A Metaphor Strained.

There was an article in The New York Times over the weekend that reminded me of the demise of the ad industry, at least the industry I grew up with. That industry provided a good way to make a living. It gave you an outlet for your nuttiness. And it allowed you to help clients while having a modicum of fun and hanging out with funny people. 

That industry is gone.

WPP alone has, in the last ten years, gone from $32B in market cap to just over $3B. And has gone from employing 203,000 people to employing 99,000 people (by their count.) That descent ain't because of AI or "the changing media landscape," it's theft and greed which can all fit under the heading of modern business management.

A friend who is a long-time freelance creative sees people treated by the holding company hegemon little better than the day workers suburban housewives used to pick up in the ghetto for some light dusting, verbal abuse and unpaid overtime. People are hired for the day at diminished wages and kept until the exact moment they're no longer needed. Then they're dropped like a seagull aiming at your head.

In truth, I see the strip mining of the ad industry as a parallel construction to the strip mining of amerikkka. If you can muster up the attention span to read George Packer's "The Unwinding,"
you'll see what I mean. And you'll understand a bit more about what's happening.

The article from the Times that reminded me of advertising can be found here.

The MBA\Blackstone\Blackrock money that bought our industry are like bad guys in a bear-suit. They cause damages, sue for damages, get paid out by the putative insurance companies that compensate the super-wealthy and then they walk away.

BTW, forget about Pubicgrease, Omnicon, Hamas, Dent, and Schtupwell. Our owners are listed below:

Who owns Omnigraft?

For years, MBAs in metaphorical bear suits have clawed at our industry. They said:

"ideas are dead." 
"data is everything."
"AI can do it."
"Social ads the size of thumbnails can do everything a brand spot does."
"No one watches TV."
"No one believes differentiation."
"Everything is parity."
"Creative is unimportant."
"The algorithm is everything."

Like the bear attacks written about above, these are fake assaults that have done real damage. They have allowed an industry to shed people and costs (we can't afford FTEs) while the compensation committees at the Holding Companies perpetrating the attacks award the dressed-up and camouflaged attackers with eight-, nine-, or ten-digit compensation packages.

People still need information to buy products. Brands still need definition. Those have been human truths since your ancestors went bipedal.

But according to the non-advertising men in expensive three-piece bear-suits, not anymore.

Accordingly, they'll leave down. Edifices falling like the House of Usher, while they're carrying bags of Mammon to 12-bedroom homes with underground-shelters in Mustique.

Here's one point and maybe unfair example. After consolidating Y&R, Grey, JWT and others into oblivion, after destroying the individual agencies bought for such significant multipliers and expunging their names from the record, after diminishing 'Ogilvy' and the like and turning them into a mayonnaise entity called 'WPP Creative,' I see this:

This is an executive and corporate bear attack. You destroy and then say, 'it's been destroyed so we'll destroy it some more. Then we'll change what it is so we can't be blamed for destroying it. But not before we walk away with $100,000,000.'

Do you really think you can have a "culture" 
(whatever that is) amid nearly $700,000,000 of cost-cutting?

People aren't worried about culture at that point, they're worried about rent.