Cheap.

Back when I was a puppy in the business and working for a mid-sized IPG agency, I had an ex-partner and friend, I'll call him C, who was very savvy in the way the ad business was run. Savvy or cynical, your pick. They're often closely related.

With another art director, I had sold a fairly large print campaign for a company that was then known as Nabisco foods. They were putting a couple of million dollars in media behind the ads. They appeared regularly in magazines like Redbook, McCalls and Good Housekeeping--those magazines were part of a group of magazines people called "The Seven Sisters." They're all pretty much gone now.

Once the campaign was running, C said to me, "you're cool for this year. The media commission on those ads alone more than pay your salary. Add that to the other work you do and the awards you're winning and you're more than worth what they're paying you."

Forty-one years ago that wasn't a bad ad-industry calculus.

Six years ago, when Ogilvy began its staffing decimation (since that time they've fired a few people virtually every week. They fire people that way so as not to attract the notice of the non-inquisitive trade press. And it's literally a decimation--they probably cut 9/10ths of their workforce) the three other ECDs and the CCO in my firing cohort were all fired by around 10AM on Tuesday, January 14, 2020.

I wasn't fired at that time. I even went to the drunken commiseration parties of my friends, and served to counsel young people in shock that their mentors were gone.

I figured, thinking back to my conversation with C forty years earlier, that I wasn't fired because I was making the agency way more money than I was costing them. 

The president of the New York office and the CEO Emeritus of the entire agency had put me in charge of a new and very difficult client--a client that had the potential to grow into something large and substantial.

If I cost X and was earning the agency (or the holding company XXX) where's the vig an axing me?

When I was finally fired about eight hours after my firing cohort, it hit me, at last and irrevocably, how gone, done and finished the advertising business (or at least Ogilvy) was.

The account I was running was Boeing. 

Their planes kept crashing and our ads needed to reassure the public that their ship was being "righted." From the time of their first crash till January 2020, Boeing's market cap had dropped from $250B to about $80B. They needed the kind of communications help Ogilvy was very good at. Not many agencies were as adept.

All arrogance aside, I'm not sure that there were any writers in the business who could handle the complexity of the issue. And explain it to people in a "Herbert Schmertz" way.

But the holding company world today is like the Oscar Wilde definition of a cynic from "Lady Windemere's Fan." 

Holding companies know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. 

The people who looked at my salary and said, "he is expendable," do not understand and do not care about the skill it takes to handle a tough topic like Boeing was. To them--they who have no understanding, appreciation or even cognizance of creative--they saw only expense. To them, creativity is a line item. If you can cut that line down, your margin is greater.

If you don't care about quality or happy clients or doing a good job or repeat business, anyone can do the job. AI can.

That sort of thinking is akin to having an item on a restaurant's menu called "meat." The category could be met by anything ranging from Kobe beef to roadkill. Since meat is meat is meat, why pay money for anything but roadkill? There's more immediate return in cutting costs. But eventually even Tad's Steaks went out of business.

Today, creative is creative is creative. Good doesn't enter the picture. There is no good, no one in charge could recognize good or cares. There's just done cheap. 

So, in our world today, this

Is better than this:

It cost less. 

And that's all that matters.