Decline.

It's hard to have grown up, as I did in advertising, and to fathom the news last week of the dissolution the Ogilvy brand and several others into the meaningless moniker of WPP Creative. 

(I'd go so far as to say if you have to append the word "creative" to your name, it's likely because you're not. We say Margot Robbie. Not Margot Robbie Pretty. Or George Clooney. Not George Clooney Handsome. The new name could rightly fall under the Shakespearean-Hamlettian heading of "The lady doth protest too much, methinks.")

Further, and more damning, to take any name with 75 years of heritage and meaning and wipe it away is baffling. I can't imagine a storied team like the New York Yankees or Manchester United overnight becoming the New York Anthropics or the Manchester Heinz Beanz, because some corporate anonymity deemed it to make structural or fiduciary sense.

Even companies with heinous pasts--in the Vaterland--like Siemens, Thyssen Krupp, IG Farben--in amerika--like Dow, Exxon, Philip Morris, ad nauseam, stuck with their names though they abetted mass murder, employed thousands of slaves and despoiled the environment. With all that, for the most part, they kept their names. 

Today, though, we wipe-out.

Perhaps the three most prominent names in amerikan advertising history are as stinkin' as yesterday's fish dinner. 

Doyle Dane Bernbach.
Ogilvy and Mather.
Chiat\Day.

All gone.

That semantic carnage set me off during what Sinatra once crooned about, "the wee small hours of the morning." 

I began big. 

Thinking of the four audiences we could possibly create advertising for. And how that choice of audience somewhat defines the tenor of the work you or your agency create and believe it.

ONE: I think in the early 20th Century, our audience was the people who made the things we buy. A lot of advertising told of the deep virtues of various products. The advertising, very often, was about what was important to manufacturers.

TWO: The creative revolution was really representative of an "equality" revolution. The best advertising of the 1960s and 1970s made a transition from what was important for brands to tell you to what was important for you to have a better life.

THREE: Next came the ugliness and dumbness of the advertising of personal fulfillment. Advertising banged on oprah- like about how toothpaste or oven cleaner could help you eat, pray, love. This was advertising that purported to deliver personal fulfillment or some greater good, devoid of any connection to the specifics of a product.

FOUR: That brings us to today, and the most pernicious and ugliest style of advertising of all--the one the metaphorical airwaves and our social feeds are currently being afflicted with. We can call this the advertising of bludgeoning. It appeals to giant investors who have been sold on the efficacy of ubiquity. Agencies and clients and networks, don't care if you hate their messaging--it's dumbness, its volume and its tone. They'll keep forcing it on you like the CIA waterboarding alleged terrorists. You'll be besieged until you choke or die, whichever comes second.

Of course, this exegesis too simple by about 92,000%. Which doesn't mean it doesn't make sense.

1900-1959--You should care about our product. We said so.
1960-1999--This is how our product delivers more.

2000-2019--Our product improves you and the entire cosmos.
2020-Present--You will buy whatever we say because we are all-mighty and unavoidable and you have no choice but to do what we inundate you with. 

In brief, that's how the ad world rose and was ruined.