The Trade Press.

My friends often deride me because I so often deride the cowardice and mediocrity of the advertising trade press. 

You'd think that if the trade press still employed journalists who did more than regurgitate press-releases and gossip, someone would be writing about the lack of honesty in the industry, not to mention the loss of literally hundreds of thousands of jobs. 

Instead we get pablum--mush with no nutritional value--posing as news.

We used to have a calculus (other than awards) of assessing the economic viability of agencies. Their major accounts, their revenue, the number of their employees. That gave us critical information about agencies--empirical, not "for sale." Of course a lot of that was fudged. But largely you knew who was doing what and how well.

All that information is missing now. Now we pick agencies based on awards they pay for. And often the same companies that are major investors in awards shows are major investors in agency holding companies. Often the agency of the year in, say 2024, is an agency out of business in 2026. That's trumpian in its dishonesty. It's like competing against judge and jury and hangman.

WPP in their 2026 annual report claims they employ 99,000 people. In 2017, WPP claimed they employed 203,000. You'd think a loss of more than 50% of your employees would be a lead story. Somewhere.

Imagine if major league baseball consolidated Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and St. Louis into one team, called, say, the Polymers and then that team went belly-up. You'd think that would earn some ink. But no. The press hasn't covered the geo-politics of the rapine of the industry anymore than People magazine would cover the closing of the Straights of Hormuz.

The top headlines of today's Ad Age (the magazine that misappropriated the name of this blog and took it as their own) read like dispatches from an unrecognizable industry. What they report on doesn't matter and they report only on things that don't matter.

Most pernicious is their editorial conceit "XX creative campaigns to know about today." I don't know if these headlines includes duplicates, but looking at all the campaigns "to know about," you'd think there was a shitload of great work out there. Most people I talk to see about one decent piece of work a quarter--or less if you don't count what Apple makes. Yet here on the front page of Ad Age are 36 campaigns worth paying attention to. Are there 36 ads in the world right now not offering Buy One Get One?

To my glaumy eyes, the most annoying of all editorial devices is the "listification" of what used to be journalism. I just got an email from Campaign US calling for entries on some "40 over 40" contest, which will turn into editorial, which will turn into selling swag, which will turn into an $500/plate dinner, which will turn into incessant LinkedIn self-promotions from the nominees and winners, which in turn will turn into yet another permutation of this even covered with maybe slightly different dressing.

Consider my rough math on the above.

If they get sixty nominations for their 40 over 40 at an average entry fee halfway between the standard and the extended rate ($360/pp) you quickly see that CampaignUS magazine makes $21,600 from this "editorial." In all my years in the business, I've never seen a copy of Campaign on someone's desk. They have a lot of different ad units for sale, but I can't believe they make much through either subscriptions or ads.

To me, it's much more likely Campaign US and so much "journalism" like it is like so many of the phonus balonus-ness that has tattered the legitimacy of every industry everywhere. They're in the business of charging real fees for fake awards then more fees for fake awards dinners.

Entries here must net them a lot. Though what this award proves beyond that you entered and paid a fee is unknown to me. £6750 is a lot for dinner for 10, too--at a time when most agencies have about a $8 dinner allowance after 9PM and you might be able to expense a pogo stick home.

So journalism isn't reporting news, it's fabricating it. They're so divorced from the idea that people will pay for useful information that they no longer even try to supply it. Instead, as I said above it's regurgitated press-releases and awards press-releases. With no perspective, honesty or investigation.

The trade press is now a flack.
They chose to be flacks over reporting facts.

Better Shred than Bleah.

An Oedipal commercial.
(Like Oeddie, you'll want to gouge out your own eyes.)

You can hardly go on LinkedIn, or read some press-release blather from some company or another, or view about 12-seconds of a commercial (that's about all you can bear) they did that they're naturally gushing over without saying to yourself, "how much suck can the world actually tolerate?" This isn't a question of human-made versus man-made. Humans can and do make slop almost as well as machines. And humans are cheaper, too. But the point is, in an effort to get us to shop till we drop, amerikrap's marketers are feeding us "slop till we plotz."

What's more, it seems like every third ad on LinkedIn is for some mini-MBA or an advanced degree for CMO, or for some sort of executive MBA program. To be honest, there was a time in my career, when I was in my 40s, that I was trying to get Ogilvy to help pay for my executive MBA. I saw the death of the ad industry coming, and thought I might have a few sentient years left to make some real money trying to work for Goldman-Sachs.

