Killing the Ad Business. From the inside.

Apologists say things like: “I’ve known Mark [Read] for 20 years and he is not a bigot."
I contend the data tells a different story.

Just recently in Forbes magazine there was a article titled “Ageism Is Not Just A Disease—It Is The New Business Model For Top Ad Agencies.”

 

The author concludes his article this way: “Primarily focusing on reducing cost by getting rid of your best performers will eventually kill agencies. You can cut back on dough and make a pizza so cheap nobody will eat it. You can make an agency so young that nobody will hire it.”

Exactly what happened in the newspaper industry is happening to what was once the profitable advertising industry.

 

1.    Vulture capitalists, the holding companies, strip the companies of value.

2.    The chiefs of the holding companies and their shareholders profit.

3.    Clients see less value from the holding companies agencies.

4.    Clients leave or lower fees.

5.    The holding companies must further reduce costs to maintain their margins.

6.    The holding companies fire more people to reduce costs.

7.    Clients see less value from the holding companies agencies.

8.    Clients leave or lower fees.

9.    The holding companies must further reduce costs to maintain their margins.

10. The holding companies fire more people to reduce costs.

11. Clients see less value from the holding companies agencies.

12. Clients leave or lower fees.

13. The holding companies must further reduce costs to maintain their margins.

14. The holding companies fire more people to reduce costs.

15. Clients see less value from the holding companies agencies.

16. Clients leave or lower fees.

 

What I don’t agree with in the article isn’t its conclusion, it’s its semantics.

 

Numbers one-16 above are not a business model. They are a going-out-of-business-model. A death spiral model.

 

Because there will be no business left when it reaches its natural conclusion in, I believe, three years or less.

 

I remembered something I wrote in the early days of this blog, back in 2007. It was about the phone company Vonage.

 

Remember Vonage?

 

Here’s Ad Aged from June 4, 2007:

 

“Last year, Vonage spent more money in online advertising ($185.7 million) than anyone else. Unfortunately for Vonage, they've had a churn rate of 2.11%. Meaning they lose about 30,000 customer a month. That's a lot of customers when you're working with a base of just over one million. Today their long-term viability is in question.”

 

The holding companies—to strain a metaphor—seem to be holding less and less. They no longer, to my eyes sit at the center of the world’s business. They seem to be able to charge less and less. Their tenure with clients seems to be evaporating. And fewer and fewer employees feel any loyalty to any agency. What’s more, agency offering—among holding company agencies—seem pretty much undifferentiated.

 

I fail to see all of the above as a business model.

 

Just as I wouldn’t see

 

1.    Sit on sofa all day.

2.    Watch Wheel of Fortune re-runs.

3.    Eat seven pints of Haagen-Dazs

 

as a health regimen.

 

Naturally, I could call it my “health model.” I might even get some people to believe in it.But it’s really death by a thousand spoonfuls.

 

What the holding companies have devised is similar. It’s not a business model. It’s a plan of rapine and robbery.

 

They’re the coal-mine-owners. We’re the workers. Once they’ve removed all the good from our brains and our creative coal is exhausted, like in every other extractive industry, the owners will move on.

 

Leaving waste and ashes behind.

 

You can’t see those things from their yachts.

 

But there’s more wrong in the holding companies than just business malpractice. There’s a lack of business morality.

 

--

If ageism is indeed discrimination as defined by US law, whether or not it’s profitable, it is morally wrong and indefensible.

Not all that long ago, Woolworth’s the once high-flying retailer did not allow Black people to sit at its lunch counters to eat lunch. Woolworth's were profitable at the time. Did that make racism a legitimate business model?

Given that parallel, I cannot accept age discrimination as an acceptable business model.

Frankly, I’m more than a little disgusted with Linkedin connections and putative journalists saying things like this, as the author of the article above, Avi Dan, said in Forbes.

 

“I’ve known Mark [Read] for 20 years and he is not a bigot. He tried to walk the initial statement back with an attempt to apologize, but actually made it slightly worse,…”

That’s fine.

I’m sure we can find hundreds of people saying how kind and loving people like Eugene “Bull” Connor was. He’s not a bigot. He plays so nicely with his grandkids. He's a sweetie pie. 

