I quickly lost a filling.

I needed a dentist in a hurry.

I had no idea how to find one, so I went to the yellow pages. And I found one not far from my dorm room with the last name of Tannenbaum. That method of finding someone probably makes at least as much sense as looking at someone's reviews on whatever platform they choose. 

In any event, Dr. Tannenbaum, DDS, turned out to be fine. He did the job. And I paid my bill. That was that, but as I was leaving his office, Dr. Tannenbaum, DDS, said something to me.

"Floss," he instructed. "You should really floss everyday." 

Floss in those days was about as unheard of as eating raw fish. Why?

But on my way back to my dorm room, I stopped in a drug store (there were no big drug store chains in Manhattan at that time) and I bought, I suppose for about 99-cents a small plastic container of 30-yards of waxed dental floss. Mint.

I've always had a weakness for mint.

In the roughly 18,000 days since I started flossing (I've seldom missed a night) I've probably bought 300 containers of floss. Not one of those containers has lasted to the end of the floss. Something always breaks. Either the floss, or the container, or both.

I'm rounding into a point.

If the collective genius of the world can't make a floss container that works, how can anyone possibly think we can make anything that works.

Every agency these days seems to have more UI or UX or USuck people than you can shake an unemployment check at. Yet every e-commerce site sucks. Confusing. You can't go backward. You can't correct a mistake. And you can't find anything. You certainly can't find anything twice.

Of course, search, no matter what mechanism you're searching from, google or amazon, is now a land grab. Your search terms have very little to do with your search results. Search has no causality; it's been sold to the highest bidder.

If you search for "best pastrami" in the little gingham town I'm currently housed in, you get a Chinese noodle place and a curry restaurant. 

Search is equal to the promise of precision bombing. There's more collateral damage than real targeting. They just want you to think it works.

When I was a kid, I remember driving into the city with my mother. Even more chilling than that was hearing on the car-radio that the mafia had so taken over New York's construction industry that the cement in our roadways and our bridges was defective. It was too sandy and would soon crumble.

And it's been crumbling ever since.

This is another of my all-too-regular "O tempore, o mores" posts. Commentary on the way things are.

But the world has been turned over to a higher and deeper level of malign corruption than ever before, and because of the technological sophistication and spread of that corruption its impact is greater than crumbling roadways.

Everything is for sale. 

And ad agencies, rather than telling their clients people are getting pissed at being strip-mined, are complicit. I remember back in 2015 I said that IBM should not retarget people. I was rebuffed by someone telling me that retargeting yielded a seven-percent "lift."

(So, if you have a click through rate of 1.5-percent, on 10,000 impressions, you'll have 150 clicks. If retargeting, aka stalking people, lifts that by seven-percent, you'll see 160.5 clicks per 10,000 impressions. That is deemed a worthwhile expenditure.)

Somehow as an industry, we no longer chastise clients for bad behavior. It's the acceptable norm to buy valentine's chocolates for $22 and get three emails/week for the rest of creation.

There's no avoiding this filth.

Corruption.

Dirt.

You're being butchered by the highest and most-corrupt bidder.

Everything is crumbling.

Everywhere.

 

So Sooth Me.

As readers in this space know, I read a lot.

By a lot, I mean more than anyone I know.

If you ever wonder how I write so much, it's because I read so much.

Yet, whenever I have intercourse with others, I feel like the odd man out for my reading. 

I get made fun of.

Excoriated, even.

It hurts a little, if you must know, feeling like an outsider. But etiam si omnes, ego non. Or Ich nicht.

Now more than ever.

Now in English: even if all others, not I. Or just not I.

I'l mocked and told of all the great things I'm missing by reading about the last days of Tsar Nicholas II, or role of women in the Classical world.

Either example is more illuminating about the state of our trumpian dystopia than I wish I had to think about.

One of the things that reading gives me is a view of human foibles. Maybe TV and movies would too, but I feel books have a longer view--and more authoritative. 

For instance, over the years I think reading has led me to some simple, timeless, human truths that are missed by just about everyone.

Here. I'll write some down for you.

1. Soothsayers abound. 
We might not be reading bird entrails or the gizzard of goats like the Greeks and Romans did, but most of humanity seems to be spending most of its time predicting the future.