The point is having dealt with clients my entire life, 99.8-percent of them would be better off if they spent 12 minutes with me and got instead of an MBA, their GMT (george-michael-training.)

I would hold only two classes.

The first would take one-minute and would require you to just memorize a single sentence: "Never work for a company that schedules 30-minute meetings." More and more companies do this and it says four things about them.

1. They're so self-important they have no time for humanity, cordiality and kibbitzing. They can only agenda. They can't think about anything, really, but getting to their next meeting on time.

2. They have way too many meetings altogether. The only positive of a 30-minute meeting is that you can cram twenty into a normal workday.

3. They aren't really open to ideas--just preconceived notions. 30-minutes is really too short to have a legitimate back-and-forth discussion, disagreement and resolution.

4. The number of meetings is more important than the content of meetings. That's why they've arranged a way to have so many.

-

The second part of my GMT curriculum wouldn't take much longer than part one.

It would require a shredder, a couple of pieces of paper and another short memorization exercise.

"99.8-percent of all people don't like being interrupted. They don't like you. They don't like your brand. They don't believe your offers. They don't like your mix. They don't like your casting. They don't like your music. They don't like your sense of humor. They don't believe you're truthful. And they've seen it all before."

Then do what I did in this video. (That paper labeled "JUNK" could be any marketing message, customer-facing, internal, paid, owned, earned. Whatevs.)

I'm 99.8-percent sure no marketing education program in the world teaches their students how people really feel about the generalized crappiness disorder that afflicts most advertising.  This video would help. So would the photo below. 

A month's-worth of shredded direct mail.

I know you can't teach taste.

But you can teach a simple sentence.

If you don't make people laugh, or feel, or think, your work will be shredded.

How most people treat most messages.

A month's worth of credit card, telco, landscaping and roofing offers.
(A fore-shadowing.)

Gary Goldsmith, Makers + Mentors, Part II.

Part II of my talk with Gary Goldsmith, Makers plus Mentors founder and former Chair of Creative Direction at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. We pick up where we left off Monday, speaking about Gary’s aims in teaching…

Gary Goldsmith: 
I always tried to infuse our program with people who I thought were current, contemporary and important for the students to be exposed to. I looked at myself as the curator of their influences. 

An example was Dave Dye. Dave agreed to teach and was an excellent teacher. He brought his vast global knowledge of the business/high taste level and coupled it with challenging assignments and an ability to critique and connect with the students. 

AD AGED:

And the better those influences are, the better the people do.

Gary Goldsmith: 
Absolutely. I think that was one element of why our program
was so successful. But the other element was something that I found missing in many other programs. We looked at our job as not just teaching them, coaching them and pushing them to be better.

We looked at our job as creating pathways to help them enter the industry at the best possible places.

AD AGED:
And that's where the mentoring came in.

Gary Goldsmith:
Yes, that’s part of it. So instead of a person having to send their book to a great agency like Wieden & Kennedy cold, we would have them meet with one of our former grads who worked there. That grad would review their book, make comments, give advice and usually show it to a few more people there. Once everyone thought it was ready to submit, they’d submit it.

So our students were not only being mentored by me and our instructors. They were being mentored by people who already worked in the places that they most want to work. And as I found out, not only are our alums happy to see the newbies that come out, they really enjoy the notion that they’re going to play a role in helping someone follow in the path that they were able to take.

 

AD AGED:
That's the way it really works. I mean, getting through the gauntlet, unless you're just singular or in some way you're wearing the gorilla suit or whatever, you know, stunts, have to do is really kind of impossible.

Gary Goldsmith:
Yes, that's right. That’s a key thing. And that's something that's often missing with many of the students I talk to who have been in some of the other programs, even very good programs. 

And what I have found, in almost every case, was that it wasn't that those programs didn't want to do that, but that they didn't necessarily have the contacts in those agencies to do that.

So yes, first and foremost you have to make really great work. Without that, nothing else matters. But when you do make great work, you have a big advantage if you have a mentor that can put you in a position for the right people to see it.

AD AGED:
My knee-jerk supposition when I heard about Makers & Mentors was that you added mentoring because the senior level at agencies has been wiped out in many ways.

