The Dead Lions. 17 New Cannes Awards for 2026.

With Cannes, once again, right around the corner, before-too-long our feeds will be filled with people announcing their attendance, boasting of their short-listing or bloviating on the importance of it all. And even though, Cannes awards more trophies than ever (over 1000 in 2024) I'm not entirely sure their awards and categories reflect the reality of today's advertising business. 

That being said, some suggestions for new, relevant awards:

1.
The "We-spent-more-on-award-entry-fees-than-we-did-on-salaries" Award.

2. 
The "We-no-longer-have-that-client-but-we're-paying-for-them-to-go-anyway" Award.

3.
The "One-of-just-two-people-in-the-agency-not-judging-the-awards-and-announcing-it-on-Linked-In" Award.

4.
The "I-was-never-a-cool-kid-but-now-I'm-on-a-yacht-and-you're-paying-for-it" Award.

5.
The "Yes-my-feet-are-size-14EEE-but-they-look-great-in-celadon-colored-espadrilles" Award.

6.
The "We've-laid-off-30%-of-our-staff-since-Tuesday-and-are-hoping-to-win-Agency-of-the-Year" Award.

7.
The "I-spent-$32,000,000-on-award-and-all-I-got-was-this-lousy-trophy" Award.

8.
The "Yes-my-lanyard-covers-more-than-my-Speedo" Award.

9.
The "I-don't-think-awards-are-important" Award.

10.
The "It-never-ran-but-it-helped-raise-our-industry's-standards" Award.

11.
The "Milk-this-award-like-a-prize-Holstein" Award.

12.

The "When-we-get-back-to-the-agency-we're-going-to-make-all-the-work-award-winning" Award.

13.
The "I've-been-here-so-many-times-I'm-blasé-about-it" Award.

14.
The "I'm-pretending-that-Paris-Hilton-is-a-vital-force-in-advertising-and-worthy-of-attention" Award.

15.

The "I-have-no-idea-who-that-celebrity-is-either-but-won't admit-it" Award.

16.
The "Most-photographed-with-people-I-can't-stand-but-I'm grinning-like-an-idiot-anyway" Award.

17. 
The "Who-can-win-the-most-awards-before-going-into-receivership-or-being-merged-out-of-existence" Award.

GEIFY. (George Explains It For You.)

A decade ago or two, when I was still working at one giant decaying advertising agency or another, I had developed a theory on how to improve the work the agency was able to sell.

This was a pragmatic theory, not the kind of powerpointy thing agencies propagate then patent which are usually beautifully designed and all but inscrutable to anyone with even an iota of scrut left.

My theory was pretty simple, as most good theories should be (and aren't any longer) at least if you believe in the efficacy, or even sanctity of Occam's Razor. (Occam’s razor is a principle attributed to 14th–century friar William of Ockham. It says that if you have two competing ideas to explain the same phenomenon, you should prefer the simpler one. It has nothing to do with shaving.)

When I played baseball, the most salient strategic advice I ever received from anyone I got from my Seraperos' manager, Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla, aka Hector Quesadilla. One night we were down by two with two men on in a late inning. As I was heading to the plate for my swings, Hector took me aside and laid some deep strategic thinking on me. "Hit a double," he said. You can do all that moneyball shit. None of it is worth a bucket of lukewarm spit if someone doesn't hit a two-bagger with men on.

My theory of improving work isn't quite that simple, but it's not bad.

Most agencies, account people and creative directors know the quality of work they need to deliver to a) not get yelled at, and b) sell something to the client.

Exhibit A.

The sweetspot is usually about midway between really good and really sucky. That's the "acceptable range." The left side of my bracket is to be avoided. Most agencies try harder and strive for the right side. The good end of meh.

Agencies, like every other social organization from a small family unit to a summer camp to a giant enterprise, are governed by the inviolable laws of entropy. If you don't feel like looking up that three-syllable word, just remember this simple metaphor. "Rust never sleeps." In other words, things inevitably decay. Your acceptable band gets crappier over time.

Exhibit B.

To counteract the movement to dreckdom, smart agencies don't try to immediately and radically change the acceptable band. That's not likely to happen, and might upset the client along the way. No one today in virtually any walk of life is embracing risk. To be tautological, it's too risky.

But what you can do is change the tectonics of your agency client dynamic. You can shift decay to improvement. That can be slowly accomplished by still "staying in your acceptable band, but every-so-often presenting something that you consider smart, good and challenging. That is the kind of creative you really want to do. As represented below by the X bracket.

Every once in a while.

There's a probability that this work will never see the light of day or the pick of pixel or the lens of camera. It still makes almost everyone nervous. And 99.76% of everyone prefers comfortable.

