Golden Ages. Tarnished.

I may be exaggerating by a factor of ten, or one-hundred, but it's been quite a while since I've seen an ad in the wild that's actually stopped me. Maybe it's been a year.

There are ads that make the rounds of various social-media cacophonies that rack-up likes like dogs rack-up fleas, but most of those, to my cynical eyes, are either a) not real, b) not very good or c) incomplete, in that they sell an entire category and not the company paying for the ad itself. 

My little local supermarket sells 25 brands of dried pasta. 
All of them can be splayed to look like fireworks.
Is there any reason in this ad to remember, prefer or choose Barilla?
This passes for a good ad today.

    

I abide by Dave Trott's communications upside-down pyramid. A good ad must have three things in this order. Very often the ads hailed today are what I call "one-third of an ad." They do well in the Impact tier, while failing to say what it is they're advertising and why you should buy it.

But all that isn't really the point to today's post. This post is about "Peak Human," by Johan Norberg, the cover of which is above.  I'm reading Norberg now. Would that my friends would read it. Would that corporate titans would read it. Would that politicians would read it. 

Reading Norberg and thinking about his thesis could make the world, your agency, your career better.

In "Peak," Norberg looks at seven "Golden Ages" throughout human history. 

1. Ancient Athens
2. The Roman Republic and early empire
   
3. The Abbasid Caliphate
   
4. Song China
5. Renaissance Italy
6. The Dutch Republic
7. The 'Anglosphere'

Norberg writes, "each of them exemplifies, in my understanding, what I think of as a golden age: a period with a large number of innovations that revolutionize many fields and sectors in a short period of time. A golden age is associated with a culture of optimism, which encourages people to explore new knowledge, experiment with new methods and technologies, and exchange the results with others. Its characteristics are cultural creativity, scientific discoveries, technological achievements and economic growth that stand out compared with what came before and after it, and compared with other contemporary cultures. Its result is a high average standard of living, which is usually the envy of others, often also of their heirs.”

What I wonder about in all this--while we're living the "closing down of 'liberal democracy and a-merry-kaka," is this.

If the golden ages of societies, countries and empires have certain characteristics in common, what about agencies? What are the characteristics that successful agencies share that make them successful? I've worked full-time at a dozen agencies, and rarely has the talent-pool at the "worst" been that much different than the talent at the "best." That said, why do some agencies flourish and others grind out crap?

In other words, what made Doyle Dane Bernbach thrive? Needham Harper & Steers, Papert Koenig Lois, Carl Ally, Scali McCabeSloves, Levine Huntley, Chiat\Day, Wieden & Kennedy and countless other agencies rise to the top? 

More importantly what is it about the current holding-company-agency etiology that seems designed to discourage all of the words and cultural affects I've highlighted above? 

Forget about the money the c-suite will make from "efficiencies" derived from the new concentration of advertising agencies (four hundred agencies reduced to three). Will the new monolith and how it's arranged have a propensity toward good--risk and mess--or toward bland--data and safety?

More pointedly, what does it take to build an agency where people want to come to work? That attracts clients? That produces real work that has a material effect on the fortunes of paying clients in the real world not a strip of beach in a beach community in southern France?

What does it take to build an agency that makes its employees (not just its C-suite) well-off, happy, prosperous, and that encourages them to start their own agencies which in turn propel them and the industry further along?

These, to me, seem like the questions the financial wizards that run the holding companies (if they're thinking about building the necessary pre-conditions of success) should be talking about. Not the four-horsemen of the advertising apocalypse: data, margins, algorithms, and people-replacement aka 'efficiencies'.

These, to me, seem like the questions politicians should be reckoning with as well. What makes a society, a nation thrive? Not merely what breaks into the news-cycle to get a blip.

My advertising friends often make fun of me because of the way I deride what some charitably call the "advertising press." But from a long-point of view, someone--with any luck someone other than me--would ask these simple questions, "Why are we in a dark age?" "Why is IPG no more?" "Why has WPP one-eighthed itself, going from $24B marketcap to $3 in just ten years?" "Why is advertising as an industry no longer lucrative?" 

I'm surprised, frankly, that no dying company asks for my non-beanery point of view. I'm surprised that this chart, which I wrote and published more than six months ago has been more-than-ignored; it's not even considered or discussed.

Instead we squeeze dollars out of stones and wonder why our hands ache.