Again, it's hard not to sound negative. But the people you used to be able to hang with and learn from, either by association or by actual tutelage, that seems to be gone now, according to my experience at agencies. 

I wondered if that was the impetus behind mentorship, that you're looking for that kind of fatherly figure in a sense that that you know and it’s kind of as if a hundred years ago people stopped seeing religious leaders for help that's when psychiatrists came in so you know is there is there kind of a parallel now we all need whether it's encouragement or guidance or some sort of affirmation from someone, if you can find someone older than you, from someone older than us, you know, we all need that and it doesn't exist in agencies. So that was my initial thought, but yours is much more, it's much more directive in a way.

Gary Goldsmith:
Well, yes, I agree, but the connecting with mentors on the outside is only one part of it. The other role of mentoring is more as you describe. And that’s the mentoring that I did and our teachers did.

It’s about getting to know each persons strengths and weaknesses, about knowing how to push them but push them in a way that’s productive and inspiring, not demoralizing. It’s about helping them set their goals, understand the sacrifices that have to be made and get prepared to transition from school to their careers. And if you’re in a leadership position and your students are putting their trust in you, you have to be willing to take some responsibility for their well-being and their career.

AD AGED:
Responsibility for their well-being in their career. Because, you know, they're counting on us to prepare them.

 

Gary Goldsmith:
Absolutely. We have to prepare them in terms of teaching/inspiring them to do the best possible work they can do, but it doesn't end there.

The other part of it is preparing them for the industry, preparing them for “real-life”, preparing them for the disappointment we all sometimes experience and giving them the knowledge and the tools to thrive and succeed. 

AD AGED:
You know, it's funny, when I was still, you know, in the traditional business, my probably best friend in the business was Rob Schwartz, you know, who was CEO of Chiat/Day. And I would often, not often, twice a year, which is often, I would say, oh, you really should meet Nika. You should really meet Bill. And he was always, I mean, Rob happens to be a super nice guy.

Gary Goldsmith:
Yes, he sure is.

 

AD AGED:
But what and I'm really shy about asking for favors, but what I realized or what I what was this idea that when you're older, and you don't have to be, I'm 68, don't have to be say 68 when you're older, could be 38, young people are a currency. And not to be mercenary about this, but it's like, you just don't see young people. And you kind of get despondent, like where's the next generation coming from I don't see people who know what Doyle Dane was anymore.

 
You know, so there's kind of a richness to introducing these young people and kind of, if you're a prospector, in a sense, finding them because they become the glowing, like the ferment of decades and the people who taught you and all of a sudden this person's a product of a hundred years of tutelage somehow. That's right.

Gary Goldsmith:
I completely agree with you. And all of us who have the privilege of teaching and mentoring get to feel the joy and satisfaction that come after all the late night critiques, early morning panicked phone calls, and the difficult but necessary tough love conversations that lead to the end result of seeing someone get exactly the job they want to begin their career.

We will continue with another installment next week.

I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles.

If you think about "Stockholm Syndrome" for a minute, where a prisoner begins to empathize with their captives, and form a psychological bond with them, it's hard to find a better and more frequent example than how the trade press gushes over 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12-figure -ionaires. It turns my stomach, to be honest, how the press--and you and I along with them--ignore the financial machinations of the -ionaire class and conflate their sinful wealth with preternatural intelligence. 

We treat these men like gods--altman, musk, thiel, karp, bezos. We should regard them as clods. Clods that don't pay tax. 

No one outside of tump ever talks about the system being rigged, or the miscreance of CEOs who act as heads of their own compensation committees or that CEO pay has risen from about 17-times the pay of median workers in 1970 (arguably amerika's most-equal age) to more than 300-times the pay of an average worker today.

If you made $25,000 in 1974--a decent salary, a CEO would comparatively have brought in $425,000. Today, if you make a decent salary, say $100,000, the average CEO would make $30,000,000. Plus, when the inevitable bellying-upping of once great companies happens--the CEO and the money behind them have it all structured so they get paid first. Workers, pensions, debt be damned, Mustique, here I come.

All that being posited, about fourteen dozen people sent me the article here from Forbes. My email box exploded with the above, treating Martin Sorrell like he's an oracle, not an oral-rinse. 

Yes, Sorrell built a giant house of agency cards--with other people's money--with no acquisition strategy other than dominate the agency-world shelf space. Why in god's name would you buy Y&R, O&M, JWT, Grey and dozens of smaller look-alikes. 

