Syzygy.

I've become friends over the past couple of decades with a luminary and luminous art director called Dave Dye. Dave's a Brit and as Brits seem to say so often, I'm gobsmacked by all this.

First of all, I've always regarded myself as only moderately talented. I never scaled the great agency heights and never won the gigantic awards. I was never one of those ad people who you might speak about with awe or reverence. I'm not being modest here, just truthful. Throughout my 45 year career, I was always the guy who wrestled to the ground the impossible brief. I was never the guy who did the industry-shaking hilarious spot with the giant director and giant talent.

In fact, if you told me a dozen years ago, I'd be partnering with Dave on an assignment through my agency, GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company I would have laughed. That would be like a summer-stock actor working across from Meryl Streep. 

Almost eleven years ago, however, Dave and I started trading the occasional email. Mostly because we are both avid about advertising--not just its current trends but its history, and Dave read about some books I had found after the great Julian Koenig (of "Think Small" fame) had passed away. You can read about our concord here, in a small post from Dave's amazing blog.

Dave and I met for coffee about eight years ago when I was still at Ogilvy and he and his large SLR were visiting New York. Since that time, we've shared stories, referred people and generally become at least tangentially connected. 

Some months ago, I had engaged with an I.T. client. The work I usually do is sort of a 50-50 mixture of "account planning and copywriting." My belief is, and I see this every day, that very few brands are able to define and differentiate themselves. Very few brands have a meaning in anyone's head--and that includes the people who work at the brand. 

And I always held that the purpose of a brand was to help people organize their minds. They can't keep track of the one-hundred soaps in the grocery store, but they can remember Dove is 1/4 moisturizing cream.

My job I spiel-erize is to help a company find its all-important "epigram." The one line, eight-word definition. Their "We run the tightest ship in the shipping business" or "The ultimate driving machine" or "The antidote for civilization."

In my long view of advertising (or more broadly, communications in general) finding an epigram is the single most-important thing an agency can do. In today's impecunious let's-drive-rates-into-oblivion era, many have decided such lines no longer count. They no longer count, in my estimation, because they take time and effort--two things our world has all-but eliminated. However, what I've seen in my personal experience that such epigrams are where the true "value add" is in our business. 

Anyone can, and will, create a spot with crappy effects, crappy ideas, crappy production values with a crappy message. Such crap is the sine non qua of our business today. But defining lines, and work that can cascade from them is, where the money is.

The executions come and go. "Betcha can't eat just one," earned Lay's billions.

We forgot that that's what we can do.
That's what we did.
Until we stop believing it mattered.
(I'd wager one-trillion dollars of brand equity has been lost in amerika alone with the disappearance of such brand pillars.)

I despise the man with every fiber of my being, but "make america great again" is one such line. I can hardly remember Kamala's. And Hillary's was so bad (I'm with her) that it might actually have cost amerika its very democracy.

Dave and I are working on a project now and had a nice hour-long "chin wag" this morning. We had about four minutes of work to discuss, but we zoomed for an hour. 

Also, Dave sent me long pdf drafts of two different books he is working on. One on David Abbott, picture above, and one on the equally surpassing but less-well-known to amerikans at least, Tony Brignull.

Dave and I talked about these books. We talked about the work. But just as much, we talked about the marketing of these books. Does anyone care anymore? In fact, I can't imagine there's a single agency CEO much less a holding company CEO who has even heard of either of these creatives--much less is aware of their work, their skill, their caring.

From that, Dave and I tumbled down a long and twisted Alice in Wonderland tunnel. Bouncing off the walls during our shared descent and hurtling into phrases like "why do we care?" "What's wrong with us?" And other giant ontological questions that might keep otherwise sane people up at night. 

We also started talking about what we do. Dave shepherds the single greatest advertising archive in the world today. He told me a story of traveling halfway across London to get ahold of two Tony Brignull ads that he wanted to feature and couldn't find anywhere else except from a distant relative of Tony's.