All I know about Read is this; I don't know him for decades. I only 1% of employees at the holding company over which he presides are over 60—versus roughly 17% of the US population as a whole. So, one out of six Americans are over 60. And only one out of 100 WPP employees are over 60.

But he’s not a bigot. 

And Brutus is an honorable man.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Special Edition. Very very special.

 

Recently, Holding Company Omnivorous Parsimonious and Picayune's (OPP) CEO, Mark Cannotread, (NYSE: ROTFL) boasted that 80% of its workforce of 120,000 people in 259 offices at three desks, is under the age of 20. And they get paid in yoyo's, scrunchi's, Skittles, gum that squirts and Mountain Dew.

"They don't hark back to the 2010's, luckily" Cannotread said. "All of them have digits and are fully, therefore, digital. Luckily, they aren't beholden to remnants of the past, like big brand ideas that define and communicate the purpose of our clients to a skeptical public. They're much more interested in making culture, making playdates and making wee-wees."

With that, ADPISSANT is proud to present tomorrow's talent today, with our first 12 under 12 list that recognizes talented individuals advancing the world into their teen years. The list honors the best and the driest diapered: the savants, the rainmakers, snow-makers and play-doh makers.

Dora, 6, never stops exploring new ways to push the boundaries of the new media-eco-scape and connect with lucrative pre-natal consumers in preternatural style. Nothing can stop her--except lunch.

Don't be fooled by his Jack-o-Lantern grin and his post-hipster haircut, Al Falfa, 7, has been winning awards since last Tuesday. Cannes Lion Bronze winner for best drawing of a rocket ship.

Patti Mayonnaise, 12, and Doug Funnie, 12. Big marketing problems? This Dynamic Duo knows Instagram and gets to Insta-Answers--instantly! They're simply Insta-mazing!

Brooklyn "Red" Hook, a tough, talented art-director who, luckily doesn't have one diaper tab stuck in the 2018s. A tireless worker who burns the mid-night oil starting around 2:15. "Sure he's cranky," said one CEO, "but he gets the job done. Especially if you cut up his food for him. In bitsy witsy wittle pieces."

So bewitching, so beguiling, so be-dazzling she goes by just one name: Lolita, 12. So beware. She lives in a kingdom by the sea and loves with a love that has never been loved. A maiden. A copywriter. Soon to be a major motion picture.

Gary Coleman, 7. Fast, feisty and a firecracker. A deep well of ideas and executional brilliance. Coleman holds high standards and terrorizes account people and clients alike. His famous "What chu tawkin' about, Willis?" raises everyone to a higher standard.

"The Smurfs," 6. After nine grueling hours auditing classes at Miami (Ohio) Ad School, the "Smurfs" as they're known are ready to work on your multi-million dollar ad budget. "Their lack of experience," said OPP's Mark Readbetweenthelines, "is only matched by the fervor of their unfounded convictions."

"'Spermy' doesn't have one foot stuck in the '80s, because his feet haven't developed yet," say OPP OB/GYN Mark Rude. "Spermy is the future. He's not stuck in the past. In fact, right now, he's stuck in the ovaries."

Holding Company OPP announces new CCO, 3.

OPP's new CCO, Brooklyn Flatbush, 3 years, 2 months.

OPP, Organic Potato and Potash, (NYSE: STFU) a creative transformation company that uses the power of creative transformation to creatively transform its clients' creative transformations, announced today the hiring of Brooklyn Flatbush, 3, as OPP’s new Worldwide Chief Creative Officer, reporting to Brooklyn Greenpoint, 7, OPP’s Intergalactic Chief Creative Officer.

 

OPP’s CEObot, Mark Cannotread, said today, “We build better futures for our clients through an integrated offer of communications, experience, commerce, technology and bullshit.

“Brooklyn has been at the forefront of creative transformation since he was 2. He brings a wealth of experience in creativity, technology and talent to drive sustainable top-line growth, even though we haven’t had top-line, middle-line or even below-the-line growth in over 44 quarters.