All this was to gull investors into ginning up the stock price by manipulating numbers until which point the whole thing has collapsed. Sorrell's former agency has seen it's market-cap plummet from being worth $31,870,000,000 eleven years ago to $3,610,000,000 today. 

If your house suffered similar decline in value, if it went from being worth $310,000 to $36,000 you would not be going to your realtor for investment advice. Basically, post-Sorrell, Park Avenue apartments are now available at Love Canal prices. But let's treat him as wise. 

(Grabbi. Rapi. Leavi. I grabbed, I raped, I l left--as Caesar might have said.)

On top of all this, and one more things our Stockholm journalists don't mention, is that Sorrell, while CEO of WPP routinely paid himself hundreds of millions of dollars--a salary way out of whack of any comparable standard--moral, ethical or competitive.

In 2015, WPP's peak year, Sorrell took home $102,000,000--1,444 times his average employee. Sorrell, in short, paid himself as if he were more valuable to WPP than fourteen-hundred people making $100,000 each. BTW, Sorrell is still on WPP's payroll, as are three or six other former CEOs, at a time when WPP's aggregate payroll has been "trimmed" from a high of 203,000 workers to under 100,000 today.

The truth is I have nothing, really, against either Sorrell or WPP. What I do despise are lies. 

Lies that are repeated and lead to building a mythology about a man that is almost wholly fabricated

WPP and their ilk played the game and profited from it. That doesn't make them geniuses, or people to admire, emulate or trust. Any more than Bernie Madoff was a genius, admirable or someone to emulate.

The problem with crashes is a lot of people get buried.

Gary Goldsmith One. A Talk with a Leader.

A few weeks ago, I noticed this online from the great creative Gary Goldsmith. Gary was starting a new ad school--having for years helped run Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California as Chair of Creative Direction. 

My experience of Gary goes back almost fifty years. Nearly every young person in the ad industry in the 1980s who was looking to move up through the industry one shaky rung of the ladder at a time had heard of Gary. Gary had landed at DDB--when DDB was still DDB, when giants out-numbered ceiling tiles, and seemed to be single-handedly doing more great work than the rest of the industry combined. 

His work, btw, wasn't just good. It made you look at how you did work. It made you want to work harder, smarter, better. It made you proud to be on the outskirts of the same business Gary was in. You can see some of Gary's early work here, if you poke around a bit. 

There are so many ad schools in the world right now. In fact, to my cynical eyes there seem be more people education others on advertising than there are people educated in advertising. It's like there are a million driving instructors and no one knows how to use a turn signal. 

But I know Gary as someone of wisdom. He doesn't do things without thinking them through, and without a flexible process to make sure they work. Gary and I have spoken through the years about his work at Art Center--particularly his "Crashvertising" modus operandi, and I've always left the conversation a better person that I was when I started the conversation.

I quickly wrote Gary a note. 

Would he like to be featured on Ad Aged? Could I interview him.

He wrote back in seconds and seconds later, I sent him a list of potential topics we could talk about. The next Monday, we had an 82-minute Zoom, that could have gone on for 82-hours.

While I amn't by any stretch a professional interviewer, I tried to ask Gary tough questions. 

1. Like why an ad school when the future of the industry we both love seems so bleak?

2. With so many ad schools what makes Makers + Mentors different?

3. How did Gary start teaching? And how has he kept it up for almost a half-century?

4. What was the ad that got him to DDB--and what happened next?

As I said, I'm no journalist. This might not be the most orderly of interviews. But Gary and I had a good time talking--sharing, and learning from each other. 

Over the next couple of days, I'll publish our discussion. My advice though, is my advice in almost all things. Read. Read Gary's work. Read of Gary's influences. Read what Gary is trying to do and teach.

You can only lead if you read.

--

AD AGED: When I first was introduced to you, we were very much younger, not in person, just by reputation. I heard about this guy at DDB who did these amazing ads for a student book for crayons. And I just went to your site, your personal site, saw those ads. And I guess my question is, or questions are, one, would those ads work today? I know the answer, but I want it from you. And two, are you fearful? Let me ask this in a provocative way. Are you fearful of people saying, well, that  Gary Goldsmith man, he's living in the past. Why does he have 50-year-old ads on his portfolio site? But just in terms of background, and I obviously have a point of view on this, but I'd love to hear it from you.

