Heartburn.

I was at dinner the other night with seven other ad people of a vintage similar to mine. 

That's a polite way of saying like me, they're as old as dirt. Mesozoic dirt.

Some of us started getting together at the onset of Covid. We were feeling the strain of isolation and the loss of community. We started getting together every couple of months, to bend and elbow and have some pastrami.

It's been over five years since we started out group. And five years is a good amount of time. Enough time to grow into, or grow out of a job. Enough time, to experience rises and falls, to try new things or to hunker down with old ones.

I had just started my business five years ago--I can rightfully look back at what I've done, what I've learned and count my blessings for going my own way. Others have enjoyed similar lessons and travails. It's called life.

Collectively, among the eight of us gathering on Inauguration night, we had probably amassed over 300 years of advertising experience. There probably wasn't an agency in New York one of us hadn't touched in one way or another. And while we try, all of us, even me, not to wallow in the decrepitude and ruination of the business, it's hard to feel good about the state of advertising today.

The compensation data I pasted above from Ad Age is one reason why. The recent news about Philippe Krakowsky's $49,000,000 parachute package was another.

I had that figure in my head and I did some figuring. 

Not long ago, I read in Ad Age, BBDO New York, which used to be among New York's larger agencies employs today only 300 people. If each of those 300 had a median salary of $150,000, the total payroll for the agency would be $45,000,000.

That means one man would make $4,000,000 more than an entire well-paid agency.

Or, if you use the median salary in noted in the clip above, approximately $71,000, my math says that Philippe Krakowsky is equal to over 690 median-waged workers. Imagine that. One man with 2.5x BBDO's worth of salary. 

Or still one more way, with say a production budget of $7,000,00, for $49,000,000 you could shoot a spot with Brian Buckley and air it six times on the Super Bowl.

I thought about agencies subsumed, strip-mined and disappeared after having been bought by IPG, the company Krakowsky leads.

I thought about Ammirati. Draft. Lintas. SSCB. Bozell. K&E. And more whose names still linger but are essentially gone. It seemed to me like a lot of wealth, a lot of jobs, a lot of lives have vaporized.

Not vaporized, exactly, but consolidated into five or a dozen individual's wallets.

Over the last 25 years or so in the business, when people like myself and my age peers I saw last night get together, we try to put our finger on what happened to our industry. We try to identify the cause of the industry's ruination.

Most often, someone mumbles something about the end of media commissions, or the unbundling of media and creative. Someone else says something about the "fractured media landscape." Someone else will pipe in and talk about how young people today don't know who Bernbach is, that is, they have no sense of advertising history. 

Those are the usual suspects, though there are usually one or two more like stray candidates at the bottom of an election ballot. 

But very little is said about greed at the top. Greed and malfeasance.

A couple of times in this space, I've written about "The Radical Potter" by Tristram Hunt. I couldn't give a rat's ass about fine china, but the I found the demise of Wedgwood--an erstwhile craft industry that was once run by artisans--an interesting parallel to what's happened to what used to be be advertising.

Read it and weep, as they say.

Burp.