I mentioned to Dave a word, an astronomical term, I had learned about twenty years ago from my wise therapist Owen. 

The word is syzygy. (zizzagee.)

Non technically, it's when three or more celestial objects align in the sky. I said something to Dave about the energy, excitement, thrill and fulfillment that comes when you arrive at syzygy at work. I mentioned how I've worked with six Hall of Famers in my time, and three major directors. Each one of them, no matter how buttoned-up and boardroomed their age and payscale had rendered them would fairly froth when they had a syzygy moment. I used the word "froth" as a shared tribute to John Webster, the English art director who had earned the sobriquet, "The Human Ad Man."

Dave said to me as we were wrapping up, "Have you written a post on syzygy?" I replied, "Dave, I've written over 7,000 posts. Damned if I know."

But that, sadly, is the point.

We work now in a business run by people who have no love. No love for a joke. No love for a touch. No love for humanity. No love for their profession. No love for their co-workers. No love for their agency. No love for their clients. No love for the ability to look at the mirror and like who's looking back at you. 

We work now in a business run by people who don't syzygy. Who don't froth. Who don't have love for anything but how much, how soon and with how little effort.

We needn't be good, they believe.
We can use science to reach people.
Techniques.
Starbursts (speaking of syzygy.)
Rewards points.
Exclamation points.

We needn't be good. 
Funny.
True.
Real.
Moving.

That's hard work.
And we have a bag of snake-oil tricks that are proven to work. 
Click now! Learn more! Enter and win!

That's what's done us in.
It's abandoning good for expedient.
(That's what does most everyone in. The short-cutting away of hard-work.)

It ain't the fractured media landscape.
It ain't consolidation.
It ain't business schools.
It ain't A.I. or some other techno-wizardry that teeters on the brink of medieval alchemy.

It's us.
It's us having forgotten.
It's us no longer fighting.
Even though it's stupid to fight.
For the right to be proud of the way we earn our bucks.

My first ECD, Marshall (whom I'm still in touch with) was a very wise man. When he hired me back in 1984, he said to me, "I want this to be the kind of place where you work hard all day. And when you get home, you're proud to tell your spouse what you did."

That ain't in any agency about section. It doesn't even mention the word "culture" or "intersection." You won't find such language in an annual report.

It's syzygy.

Casting.

I get a lot of calls from friends and people something like friends who have reached a state of career arrears. (Flattering myself, I'd say "career arrears" is a Cole Porter-ish way of saying they've been fucked up the arse by macro-economics.)

I've spent my career in career arrears and I've learned exactly one thing:

Do something.

It doesn't much matter what.

But do something.

Something that gets you noticed. 
Something that gets people curious about you.
Something that's funny and pass-along-able.
Reach out to people you like.
Reach out to people you've had a falling out with.
But do something.

Speaking of doing something, about thirty years ago I shot a fairly large package of commercials with Errol Morris. When I flew out to Santa Monica for casting, I was a-twitter with excitement. Casting with Errol Morris--a man who always seems to make precisely the right casting choice. I sat at the cheap folding table right next to him, and prepared to be wowed by his absolute genius of discernment and direction.

In six hours or so, 94% of the time we were seeing talent he said only two things. Better life advice you'll never get.

When talent stood on the little piece of tape and stared into the video camera, Errol would say (in his charming, slightly cross-eyed and daffy way) "do something."

If he liked the do they did he'd start them over again. He'd say "do something different."

If you spend anytime whatsoever on LinkedIn, or read what's left of the advertising trade magazines, there is no shortage of absolutely stunningly asinine advertising advice about breaking through in whatever they call today's era. 

They'll be bushwa about influencers. And AI. And algorithms. And "craft." They're be absolute nonsense from painerchuks and the like about "authenticity." There will more pablum than you'd get from a presidential press conference wrapped in a new business pitch covered in an agency about section.

