A Guest Post From a Leader.

What an honor, George, to be gracing the pages of adland’s most erudite establishment. Thanks for having me.

 

And hello there, Ad Aged readers.

 

By way of a quick introduction, I started reading George’s blog years before I had the incredibly good fortune to sit next to him at Ogilvy New York for five years. When I first started at The Chocolate Factory in 2015, I spotted George roaming the halls, and I remember thinking: “Oh, sh*t. There’s George Tannenbaum. I’ve finally made it to The Show.” I clumsily introduced myself as a fan of Ad Aged, and we’ve been friends ever since.

 

I mention this because there’s a lot I learned from reading George and working alongside George and just shooting the breeze with George that’s in my new book, Zombie Brands: How brands lost their humanity—and how they can regain their appeal in the age of AI.

 

In a nutshell, it’s about how the smartphone-centric digital media ecosystem and short-termism gradually chipped away at the stuff makes brands alluring, and explains how creatives and marketers can reinvigorate brands’ ability to seduce.

 

The inspiration for the book actually came from goofing on Twitter—my “How it started / how it’s going” thread—which George actually wrote about back in 2022. It’s still at the top of my Twitter (I refuse to call it anything else) profile.

 

I kept staring at the above juxtaposition. On the left, one of the 1500 or so brilliant ads TBWA created from 1980 through the early 2000s that transformed an obscure Swedish vodka brand into a global spirits powerhouse. On the right, well, I still don’t know what the hell that is on the right. There was a story here, I thought. How did brands go from making these expertly-crafted, gorgeous communications that people wanted to hang on their walls to the disposable, completely invisible junk you see on the right?

 

I don’t think this is a particularly controversial take, but the advertising industry is suffering from a crisis of confidence. Storied agency brands are being shuttered, consolidation is eliminating jobs, and all anyone seems to want to talk about is AI. Agencies are in a defensive crouch. And there’s a feeling that people at agencies are spending a lot of time making stuff nobody cares about. Let’s face it. No one got into advertising to make banner ads or Facebook posts.

 

Then there’s clients. I think they, too, have a sense that we’re spinning our wheels. As Michael Farmer recently pointed out on LinkedIn, "since 2009, forty of the top sixty advertisers have seen brand growth rates fall below nominal GDP growth rates." Ouch.

 

Finally, there’s the audience. They keep telling pollsters they don’t like ads, they find a lot of digital ads creepy, and they pay a premium to avoid it. I’d argue that it’s not actually true they don’t like ads, generally, it’s that they don’t like crappy ads. But if most people are paying to avoid your product, you’ve got a problem.

 

Now, I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I do know that “make even more slop faster and more cheaply and continue to bombard people with it” isn’t going to work. At the heart of Zombie Brands is a simple proposition: how about we move away from pestering and get back to persuasion? If I can convince even a handful of people that’s worth a try, the book will have done its job.

I've bought it. 
Have you?

 

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