George Tannenbaum on the future of advertising, 
the decline of the English Language and other frivolities. 100% jargon free.

A Business Insider "Most Influential" blog.
Back about twenty years ago, someone had passed me a counterfeit ten-dollar bill. It looked a little strange, slightly washed out, but without thinking too much about it, I went to a local restaurant and bought a roast chicken with it. And two sides. If you threw out everything that comes your way that looks off, the entire ad industry, every relationship you’ve ever had, and the world economy…
Over the last couple of weeks, WPP’s stock has risen considerably. Its share price, which was down in the low-teens six months ago, is now in the mid-to-high twenties. Its market-cap, which had plummeted to about $3 billion from a high of about $16 billion has climbed to almost $6 billion. Much of that rebounding comes after WPP’s latest earnings report which financial people regard as…
It’s Sunday morning as I type this. Sparkle has been walked. She’s had an hour in the dog park with various canine friends. Especially Graham. I’ve done two walks me-self. One of two miles in the dog park. Another of two miles along the beach. It’s about 200 degrees out and I’m schvitzed. I have two posts written for next week, and can’t relax until I get a third. That’s the rule. If I don’t have…
About 15 years ago when I went back to Ogilvy to help run the IBM account, I came to the realization that while a lot of people jabber on and on about technology, very few people understand what technology actually does or how it actually works. Even fewer can actually explain it so it’s memorable and sexy. I also realized that journalism had started doing a better job explaining processes and…
As we head into the midterm elections, I can’t help but thinking there is too much lee-way in the world. Without getting into politics, there are somethings that are just wrong. Wrong enough so you should be excluded from “people-facing” roles for ever. A senatorial candidate with a Nazi tattoo. OUT. A designer who said he loved Hitler and told Jewish women that they should have been gassed. OUT.…
I was batting fifth which is my favorite place to bat. You don’t have the pressure on you that the third batter has, in this case Danilo Garibay, who was in spitting distance of a .300 season, and already, with more than twenty games left, had knocked in over one-hundred runs. You also don’t have the weight of batting clean-up like Salome Rojas had. Salome, Hector said, often shaking his head at…
I read this last week in The Economist: If you care about passé things like art, literature, craft, beauty and wit, this would be a hard article to ignore. Also if you’re from New York and you love it as so many New Yorkers do. Even if they’ve re-locaterized two-hours north to the Gingham Coast, where an outfit of Lilly Pulitzer is considered resolutely OG. Then if you make it to the first…
When I worked on Mercedes-Benz in the middle-90s, the brand, at least to my eyes had been shaken to the core by the advent of Japanese “super-luxury” competitors. Seemingly overnight, Mercedes no longer had the high-end of the car market to pretty much to themselves. All of a sudden they were being eaten alive by Infiniti, Acura and mostly mostly mostly Lexus. Because of vagaries of currency…
Disinformation has a Soviet ring to it. With a sprinkling of Kafka. Wrapped in corporate PR. And shrouded in military-industrial complex. Such is the prevalence of disinformation today—in every walk of life—and the success of disinformation today, that we seldom even hear the word anymore. People are too busy being “transparent” and “authentic.” That said, Google Ngram disagrees with me. (Ngram is…
Does work like this matter anymore? Almost forty years ago, I developed a test. A test of people. (As my daughters might say, I’m a judgey sonofa.) Around that time, even though I was young, often clients and others would ask me if I would talk to their niece or nephew, or a friend of a cousin’s tennis coach, because they wanted to get a job in advertising. When I started in 1993 or so teaching a…
Every once in a while, you read something or stumble across a story that is so profound that you feel obliged to check if it were written by Sophocles or Plutarch. This story here from Wednesday’s “Wall Street Journal” is an example of what I mean. You can read it here. I was never much of a Tony Bennett fan until 2001 when my father died. Around that time there was New York’s last jazz station…
Words matter, about 2,000 pundits a day pompousicate on LinkedIn. Words matter, says every client in every meeting. Words matter, say hack-assed creative directors, without every bothering to read the words. Words matter, as another billboard goes up that hasn’t a soupçon of stopping power, charm or wit. Or even coherence. Words matter. And then we bring on legions of machines that don’t…