None of any of that is anything more than a modern rendition of Shakespeare's Polonius lip-flapping platitudes masquerading as wisdom.

Your job when you're looking for work (and smart people are always looking for work) is to

a) stand out;

b) get noticed; 

c) make an impression and

d) stay top of mind.

There's really not too much more to job-hunting, advertising and life than that.

I've written about this before. But since most of all readers soak up information like a cheap locker-room towel soaks up sweat, it's probably swirled down your mental drain.

Over 50 years ago, I read this book.

I remembered the author, whom I liked, sorted amerikan presidents into one of four categories.

You can sort almost anything into these categories, including yourself.

There's only one demarcation that's any good if you want to survive what in many cases is a world that seems bent on knocking you down.

Passivity, while it might work if you're staring down a bear in the woods, is not usually an option in every day life. Good things might come to those who wait but more good things come to those who go and get them.

So we're left with one box.

Active (do something) positive (memorable.)

That's the brief, boys and girls.

It's not about what you've done (I won this award. I pitched this business. So and so recommended me.)
It's about what you're doing.

Every day.

It's about being avid.

Being fearless.

Letting your ass flap in the wind.

Even leaving my readers with that horrific image is better than leaving them with nothing.

I'll probably get a job out of this post.

Fake Blame.

Last week a fake video made the rounds of musk, altman and bezos (I refuse to capitalize proper nouns when the people, places or things they're noun-ing are by no means proper) about AI being powered by newly unemployed people riding exercise bikes to power data centers. 

Yes, according to these people, we were put here on earth to be draft animals and/or cannon fodder for the plutocrat class. Before long we’ll bring back Hobbes’ nasty brutish and short lifestyle, if we haven't already. Those are the terms and conditions we’re forced to accept.

Meanwhile, back in reality-ville (a shrinking community of pariahs) headlines like these are all-too-frequent.

In what's left of the decimated ad industry (editor's note: decimatio was a Roman military concept--over 2,000 years old. It was a form of military retribution that called for the execution of one out of ten of a particular group. In modern usage, we bastardize the word to mean complete annihilation. We don't really decimate our enemies anymore we more eighty-percent-imate them) A.I. is increasingly being blamed for decimation. It is blamed for the destruction of thousands of jobs, dozens of agencies and trillions of dollars of brand-equity accumulated through the decades.

WPP blames AI. It never blames its abject "out-of-touch-with-reality-ness." What do I mean by that? They've shed 80% of their revenue and their clients and their viability. They're shrinking as fast as a libido in an old-age home. Yet they are trying (vainly) to position themselves as something they call a "growth partner." HINT: Before you call yourself a growth partner, make sure you're growing. 

AI, to my non-cataracted eyes, has become a convenient scape-goat for the destruction of entire industries and countless lives. Just as when two-feet of snow are dumped across half the country or 500-year-storms occur roughly every other years, we don't blame exxon and their fellow petrodestructors, we blame something vague and un-arrestable. We castigate climate change not big oil's role in it. 

This is a semantic shifting of the blame that 98.98% of all people are too busy bemoaning to actually realize what's happening.

Here's a more concrete example.

We blame job loses in an amorphous way on AI. (AI is un-prosecutable. We can't lynch it, despite the mention of pitchforks above. We don't even tax the billionaires behind it.)

We blame job loses on AI.

We never say, who's behind AI.

We never say
if elon musk pays himself one-trillion dollars,
that's $1,000,000,000,000,
that's the cause of disruption.

No one ever does the math and says
$1,000,000,000,000
is ten million (10,000,000)
$100,000 salaries.

The disruption is not caused by AI,
it's caused by one person deciding he is worth more to the world
than ten-million people earning $100,000/year.

musk pays himself enough to give everyone in all these states $100,000/year.

Or, the same to every resident of the 2, 3, 4, 5, and 1/2 of the 6th largest cities in the US. 