 

Cannotread continued, “It hardly takes a CPAbot, which is what I am, to know that 44 quarters adds up to almost nine dollars. Ca-ching.”

 

OPP, a creative transformation company has recently come under fire for transforming companies without their consent. OPP transformed one client’s men’s rooms to women’s and then back again before anyone noticed.

 

“Creative transformation is a transformative creative business,” Cannotread said, reading from prepared remarks. “Brooklyn has a wealth of experience in creative transformation. He plays well in the sandbox—the literal sandbox, we don’t speak metaphorically at OPP. Brooklyn’s only 3 and he’s insisted upon having a sandbox in his cubicle.”

 

Cannotread acknowledged that since most of OPP’s account people talk about marketing buckets, Brooklyn’s sandbox prowess should be very useful and "bucket-friendly."

 

“So many creative people today are almost in their tween-years; one or two are even in their teens. Brooklyn doesn’t hark back to the 2018s or even the 2019s. In fact, he doesn’t hark back any further than Tuesday at 2:15PM, which was his nap-time.”

 

OPP spokesbot, Mark Cannotwrite added, “As a transformative transformation company, Brooklyn will not only help us transform, he’ll help us transform how we help other companies transform their transformations.”

 

Cannotread said, “OPP remains at the forefront of lagging behind. And Brooklyn will help us continue our starts-and-stops and we leap forward into the past. And the best part is, we can pay Brooklyn in fruit roll-ups and Pepperidge Farm unsalted goldfish. That right there will save us at least eighty-cents. Win-win.”

 

 

 

Faulkner. Mark Read. Anger. And Ageism.

When something bad happens to you, the reaction you get from many people is, “Give it a little time. You’ll get over it.” Or, “you have to grieve for a while, and then put the past aside.” Or austerely and grudgingly, “get a grip. You can’t dwell on these things,” as if you have no grip and have no right to dwell where you wish.

You can think about these responses to issues large and small. 

I heard them all when Nancy, my younger sister died in a motorcycle crash on 12^th Avenue at the very-too-young age of just 47. We hear similar Hallmarkian platitudes about race, sexuality and more. Societally, we hear them from all sorts of people usually appended to sentences like, “Nobody handed me anything. Made it myself. Why can’t ______ people put the past behind them?”

 

All these statements might be uttered by well-meaning people. But they are tainted and sullied by the lack of understanding or, worse, willingness to abjure the past. They are in most cases insensitive and unfeeling, even cruel and racist.

 

Back almost 50 years ago, my best friend, Fred and I, as ninth-graders, as 14-year-olds, made our high school varsity baseball team—as starters. Most of the other guys were seniors. They were thinking of starting college, or getting laid, or avoiding Vietnam or finding new ways to get stoned—or all of them.

Fred and I were alone on the team and we began a closeness that continues today.

 

One afternoon, I had hit a single and Fred, at bat after me, lined a ball to right centerfield. I made it safely to third, but Fred stumbled between first and second and there was a play at second base. I yelled from 90-feet away, “Slide, Freddy boy.”

 

Fred slid and came up safe against the tag. He stood, dusted himself off and called time. He walked over to me. Got close to me, and said something quietly to me that changed my life.

 

“Watch that boy, crap” he said.

 

I started to protest, but realized I was wrong. Inexcusably wrong. No explanationly wrong.

I never called anyone boy again. Even if they were a boy. It's a word that's loaded like a hand-grenade. 

 

I also realized something as quick as a throw from the outfield. Words can and often do mean something different to the hearer than they mean to the speaker. You have to be thoughtful with words. Even innocuous ones can be weighted with centuries of evil and cruelty and social order and racism.

 

It’s not unusual, since being corporately kicked to the curb by a holding company that fires people over 60 at 600% the rate that their proportion in that company would indicate, for people to remark that I am angry.

 

You’re damn fucking right I’m angry.

 

For fifteen years I received no raises. For fifteen years it was assumed that the grey of my sideburns meant that my ambition, intelligence, contemporariness had been pushed out by those very follicles.

 

For most of those fifteen years I was handed the steamiest of the steamiest piles of shit in the agency. Soothing a troubled CEO with a speech or manifesto. Handling a particularly gnarly commercial or pitch. Or client video.

