To stand for something

In this AI world, being different is brave. Having a point of view is rare. Today's leadership in tech just don't have it in them...

On May 15, 1947, Bill Bernbach wrote a letter to the executives at Grey that now reads like prophecy. He warned about “the trap of bigness,” about agencies that “worship techniques instead of substance,” “follow history instead of making it,” and let “hardening of the creative arteries begin to set in.”

That last phrase is the one I can’t shake. Hardening of the creative arteries. You can feel the blood stop moving.

Bernbach was writing about an ad agency, but he was really describing what happens to any institution once it gets large enough to confuse scale with vitality. The danger is not growth itself. The danger is what growth quietly puts at the center.

Everyone says taste matters. Yeah cool. But taste is often just the visible residue of something deeper: a philosophy, a point of view, a set of convictions about what is worth making and what is beneath you.

When that philosophy weakens, taste eventually goes with it. The work might still look polished for a while. The logo may survive. The press releases may still sound confident. But the animating force is already gone.

That is why the story of DDB matters.

For anyone outside advertising, it is hard to overstate what DDB represented. This was not just another agency with a famous founder. It was one of the places that changed the grammar of persuasion, and if you want the longer version of that story, I wrote about it here.

DDB helped lead the creative revolution by doing something radical for its time. It respected the audience’s intelligence. At a moment when most advertising was addicted to chrome, bravado, and hype, DDB made work with wit, restraint, honesty, and self-awareness.

Its Volkswagen campaign, especially “Think Small”, remains so influential because it broke the logic of the category. Instead of pretending the car was bigger, faster, sexier, or more glamorous than it was, the ad told the truth with style. It did not shout. It did not flex. It trusted the reader to get the joke.

That same sensibility showed up again and again. Avis turned second place into a strength with “We Try Harder”, one of the earliest great challenger-brand campaigns. Levy’s rye bread gave America one of its most durable lines, and the “Daisy” spot for Lyndon Johnson proved that one minute of fear and precision could alter political history.

This was not a shop that merely made ads. It built a philosophy of persuasion.

That is what made DDB a legend. Not a logo. Not mythology. Not award-show fumes. A standard.

Which is why its death matters.

When Reuters reported that DDB would be folded into TBWA after Omnicom’s takeover of IPG, the language was predictably corporate. Consolidation. Integration. Efficiency. Cost-cutting. Clean words for a dirty process.

But what disappears in those moments is not just headcount. It is institutional memory, judgment, and the accumulated wisdom of what actually works. Not what tracks well in a dashboard. What works.

One former DDB leader put it bluntly in a LinkedIn post: what dies when great agencies die “isn’t just jobs.” It is “the accumulated wisdom of what actually works.” Then came the real obituary: “We traded institutional memory for efficiency.”

That is the line. Not that an old name vanished, but that a place built to teach standards, judgment, and courage got flattened into a structure built to optimize margins.

The warning signs showed up long before the merger. In 2021, Business Insider reported deep confusion inside DDB as leadership pushed harder into a more data-driven, precision-marketing direction. Former employees described a “huge swell” of departures, said the work had become “all about numbers, measuring KPIs,” and described feeling less like makers than labor.

That language matters because cultural decline leaks into vocabulary before it shows up on the balance sheet. First the words change. Then the work follows.

This is the part people miss when they talk about decline. The problem is not data. The problem is not technology. The problem is what moves to the center of the table.

When craft exists to serve the system, the work gets thinner. When the system exists to serve the craft, the work has a chance to stay alive.

Even current DDB leaders have said some version of this out loud. In 2025, regional executive creative director Alejandro Canciobello said the attention economy had pushed advertising toward “performance and efficiency” at the expense of “compelling storytelling”. That is the whole fight in one sentence.

A company built on wit, taste, and long-range persuasion got trapped inside an economic model that rewards throughput, attribution, and short-term proof. In tech companies, this happens all the time. Creative judgment gets subordinated to people who can speak the language of creativity but cannot make anything memorable themselves.

That sounds harsh. It is also ordinary.

I do not come from the advertising world. I study it. I admire it. I have friends in it. Design agencies face many of the same pressures, and after a while, you start to recognize the pattern, no matter which industry is wearing it.