Back in 2016, WPP had an annual revenue of about $14,000,000,000, just slightly more than their annual revenue today, a decade later. (Profit has decreased in that time by more than 75%.) 

Martin Sorrell took $100,000,000 of that money as his own compensation. The compensation committee agreed to policies like these.(The compensation committee decides its own compensation):

I refuse to blame "exogenous" technologies for the destruction of giant swaths of our industry and the world economy. 

I blame those who treat everything like it is an extractive industry. They remove all value and leave nothing but slag and mercury-poisoned water behind.

An example of destruction from "The Radical Potter,"
by Tristram Hunt.

I blame greed. That most biblical and second-most damning of all sins. (Hubris is first.)

And the world’s most-effective and least-prosecuted killer.

Shakespeare, as usual, could have written this post in a dozen words. As in Cassius' to Brutus in "Julius Caesar." (Not about salad.)

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, 

Wolf Man.

There aren't many people who have experienced Lycanthropy, just as there aren't that many who even know what the word means. But having grown up as I did, with a borderline mother given to fits of uncontrollable madness, I am well aware of the ailment, though you can't ever, really, get accustomed to it. 

Lycanthropy is an ancient disease. It's named, in fact, after a king in ancient Greece, four millennia ago, who was punished by Zeus by being turned into a wolf.

Instances of Lycanthropy appear in western thought as early as the bible. In Daniel 4, Nebuchadnezzar (who is more well-known today as a large bottle of wine) was "driven from men, and did eat grass as an oxen." He was in real need of a makeover. His "hair grew like eagles' feathers" and his nails as "birds' claws." 

William Blake painted Nebuchadnezzar like this, hardly a picture you'd put on your Hinge profile, unless, of course, you're into wolf-kink, as so many are.

Of course, if you think for a minute about modern horror movies, werewolves are practically a leitmotif, with literally thousands of films made about, in essence, Lycanthropy. Here are a mere smattering.

These movies didn't emerge fully-formed from the head of Zeus. For thousands of years, around the world cautionary tales of primarily men being turned into wolves abounded.

Some years ago, my therapist of four decades, O, suggested I read "The Parnas," by Silvano Arieti. Arieti, a psychiatrist, a survivor of both the Holocaust and an attack by wolf-Nazis was one of the Twentieth Century's great minds. He was one of the world's foremost authorities on schizophrenia and has written one of the great books on creativity, "Creativity: The Magic Synthesis."

Here's how Arieti describes his up-close encounter with a small group of Nazis, seeing them transform.

Freud in his study of Little Hans--a boy who turned into a wolf wrote, "Lupus homini lupus." Only a wolf acts like a wolf to man.

I'm 98.7-percent Freud was wrong here. I've seen Lycanthropy. I'm a survivor, in fact.

This isn't something I joke about.

There are many who know about Lycanthropy who claim that whole cultures can turn lupine. I am one of them.

Sixty million Germans shuffled their iPods one morning. They switched from Beethoven and Mozart to the Horst Wessel lied and Deutschland Über Alles.

Today, fifty percent of amerika is snarling and drooling spittle and blood and chanting in Leni Riefenstahl guttural exhortations USA USA!

Soon goons will be clamping down on those of us not goose-stepping. We will be arrested. Assaulted. Categorized as üntermenschen. The wolves are here. 

They attack in packs.
And the packs normalize the attacks.

My country tis of thee,
Sweet land Lycanthropy,
Of thee I mourn.

Triple Trouble.

As happens so often when you play, either as an amateur or a professional, either as an "I-wanna" or an "I-can," I got plunked in the noggin during a late inning of the first game of a twilight twin-bill.

When I started playing ball for serious in say 1973, when I first started showing up as "good" and as "someone to watch," batting helmets were about as primitive as an old DuMont television set. The kind of sets that took a good ten-minutes to warm up and had you getting in a Muhammad Ali sparring session with the vertical hold. You did more punching against the set's wooden cabinet than most fighters do during a three-round prelim.

