Not starting my own agency.

For about the last fifteen of my 36-years in the agency business, two or three people a week might stop me in the hallways or send me an email or drop by my table and say to me “when are you going to start your own agency?”

I got a couple dozen more people asking me the same after I was dismissed from Ogilvy despite the years of 70-hour-weeks, despite client relationships, despite my unofficial role as the ‘wise old man of the agency’ and despite having earned some recognition within those once-hallowed halls as an ‘unusual talent.’

“When are you going to start your own agency?”

Over the disastrous Trump-unpreparedness-fueled economic collapse over the last two or three months, I’ve seen a dozen or two dozen colleagues announce that they’re opening up shop. More and more people would ask me about me.

I would always respond in the same way.

I’m not interested in starting my own place. I’m not interested in worrying about payroll and rent and HR issues and client servicing throes. What's more, I want to do things my way. I want to offer every client I have the full-attention of the "founder." And I want to be able to not worry about scopes and billability and hours. I want to do the job for clients that I think needs to be done.

And I only want to work with people who get that--and get how unusual that is, as well as how unusual I am. At the age of 62 and one-half, I’m not interested in anything other than being me. I can say that now because it’s taken me almost all of those 62 and one-half years to figure out most of who I am.

That path of discovery started long ago, back in 1979, in fact, when I signed up for my first therapy session at $8/session. It’s continued every Thursday since then. For 41 years. At more than 41 times the cost.

The discovery heightened when I was fired from the vaunted digital agency R/GA at the age of 56. I told myself that I had to treat myself like a product. No one “needs” an expensive, incorrigible 56 year-old copywriter. Especially as the business has become youth, cheapness and conformity obsessed.

I became more me in the process.

An unusually perspicacious writer who not only uses words like perspicacious, he knows what it means. Of course, part of being perspicacious is knowing when you can and when you cannot say perspicacious. 

I positioned myself as someone who listened long enough, well enough and empathically enough to unravel clients problems. I also worked to get better than, perhaps, anyone else at breaking things down to their simplest and most-appealing truth. Maybe, the simple, human truths Bernbach was always searching for.

Now, five months after I was kicked to the curb for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, I get the when are you going to start your own agency even more often.

I usually just smile and change the subject to something more pleasant, like the impending end of civilization as we know it.

But in the back of my mind I think about a story my long-ago partner, Mike Withers, told me when we worked side-by-side for three years at Ally & Gargano.

“George, back starting 1964 I was a junior art-director at Collett Dickenson Pearce & Partners.”

I hadn’t heard of the place and told Mike.

“It was probably the greatest agency in London—maybe the greatest agency in the world.”

These were pre-Google days, and I had to take Mike’s word for it. Some of my English friends might tell me I’m mistaken about all this. But I’m sticking by it.

“They had a policy. They would accept no more than ten clients because they wanted each account to be run by a founder.”

“Smart,” I said, unsmartly.

“They also said that at the end of each year they would fire their worst client—and find a new one. That policy impelled their clients to strive for good work. Because CDP was that good.”

“Really smart. Turning tables. Making clients worry if they’re good enough for the agency—not the other way around.”

I’ve carried that modus operandi in my head for nearly 30 years.

Right now I have four retained clients and two clients I handle projects for.

Knock wood. I’m busy as hell.

But I don’t have ten clients yet. And I haven’t fired any.

And I still have no ambition to start my own agency.

CItizen Kane and the WaterPik.

Every day, I get six notes or four from people I hardly even know. We might be connected on Linked In (I seem to be connected to nearly everyone) or maybe I worked three desks over from them. 

My wife will hear me sigh. "Who's that note from," she'll ask.

"Someone named Jill."

"Who's she?"

"I dunno. I couldn't pick her out of a lineup."

Nevertheless, these people will ask me to give them an opinion of something they produced or something they've written. They'll ask me to "like" a post or a photograph. I guess when you're internet-famous like I am--on five or six continents and among millions of incontinents--it comes with the territory.

Like most people, I'm very pressed for time. But I usually try to be as gracious as I can be. That too, comes with the territory.

More often than not, I'll click on a video, and nothing happens. I don't mean the video doesn't play or advance, I mean nothing happens. 