However, by relentlessly sharing good work, by persistently challenging the client and your agency, you are playing the long game. Rather than your acceptable band of work migrating into dreck territory...

Regression to the very mean.

...showing smarter, better work stops the decay and slowly, slowly, slowly can lead to a resuscitation.

Ascension.

Most agencies and creatives and yes, clients, have given up in many ways. There's such tonnage demanded, that no one any longer has the time to think about how to improve life. What's more, most agencies and the bankers that own them, want immediate radical change. So they bring in a set of outsiders who break the system entirely. They start with hope and quickly sink hip deep into the ash-heap of futility.

It's like the New York Jets every year or so. Some trade, high-draft pick or new coach is going to turn their fortunes around. 

Then they finish yet another season 3-14.

There's no simple way to improve an account, an agency or an industry. There's only, really, marathon training. 

That means lacing up your shoes and clocking your miles through rain, sleet, snow or gloom of night. Through cramps, aches and marauding rodents.

Work takes work.

Good work takes even more.

Killed. Gutted. Lied About.

I shouldn't involve my legions of readers with my personal mishegas. However, after 7,374 posts in this space, give or take a false-start or two, my well is, again, seemingly close to running dry. I'm also busier than a cat in a fish market waste basket , and so I rarely have the time I need to choate the inchoate into some sort of passable bushwa.

That said, what follows will be perhaps a little slapdash, or, to indulge in full-Semitic deprecation, a little more slapdash than usual.

Last week, the news hit me hard--I think it hit a lot of people that way--that Wire Paper and Plastic was eliminating the Ogilvy brand. To be blunt, they had eliminated everything it stood for about a decade ago. Rechristening Ogilvy as Wire Paper and Plastic Creative only seals shuts and nails closed a door that was slammed ages ago.

Does any agency now stand for anything and produce anything other than undifferentiated noise?

Now, Ogilvy joins the list of other storied advertising names that have fallen by the wayside. Just this year, Doyle Dane Bernbach went the way of the passenger pigeon or the dodo. Not long ago, J. Walter Thompson sank into a tarpit, as did Y&R, and dozens of other pillars of the street formerly known as Madison Avenue.

I'd imagine, if any holding company apparatchik is reading this and cares about the opinion of perhaps advertising's most-read and most-influential blog, they might claim that the Ogilvy name is not disappearing. They find some circumlocution, an operating entity, a tax-haven or write-off, or some corporate job-lot that discounts defunct agency swag. 

Anonymous corporate spokesbots will say things like this to the anonymous trade-journal spokesbots who will print their utterances without interrogation:

Under the WPP Creative plans, which the FT said would be unveiled later this month, WPP will keep its existing creative agencies, including Ogilvy, VML, and AKQA, but fold them under a single umbrella to simplify its offering to clients, the report added.

The bought-and-paid-for trade press (press as in what an iron does to a shirt, not as in journalism) is already doing a "Full Orwell." They're tripping over themselves not to let a little thing like reality interfere with their nixonian journalistic-suck-up.

Entire bushwa here.

If you believe any of this iconic-brand claptrap, I have a slightly used bridge I'm selling, cheap.

In my entire life--99.7% of it spent in or around the advertising business-- I've never seen a more complete and nefarious dismantling of a brand, ever, with the possible exception of card-carrying National Socialists in Germany in late 1945, and card-carrying Soviets in Russia around 1991. They crossed those jobs off their resumes with alacrity. You rarely see obersturmfuhrer listed on LinkedIn these days.

Corporations often play fast and loose with brands they built over-time. I don't think you can buy a Chevrolet Impala anymore. But for decades it was America's best-selling car. Likewise, the Ford Mustang transitioned from a pony-car to yet another SUV. Likewise the repugnant party transmogrified from a fiscally responsible group of old white men to a group of old white men responsible for the greatest fiscal irresponsibility since the old Romans took the precious metals out of their currency, thus debasing the whole thing from toenail to toga.

What's happened, really, to the Ogilvy's of the world isn't just naming malfeasance.

The holding company hijinx represent the complete transition of the ad industry from an industry that created ideas in the service of moving products and building brands to an industry that carpet bombs the few remaining media properties and their associated algorithms with Advertising Slop--thousands of ads that will drip-feed us into willing compliance.

The brands are dead.

Their ethos is dead.
Their function is dead.

Fifty years ago, defunct agency Doyle Dane Bernbach ran this ad. I'll enlarge they last bit, and type it here too.

Maybe someone will read it.

Nah.

TR/DR. (Too real/didn't read.)

No donkey chases the carrot forever. He catches on. And quits.

