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.

Close Encounters of the MBA Kind.

Three times last week I got an email telling me that something I either had or hadn't subscribed to was either renewing (automatically), going up in price, or renewing automatically and going up in price.

I'm not necessarily cheap but I do toss nickels around like manhole covers especially during these parsimonious times when paying clients are trying to become non-paying clients simply because so many purveyors, not me but like me (this includes giant global ad agencies or once-giant global ad agencies) are willing to work for legumes. 

That's my way of saying, spending-wise I look before I leap. And while the machinations of "subscription" "services" make it hard for you to know what you're subscribed to, how much it costs, or what you get for your expenditure, I do the best I can to keep an eye on my scheckels, especially since I plan to hang up my spikes in just over 1450 days, when the calendar turns to 2030.

If I earn money in the year 2030, it means I will have been gainfully employed by the sweat of my own wrinkled brow for parts of six decades. That surpasses my baseball hero, the Cuban Comet, Minnie Minoso, who played major-league horsehide in five decades-- the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. If I can earn my day rate in 2030, I'll have done so in the 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, 20s and 30s. A skein of six decades. A record, I believe. Or if not a record, good enough for me. I ain't under any circumcisions (that was intentional) going for a seventh decade.

But back to last week and the re-subscription emails I received.

The first was for something called YouTube Premium, which was raising their price from $12.95/month to $15.95. I got a woman on the blower and asked to cancel. (There was no link that would have made it simple--or I couldn't find one.)

"I can lower that price," she chirped "to $9.95." 

"I never signed up in the first place," I snapped. "I already pay god-knows-what for the YouTube TV streaming service that I never use and I don't want this."

"But I'll lower the price."

The next email I got was from the all-but-defunct trade magazine Advertising Age--the ones who stole the name of this blog for their magazine. 

They were charging me $199.99 for a digital subscription. Again, I don't remember signing up for one. And every thing I click on on their site--everything of any ostensible value--is paywalled. I can't have at it unless I subscribe at a higher-level, I think for $699.99. I'm sure at that point there's still more blocked content and they'll try to get me to spend $999.99.

Again, I could find no cancel button. So I suppose I spoke to someone in Myanmar which is somehow cheaper than having a cancel link.

She tried to upsell me to the $699.99 package for only $499.99. I said no, I just want out. At which point she offered the $199.99 package for $99.99.

Finally, I got an email from WeTransfer, a service that costs I think about $12.99/month that I use about once a year if I have a high-res MP4 to send to someone. They offered to lower my price to $9.99/month, and again I said, "no."

There's a point in this--a macro one about self-appreciation and self-belief. It pertains to all of us and our entire industry. Maybe our entire world.

Especially amid the word on the street that a certain holding company is growing because they give creative away while only charging for media, and another holding company is giving everything away to try to gain some account-win momentum.

If you lower you're prices every time someone barks or sneezes, if you can't charge what you believe you deserve and what you're worth, you're not a business-person, you're a charlatan. You're one step below or above a busker in 16th century England singing for your supper.

I'll admit, I've worked for five decades in this business and I've worked with a therapist for a similar amount of time. My experience, my acclaim, my success, my busy-ness, my self-belief and more have allowed me--not without some internal sturm und drang--to charge what I charge.

The demise of the advertising industry--on both the ecosystem-level and the individual-level--is that we've willingly allowed ourselves to be devalued. Somewhere along the way, it became easier to roll-over for $X than it was to fight for $XX.

I ain't doing that for now.

Hopefully, I won't have to over the next 125,630,782 seconds. 

In the meantime, if you have an Advertising Age log-in I can bum, HMU.

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.