Nothing is happening that intrigues me, that gets my attention, that provokes me to the point where my curiosity tells me to listen up. 

In other words, I'm bored within about five seconds. 

But because I'm trying desperately to be nice, I give it twenty seconds more. Still nothing. Then I scrub ahead twenty seconds. 

Nothing has happened.

So not only did the piece not grab my attention, it didn't go anywhere. 

More and more communications seem to fail on these fronts. You, the creator or you, the client, expect people to watch what you've made or written because it's important to you and interesting to you.

Have you thought about your viewer?

What's in it for me?

Are you being respectful of their time? (they didn't turn on the TV to watch raindrops trickle down a windshield.) Give them a reason to watch. Something they haven't seen before. Tell them something new that teaches them something valuable. Tell them a joke. Or help them get through a rough day.

Here's a commercial that to me summarizes just about everything bad about most communications. Brands and agencies presume because something is important to them, it's important to you.

Making that assumption is insulting. It's the marketing equivalent of talking someone's ear off on an airplane. You have to give me a reason to listen to you.

You'd think this was all painfully obvious, but it's painfully clear that advertisers and their agencies do believe today that they can bore people into buying their products.

Now spend three minutes with the film above. Prohibition (no trespassing signs make people want to break in, as does locked fence after locked fence after locked fence. As do the creepy zoo animals, the abandoned gondolas, the giant castle with just one room lit. 

Guys, I know we're not making Citizen Kane. But job one, whether you're hailing a cab or making a spot or writing a deck, is to get attention.

It's frustrating that this most essential bits of common sense seems ignored in about 99.9% of what I see.

Modern marketing. At it's very second best.

My wife and I are close to buying a seaside home in a little town nestled on the Gingham Coast in Middlesex County, Connecticut. It’s a lovely place—just decrepit enough to keep me working until I collapse in a sweaty heap and die of exhaustion. But not so decrepit that my wife doesn’t want it.

Last week, in a rare display of foresight, I thought it made sense to buy a bed. So we could sleep, not on the floor.

Somehow I came across an ad for a bed you could buy online and assemble by yourself in minutes. It looked ok. It looked well-made. It wasn’t extraordinarily expensive. And they deliver in two or three days. So far, so good.

I went to their site and of course, as is de rigueur today, I got hit with a pop-up window. If I gave the Thuma people my email, I could save $25 on the bed.

I hesitated. But saving money is the better part of valor and I gave them my email. Since that moment about five days ago I’ve gotten about twenty messages from the Thuma company. Plus their ads have followed me on every social media site I visit, whenever I visit them. With each message and each ad, I’ve gotten more and more pissed at the Thuma company.

What right do you have, because you’ve promised me roughly 3% off the price of the bed, to stalk me? This isn’t passive stalking—like that of traditional advertising where I might happen to see a Verizon ad no matter when I open a magazine, newspaper or turn on the television. The is a full-fledged effort to follow my every movement.

I don’t feel that you are watching me, Thuma. You are watching me.

But then it gets worse. With this crap.

Everyone depicted on the Thuma website is impossibly thin. And impossibly beautiful. And impossibly hip. In other words, everyone is impossibly unlike me.

Everyone is also so fucking giddy. And so impeccably coifed. And they’ve just found something uproariously funny.

Oh, and if you're speaking to me, please don't speak to me like I can't spell. It's taken me a lifetime to lower my standards to the point where I use vernacular like "gonna." But "gunna"? And below that, "MMHMM"? Uh-uh.

There is so much I hate about this pandering way of writing. 

"Thanks for joining us!" I didn't join you. I wanted a coupon. Then "we're focused on celebrating..." No, you're focused on making beds. Lastly, "designed for how you live". If you knew how I lived you'd find a dictionary, a copywriter, some overweight models and start over.

Of course it gets worse. These things always do. "Thoughtful beds..." Because my last three beds weren't thoughtful at all--they were callous, unthinking snots--queen-sized snots, at that and one folded out. "Modern living..." because I've secretly shacked up with Jane Jetson and Elroy is our tow-headed robotic lovechild. Mmmmm, sex with androids.

