Trajectory. Tragedy.

Some years ago, the great Dave Dye, at his blog "Stuff From the Loft," created one of his in-depth portraits of the famous English copywriter, Richard Foster. You can read it here. You should read it now.

I don't quite know how Dave does what he does, or even why. Other than that he loves advertising and like any true-believer wants to spread the word about good work and the people who did it.

Dave's portraits are graduate courses in advertising. In fact, once when I was teaching at Ad House, it came to my attention that no one in the class knew what Doyle Dane was. Or who Helmut Krone was. Or Phyllis Robinson. Or Ed McCabe. Dave's blog became about 61-percent of the after-class curriculum. I'd copy the ads in his posts, make a 91-page handout and say, "Keep this in your bottom drawer. Someday when everyone else is stuck, you can read this sheaf of paper, and be unstuck. Consider this your unfair advantage."

Dave wrote this marvelous introduction to Foster on his blog. It's right on the money. Foster was more Clemente or Perez than Mantle, Aaron or Mays. Their accomplishments were greater than the acclaim they earned.

To me however, beyond Foster's work, seven offer letters Richard received were the best thing in Dave's post about Richard. Seven offer letters Richard received over the course of just eleven-and-a-half years. 

During that niblick over a decade, Richard's wages rose from ten pounds a week to £400/week. Plus two-percent equity in his agency. Plus a £10,000/year car allowance. If you were to graph Richard's trajectory, it would look something like this:

There's a lot of gibberish in the world about the demise of the advertising industry. In my lifetime, we've laid the blame on:

• The rise of data
  
• The atomization of the media landscape
• Changing consumer habits
  
• AI
• Influencers
  
• 39,876 other causalities.

What no one ever mentions is that for decades--or half-centuries even--the potentates at the top of agencies and their holding companies, took tens of millions--even hundreds of millions (pounds or dollars, it doesn't much matter which) straight off the revenue line of the entities they were paid to manage. 

When Martin Sorrell paid himself $100,000,000, that meant one-thousand $100,000 creatives weren't hired. That has proven to be less-than-salutary for the long-term-efficacy of what was at one time, an industry.

What's more, ascents like Foster's depicted below in offer letters and above in my rough-graph, were no longer possible. 

It's hard to attract bright and ambitious people to an industry if they have no job security and raises come at 2-percent increments every 36 months. All for the joy of doing the 16,876,877th commercial for a telco with Kevin Hart.

People talk (too much) about culture in ad agencies. I never really understood the fuss about culture or even, frankly, understood what was meant by the term.

When I started in the business you could make a good living and rise quickly. Today, wages are lower in real dollars than they were 50 years ago, and agency tenures are shorter and less reliable.

Here's an idea.

Pay people well.
Let them buy their own culture.

(more than a 40x increase in 12 years.)

Digging In.

I've been looking at, admiring, coveting, studying Dave Trott’s ad work since the mid 1980s. That’s when I saw his (and John Webster’s) Courage Best work and his Toshiba work (which, at the time i didn’t get.) I never met Dave in real life, though I came close once, at some art directors club function in the west 30s, but chickened out.

However, Dave and I correspond a lot. We trade articles and emails and general commentary on life--in the industry, and more often outside of the industry.

Dave posted this about a week ago.

If you're over 55, you remember a time in the industry when creative people had to do more than make ads pretty and culturally relevant. They had to live the product/brand/service. They had to do a factory tour. They had to speak to people who made the product and used the product. They had to investigate and interrogate the product. Only then, could they write about the product in a way that was unique to their client and not just a generic ad.

Here's a commercial example that illustrates that modus operandi. Though not my favorite of Wells Rich Greene's work on Braniff, this commercial, shot by Howard Zieff, is an almost perfect example of what I mean. Understanding of a product, or the customer pains around the product, was not gained second-hand via a discussion with a planner, or through reading a powerpoint deck. Understanding was gained through living and breathing the brand. And through something called "empathy." Empathy today is as obsolete as loving thy neighbor. It's a game for saps.

Today, such non-quantifiable aspects of advertising have been time-sheeted out of existence. All ads (no matter what form they take) all communications, for that matter, look, sound and feel alike because the people behind them have been allotted about 90-minutes to create them. The details of life, the facts of a brand cannot be uncovered in that time. Instead, we default to pablum and "buy one get one free." We don't do work that comforts the afflicted or afflicts the comfortable because the corporate chieftains who strip-mined our industry, deemed that such work would not make them their billions fast enough.

• As an industry, we no longer understand people or even try to.
• We get out information about humans from columns and rows.
• Or in antiseptic conference rooms.
• Then we're told nobody wants to see anyone who's not smiling.
• 97.9% of all commercials end with a grin-fck, a high-five or a dance move.

For the past six years since I've been running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I've been my own planner. Eva Augustyn, Ogilvy's former head of planning on IBM, wrote this about me, unsolicited, about ten years ago. I've converted that into permission to myself interview clients and customers about what they do for a living. What they do differently. About why it's different and important. About why they're proud.