AD AGED: Crayola is the category.

Gary Goldsmith: Exactly. And on a separate note, the other reason those ads are important to me is that when I did those ads, that was actually the first time I really “got it" and felt like I had done something good.

Gary Goldsmith: Honestly, George, I never really thought about it that way. I think it depends on the context. I have those ads on my personal website because they’re part of the historical body of work that I want people to see, whether it be my students or others. The site is more of a retrospective than just a “this is what I'm doing now”. But do I think that they would still work now? Yes, because I think they come out of an insight that's still true.

You could criticize them to say that they’re generic for the category, but there is no category.

AD AGED: Interesting. Can you expand on what it is you got?

Gary Goldsmith: It was getting the idea of the words not repeating the picture, the picture not just illustrating the words, but the two working together in a way that made a combined meaning that you wouldn't have had otherwise. 

And I specifically remember going through this whole process of trying to figure out the best way to say it. With the first ad, I kept thinking, well, let's see, if a toy breaks, you have a broken toy. If a crayon breaks, you have two crayons. That was the first long-hand way I had of saying it. Which was, of course the idea…you break one, you have two of them now.

But then by going back and writing line after line after line, I came up with “Toys break, Crayons multiply. A much shorter, more succinct and memorable version of that same thought.

AD AGED:
And it's about imagination.

Gary Goldsmith: 
Yes. And that was the first time that I thought, ok, maybe I could be good at this.

AD AGED:
Oh, interesting. You know, but before.

Gary Goldsmith: 
Before that, I was struggling. I was looking at a lot of work in annuals like we all do when we first start. And a lot of the great work back then really spoke to me. I loved a lot of the work I was seeing, and I knew why I loved it.

But I couldn't do it.

I would start working on something, have high expectations, finish it and be disappointed. Even though I knew good from bad, I simply could not do work that I thought was very good. I kept trying and trying. More all-nighters than I can even count. Some stuff was okay, some stuff was pedantic, and then finally, I did that ad.

AD AGED:
And it's almost like it opened the doors.

Gary Goldsmith: 
It's a moment, yes. And yes, I tell that to my students all the time. I always reference the difficult time that I had at the beginning…I want them to understand that it's not easy and none of us do it naturally. Keep pushing and your moment will come.

AD AGED:
Lets end today with a little digression, which is what I do best. I'm reading this book now, which is fabulous.

It's called "The Ancient Wisdom of the Mesopotamians."  And it's like it's our Western and modern tendency to look at people different from us and say 'how could they have been so ignorant?' 

4000 years ago in Mesopotamia, no one would ask if you believe in God or not--Because God was, just was. Right. 

What the author is saying is we're being spoken to all the time. We just might not be able to see it. You might not be able to get the perception of the person who loves you and you don't see it. Or the craft you want to do, but it's kind of there. You just have to make the things align. 

It occurs to me, When you say this is the moment it clicked, is there a similar clicky moment on why you're starting Makers and Mentors now? Is there a similar conjunction, a similar kind of epiphany in a sense?

Gary Goldsmith: 
Yes.

There is, in the sense that, you know, I talk to a lot of students, not just my own students, but other students who know of me and send me their books…students who went to different schools than ours, state schools, private schools, art schools…and I talk to them and I learn about what they were doing in their programs as I try to help them. And one of the things that it reaffirmed for me was that in the program we built at Art Center at that time, we put together a carefully curated collection of great teachers. And I always continued to evolve the curriculum and bring in new and contemporary teachers. It was not a fixed faculty where every term was necessarily taught by the same people.

I'd hear about somebody doing some really good work in LA, meet with them and ask them (or beg them if necessary) to teach. Even if it was only for a term or two. That was back when we had to be in person. During and after Covid, when we went remote, it threw the doors wide open. Jeff Goodby, Jaime Robinson and Greg Hahn each generously agreed to join me on zoom for two weeks of Crashvertising. Dave Dye was kind enough to join us on zoom from London and taught for a few semesters. It created the possibility of building a program like we’re building with Makers+Mentors now, unencumbered by bureaucracy and with talented, contemporary instructors teaching from anywhere in the world.

Or I brought Dave Dye to teach when we could go remote because of Zoom.

Continued...soon.

--