Then as if you're Soren Fucking Kierkegaard, "We call it Functional Luxury. For the Indoor Enthusiast." I can't figure out your capitalization system, why each line is punctuated, what Functional Luxury is or how you came to the conclusion that I am an "Indoor Enthusiast," whatever that may be. Or "shop the bed." Because I guess saying shop for the bed would derail the entire capitalist system forever.

Next, why is this Spandex-clad woman practicing the balance beam on her $900 bed? Izzat Simone Biles? Is that what you mean by being an "Indoor Enthusiast"? If so, count me out. I'm still mastering the perpendicular bars.

And where is this guy leaping from? In the parlance of school-yard basketball, he's gotten air. It looks like he's taken the plunge from a nearby brick wall or perhaps his "Indoor Enthusiast Diving Board™." Void where prohibited, or above the shoulders whichever comes first.

 Finally, why is this "content" allowed to be on a family site like YouTube. It ain't exactly Citizen Kane. Or even the TyD Bowl Man.

"So I thought I'd pop on here real fast and give a review of this bay-ed, not the mattress...Anyways, it's not about the mattress, it's about the bed.  [Knocks] Solid. Wood. Bed. So my thoughts on the bed. Weeeeee love it. That's pretty much all I have to say." 

But then she goes on for three more minutes.

60 years ago, David Ogilvy said "The consumer isn't a moron, she's your wife."

But everyone here is treated like a sub-moron.

Keep doing work like this, Thuma. Yer gunna git in trubble.

Advertising and Diversity. A retrospective and some questions (which won't be answered.)

This will likely get me in trouble on about 19 different fronts. But what’s a blog for but to express your feelings, thoughts and beliefs as candidly as you can without fear of being ostracized, rebuked, excoriated or banished from the industry. Besides, I’ve already been banished from the industry—and my life has improved while in exile, not deteriorated.

So, as the kids say, WTF 😈.

Over the past couple of days, every white, male, multi-millionaire head of the Holding Companies that exercise oligopoly-control over the advertising industry, thereby colluding to depress wages so they can earn eight-figure compensation packages and can return ‘shareholder value,’ has spoken out against the “systemic racism” of the industry they purport to lead.

They have shaken their heads and formed committees and temporarily changed their logos on Linked In. They have spearheaded task-forces and vowed, this time, to fundamentally change that system of racism. They’ve even trotted out their new heads of diversity and inclusion or their heads of culture to show just how committed they are, this time, to make things right.

BTW, this article was from “The New York Times,” from over 601 months ago.

“Some of the city's top ad agencies, which were slapped around a couple of years back by the City Commission on Human Rights for their poor showing in minority group hiring, have now got ten a little pat on the back.

“When the 12 agencies appeared before the commission in 1968, they had 492 Negro and 199 Puerto Rican employes. That was 5.6 per cent of the total of 12,206.

“Today, the percentage is 11.3 of a total 12,134 with the breakdown, 1,015, or 8.4 per cent black, and 350, or 2.9 per cent Puerto Rican.

“"While the job is by no means finished,’ said Eleanor Holmes Norton, commission chairman, ‘the commission does regard the results of these months of negotiations by commission and agency officials as a heartening sign that progress can be made if the will is there to surmount obstacles.’

“Perhaps more important is the increase from 131 to 355 in the number of minority group members in professional job categories. That is an increase from 1.9 to 5.4 per cent, of today's total of 6,628.

“‘These figures,’ said the commissioner talking of the whole report, ‘show a definite improvement in the Opening up of this prestige industry.’”

This article is from over 300 months ago:

Edward L. Wax, chairman and chief executive of Saatchi and Saatchi Advertising Worldwide in New York, part of Cordiant P.L.C., outlined a comprehensive "diversity initiatives plan" to recruit, hire and retain more full-time employees who are black, Indian, of Asian descent or speak Spanish. With minority members comprising fewer than 10 percent of its employees, the agency industry languishes near the bottom of occupations ranked for diversity by the Federal Government.