Right now I'm in the middle of about 20 interviews with clients about their technology products. I know an AI's worth more about AI than I did before I started these chats. And think I can begin to work out--to salutary business effect--the first of my two marketing Ds. 

I'm a very shy guy. I don't like talking to strangers. I don't even like talking to friends. And many times I wish I could outsource these interviews to someone else and read their eight-page executive summary.

But this is the only way I know to do advertising.

To get to the soul of a brand.

To differentiate at the corpuscle level. Not the decorative or stylistic level.

If I look a little grey-er and seem to have a little less pep in my step than usual.

This is why.

But the work is better.

Itzhak.

I've been around the advertising business literally my entire life, which includes the few years I spent with my father, Stan Tannenbaum and my Uncle Sid Tanenbaum. They rose from fatherless Jewish ghetto boys growing up in Depression-era Philadelphia, to the top of the amerikan ad industry. 

My father started as a copywriter at Kenyon & Eckhardt in 1954, rising to Chairman of the Board by the time they guillotined him in 1978. Sid was also a copywriter. He founded what became Philadelphia's largest ad agency, Weightmann, Inc.

I never achieved the heights of either Sid or Stan, but along the way, I was "great adjacent." I worked with a handful of agency Hall-of-Famers: Rosenfeld, Sirowitz, Gargano, Tesch, Hayden and Chris Wall (though I don't think he was actually ever enshrined.) I also worked with and am still friendly with Marshall Karp, who was my first ECD and is now a best-selling novelist. 

On the directorial side, I shot a lot with Tony Kaye, with Errol Morris and with Joe Pytka. I spent a lot of time on set with Sir Ridley. 

When I was with these luminaries, I did a lot of observing and not so much talking. The main thing you notice, if you're really in their working with such people is their joy.

Sure, they might groan and moan. They might massage their temples and grunt that they're getting to old. They might delay their arrivals in the morning and speed their departures at night. When they've accumulated the mammon they were working so hard to get, they might take the occasional long weekend at the beach, or throwing a stick for the dog.

But the one thing all these people all had in common was an electric love for what it is they did. They had joy. And were surprised and exhilarated by the inevitable missteps that they somehow turn into little fillips of magic. Like a great ballplayer, they find a way to go deep against gravity and still shift their weight and make the throw to get the runner. Most important, they're not blasé about what it is they can do. They're thrill and surprised by it. Even if it's just the nutty juxtaposition of two words never put together before, or two piece of film that are incongruous but that somehow, for all their disconnectedness, bring forth a story in an eye-brow raising way.

On Saturday evening, though I had a cold for all the ages, my wife had piled about seven old comforters into the front seats of my 1966 Simca 1500. Since we got the car some two decades ago, and despite the many ministrations of Lothar, my Toms' River-based mechanic, who is considered by many to be the best Simca-man in the world, the heater has worked not a lick. So, as a blizzard was threatening and the mercury in the thermometer was slinking into hiding, we piled into the old machine to add another hundred to the four-hundred thousand on the odometer. We headed up to the Bushnell Theater in Hartford, CT.

Hartford is like the ad industry. It was once a glorious place full of wealth, opportunity and optimism. Today, the city is a small island of marble-clad state buildings (it's Connecticut's capital) surrounded by surplus military vehicles re-purposed by the local police to keep out the encroaching mayhem of the every-growing black and brown ghetto.

But, as the seat of much of the amerikan insurance industry, there's an effort now and again by that industry to keep the city alive for the same purposes that cities have always lived. For art, culture, community. You'll see corporate logos strewn amid the decay. That makes CEOs feel better about not paying their taxes.

The Bushnell itself is a 3,000 seat theater of the old style, with an art deco ceiling, artwork glorifying the seven muses, and giant bronze sconces you'd expect to see in Paris, or outside of a Victoria's Secret in Palm Beach. Hartford also has "the Athenaeum," complete with diphthong and works by Caravaggio, Orazio Gentileschi, Bernardo Strozzi, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, and René Magritte as well as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. 

At the Bushnell we spent the evening with Tel Aviv-born violinist Itzhak Perlman. He told the story of his life. His birth just as WWII ended in Mandatory Palestine. His first forays into music. His parents' poverty. Being stricken with polio (look for Polio 2, coming soon to cities near you.) And the development of his musical genius and his joy in playing, learning, entertaining and teaching.

Perlman showed this clip of a one-minute appearance of his on the kids' television show Sesame Street. It's probably close to half-a-century-old. Evil forces in amerika are shutting down Sesame Street--and most of what was good in the world. It's essentially the banning of all laughter because you don't get the joke.

There's more "christian" love in the Sesame Street clip, and more management wisdom and more "how to do great work" than you'd get from a thousand panel discussions and Seth Godin books and pontificators. 

There's more joy, and laughter, and trying, and triumphing than you might find in Shakespeare, Verdi or Moby Dick. It's about a minute long. 

It's one of those things life can teach you if you're not talking all the time and if you're open to being taught.

Joy. Oh, boy.

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.