As in ancient days, many of those making predictions, think of themselves as in possession of some god-like wisdom. They believe they see things others can't because they've been touched by the divine. Or by a whitepaper. 

Except like most soothsayers past and present they're not divine. And they're wrong as often as they're right.

Humans always have been and always will be scared. Of today and tomorrow. We look for people and predictions we can believe even if they're wrong. For no good reason, they remove fear.

Until the fear comes back. 

Usually worse than it was.

2. Something for nothing never works.
Since the beginning of time, humankind has looked to gain without paying for that gain. We're all of us looking for the winning lottery ticket without having to buy one.

At the start of the internet era, advertisers (and agencies) bought this hook, line, sinker and stinker. We could target people exactly with no waste at precisely the moment they were hungry for something. 

Not only would cost be eliminated, risk would be, too.

I'd imagine since digital advertising started literally trillions of dollars of brand-equity have been destroyed because brands and their agencies wanted to believe telling people about what they make or do didn't matter. 

It does matter. 

Just as paying for talent who can differentiate your brand matters. You won't get it from cheap and you won't get it from AI.

Anything worthwhile costs.

3. All progress is based on a leap of faith.
Humankind has always tried to convince itself that the universe is an if-then proposition. If we pray to this god, our crops will be watered. If we use this best-practice, our business will thrive.

In fact, when the notion of best-practices first infected advertising about 25 years ago, I used to say to people, "Madison Avenue is the best retail street in the world. But one in five stores are empty. If all you had to do was follow rules, everyone would be rich. The rules aren't that good. And following isn't that simple."

4. It's more complicated than you think.
Many people today believe data is a panacea. It will give them a view into the minds and desires of consumers and will help brands sell more.

Usually, that data is based on six or a dozen variables.

Whereas your brain, yes, even yours, has over six-trillion synapses. Meaning real, human decision-making is way more complicated than even the best data-mining.

5. Hard work works.
I have a friend who runs an agency. He often assigns five teams for five days. They have to come up with five ideas a day. At the end of the week, 125 ideas are posted on the conference room wall.

Collectively or individually, that's how life is.

Do a lot to get a little.

I've written 7090 posts in this space.

About twelve have been good. Maybe fourteen.

As Yogi said, "that's not a typographical error, it was a clean single through the middle."

That's not a bad batting average.

Thanks for reading, even though I suck.

Believe.

About forty years ago, the far right mannikin president raygun said the scariest words in the English language were, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

Many people--the tea party, the anti-tax libertarians, the anti-tax billionaires bought that folderol. They don't realize how much the federal government does.

Meals for seniors. Help.
School lunches. Help.
Hospitals. Help.
Medicare. Help.
Food Stamps. Help.
Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Help.
Mental Health Services. Help.
Clean air. Help.
Drinkable water. Help.

The list goes on. Almost everybody gets something from the government. The super-wealthy get more than most. And mostly they stopped paying taxes when the abomination above was president.

And I'm not for a moment going to pretend that there's no waste and fraud.

But the real problem is that the government has a communication problem. 

The government doesn't tell those who pay taxes all the things the government does.

I remember reading "The Power Broker," by Robert Caro, the magesterial biography of Robert Moses. Moses liked building bridges, not tunnels, because they soared. They showed the towering heights of government achievement. They inspired. They showed you the power of government in the way a delivered piece of mail never could.

Years ago I helped out on a pitch of a foreign stock exchange. I wrote a line that went like this: since the seventeenth century, no organization has created more wealth for more people than the blank.

Because people don't know.

Because no one bothers telling people what the great institutions that make up democracy do.

We've forgotten what things do and have done and have always done. Call it "presentitis." 

About six years ago some friends and I tried to start an ad school. We called it Working Class. It's aim was not to teach HOW to advertise--there are a million schools that ostensibly do that. 

We wanted to teach WHY we advertise.

I wrote a manifesto. 

A launch manifesto for an idea that never launched.

It's important for brands, agencies, governments, people, lovers to tell the world what they do. Why they exist. Why they're good. Why the world would suffer without them.

Goodby, Silverstein's great Got Milk campaign was all about what would happen if milk were to disappear. 

We stopped doing that. 

For our democracy.

For our industry.

For ourselves.