"I honestly don't think there has been any conspiracy to keep our business white," said Mr. Wax, who is also the 1994-95 chairman of the association. Still, he added, "the fact remains that our poor performance is primarily due to one single factor: that many agency managements have not made a sufficient commitment to increase diversity in their agencies."

Then there are these two from 593 months ago and 604 months ago:

This article was from 599 months ago. Some large agencies, including my old man's thought spending money on "minority education" was more important than awards. 
To quote Sarah Palin, 'How's that hopey, changey thing working out for ya?'

“When asked to comment on the announcement by the Leo Burnett Company that it was withdrawing from advertising ‐ awards competitions and was putting the entry money into the educational area instead, several agency executives said exactly the same thing: “I wish we had thought of it first.”

“Among them was Stanley Tannenbaum, chairman of Kenyon & Eckhardt, who decided to be the second to make the move.

“’We're definitely not going to participate,’ he said. ‘We will use the money toward a fund to help educate minority groups….’

“And, although he was also sorry he wasn't first and feels that awards are getting “out of hand,” Al Hampel, creative director of Benton & Bowles, said, “but that's not saying we're ready, to get out of them.”
Even among those who didn't support the Burnett move there was a widespread feeling that there were just too many awards competitions.
“…The attitude, however, was hardly unanimous. James Durfee, president of Carl Ally, Inc., commented, 'No matter how they're run, they're worth something. I wouldn't want to cut them out for our people.'
“'It's about time that every body take a good cold look,' said Richard Gilbert of Gilbert Advertising, about each of the competitions. 'Do they serve the industry or the people who run them?'”

Here’s why I think today’s effort to bring more people of color into the advertising industry will fail like the ones cited about and about two or three dozen other efforts I recall from my nearly 50 years as a person conscious of the exigencies of the business.

1.The current holding company model is unwilling to spend the funds to invest in training people (regardless of their race, creed or color.)

2. The current holding company model is unwilling to tell clients that they need more time to do their assignments (because they have people who are less-experienced doing that work.)

3. Clients are unwilling to allow agencies to take more time or charge higher fees in order to accommodate the recruitment and training of people of color.

4. The current holding company model is no longer to willing to work as a ‘teaching hospital’ and help people (regardless of their race, creed or color) learn the ropes of the business.

5. The current holding company model has turned the entire advertising industry into a low wage industry (the median salary within the Interpublic Group is under $72,000. Meaning that half of IPG’s employees make under $300/day. That’s hardly a living wage in the big cities that are home to most ad people, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Singapore, Paris, Berlin and the like.)

6. The current holding company model is impoverished. Employees have been furloughed, wages have been cut or frozen and raises in many circumstances have all but disappeared.

7. Current holding company leadership is not selling advertising as a profession to people from diverse backgrounds. What’s more, given the financial realities noted in points 5 and 6 above, selling the advertising industry as a viable profession would be challenging to say the least.

Of course, any of the above steps requires the expenditure of a lot of money. I’d bet there’s not a single agency holding company that will agree to stop investing in awards shows until an appropriate level of diverse representation is achieved. I’d bet not a single agency holding company would agree to begin to invest in educational programs of young people from diverse backgrounds. And I’d bet not a single agency holding company chieftain (all of whom have salaries between seven and eight digits) would forgo half of their salaries—say a reduction from $16 million a year to $8 million a year—to accomplish the steps I’ve outlined above.

Further, I’d bet not a single client would allow their agencies more time and more expense to make the changes necessary to begin bringing diverse people into the fold.

The question amid all the furrowed brows, corporate tsk tsking, finger-wagging, noble speeches and august committees is the same as it’s been for almost 60 years. Will you talk about change or will you outline a five-year plan with specific objectives and an agreed upon budget (preferably in escrow) to achieve those goals? Next, what will happen if those goals aren’t achieved? Will the holding companies and their chieftains have to forfeit compensation and pay fines?

Last, this humble blog, a one-man operation gets over 70,000 readers a week—most of them I presume from our industry. Any chance any of the holding company people I’m addressing in this space will actually comment? Or will you just pretend this blog doesn’t exist, and doesn't influence thousands of advertising people—in much the same way you pretend people of color don’t exist?

