The global consolidation & commoditization of creative advertising has led to some of the most evil, craven behavior in recent business history. Agency leaders are instructed to fear, and their primal fear ripples outward to the thousands of working people across the industry. We are all “on” 24/7 to protect our livelihoods, while holding companies scheme on ways to increase margin. It’s giving late stage capitalism, and it absolutely sucks. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

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The holding companies are terrible businesses.

First day of business (or ad) school they teach you how important it is to differentiate yourself and have a unique selling proposition. Holding companies strip all of that away from the companies they acquire.

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This. The prospect of being laid off is grim, but the way it’s making survivors increasingly paranoid, political and workaholic is ensuring that whatever’s left will hardly be worth joining.

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This business used to be fun.
Agencies used to have dignity — to the point where we’d stick up for ourselves.
We used to be able to push back on ridiculous requests.
…Now we’re all working toward the sad bottom of the barrel, with stagnant salaries and no prospect of better days ahead.

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The WSJ had a podcast on the toxic culture in investment banking and I know I should feel sympathy for them because working crazy hours is terrible no matter what, but I can’t help but feel resentful of them at least making insane amounts of money for it and getting all this press about how the culture needs to change for them like it doesn’t exist in every other service industry.

likesmart

There’s also a downside.

likefunny

You all stated what is happening so well. It's sad to come to work fearing what is going to happen.

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