Ergo, cataclysmic self-denigration.

We forgot that telling the world what you do is part of making a business or an entity sustainable. It doesn't just happen naturally.

We have to do it. Advertising is part of being.

In advertising for the last thirty years people have been saying advertising doesn't matter, or they can do it cheaper, or that some other contrivance can do a better job--influencers, product placement, conversations. 

I've been in the advertising business my whole life. My father was in it before me. His brother, my uncle, fifteen years older than he was in it before my father. For all that time people have been tearing advertising down. It's value. It's efficacy. And they've strip-mined all the value out of it.

The same thing is happening now with our democracy under trump and the heritage foundation and project 2025.

We need to advertise.

To put reasons-why into what we do and what it does.

This was my manifesto:

Advertising has created trillions in wealth. It’s built important businesses. Contributed to culture and created thousands of careers.

But as an industry today, we run on infinitesimal margins. Our attrition-rates are at unsustainable levels and the best and the brightest are finding alternative careers.

More than ever, clients are questioning the importance of what we do and are doing more and more of it themselves. We, the people behind Working Class love advertising. We believe in it. It’s power for good. It’s economic verve. 

We are forming Working Class because we believe. And we want to spread our belief to others. 

So, agencies believe again in what they sell. So, clients believe again in what they buy. So, the people of the industry believe again in themselves. So, we all believe again in our future. Starting now. 

We believe. Believe with us. 

Victim-hood.

I went to the dentist on Wednesday.

Thank goodness my teeth and gums (despite a little recession) are in good shape.

The hygienist did her thing for thirty minutes. 

I saw the actual dentist for five. 

He smiled, said terrific, poke (semiotically) and left.

Since then, I've received about a dozen emails asking me about my "dental experience." Then they bid me to upload my answers on the dental practice's google page and write a review.

Service for 35 minutes. Then an hour's worth of survey requests.

The equation of modern humanity.

I ordered Chinese food Saturday night.

Before I could check out, I was assaulted with four different offers. I could ostensibly save $20 if I turned my information over to ____. I could save $15, if I turned it over to ______. I could save even more if I turned it over to ______. Finally, some bland blur of type tried to sell me a Chase Sapphire card. 

What a time to get a new credit card, when I'm hungry for some mu shu.

I was ordering Chinese food. But I feel like an assault victim.

Even Pastrami Queen, royal as they are, gets into the act. I was disappointed a kosher pastrami place spammed me--and without the royal We.

What's going on here is a bigger problem.

It's the problem of hate.

Yes, hate.

People are no longer people. 

They are victims. Protoplasm who exist only to extract money and data from. So you can assault them with more demands for money and data.

The victimization of humanity is everywhere.

The things you don't want--that haven't the vaguest recognition of your interests and your need--that invade your feeds no matter how often and how vehemently you attempt to hide them or block them. 

In the past week I have tried to expunged approximately 1000 exxxageratedly-bosomed women from my feeds but they come back with a vengeance. As does everything I attempt to block.

Blocking is a joke.

You are the victim of what the platforms want to blight you with. From politics to filth to fascism to toxicity.

The rule in advertising--I'm not sure if it was first said by Bernbach, Hegarty, Brignull or Abbott--was that we are uninvited guests into people's living-rooms. 

I amended that for our device era. Most often we're uninvited guests into people's palms or crotch pocket, whichever comes first.

Yet, we have less-than no manners.

Advertising, for all the blather about influencing culture, is a reflection of the larger world.

What we have today is the world-view of big, consolidated capital. 

You make. Consolidated capital takes. Then sells your information to thousands of others--so they can profit more and more assault can come your way.

You are not a person.

You're a piece of shit.
You're to be assaulted.
You're to be ignored.
You exist to feed me.
Regardless of your needs.
You're the source of my wealth and I can do what I want to you because there's no one to regulate my greed. And the plutocrats have no moral or ethical or kindness-oriented center.

Most advertising victimizes its audiences. When it should be helping its customers.

Most holding companies--in the way they treat their workers and their clients--are the same. The current agency practice of hiring masses of freelancers is a cost-cutting ruse. No more health care for workers. No more "brand knowledge" for clients. Everything but my $49,000,000 parachute be damned.