Tell me this, Mr. Sadoun, Mr. Roth, Mr. Wren, Mr. Read, and Mr. Bollore: Why, this time, will it be different?

Hello...hello....hello.

Philosophical Phriday. (Dark.)

It’s Friday.

It’s the state of the world that, I think, we are all suffering the effects of exhaustion. Personal exhaustion. National exhaustion. And, yes, cosmic exhaustion.

I think in almost every sphere of my life, I feel like a china dinner plate and the Great Magician has just pulled off the great tablecloth trick. Everything has been pulled out from under me, and who knows any longer where you stand—and if there’s any such thing that's less firma than terra firma.

Some of that shaky feeling is because I am walking on untrod ground everywhere I step. W.H. Auden, way back in 1947, wrote a book-length poem in an attempt to capture the feeling. He called it “The Age of Anxiety.” He won a Pulitzer Prize for the thing, Leonard Bernstein composed a symphony based on the work and Jerome Robbins a ballet. Back when things like that mattered.

I suppose I’m invoking the recency heuristic, but I think Auden back in the mid-1940s might have had it simpler than we are feeling today. Sure, he was living in the wake of the near destruction of the world—an estimated 3% of the world’s population died in World War II. That’s not counting Stalinist-terror and Mao-ist terror that book-ended the war with killing sprees, each of which destroyed between 30 million and 70 million people. And sure Auden had to face the prospect of Soviet tanks in Europe and Soviet and American A-bombs wiping-out everything save cockroaches and their republican counterparts.

But today, somehow, seems worse.

The ongoing anti-black war. The prospect of a global Depression. A virulent disease. An even-more dangerous existential climate crisis. And worst of all, our inability as a species to take any of these threats seriously.

Maybe, in fact, the worst consequence of our current Age of Anxiety is the worst of all consequences. Our species can no longer agree on a common reality. Truth and facts have lost their meaning. The United States of America has be subsumed by the Solipsistic States of Anxiety.

We are even debating whether or not the earth is round. And I know in my marrow that in the next three years or five, there will once again be a Koch-backed anarchist movement that will gain traction based on the idea that only property-owners and taxpayers should be allowed to vote. That terrifying idea makes absolute sense if you’re a Federalist Society-endorsed Supreme Court judge—as five of the nine are—and you hold to the noxious, nefarious and illogical conceit called “Originalism.” 

Originalism--the notion that our laws today should reflect  what our founders' intent was back when 90% of the population couldn't vote, black people counted as only 3/5ths human and slavery was the law of the land.

Yeah, this is gloomy.

And, maybe, I have no right to gloom. Despite bearing the scars of child-abuse and neglect. That was 45 years ago, get over it, George.

My business—five months gone from Ogilvy—has surpassed my wildest expectations. I am lucky enough to be turning clients away, knock wood. And so far, am enjoying the luxury of employing just one person, an old friend who I’ve hired to be a “mensch-meter.” If she doesn’t think someone is a mensch, I won’t work with them.

What’s more, my wife and I are healthy, working and living in a tight little cottage on a cliff 20 feet above the roil of the Long Island Sound. My daughters are well, too. And that makes me happy. And Whiskey, who is undergoing chemo, seems to be handling the treatments and the drugs with aplomb. She’s eight now and like the rest of my family, of course, suffers from ups and downs, but we Tannenbaums seem to be a resilient flock.

When we have the time, we can sit on some classic Adirondack chairs in our backyard and look over the Long Island Sound. We can hear the metrical clanging of a buoy’s bell less than one-thousand yards away. There, twelve miles in the distance is the Long Island coast.

More often than you’d think you see an Osprey one-hundred feet in the sky. Suddenly, the large raptor drops into the sea and emerges seconds later with a small silvery fish in its talons. It struggles for a couple of seconds. It ups-and-down for a minute fighting gravity and the added weight of its kill to fly to its high nest and feed its family. Soon it gathers speed and its broad wings lift it into the sky and on its way home.

Somehow it all reminds me of Icarus and Daedalus. You know, that whole flying-too-close-to-the-sun-thing.

There’s a lot to trying to make it in this world. A lot of escaping the gravitational pull of common expectations. A lot of trying to escape altogether. Most of all, there’s trial and error. Soaring. And, inevitably, crashing.