The helmets I wore in my playing days were not heavy, lusty affairs like players today wear. I liken them to the chocolate sauce soda jerks would dip a cone in. The helmets were basically a thin shell congealed over your cerebellum--more to give you the idea that you had some protection than actually providing real protection. Even after Tony Conigliaro was almost killed by a fastball to his eye-socket, the strength of helmets was more cosmetic than functional. If a drunken sparrow flew into your head, you might be lost for three games or a week.

All that being said, a fastball aimed at my temple led me to a reunion with my unconscious in the Mexican dirt. I lay sprawled on the ground, kicking my legs with pain. When I woke up and saw a horde of grim faces around me, I noticed also the slow floating particulate of dust wafting down to earth from the heavens. It looked peaceful almost. I felt almost like the horse in Frost's great poem, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening."

I gave my big dumb head a shake

I asked if there was some mistake.

The only other sound's the hush,

Of cerveza cries, and brains of mush.

-

I got up slowly from the ground and wiped off--a son of a harridan mother's influence--from my off-white flannels. My tunic emblazoned with a teal script "Seraperos" insignia looked like it had spent a year in a trench during the Somme or Ypres or Argonne battles.

Two teammates flanked me and we flight-of-the-bumblebee'd the 20 or 30 shuffles back to the clubhouse. I tottered like a 40-year-old drunk ending year twenty-seven of a twenty-five-year-bender. 

I sat on the bench in front of my locker. Someone handed me a small dixie cup of ice-water, someone else poured the same over my head. Thin mud washed through my scalp like a summer rain on a dirt road.

Jesus Verduzco, our backup short-stop and third-year medical student at Tecnológico de Monterrey, whom we all called pre-maturely "el doctor," came over with a few clean towels and a galvanized bucket filled with ice. With skilled hands he constructed a compress--a sandwich of ice and terry--and guided me to lay down on the varnish.

"Are you dizzy," Verduzco asked me in passable English. "Do you have an ache in the head?"

"I am seeing three of you," I answered staring up at him like a knocked-down boxer the referee. "Are there three of you?"

"It is just me," Verduzco said. "Alone." 

He grabbed each of my hands and tugged. He was checking to see if I offered back strength and resistance. He felt at the knot on my head, had me pivot onto my side and applied another cold compress to the cranial insult.

By this time game one was over. It would be a half hour before game two and the team came in for a smoke and beer or a sandwich. Hector came right to me.

"You are ok, Jorge," he asked/told me. "He is ok, Jesus," he asked/told Verduzco.

"I am ok," I answered/lied. Not wanting my pain to get in the way of my toughing out of the pain. "I already am feeling twenty-percent less bleary than just a minute ago."

Verduzco again pressed around with his thumb. He origami'd another compress and applied it. "It feels pain," he asked in his passable English. "It feels less pain," I answered in my unpassable Spanish.

"We lost game one" Hector said to me. "Do you think you can play in game two. I am not so desperate as to call on Perez-Abreu."

I am one of those benighted souls who plays through pain. Before too long it's expected of you. The pain still hurts. But no one knows that. They just count on you. That's the real cost of pain, living with it in silence.

Fernando Perez-Abreu, a back-up utility man was in his fourth season in the Mexican Baseball League. He was good with leather but had yet to hit anywhere near his weight.

"I am seeing three of you, Little Cheese," I answered. When I joined the Seraperos de Saltillo, I had el-Norte'd Hector's full-name, Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla into the more or less palatable Hector Quesadillo. This in my addle I had truncated into mere "Little Cheese."

"I have many times been kicked in the head by the horse," Hector said. He had pulled up two small folding chairs, with a thin ass-cushion on the seat. One chair was for him and one was for Verduzco. Hector had one loving hand holding my compress in place. The other held my left hand in his. He held it like I was seven and scared of a lightning storm.