That's the lesson to remember.

Unless we do, we die.

Unless we change, the tidal wave of consumer indifference will wallop into the mountain of advertising and manufacturing drivel.

That day we die.
We'll die in our marketplace. On our shelves. In our gleaming packages of empty promises.

Not with a bang. Not with a whimper.

But by our own skilled hands.
--

 

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.

Yer Out!

When I was a boy, probably not long after I left diapers, my father gave me a Spalding baseball glove of the old style, a regulation size and weight baseball and a small can of neat's-foot oil. The oil, which was to be applied liberally to the baseball glove, would make the leather pliable and suited to my hand. It would allow me to grasp a pop-up or flyball or snag a grounder out of the dirt.

I say the glove was of the old style because it was closer to the gloves of the 1950s than the gloves of the 1960s or '70s. The whole affair was not much bigger than my hand itself and the fingers of the glove were, like mine, short and stubby. 

Still, the deep pocket (I broke the glove in well) was emblazoned with Whitey Ford's signature--and in the shadow of Yankee Stadium where I grew up, such a signature was second only to having a glove with Mickey Mantle's moniker on it.

As I got older and larger, I quickly graduated from my Whitey Ford Spalding into a sleeker, trimmer and more modern Wilson with Ron Santo's signature on it. This, to my ten year old's eyes was not dissimilar to the leather wielded by actual pros. I cherished the glove like an ingenue her diamond ring.

However, my older brother was also at play in the fields of the lords. Fred had moved up to the Mercedes-Benz of gloves. A Brooks Robison Rawlings model with basket-weave webbing that was literally twice the size of my Santo Wilson. Rawlings' slogan was "Finest in the Field," and most wise men believed that.

Brooks and his Orioles of Baltimore, in 1970 when I was twelve, single-glovedly defeated the powerful Cincinnati Reds team, and I just had to have a glove just like my older brother's. The glove cost literally all the money in the world--I think $35--and my father bought one for me on the condition that I would turn my two-year-old Santo model over to my younger sister, Nancy.

Growing up in a family of boys, Nancy took to baseball--to the horror of my mother and the prevailing gender norms of the day--much more readily than she took to Suzy Homemaker kitchens or Easy-Bake ovens.

Whereas Fred and I were fast-growing, Nancy was more earthbound. In those days, the big kids--me and Fred played the corners--first or third--and shrimps, squirts and peewees played the middle infield spots, second and short.

Boys and girls didn't often play sports together in those days. Not against each other, not on the same teams. But in summer camp, when I was 13 and Nancy was 11, I had already emerged as the big baseball cheese while Nancy played shortstop for the girls' camp. I guess once around the end of the summer the girls would play the boys in some sort of exhibition game.

I remember Nancy, built low to the ground and lithe, hoovering up grounders and zinging the ball to cut male batsmen down in this game. Nancy's hands moved like wild birds. With the speed and confidence of a well-honed magician on his way to making the black Queen sally impossibly through the deck and appear against all odds.

That was the last I played with Nancy. 

The genders pulled apart. Girls aged-out of sports. And I moved up to loftier horsehide echelons where we wouldn't be caught dead sharing the diamond with a girl.

Nancy would have been 66, on Saturday, Valentine's Day. She died in a motorcycle crash on Mother's Day in 2007. She was 47. The last time I saw her she lay on a slab in the New York City Medical Examiner's Office on First and 31st. He face was black and blue. Her beauty still there. Her dead smile still beatific. 

I could see her beauty through my tears.
I still can.
I always will.
I can still feel her hand in mine.
I hear her laugh.

Some time later I subwayed out to Brooklyn and cleared out her slovenly ground-floor apartment. It was a depressing wreck of a place and made me think that in someways, Nancy had reached her apotheosis that summer afternoon when she was 11 and showing the boys what for. 

Her old Ron Santo Wilson was in a closet. I scooped it into my bag along with just two or three of her belongings. The rest I Hefty-bagged and dragged to the curb. I have still a set of her motorcycle keys, a pair of her expensive eyeglasses and her glove.

The Santo glove sits in my New York apartment. It still looks well-oiled and ready to go. I suppose I could pass it along to my grandson, Jude who will turn four this summer. He's too young, really, for such an advanced piece of equipment. And he's too young to learn of Nancy, and death, and the sad that comes from life.

I will be heading back to New York from Connecticut tomorrow. My wife has things to do in the City as do I.

I'll check in on the glove while I'm there. I'll look in on it like a father looks in on a sleeping child. I'll think about bringing it up to our country house from Manhattan, so we will be closer--I don't have many artifacts like that old Santo. But I'll leave it where it rests.

