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I've been listening intently to the responses to Advertising Age columnist Brady and his recent fire alarm "Chaos 2.0." This entire line of rhetoric has been going on for the past three years, ever since Proctor & Gamble CMO Jim Stengle declared to a 4A's conclave at the Greenbrier that, "The marketing business model is broken."
Big whoop! That's like telling a person they have cancer and then leaving them hanging as to whether it's treatable or not.
Anyhow, the prognosis has not been favorable, as we've been crowing ever since we started crowing about the facts of life in the Post-Advertising Era. But I'm not going to go there. Every
Adblog from here to there and back is doing that dance to death already. I'm going to take it in another direction and ask, WTF have Madison Avenue's thought leaders been doing about all of this drum beating, if anything?
THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE A $800 BILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY. WHERE IS THEIR PLAN B?
Where are their contingency programs? What do they have in the wings ready to replace the slow-fading 30 second spot and the double page spread? What was that? The 30 second spot on YouTube.com. Now there is a "killer app" if I ever heard one.
The other day some headhunter called me up about a job at a top ten agency as Chief Strategy Innovator. I couldn't stop laughing. Chief Strategy Innovator? Where do they come up with this shit? I asked her who I would report to. She said the Worldwide Creative Director. That's when I fell off my chair.
The guy with the fire hose reports to the kid with the matches.
First words out of that kid's mouth has to be, "Come on in. I got something really cool to show you. But, eh, you gotta leave
that big rubber thingy outside. I'm really scared of snakes."
Why wouldn't the Chief Strategy Innovator report to the CEO?
Could it be because the CEO is too busy trying to keep the clients from waking up to find that the agency set their house on fire and never paid the phone bill so they could call 911?
This shit is crazy. Anyway I decided to play along. After all, the headhunter was talking really stupid money. Well over half a mil.
They even said I could work "virtually." This was just too crazy to be real. I asked her who would be making the final decision. She told me the CFO was handling the negotiation. That's when I decided to end this foolishness right then and there. "When can he come out to LA so I can interview him?"
I knew that would stop this distraction dead in its tracks. "He's prepared to come out and have lunch with you tomorrow" was her unexpected answer. Now, I was the one who was agasp.
After another 15 minutes I learned that with the departure of Nike and Miller from their two blue ribbon "creative" shops, the major agencies are looking to "beef up" their teams with name brand players. "Several of their clients read you religiously," was how the headhuntress put it. I couldn't do it. I couldn't have some poor bean counter do the 24 hour turnaround just to have me smile and say thanks, but no thanks. I told her it was a pass. That was last Tuesday. Two more head hunters have called since then. Same agency. Same job. Different perks.
One said I could work out of any city I wanted in the world.
Any city. The other said the offer came with a beach house in the Hamptons. When I told her that I had been told I didn't have to move to New York, she said, "Then Broad Beach in Malibu." Not too shabby. I was having way too much fun with this circle jerk. It was really pumping up my already larger than life view of myself. I needed to call these people's bluff, so I said
I wanted to make sure I was making the right decision.
So here's the deal. If there are any other agencies out there
who think I'm worth recruiting as their Chief Strategy whatever and believe that I would be worth more than $750k a year and are fine with me working from Los Angeles and would love to save the headhunter's fee, drop me a line before Monday, April 30 th at Harry@Harrywebber.com .
And if there are any clients out there who have been reading me "religiously" and think I could do a better job with their millions than those agencies that are out there knocking down the doors of guys like me, you can also drop me a line and I'll bring you along to whatever agency I decide to go with.
And for the guys who started this whole line of inquiry, don't give up if you don't have the winning offer. I'm sure you can get Joe Jaffe for a just a bit more.
Stay tuned.
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