Agents of Agency.

A little more than two decades ago, I was co-head of the flagship office of an agency that was really only interested in selling itself to a bigger entity. 

That was when I started hearing my colleagues in "leadership" say things like, "we don't want to call ourselves an agency." Or "we're not an agency, we're a consultancy."

That's when I started thinking about what the word agency actually means.

It means you or your business act on behalf of the people or companies paying you. You are agents of their success. George Clooney's agent, or Jennifer Lawrence's work not for their aggrandizement but for the success of their clients. The more an agent helps George Clooney get great parts and great deals, the more money the agent makes. That's the equation. And it's a pretty simple one. 

Along the way, I suppose when the holding company era came to full-flower, that equation broke down.

An agency's clients were no longer important, the agency's value, and therefore its awards were. Quickly an agency's raison d'être went from making clients look great to making the agency itself look great. The better to gin up their share price and bonus thyself.

Agencies--tautologically--were never supposed to be about self-aggrandizement. They were always supposed to be about client aggrandizement. That's the way agents work. Do well for clients, and my business will do well.

For about a decade now, WPP has been more focused on promoting its success and elan than that of their clients. The visuals above I took from one of their leader's linked in pages. We're connected, having worked together in the 1990s.

Agents in a sense operate behind the scenes. I have a compendious memory and can only think of three agents who are above the line. Swifty Lazar. Michael Ovitz. And Ari Emanuel. 

Agents aren't supposed to be known. They're supposed to make those whom they work for be known.

No agency network could take this ad, change some names and run it for itself. No holding company could claim, "The world's best businesses work with XXX."

Trumpeting such specious accomplishments as I've pasted above reminds me of something David Ogilvy himself said many decades ago. "The consumer is not a moron; she is your wife." 

Forget the gendered nature of that statement. Think about an even bigger issue. WPP, as a communications company, is treating people like morons. They're lying to he world, thinking the world is too moronic to know fact from fiction or reality from fantasy.

The subject object split between the above and the items below is a chasm, wrapped in an abyss, shrouded in a press-release.

Two things are in evidence here. 

One: WPP is obviously expert in gaming the award system. How do you win network of the year one month while your value falls from £24 billion to £3 billion? If awards made sense--and you're most-awarded why did you suffer such a precipitous drop in worth? If you provide value to your clients (an agent's ostensible reason for being) why has your value dropped 65-percent already in 2025?

That's like starting the year earning $3000/week and ending it earning $1000/week, while being named "employee of the year."

The sad truth is that most agencies today, especially the giant ones (or formerly giant ones) are run by people who do not have the skills to actually help clients. 

They can't art direct. They can't write. They can't strategize. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

In my eyes, all they can do is spreadsheet and cut costs and finance, so they can get their eight-and-sometimes-nine figure payouts. They really have nothing to do with the agencies they "run." In fact, they're usually not even co-located with their agencies. Whatever they do, it seems that they do it poorly--or why would their value have dropped in the case of WPP by 88-percent?

Then they do this. Again, it's all about them. And when you've lost five of every six dollars of value you had, maybe you don't fly to Brasil for a ribbon-cutting. Optics by Braille.

I've been in advertising my whole life. Not just my grown up life, since my father was in advertising before me as was his 15-years older brother, my Uncle Sid. In effect, a Tannenbaum has been in the ad business since just after World War II. It's kinda the family business.

I've always wanted to be a star. Have written novels or screenplays or great histories of life on earth. I knew early on I didn't have the "sleep on the floor in alphabet city" tolerance  pursuing such dreams demands if you don't come from money. 

So I started in the agency business fully-accepting that I was working to aggrandize others because I didn't have the talent, money or stamina to be a star myself. I can be disappointed in working for others--I wish, in the words of AE Housman, my garland wasn't briefer than a girl's. I could spend my life wishing. Or I can say as Joe Louis said when he hung up his gloves.

I did the best I could.

And I never lied about it.