This is our world, our industry, our everything today.

We've gotten exactly the politics, too, and the pastrami we asked for.

It sucks.

Revolution.

It's attributed to George Orwell, but there's no evidence that he ever wrote it or said it. Regardless, it's full of relevance today. And import, too. Perhaps more than ever.

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

As we sink ever-further into the alternate reality of amerikan politics, I wonder more and more why so many of us continue to give oxygen to bad actors like trump and his nazi-wannabe co-conspirator musk.

Why do we have to re-post the asinine and malign things they say and do. What's gained by posting, once again, the nazi salute? Why do we send their reach soaring when we should be ignoring?

Deal with the affront by pushing it back.

I didn't love the book Humankind by Rutger Bregman. It was too simplistic and too optimistic for me. But I liked this passage very much. And haven't been able to shake it since I read it six months ago.

We are consuming news 24/7 and eating ourselves to death. 

Which brings me back to the very top of this post.

And some Variations on a Theme.

In a time of universal blowhard-ness, ignoring the noise is a revolutionary act.

In a time of universal technological and intellectual filth, ignoring social platforms is a revolutionary act.

In a time where fact-checking has been abolished, checking facts is a revolutionary act.

In a time where mean-ness has been normalized, kindness is a revolutionary act.

In a time where the (slim) majority bullies, standing your ground is a revolutionary act.

In a time where machines are trumpeted as superior to humans, being human is a revolutionary act.

Don't give air to these people.

Don't pass along their lies.

Their cruelty. Their demonic ideology.

Be human.

A revolutionary act.

More from "Humankind: A Hopeful History".

In children, the correlation between seeing violent images and aggression in adulthood is stronger than the correlation between asbestos and cancer, or between calcium intake and bone mass. 

Cynical stories have an even more marked effect on the way we look at the world. In Britain, another study demonstrated that girls who watch more reality TV also more often say that being mean and telling lies are necessary to get ahead in life. As media scientist George Gerbner summed up: ‘[He] who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour.’

Choke them off. 

The Torrid Forty.

I have a bit of patter that I use with clients. 

Just because it's patter doesn't mean it's bullshit.

I repeat my spiel, not because I'm glib, but because as obvious as it is to me, it hasn't occurred to many other people.

I usually start this way: "When I started in the business, there were a lot of magazines and newspapers. If you were working on a fast-moving consumer good, say Grey Poupon mustard or A-1 Steak Sauce like I did, you and your partner would be given a week or two to create three print campaigns of three ads each to present to the client.

"There were the seven sisters magazines in those days. Women's books, like McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, Better Homes and Gardens. We did ads to fill these magazines and to move our clients products.

"Back in 1980, their combined circulation was 45 million. By 1990, it was just 37 million. And by 2008, the seven were down to six, and the circulation was only 26 million. Today, just three of the magazines are left and their circulation is likely less than the printed version of my blog.

"We presented our campaigns to a battery of clients. After a couple of months of bi-weekly presentations and revisions, we eventually sold something. After another couple of months, we'd have shot, written and produced our ads and another couple of months later, they'd start to run.

"In those days, a campaign might include three ads and last a year and a half. If you were on a popular campaign, you might have to go through all that for another round. Three more ads. Most often, you had already moved onto something else."

If my client hasn't run out of the room screaming at this point, I'll usually continue.

"Somehow, the agency world has stuck with the number three. Even though there are a million channels today and advertising is always on, and people actually get pissed when they see the same ad over and over, agencies seem to present three ads or five or eight. Never really enough to keep a brand fresh and top of mind without being annoying."

That when I usually bring up an offering GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company developed. 

I got the idea when I worked with Joe Alexander and Cabell Harris and a few others on this corona virus campaign. 

The assignment wasn't to do an ad. It was come up with a way to be newsy and way to be different and relevant every day.

That led me to develop my Nifty Fifty™. Going into my sixth year of running GeorgeCo., it's become my second most popular offering.

It gives the clients a lot of ads. And lines they can use wherever they spread their brand. Their emails, their site, their sales-presentations.

There are three other things the Nifty Fifty does that I think are valuable and should be pointed out.