I have felt that pattern as a customer, too. When Blue Bottle was acquired by Nestlé, I remember that sip of the New Orleans and wondered why, by the time I reached the end of the block, I wasn’t trembling because of how strong it was. It was watered down, just like all of Nestlé’s products. When a glamping brand I loved got acquired by Marriott, the customer support became maddening. The website experience is just utter garbage, and earned credits are lost.

That is how the decline usually feels. The thing that made the thing feel like itself starts to thin out. The edges get sanded down. The weird little standards that once made the experience memorable get replaced by process, scripts, systems, and scale.

Big fucks small. But even that line is incomplete.

Big does not only kill small from the outside. Small often starts dying earlier, when it begins copying big. It starts admiring the wrong things, hiring managers before it has protected makers, and mistaking polish for conviction.

That is the pattern I want people to see, whether they work in advertising or not. First, the philosophy weakens. Then the language changes. Then the metrics move to the middle of the room. Then the people who protected the standard leave. Then the institution starts managing its reputation rather than renewing its perspective.

By the time the acquisition, reorg, merger, or quiet surrender comes, the rot has often been underway for years. The paperwork arrives last. The soul usually leaves much earlier.

The same thing happens to careers, teams, publications, friendships, and companies that reach the top and mistake dominance for permanence. They stop standing for something precise. They get lazy with standards. They start outsourcing judgment to consensus, dashboards, or market research.

Bernbach saw all of this coming in 1947. “There are a lot of great technicians in advertising,” he wrote. “And unfortunately they talk the best game.”

That line still lands because the danger was never incompetence. It was competence without soul. Process without courage. Technique without philosophy.

He was not against rigor. He was against mistaking rigor for aliveness.

That distinction matters even more now because today’s winners are more vulnerable than they look. A company at the top starts believing its system is the source of its success, when often the system is just the scaffolding built around an earlier act of conviction.

Somebody once had a sharp point of view. Somebody once made a weird bet. Somebody once protected a standard that did not make immediate financial sense. Then the company grows, more layers appear, and institutional self-preservation slowly takes over.

Then the consultants slither through the back door. Then people without real expertise start managing the people who do. Then entropy begins its slow work, or a bigger player finishes the job.

You can see this in advertising. You can see it in media, fashion, hospitality, tech, food, apps, movies, publishing, and culture at large. What made the thing matter becomes less legible to the people now entrusted to scale it, so they inherit the results without understanding the philosophy that produced them.

That is why standing for something is not brand theater. It is a survival strategy.

A real point of view does more than make a company interesting. It tells people what to protect when pressure shows up. It gives a company a philosophy for hiring, making, rejecting, and deciding. It helps you know when the market is asking you to evolve and when it is asking you to betray yourself.

Most companies do not want that kind of clarity because clarity is expensive. A real standard creates friction. It embarrasses the people who do not meet it, forces choices, closes doors, and makes certain shortcuts intolerable.

That is why so many companies reach for substitutes. They borrow language, borrow frameworks, borrow trends, borrow certainty. They do not build a philosophy. They build a deck. They share what they’re seeing on Twitter because they themselves have no ideas, no point of view.

And a deck will not save you when things start to rot.

Bernbach understood that too. “If we are to advance,” he wrote, “we must emerge as a distinctive personality. We must develop our own philosophy.” That line still cuts because most companies do the opposite.

They build an identity system, a campaign, a content engine, a management layer, a dashboard. Then they wonder why nothing holds when pressure arrives.

That is the real warning inside DDB’s story. Not that a famous name disappeared. Not that one more institution got folded into a holding company. That part is just paperwork.

Big fucks small is as real a law as gravity.

The real warning is that decline begins long before the press release. It begins the moment philosophy gives up the center seat.

That is the danger for any company at the top right now. Do not confuse momentum with meaning. Do not let performance language quietly replace your philosophy.

Do not hand your standards over to people who only know how to measure what can already be counted. Do not assume the thing that made you win will survive on inertia.

Because entropy is patient.

And if entropy does not get you, a bigger player will.

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