Finding a Voice.

Last week it was announced that after 32 years, the advertising relationship between IBM and Ogilvy had ended. I knew the news beforehand, as you'd expect. And to be real, the vibrancy of the relationship had ended probably ten, or even fifteen years earlier.

The two former behemoths were like long-married billionaires. They no longer cared for each other, but it would be too expensive to leave. So they tolerated each other's presence.

I worked for Ogilvy and on IBM for over a dozen years--for parts of four decades. I'd be lying if I pretended I was anything but a cog in a Steve Hayden, Chris Wall, Matt Ross (account guy)-built machine. I wasn't a power-hitter. But I could do the little, important things that help teams win. 

I could make a timely hit, I could advance a runner, I could come through in the clutch, and I could while away the hours--that is put in the work that makes work work.

Yes, over those dozen years I produced hundreds of TV commercials, hundreds of print ads, banner ads, websites, direct mail pieces, radio spots and, even, strategy decks thanks to my adroit ability to boil 97-page decks and 34 contributing voices down into TV-Guide length-blurbs. I also wrote speeches, jokes and emails that helped the troops.

Those dozen years were the best dozen years of my long "working-for-others" career. They made the last almost seven years of working for myself possible. They gave me confidence. More important, they gave me the skill that justified that confidence. 

I am smart enough, and my hard drive is organized enough, to have saved certain documents from those years that can remind me of much of what I learned along the way. One of those documents was IBM's 2001 Annual Report. It was IBM CEO Lou Gerstner's last annual report since he led IBM's turn around. I sensed that it might appreciate in value like a Honus Wagner baseball card.

There was a time in our business, at least at Ogilvy, where creative people weren't just designers and writers. They cared about design and writing, but more than that, they were business people who could use creativity to advance a client and agency's prospects, and therefore their career. That amalgam of business-sense and creativity seems to have been wrung out of modern advertising. Creatives aren't supposed to worry their little heads about business issues. It's almost bad for your career to be too pragmatic or mercantile.

So, yes, in those days, some of us read annual reports.

In this annual report, which I have in front of me, there was this beautifully designed and written section, right at the beginning before the rows and rows of SEC reporting. I suppose to most people reading annual reports, the numbers are the most important things. Like they seem to be most salient to the holding companies today. However in this IBM annual report, the "Sixteen decisions..." section was more valuable than a B-school degree.

There as a spread in that section that does more to sum up the relationship between IBM and Ogilvy and how instrumental Ogilvy was to IBM's turnaround and ascent. I suppose in the long history of advertising, not too many people make it to pages 36 and 37 of an annual report, but I did. And I learned from it.

When an agency helps a brand "recapture something we'd lost--our ability to engage our customers and our industry in a meaningful conversation about what matters to us, and to them," that is something that is worth more than any number of trumped up and largely specious awards and self-aggrandizements. As is this, "When we rediscovered our voice, we discovered something else: our sense of direction, the courage to stand apart from the crowd and, ultimately, what it means to speak like a leader again."

Man, if I were John Wren or Arthur Sadoun or Cindy Rose, I'd hire a good stone-cutter and etch those in my executive suite. I'd then call in everyone of my remaining 109, no, make that 81, cancel that, 68 employees and have them memorize it. That's every new business pitch in just 57 words. (Not one of them 'intersection.)

In my life in advertising, this used to be what we did. Engage people in what a brand does and why they need it. Stand out from a crowd. Speak like a leader.

We didn't have these silly demarcations, like brand, performance, social, digital. We didn't have cuneiform funnels and bow-ties and ecosystems.

We had words that mattered.
Working to make brands matter.

Work that matters not merely to juries in cerise-colored espadrilles in southern France. But to people in supermarkets, on Amazon, in car dealers, when they're booking a vacation.

That is the road back.
For clients.
For agencies.

Find our power.
Find our meaning.
Find our purpose.
Find our voice.