"There are many times we are kicked in the head by the horse," Hector continued. "This is the natural confluence of head and the fates. This is like rocks and waves. It is like tax and collector. It is like axe and the neck of the turkey."

"It is like Prometheus and eagle."

Hector laughed with me on that one and squeezed tighter my hand.

The in-between mayhem of 25 men between games was in the triple decibels. The raucous bounced off the metallic of the lockers, the linoleum of the floor and the tile of the showers. But my head shut it down. I could hear only Hector and feel only the love that traveled like an electrical pulse from his hand to mine and through my 178-pounds.

"There are many times we see triple, hear triple, get kicked in the ass triple." He was reverie-ing now, like a Shakespearean tearing through twenty-stanzas of the Bard. "We have triple the pain. Triple the hurt. Triple the musts. Triple the not-understanding. We have three of pain. But we must not not show up. We must be triple times triple stronger than the seeing-three of the pain."

"I am seeing still three of you," I said, opening slowly and closing my eyes. When it hurts to blink, that is when you know you know pain.

"You will play tonight," Hector squeezed. "Tomorrow the pain will be less but because of your strength your self will be more."

"And when I am in the field and I see three not one grounder hop my way, or when I am up at the plate and see three not one curveball break high and into my power, when I see triple, Little Cheese, what then?"

Hector laughed. 

He removed once again the compress from my temple. He handed the wet towel to Verduzco and he quickly re-filled the towel with melting ice. Hector, with love, lay the compress on my wound. He did not believe in anything larger than himself, but with his eyes he mouthed a short imprecation--hoping the gods would respond. Take from Jorge the pain, he said.

He caressed the compress so as not to caress me.

"When you see three grounders bounding your way, or three curveballs fat like a holiday supper," he said, "When you see three, do what always I did."

Silence so as not to interrupt timing as universal as the cosmic Borscht Belt.

"Do what always I did," he said, "Grab the middle one."

The Bill of Goods We've Been Sold. Coming Due.

For about the last fifteen years or so, I disparaged digital media because so many people were gulled by it into believing communicating with other people (either one-to-many or one-to-one) would, through the magic of "free" media, be forever inexpensive or even free.

Seeing that you could make ads and run them for little or no cost--certainly not the cost of, say, a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, Time or Seventeen, led people into devaluing along the way the care they took in creating the messaging. 

It's free. Keep throwing shit out there till something hits. No consideration was giving to the cost of annoying people. Digital media became a port-o-san that was never emptied, that no one would ever think would stink and overflow.

Ads, in fact, became like steak house parsley. They didn't cost much. They didn't matter much. They didn't make much of a difference. So people stopped caring.

Many of the best companies in the world, of course, were built on good advertising. Agency people and client people forgot that. They bought into "it's cheap, who cares?" And every day, we see crappy ads drain billions from the literally trillions of brand equity good advertising helped brands amass over decades and decades.

I know of no reason to buy anything anymore, whether it's a hotel room, a Caribbean destination, an automobile or a new pair of running shoes. People used to pay extra for those reasons. Now they buy whatever's cheapest and nothing has any real value anymore.

Digital media convincing advertising people and marketers that advertising and media and reaching people are free destroyed billions in brand value. 

I was hired twice by Ogilvy. Once in the analog era and once in the digital era. As Mark Twain once quipped "the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." 

The difference between analog and digital thinking is likewise.

If I were charged with selling a new technology, I do exactly what the people who sold us on digital did. I'd say everything will save users massive amounts of time and money. Since your competitors (in my examples, old-line media and in-person training) aren't cohesive, they don't defend the strengths of their ways. 

While we were counting the money that was never delivered we also bought the idea that digital can train and inculcate people and marketers cheaply and quickly. No one ever says aloud, "online training sucks. Have you ever learned anything from an HR 'don't take a bribe' video?" No one ever says, when a customer shows up, 94% of all help is either a) non-existent, b) staring at their phone, or c) staring at their 72-ounce dunkin' coffee. 