One, when you're dealing with increments of fifty, it takes away some of the preciousness that has somehow attached itself to advertising. People (agencies and clients) have so many expectations from an ad when they only do a couple, that they usually crumble under the weight of everything they're supposed to be doing and every constituency they're supposed to appeal to. 

What's more there are usually a dozen or so idiosyncrasies that further sully the work. Like someone doesn't like the word "get," or wants to imply "hamburger" without actually saying the word hamburger because that would be too limiting.

Finally, you can rightfully argue that working this way allows clients to be small-c catholic--more accepting. So what you don't like Tuesday's ad? There will be another ad on Wednesday. 

Secondly, when you're dealing with doing fifty ads at a time, the brief has to be complicit. It has to be good and simple and broad (not esoteric) otherwise you'll never get to fifty.

Good, simple and broad doesn't mean beige. It means the brief has to be able to handle a lot of selling points. 

The VW template below is a good one for Nifty Fifty's. It explains in part how DDB was able to create so many great ads for Volkswagen through the decades.

The third thing the Nifty Fifty does is maybe the most important. 

It unconstipates you.

When you have to come up with fifty of something, you have to train yourself to be more accepting. To let a joke fly even if it ain't a barn-burner. Or a word-play. Or a news item. 

That joke, word-play or news items isn't 33% of your campaign. If you're doing fifty, it's 2% of your work. That'll loosen the ol' sphincter in a good way.

Call me.

One Word.

My 97-year-old Uncle Slappy, who lives in a nice condo with a view of the pool, is a defrocked Rabbi.

The Board of Directors at his former Temple, Beth Youiz Mywo Mannow, removed him from his post after he had spent over 40 years presiding. They asked Slappy to leave because, ostensibly, he was getting too old to carry on. Though Slappy's mind makes Stephen Hawking's look like that of an organ-grinder's monkey, the Board wasn't entirely wrong bidding Slappy adieu.

It wasn't age that did Slappy in, however. Or even his preternatural crank.

It was the courage and conviction of his conscience. 

One Yom Kippur his sermon was just one word long. 

He said just one word: God. 

Then for twenty minutes looked each congregant in the eyes. Burning God through their retinas.

That was too withering. That was too much for the board.

The other night, as I wrote about yesterday, a group of seven other older ad people and I got together for Indian food at a nice place near Union Square. 

One of our group got up on a soapbox for a bit. He's entitled. He had been both a CCO and CEO at one of America's hottest agencies. He contended that one of the myriad issues with advertising today is that no one knows how to use products anymore. No one knows when to drink a beer or what they should look for if they're buying a car. (The average price of a new car according to the Kelly Blue Book is $47,400. Please don't tell me these are emotional decisions. For that money, you consider what and why.)

About six hours ago, I got a 271-page newsletter from an agency that used to have another, more famous name. I'm not exaggerating. It was 271-pages long. 

I subscribe to newsletters like this one because while I'm out of the mainstream ad industry, I want to keep tabs on what it's doing. I aim to offer my clients more than they can get anywhere else. To do that, I have to, in part, know what my competition are doing.

Here's a screenshot of the cover and a bit of the content from said newsletter.

All of this stuff swirled together in what's left of my Cuisinart of a mind. Uncle Slappy and his one-word Philippic. My friend saying we don't know what products do anymore. VML's 271-page newsletter, and also, Alex Murrell's essay "The Age of Average."

(Murrell's essay is about how everything today, from interior design, to how we look, to the cars we drive all looks the same. Here's a photo from Murrell's piece. I've added below the photo about one-hundred taglines I've found for various electric vehicles.)

All that came together this way.

The one thing advertising should do we've forgotten to do. 

We're talking about AI. 

Conversations. Cohorts. Generations. 

Buy-outs and mergers. 

Timesheets. Scopes. Billability. 

Attention-spans. Tik-Tok. 

We're talking about everything but what we're supposed to be doing. Making a brand stand out. Making a brand stand for something. Making product A DIFFERENT from products B,C,D,E,F,G,H and so on.

We're supposed to differentiate.

Give people reasons to buy.

Make them feel smart for knowing those reasons.

We're suppose to make sure "everything isn't the same." 

From cars, to resorts, to mayonnaise, to chips, to agencies, to presidential candidates.

We used to create ads that did this. 