But for whatever reason, in whatever Age of Anxiety we live in, we somehow decide to try again.

There are two ways we can end this merry little romp. They're both by Mr. Auden from his aforementioned epic. Pick one. Or none. Or both.

“The world needs a wash and a week's rest.”

“The wolves will get you if the moths won't.”

Meet Mr. Ponzi.

There are many canards I could write about when it comes the oligopolistic and anti-competitive agency Holding Company hegemony. The industry, he quacked, is daffy with canards.

But one of the most heinous is the precept that rank and file workers—you and me—those not in the C-suite and not paid hourly—are somehow considered “executives.”

Hahahaha. We're executives and Donald Trump is a natural blond.

To be as blunt as a sledge-hammer about this, we’re considered executives—and not hourly workers—so the agency and the holding companies can compel us to work 70 hours a week while paying us for 40.

It’s not the hard work that’s demanded of us that rubs my goat the wrong way, it’s the deceitful and nefarious ways agencies treat you so they benefit from your work without paying you for it.

Maybe someone sitting in the upper echelons of these organizations could write me a note and explain it to me.  I'm internet-famous and I'm sure you could find my email. And, I'll concede, maybe I’m wrong-headed about this. But I ask you, how is it right to pay someone for 40 hours of work yet bill a client for 70 hours of their time?

The way agencies have gotten away with this is by calling you an executive. When I was young in the business—I was at just 33, the youngest-ever Senior Vice President and Group Creative Director at Harvard Business Review’s “Agency of the 80s,” Ally & Gargano. By today’s standards, I wasn’t just treated as an executive, more like a Poohbah.

I had an office designed by noted architects Gwathmey & Siegel, a salary that went up every year, bonuses when I helped win an account and a credit card that allowed me to take a black car to clients and back and home if I worked late without having to withstand a virtual interrogation from a host of micro-managers who questioned every expense report with time costing more than the original expense. Who will guard the guards, dontcha think?

What’s more, I had someone to answer my phones and if I had stay till, say 11, someone who would say, “George, can I get you some dinner,” and if I needed a book or a dozen magazines because I was doing a bit of research on a project I was working on, again, my expenditures were not questioned like I was Willie Sutton hanging out in a dirty alley-way behind a Citibank branch.

I wonder now, what appurtenances come with the epigram “executive.” You sit on a factory floor, go decades without a raise, and are left alone when it comes to administrative help. When it comes to expenses and the like you're treated Napoleonically—guilty until proven innocent.

I’ve spent a couple minutes, honestly, no more than that, on the website of one of the holding companies. It doesn’t matter which one—they’re all the same.

Take three or seven minutes to browse these sites and it’s amazing what you can find. For one thing you’ll find out how real executives—not agency ‘executives’ are compensated.

If you're an executive, why aren't you treated like an executive?
(Orwellian rendition: some executives are more equal than others.)

I suppose I have the soul of a semiotician or a philologist. That’s a fancy-schmancy way of saying I look for meanings in things that go beyond what’s overtly being said.

So if someone says, “We’re all in this together, and you find out from “The Wall Street Journal” in their report on CEO pay at the S&P 500 that they make $16.6 million—231 times what median employee makes, you have to question not only the morals of that company/industry you have to, I think, also question that company’s long-term viability.

"We're all in this together. Except I make $16 million and you make 1/233rd of that.

I bring up viability because I don’t believe people are stupid. And sooner or later they’ll wake up to some stark realities.

There’s no longer in agencies money, advancement, security, perks or any chance at getting of any of those things as long as the corporate entity has a layer (or two or three) of people making 231 times what regular folks make.

Meanwhile, of course, these same agency holding companies are selling their clients two conflicting promises.

On the one hand they’re able to provide the best creativity and the most innovative thinking all of which taps into the cultural zeitgeist and is attention-getting and motivating while producing brand value.

On the other hand, we can do this quickly and cheaply without paying people and while living with an attrition-rate that hovers around the 30% level.

I can’t figure any of this out.

But then again, I’m not smart-enough to get paid $16.6 million.

At least not in a bad year.