I don’t think people or agencies should quote notable advertising people—like Bernbach or Ogilvy—if they don’t at least take a stab at abiding by their standards of work, or how people are treated or the ethics of business those two men believed in. You shouldn’t cite someone’s words but ignore their intent. I recoil when I see Ogilvy, the entity, co-opting the words of their founder when there’s…
I’ve only been to Berlin, Germany once, and that was for an IBM shoot, not a tourist visit. Still I woke up around four in the morning every morning to try to get lost as well as I could. The hotel we were staying in had been a bank. It was on a plaza across from Humboldt University and not far from the location of the nazi’s notorious book burnings, the first of which flamed in May, 1933, just a…
One of my first big bosses, a recent inductee to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, was John C. Jay, who steered the creative department at Bloomingdale’s in-house agency in the early 1980s. Later, John helped make Wieden & Kennedy great and Nike as hot as they ever were. John had an amazing array of talents. But perhaps more than anything, he could spot a trend long before anyone else. I guess…
Not too long ago, there was an opinion piece in The New York Times by the founder of the retailer Patagonia. Assuming you can still read, you can find it here. Chouinard’s essay starts like this: Over 50 years ago, my wife, Malinda, and I bought a chef’s knife of carbon steel that we still use. It could be passed down to several generations. Compare that to the junk stainless steel ones that might…
One of the great joys of my life in a life that, despite my lugubrious mien has many, is abebooks.com . Though abe sold itself to amazon back in 2008, and I despise amazon and its non-tax-paying owner, trillionaire jeff bezos, I still shop there. That’s the beauty of today’s monopolies. Standard Oil could sell their petroleum only once. Armour and Swift could sell their cows and hogs only once.…
More than two decades ago, as a brief chapter in my Agency-wandering-Jew-ness, when I had four jobs in three cities in two years, I found myself in a giant coroner office of a giant bland agency that had hired me to un-bland them as long as I could do that without a) spending money or b) demanding original thinking or c) upsetting their profitable status quo. In other words, like so many clients…
I finished late last night during another losing battle with Dame Insomnia, Andrew Ross Sorkin's great book you-should-drop-everything and read, "1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation." You can order it here for $12.52, with free shipping. If you order this book, or any book for that matter, you'll likely have it delivered in plastic packaging. The…
Toward my waning days at Ogilvy (and when you work for a holding company, your days are always waning) I was asked to help out on a pitch for a passel of Johnson & Johnson products. After centuries as J&J, J&J changed its name to Kenvue. I think they believed this would help indemnify some portions of the company from billions of lawsuits against it talc-based business. DuPont did something…
Not too many minutes ago, I got off the phone with a prospective client who had called me somewhat unexpectedly. Sometimes that's the best kind of call. Sometimes lack of preparation and background forces you to answer questions in a "reactive" or limbic way, the way your head might react when avoiding an unexpected round-house sucker-punch. Maybe it's a function of having been born during the…
I was a kid at a time before there were a lot of "organized sports" for kids. Sure there was Little League in the Spring, and Pop Warner football in the Fall. If you were so inclined, there were probably swim teams at the Y and even hockey leagues here and there. But for the most part, sports just happened organically, like a stray gust of wind picking up a pile of leaves or an apple falling on a…
Two things happened yesterday or the day before that not too terribly long ago would have had a profound impact on my life. First WPP, the holding company that's shed more than half its people over the last ten years, has just announced yet another round of "restructuring." It's hard for me, a guy who shuns euphemisms and prefers honest language, to accept a world that's allowed the word…
Some years ago when I first opened GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, my new business phone was ringing fairly off the hook. Though nobody wants to be fired from a steady job, I came to believe that the timing of my firing was actually pretty good. Not only was I able to beat the Covid "let's-fire-everyone-rush," when I was fired Ogilvy hadn't yet lost its reputation as a legitimate agency. To…
Back about five years ago, I got a call from Steve Hayden, a friend and mentor. Steve had not only been the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather, he probably won more new business for that agency than any ten other people. He was also the copywriter on Apple's "1984" commercial, a spot many people regard as the best or most-famous or most-important ever. Steve had a client who needed manifesto-ing…