No, it doesn't sound smart.

No, but that actually is the situation, because what I thought made sense was the workloads are growing, your fee should be growing.

You should be paying, or being paid I should say, on the basis of how much work you're doing.

There should be something that says, "We know how much work we're doing.

That's what we wanna charge, and then we will staff it appropriately given that amount of work." But agencies never showed much interest in trying to understand what is the relationship between the number of deliverables we're doing, the number of man-hours or FTEs that it takes, and the fees that we should be talking to procurement about.

So they allowed procurement to just turn loose and say, "These folks are undisciplined," cut the fees, and let marketing, who was worried about growing the brands, raise the workloads.

And then everyone accepted that.

So this is about the, the quality of the deliverable.

Is it short-term financial thinking? Have advertisers been led down a funnel into this minutiae, which isn't helping their overall brand?

Well, there are a couple of things going on.

I mean, that's a really good question, and it's probably the most central one.

First of all, we have to look at the existing incentives for C-suite executives, whether they're in marketing, at the advertisers, or at the holding companies, or at the agencies themselves.

For a very long time, C-suite executives have been paid a lot of money when the share price grows.

And the average remuneration for a chief executive of a Fortune 500 company is something like $27 million.

And if that's driven by share price performance, then they're going to think an awful lot more about share price performance than they are about doing a great job for their clients, particularly if there are short term things they can do to enhance their share price performance.

It's about, did I grow my sales this month? It's about my margin this month.

So my question to you is, did the industry destroy its own value across these three decades? What happened to the pricing here?

Well, you know, you have to go back a little bit to when media commissions used to be the way they were paid.

And whatever a client spent on media, like let's say P&G spent $100 million on a brand, its agency would receive 15% of that.

And that would cover everything.

That would cover media planning, media buying, all the creative work and all the production of the creative work.

That was it.

And it was a very, very high, very high fee.

agency creative scope of work.

I thought like the number of units, like the cost per unit has gone down dramatically.

Well, no.

Now here's the thing.

Nobody knew what the price per unit was because Ogilvy, and I'm not blaming them because it's been for the last 30 years, every agency I have analyzed, nobody keeps track of the work they do.

Nor do they have any data that says how much work it is.

So the only metric that they would follow was income and cost profitability.

And they would say to me, oh, you don't need to look at client X because they're great.

You know, right now we're in an extreme move towards simplification and almost like, you know, ruling out all of the complexity within the workforce, whether that looks like consolidation or in, you know, as you described, paring down creative teams.