We bought a lot of purported savings and we're convinced to ignore the real costs. Like the cost of paying the c-suite 300-1000x the compensation of their median employees. It's great for the c-suite. But I can't think of many healthy businesses now, from retail, to law, to healthcare, to education, to advertising. There's no money left for the people "doing the work." There's only money for the people who own the companies.

Right now communications suck because no one cares (they're 'free, after all.) And no one knows anything about the brands because they went through eight-weeks of online modules written to appeal to a brain-damaged gerbil. And besides they're earning less in real dollars than I earned in 1980, when I made $11,700.

The costs of buying a panacea hook line and sinker are always staggering and narly beyond comprehension. Whether than panacea is a new fuel that far out-performs the old one--like gasoline versus whale oil. Or a drug that will help you shed the "freshman ten" you've been adding to since 1992. 

Sooner or later the unintended consequences will catch up do you. Our environment will turn on us. Our drugs will kill us. Our machines will steal our privacy.

As Malcolm prophetically said after JFK was assassinated, it's a case of "the chickens coming home to roost."

We're slogging through a lot of bird shit.

But we need the eggs.

Trajectory. Tragedy.

Some years ago, the great Dave Dye, at his blog "Stuff From the Loft," created one of his in-depth portraits of the famous English copywriter, Richard Foster. You can read it here. You should read it now.

I don't quite know how Dave does what he does, or even why. Other than that he loves advertising and like any true-believer wants to spread the word about good work and the people who did it.

Dave's portraits are graduate courses in advertising. In fact, once when I was teaching at Ad House, it came to my attention that no one in the class knew what Doyle Dane was. Or who Helmut Krone was. Or Phyllis Robinson. Or Ed McCabe. Dave's blog became about 61-percent of the after-class curriculum. I'd copy the ads in his posts, make a 91-page handout and say, "Keep this in your bottom drawer. Someday when everyone else is stuck, you can read this sheaf of paper, and be unstuck. Consider this your unfair advantage."

Dave wrote this marvelous introduction to Foster on his blog. It's right on the money. Foster was more Clemente or Perez than Mantle, Aaron or Mays. Their accomplishments were greater than the acclaim they earned.

To me however, beyond Foster's work, seven offer letters Richard received were the best thing in Dave's post about Richard. Seven offer letters Richard received over the course of just eleven-and-a-half years. 

During that niblick over a decade, Richard's wages rose from ten pounds a week to £400/week. Plus two-percent equity in his agency. Plus a £10,000/year car allowance. If you were to graph Richard's trajectory, it would look something like this:

There's a lot of gibberish in the world about the demise of the advertising industry. In my lifetime, we've laid the blame on:

• The rise of data
  
• The atomization of the media landscape
• Changing consumer habits
  
• AI
• Influencers
  
• 39,876 other causalities.

What no one ever mentions is that for decades--or half-centuries even--the potentates at the top of agencies and their holding companies, took tens of millions--even hundreds of millions (pounds or dollars, it doesn't much matter which) straight off the revenue line of the entities they were paid to manage. 

When Martin Sorrell paid himself $100,000,000, that meant one-thousand $100,000 creatives weren't hired. That has proven to be less-than-salutary for the long-term-efficacy of what was at one time, an industry.

What's more, ascents like Foster's depicted below in offer letters and above in my rough-graph, were no longer possible. 

It's hard to attract bright and ambitious people to an industry if they have no job security and raises come at 2-percent increments every 36 months. All for the joy of doing the 16,876,877th commercial for a telco with Kevin Hart.

People talk (too much) about culture in ad agencies. I never really understood the fuss about culture or even, frankly, understood what was meant by the term.

When I started in the business you could make a good living and rise quickly. Today, wages are lower in real dollars than they were 50 years ago, and agency tenures are shorter and less reliable.

Here's an idea.

Pay people well.
Let them buy their own culture.

(more than a 40x increase in 12 years.)