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.
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