Musky Cannes of gin and vermouth
Drilling for ads off the shore of the Mediterranean statuefest.
Don’t kid yourself. When people say ad deals don’t get done over four-martini lunches at “21” anymore, they’re only half right. The big ad deals get done by people soaking in a hot tub filled with gin and vermouth on the back of yachts moored on the Mediterranean abutting Cannes, France while holding a statute someone gave them for very favorable press they paid to release. If you ever wondered why I eschew the spotlight. Second to failing memory, it’s that.
+++
This is the time of the year that the ad world descends on Cannes. It’s equal parts ad world insiders with titles above Vice President, ad-world wannabes, and a splash of Elon Musk. They go there every year at this time to hob, nob, see, and be seen… especially at the swankiest parties and on the biggestest yachts. That’s where they buy and sell big swaths of ads. So, I’ve read. I’ve never been to the party.
Musk is there to sell ads. Mark Read is his gauntlet.
Read is my age. He’s been in advertising twice as long as me. He attended schools that wouldn’t let me use their restrooms. His desk has more trophies than participants from three dozen little league teams. Read presides over the world’s largest ad agency, WPP. Which, people forget, started life as Wire Plastics Products. A company that literally weaved baskets. Sir Martin Sorrell bought it in 1985 for one reason. It was public. He could buy ad agencies with stock. Investors liked that. They’d buy WPP stock. The stock price would go up. Sorrell would issue more stock. He used his more stock to buy more agencies. That flywheel is, easily, the best part of this story. In the little more than six years since Read has helmed WPP, the company’s stock is down about half.
And none of that matters. Not today. Their intense exchange on a stage moments ago became an instant classic. Read, “You told us to go f*ck ourselves. Why?”
I guess Read forgot that major agencies like his WPP called Musk’s Twitter antisemitic and pulled ads from there while running ads on far more antisemitic platforms. Ah, simpler times.
Today, Musk replied with, “Of course, advertisers have a right to appear next to content that they find compatible with their brands. That's totally fine. What is not cool is insisting that there can be no content they disagree with on the platform.” Elon must have missed Jack Dorsey’s very recent, very insightful comments that ads lead to censorship. Even when he’s there to be contrite, he just can’t quite muster it.
For me, those are old stories. I’ve already written them. Insiders will write them tomorrow. What they won’t write is my story.
Many years ago, I sold my tiny, little private company to a biggish public company. I believed they were going to take my technology and some of my ideas, put it in their catapult, and launch it into a strata I never could. The CEO said as much. They paid me a never-to-be disclosed very fair price for it. They promised further vast riches from windfalls we’d reap changing the media world. The details aren’t important. They rarely are. After the deal closed, they put me in a cubical under fluorescent lights demoted me from CEO to bystander and told me cease and desist creating products and serving customers.
When I asked why they didn’t want to pursue our grand dreams, their deal lawyers said it was never part of our hundreds pages long deal prenup. “We’re going to build something fierce together,” is something a CEO says in throes of deal passion to get his hands on my entrepreneurial trophy. A few days later, I quit my well-paying, dead-end, do-nothing job. Turns out, my requirement to stick around wasn’t in the deal docs either.
A few minutes later, the lady who ran the investment bank that did the deal called me. She’d been doing deals twice as long as me, her desk was filled with Lucite obelisks, she attended all the right schools and right parties.
She spent many minutes screaming at me. How dare I leave? Plus the usual claptrap that I’ll never work in this town again. You see, brain rot is not new. Far from it.
I couldn’t see her. It was in an era before FaceTime. But I know in my bones that all the time she was speaking at me, every time she said, “You…” rage would shake her hand and and her finger would point at me through the phone.
That happened a long time ago. And, yeah, some people won’t take my calls or connect with me on LinkedIn. To her and to important people in her world, I’m an outsider. Whatevs.
Minutes in, when she — eventually — paused to breathe, I asked if she was done. She thought for a moment and said, “For now.” That’s when I said, “You’re not my mother. Don’t speak to like you are.” That ended our call and we’ve never spoken since.
Like so many other stories, I forgot that one. Until today. All the memories came back when I saw the tip of Mark Read’s finger point at Musk. The head of insiders railing against the ultimate outsider. Venomously.
Musk sat there. Took it. And, in the moment, where he showed restraint and provided a thoughtful response, I believe in my bones, he was thinking, they’re going to take my technology and some of my ideas, put it in their catapult, and launch it into strata he never could. They won’t. He should have said, “Your mother.”
In a little way, I think I shared a virtual tu madre moment with Elon Musk. Good day.