 

Not me. Not in Cannes. Not ever.

But I was too old to ever be invited out to dinner with those same important clients. Too ugly and otiose in pink shorts and sockless shoes to consider taking to Cannes. Too taken for granted so so often asked to do more and more for the company that offered me less and less.

 

Worst of all, to someone who made his living from being attuned to language, was the language. “Well, you’re just riding it out,” I would hear. “Well, you get tired.” And worst by far, people two decades younger than I but “above me,” calling me dude.

 

“Dude, I really need you to do this.”

 

“Dude, can you work on this over Christmas break.”

 

I’m tired of this whole Ageism thing. Sick and tired.

Tired that people like Mark Read could say what he said and keep his job and his in-perpetuity salary. Tired that no one says, really, what needs to be said. That no one says what is really the salient truth of the ad industry today.

 

It’s this:

 

Advertising is a low-wage industry.

 

And like any industry that competes solely on price (procurement) not quality, the race will continue and it will be a race to the bottom.

When today's 24-year-olds are 34, 2020 will be the good old days. A RLO (Read Like Object) will say "They don't hark back to the 2020's, luckily."

Yep.

 

Wages will decrease. Raises will become an anachronism. And money will go to those only who deliver boardroom value, not value to clients. A greater and greater share of the industry’s revenue will be glommed by fewer and fewer people those with more and more distance from the actual work of our industry.

 

Right now I am nearing the end of an amazing book called “The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War,” by Michael Gorra. Faulkner famously said in “Requiem for a Nun,” words Shakespearean in their brevity and their import.

“The past is not dead. It’s not even past.”

 

And this thought, maybe even more seminal: “Happen is never once.”

 

It keeps occurring.

This will keep happening. The RLOs will never learned the lesson I learned as a 14-year-old clad in dirty baseball flannels.

Happen is never once.

 

Yes, I am a voice crying in the desert. I always was.

 

Yes, I am angry. I always have been.

 

Yes, I am staying angry. Why shouldn't I?

 

Maybe my outrage comes from age.

 

But dude, I deserve that.

 

 

 

The time to keep going.

We played, one weekend at the beginning of September 45 years ago when I toiled for 140 games for the Seraperos de Saltillo, five games in two nights. I don’t remember where we played, if we won or lost or where we were going next. After a while the games became like drips from a leaky faucet, they reverberated for a blink and then were replaced by another and another.

In those days anyone from el Norte or from el Sud, knew of the legend of the great American first-sacker, Lou Gehrig. Wally Pipp, Gehrig’s predecessor for the Bronx Bombers begged off a game one afternoon, complaining of indigestion or a hangover or a combination of the two. The Yanks' manager, Miller Huggins, replaced Pipp with Gehrig and the rookie Gehrig, not yet the Iron Horse, went on to play 2,130 straight games. He didn’t sit for thirteen years.

 

Hector Quesadilla, my manager sat across from me. I sat in my usual seat, two back from Gordo Batista, our third-string catcher and first-string bus-driver. The bus was an old American affair. A proper school bus of the suburban variety, painted white with a giant white baseball wrapped in a colorful teal, navy and red serape painted each side and our team name Seraperos running three-quarters of the length down the wheezing vehicle.

 

It was late when we assumed our spots. And we were driving from somewhere to somewhere else, usually through the steaming valleys into the thin cool air of the Sierra Somethings and back down again, until we found our hotel near the ballpark and fell out of the bus in Sinatra’s wee wee hours to try to sleep in a bed as level as a seesaw.

 

I sat alone on my green vinyl bench seat, my head resting on the leather of my tired Rawling’s fielder's glove as if it were a pillow. My feet hung over to the floor and I tried to close my eyes to the ping ping ping of the wheezing diesel and the cursing of Batista, “You muthafucker, you get up this hill and I will have you to drink the finest 10W40 in all of Mexico, just get up this muthafucker of a mountain so we can whiz down like a marble in a child’s toy.”

 

Hector, across from me, told stories to the ceiling and to whomever would listen, mostly me.

 

“Diego Kanner he was el caballo de hierro,” said the old man.