It deserves its space. 
It's earned its peace.
It needs to just be.

Nice play, Nancy.
He was out by a mile.

--

Ad Aged's First Choose Your Own Adventure Post.

---

20 Things I Have Learned.

1.
I won't ever really believe in technology until I can make it all the way through a 100-yard container of dental floss (waxed or unwaxed) without the spool jumping off the spindle and thus be rendered almost useless.

  

2.
You're officially old when your dead friends out-number your living friends. I am getting depressingly close.

3.
If you feel that a headache is beginning it's best not to listen to Tito Puente on your earpods.

4.
Never trust a politician who says he's not a politician.

5.
Let sleeping dogs lie. Let everybody else lie too. They're going to do so whether or not you let them.

6.
The warm kaiser rolls they used to serve at Dubrow's Cafeteria on 7th and 36th have never been surpassed.

7.
If you want to utterly destroy things that are important to you or other, begin cost cutting. Eventually the simple things that you cherished will resemble nothing more than well-packaged food-additives with a sticker that says "New!"

The effort to sanitize warfare doesn’t succeed, no matter how advanced the technology becomes. Don't let anyone, the war department, General Dynamics, Palantir or marketing scientists tell you otherwise.

8.
Certain ideas like "precision targeting" (whether it's a rock from a Roman catapult or an email from Best Buy) are perennial human dreams. As a species, they are beyond our grasp.

9.
The Jewish holidays are always early or late.

10.
The higher up you are in an organization, the more people there are who are paid to lie for you.

11.
People who say, "that's my opinion," are usually deniers of facts and reality.

12.
The only difference between one NBA or NFL highlight film and any other NBA or NFL highlight film is the color of the uniforms.

13. 
No one has ever gotten advertised internet download speeds, promised telco network reliability, pharma ad side-effects, or a benefit from loyalty points from Amtrak, AARP or Triple A.

14.
91% of all Olympic half-pipe contestants from amerika are named "Chase." I watched for 20-minutes last night and 91% also seemed to fall.

15.
I was curbing my enthusiasm about forty years before Larry David made it cool.

16.
The ability to make a list can save your life. Especially if it's funny.

17.
Also, the ability to tell a joke. Especially if it's funny.

18.
Most also, the ability to do the most loathsome thing first. And get it out of the way.

19.
W.C. Fields said he never drank water because "fish fuck in it."

20.
The ability to write lines like that can make you money.
-------

Forlorn Friday.

Sometimes if you're a human, it can feel like the world is closing in on you. Put in the parlance of an old Warner Brothers' gangster movie, it feels everybody is out to get you.

If you believe as I do, that the world pendulums between the people having power and the elite having power, we're living at a time where it seems the entire universe is cosmologically aligned to eviscerate your metaphorical scrotum. And not in a good way.

When certain people's paychecks is measured in the trillions, that means many more people have nothing. Of course it's not a zero-sum game, but some sums are taking more than is conceivably decent. (BTW, I'd love to open up a Chinese restaurant for nihilist. I can call it "Dim Zero Sum.")

Of course, you can't go two-pixels deep into the news without quickly feeling like the disunited straits of amerikaka is fast transitioning from a ersatz democracy to an out-an-out serf-society. A few people will have palaces and Bentleys and Saudi jets, and hot and cold-running sex-slaves. The rest of us won't even be able to see a doctor, take a vacation, afford a home, or pass anything along to our children.

Maybe what's set me off this morning is that I finally gave in to the imprecations of my ever-loving and bought a google device so I could get programming on my television. I turned off the TV for good about a year ago. I've lived happily without it for all those months. I haven't missed the pharma commercials, the hysterical refrains of "breaking news," Bobby Crabtree of Colonial Toyota or any of the shows the media offers, all of which are so dumbed down Kaspar Hauser would gladly gallop back to his lupine family to enjoy a good nit-picnic.

Frankly, I feel like a buxom pre-teen girl on the epstein island of modern amerkin. I'll do just about anything other than what they want me to do to be left alone. 

Of late I've read two books that have further scared me down to my pupik bone.

First, "The Second Estate" by Ray D. Madoff. (Unfortunate last name.) Ms. Madoff's work can be summed up in two passages that appear in its first three pages:

--

-

The second book might even be scarier. "The Traitors Circle" is the story of Germany of less than one-hundred years ago. And how one person perverted every norm and persecuted and killed those who would not go along with the perversions.

Every societal institution, every "christian" value was over-whelmed by this barrage of inhumanity and hate. The world burned because of it. And more than one-hundred million people died in short order.

Unfortunately, it feels like it can happen here, and is.

More every day.

Damnit.