Here's the copy from a Volkswagen ad that's almost sixty years old. I typed it below so you could read it. With all the quirky line breaks in-tact.

You know what makes the car different.

People bought the car. 

And they knew why.
And they probably told their friends.

And felt smart for it (that's rationality leading to an emotional connection.)

Today, we forgot our jobs.

One word: Different.

After we paint the car we paint the paint.

  You should see what we do to a Volks-
wagen even before we paint it.
  We bathe it in steam, we bathe it in
alkali, we bathe it in phosphate. Then we
bathe it in a neutralizing solution.
   If it got any cleaner, there wouldn't be
much left to paint.
   Then we dunk the whole thing into a
vat of slate grey primer until every square
inch of metal is covered, inside and out.  
    Only one domestic car maker does this.
And his cars sell for 3 or 4 times as much
as a Volkswagen.
    (We think the best way to make an
economy car is expensively.)
    After all that dunking, we bake it and sand
it by hand.
    Then we paint it.
    Then we bake it again, and sand it again
by hand.
    Then we paint it again.
    And bake it again.
    And sand it again by hand.
    So after 3 times, you'd think
we wouldn't bother to paint it
again and bake it again. Right? 
    Wrong.

Heartburn.

I was at dinner the other night with seven other ad people of a vintage similar to mine. 

That's a polite way of saying like me, they're as old as dirt. Mesozoic dirt.

Some of us started getting together at the onset of Covid. We were feeling the strain of isolation and the loss of community. We started getting together every couple of months, to bend and elbow and have some pastrami.

It's been over five years since we started out group. And five years is a good amount of time. Enough time to grow into, or grow out of a job. Enough time, to experience rises and falls, to try new things or to hunker down with old ones.

I had just started my business five years ago--I can rightfully look back at what I've done, what I've learned and count my blessings for going my own way. Others have enjoyed similar lessons and travails. It's called life.

Collectively, among the eight of us gathering on Inauguration night, we had probably amassed over 300 years of advertising experience. There probably wasn't an agency in New York one of us hadn't touched in one way or another. And while we try, all of us, even me, not to wallow in the decrepitude and ruination of the business, it's hard to feel good about the state of advertising today.

The compensation data I pasted above from Ad Age is one reason why. The recent news about Philippe Krakowsky's $49,000,000 parachute package was another.

I had that figure in my head and I did some figuring. 

Not long ago, I read in Ad Age, BBDO New York, which used to be among New York's larger agencies employs today only 300 people. If each of those 300 had a median salary of $150,000, the total payroll for the agency would be $45,000,000.

That means one man would make $4,000,000 more than an entire well-paid agency.

Or, if you use the median salary in noted in the clip above, approximately $71,000, my math says that Philippe Krakowsky is equal to over 690 median-waged workers. Imagine that. One man with 2.5x BBDO's worth of salary. 

Or still one more way, with say a production budget of $7,000,00, for $49,000,000 you could shoot a spot with Brian Buckley and air it six times on the Super Bowl.

I thought about agencies subsumed, strip-mined and disappeared after having been bought by IPG, the company Krakowsky leads.

I thought about Ammirati. Draft. Lintas. SSCB. Bozell. K&E. And more whose names still linger but are essentially gone. It seemed to me like a lot of wealth, a lot of jobs, a lot of lives have vaporized.

Not vaporized, exactly, but consolidated into five or a dozen individual's wallets.

Over the last 25 years or so in the business, when people like myself and my age peers I saw last night get together, we try to put our finger on what happened to our industry. We try to identify the cause of the industry's ruination.

Most often, someone mumbles something about the end of media commissions, or the unbundling of media and creative. Someone else says something about the "fractured media landscape." Someone else will pipe in and talk about how young people today don't know who Bernbach is, that is, they have no sense of advertising history. 

Those are the usual suspects, though there are usually one or two more like stray candidates at the bottom of an election ballot. 

But very little is said about greed at the top. Greed and malfeasance.

A couple of times in this space, I've written about "The Radical Potter" by Tristram Hunt. I couldn't give a rat's ass about fine china, but the I found the demise of Wedgwood--an erstwhile craft industry that was once run by artisans--an interesting parallel to what's happened to what used to be be advertising.

Read it and weep, as they say.

Burp.