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.)