 

“He was the Mexican Lou Gehrig.”

 

“No,” said Hector. In the dark of the old bus he removed a bat from a bat bag and began to use the bat as a baton against the ball. He could bounce the ball 50 times off the bat, 100 times, 150 times. I never got to more than 14. I did not have his rectitude.

 

“Lou Gehrig was the American Diego Kanner.” Pock pock pock, Hector bounced the horsehide as Batista downshifted to get us up over another peak.

Kanner in an undated image.

“He played 5000 straight games,” Hector said, “That’s when they stopped counting. He played 12 months a year for four teams or six a year, for four pesos or six a game. Sometimes pitching, sometimes catching, sometimes infield, sometimes outfield, but always playing.”

 

“I am tired after our five games in two nights.” My eyes were closed. I felt a chill as we climbed up to 8,000 feet or 9.

 

“Things are different now. You know how Abraham, the patriarch had a child at 86.”

 

“And Methuseleh lived 900 years,” I answered.

 

“Yes, and Porfirio Diaz was a one-term president for 31 years. Taking 31-years of land and money from campesinos, and then he has Madero killed with the United States, of course, to help. So much for the Revoluccion,”

He owned the land. He owned the army. He owned the peasants. El Norte owned him.

“¡Pobre México! ¡Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos!”

 

Hector laughed, “Yes, poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States.”

 

Batista cursed in his driver’s seat and wiped the fog with an old handkerchief from the front windshield. The bus had nothing that resembled a defroster save that old rag.

 

“Maybe men were tougher in those days. Think of Odysseus.”

 

“Ah, think of one even more stalwart than Odysseus—think of Penelope. Fighting off one thousand vulpine suitors with a sewing needle and her guile. That was Diego Kanner. Not the strength and martial acumen of Odysseus. The guile of Penelope.”

 

Hector continued richocheting the ball off his bat. Even when Gordo swerved the big hulk of bolts sharply to avoid a darting animal in the dark, Hector kept meeting the sphere with his bat.

 

“We all have Scylla on one side of us.”

“And Charybdis on the other.”

 

“Yes,” said Hector catching the ball in his left hand. Ahead in the distance we could see the faint incandescence of a city small or large. We had no maps.

 

“Your Scylla is putting on a gray suit every morning and a tie and reporting for work and dullness. Your Scylla is living in a filing cabinet.”

 

“Like my father.”

 

“Like everyone’s father. Like everyone everywhere who stops playing a game for boys because they have decided no longer are they a boy.”

 

“Like my father.”

 

“And your Charybdis—there are too many to mention. Perhaps a woman and a mortgage and a thousand debts real and imagined. And all at once, you no longer play like Diego played for 5,000 straight games. All at once you are trapped.”

 

“Complaining and tired. And eaten alive by creatures indescribable.”

 

“I played one season with Diego,” Hector said. He had returned to the bat and ball and was pinging it again. “It was my first season, I was 15. And his last season, he was 50. He told me then about the Greeks. About the sea monsters, though he had never seen the sea. He told me about Scylla and Charybdis.”

 

The original "between a rock and a hard-place."

Again Gordo downshifted. Then he threw the bus into neutral and we coasted down a long hill into a sooty ebony city.

 

“He told me, Diego did.”

 

Now the machine was in gear again. We were slowly grinding through the maze of streets looking for the crackling neon of our night’s lodgings.

 

“There’s one time to keep going,” Hector said. “This is what Diego told me. Maybe though I was just 15, I was already too hurt to play one day.”

 

“There’s one time to keep going.”

 

“When everyone tells you you must stop.”

 

Hector banged the fat end of the bat on the linoleum clad floor of the bus. The sleeping men in the back grumbled awake, grabbed their gear and walked slowly to their rooms and to sleep.

 

We would play again today. It was time to keep going. 

In just hours.

 

A Labor Day tale of labor and loss.

I posted this ten years ago when I was working at R/GA across the street from the Finck Building on West 39th Street between 8th and 9th avenues, the veritable bowels of New York, in the shadow of the apotheosis of urination, the Port Authority.

While the rest of the civilized world recognizes May 1st as Labor Day--the Great Retrograde Satan--America—has stuck it in September, so as to separate labor from any tinge of socialism. communism, Wobblieism or any other ism that doesn't involve having capital exploit the working classes down to their waning sinew.

So, the richest nation on earth, and the only advanced nation with virtually no social safety net, no health care, no decent housing, thirty million unemployed, thirty-seven million people struggling with food sufficiency (including eleven million children) and an aggregate homeless population equivalent to the 31st largest city in the country, Labor Day does nothing for workers, no one does, except provide them with mattress sales, 60-months of free-financing and three-day-delivery to qualified customers, void where prohibited.

Be that as it may, my tribute to labor.

For the time being (what in advertising isn't for the time being?) I work across from the Finck Building. I got in at 7AM this morning and did a bit of research on the edifice.

Moshe Finck was 12 when he arrived at Ellis Island just before the Great War broke out, with his father Bensalem, an itinerant bootmaker from the eponymous Finck, Austria. Like so many poor, immigrant Jews before them, Finck pere and fils settled on the Lower East Side and began scrounging for work.

Bootmaking, being a heavily unionized trade, was closed to the Fincks so they applied their manual skills to the garment trade, originally working at the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory. The Fincks survived the famous fire at that factory only to see the elder Finck crushed to death when a 306-lb. seamstress fleeing the fire leapt 13 stories to her death and landed on Bensalem, killing him in a flurry of garters and bloomers and hatpins.

Undaunted by this horrible tragedy and still only a teenager, Moshe redoubled his efforts, sewing night and day. Eventually after five years of working eighteen hour days, Finck had saved enough money to open a small garment factory on Avenue D and 11th Street. "Finck's" he called it, specializing in "dickies, ascots and other affairs of the neck."

Fortune shined on the young Finck. He entered the dickie manufacturing business just as the Roaring 20s Dickie Boom began. Dickies were all the rage--everyone from Babe Ruth to Warren Harding were wearing Finck Dickies. In fact "Lucky" Lindy was wearing a custom-designed Finck dickie when the Spirit of St. Louis crossed the Atlantic. "I hate those dirty sonofabitch Jews," said the dashing aviator upon landing in France, "but that cud of a Christ-killing goat can sew like Jesus himself."

Finck left the Lower East Side for a 12-room apartment on 127th Street and 5th Avenue--an arriviste Jewish neighborhood at the time. He was driven to work in a Dusenberg and was seen at Toots Shor's with high-rollers like Abe Rothstein, Bugsy Siegel and Toots himself. In 1928, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a story purportedly about Finck, "A Dickie As Big As The Ritz." It was lost when Zelda used the manuscript to light a candelabra containing some 300 tapers.

Then came the crash. And the dickie bubble burst like the tulip bubble before it and the South Seas bubble, too. Suddenly destitute men were selling dickies on street corners for a nickel a piece. Finck watched as all he worked for went down the tubes. He survived the Depression pressing clothes in Wo Hop's hand laundry, hands optional.

However, with World War II, Finck's fortunes returned. Suddenly the Army-Air Force's demand for aviator's scarves sky-rocketed. It was Lindbergh who remembered Finck. "He's a fuckin' immigrant Jew," the good-natured pilot grumbled "but he makes the finest dickies in the sky."

RAF Ace, Robert Roland Stanford Tuck was wearing a Finck dickie when he downed three Messerschmitt Bf 109s and two Focke-Wulf 190s in a Hawker Hurricane with his engine leaking oil as British and French troops escaped the Nazi pincer on the shell-pocked shingle of Dunkerque.

Soon Finck Aviator Scarves were supplying 25% of all scarves to Allied pilots. Then 40%. By war's end, Finck was making 75% of all Allied aviator scarves and was employing over 1,000 scarf-makers.

Finck built the Finck Building in 1943 to house his massive operation.

Finck Aviator Scarves and its subsidiaries in Japan, Nicaragua, and up and down Africa's notorious "Dickie Coast,"  closed by the early 1960s bowing to both the advent closed cockpit aircraft and stiff Japanese competition.

Thousands of workers, and Finck himself slid into obscurity.