Sideways at Sixty

After a few hundred clients and about the same number of blog posts, I finally decided to hang it up and officially retire from brand consulting. To be perfectly accurate, I actually pulled the plug on consulting in 2018, I just didn't make a big thing out of it. A number of my peers were curious as to why I'd retire a bit sooner than convention would have it, but the truth is that for the second time in my career, the landscape had shifted so dramatically as to render any further efforts somewhat futile. Allow me to explain:

The first time I reinvented my career was in the mid-1990s, when the digital revolution was underway and everything seemed to be changing. At the time, I was enjoying success as the owner of Frankel & Anderson, a boutique advertising agency known as "the bady boys of advertising." We had a good run, but by the mid-1990s it was clear that the advertising industry had shifted from a messaging industry to one of pure media. That is to say that ads no longer needed to carry a strategically relevant or compelling message (which was our specialty); clients simply could put anything out there, buy their media wholesale and hammer their logos into the heads of viewers and listeners until they bought something. In the blink of an eye, "garnering sales" gave way to "heightened awareness," which sucked up all the business on which we once thrived.

By 2000, I published The Revenge of Brand X, in which I argued that unless a brand was perceived to be "the only solution to your prospects' problem," it was really nothing more than a logo. Apparently, from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s enough CEO's were noticing that awareness alone wasn't generating sales, and that's when I became a brand strategy consultant. It worked. And for the next two decades, I was able to implement brand strategies that measurably increased profitable revenue for all those CEOs who were fed up with their faux ad agencies and underwhelming marketing staff.

And then the ground shifted again.

In the early 2000s, the typical CEO was at least 50 years old, schooled in the traditional art of business, where generating profitable revenue and growing market share was his perennial goal. By 2015, however, that had all changed: all those CEOs were disappearing, leaving teenagers with no marketing or business acumen in their place. Fewer and fewer CEOs cared about growth, brand value or profitability. I didn't need a second memo. My market was drying up fast. Besides, I was no longer a young buck out to change the world.

I had become older, wiser, and financially secure. And by wiser, I mean smart enough to realize that everyone else wasn't the problem; the problem was thatI had become obsolete. Whatever model the business world deployed, it didn't involve people like me. It was time to close shop and enjoy the fruits of my labors.

That decision may have been one of the best of my life. Stepping back to see the big picture meant stepping off the hamster wheel of a perpetual career. And that led me to a very stark and somewhat somber realization: most of my peers never get off the hamster wheel. They keep working for their future, as if they were still in their twenties. Of course, at 60, you shouldn't be living for your future. You should be switching it up and living for your present.

Unfortunately, I noticed a sad and peculiar phenomenon occurring with many of my over 60 friends: Many of them became former friends right around that birthday. People I'd known for most of my life suddenly disappeared. While I was tending roses in my garden, they were simply wallowing in the miserable realization that they hadn't fulfilled the potential to which they'd felt entitled. They were lawyers, professionals, and creative types -- all kinds of people, all littered with broken dreams, broken marriages, steady diets of alcohol and sharing the prospect of facing the rest of their days with more past behind them than future in front of them.

They're all running out of time, desperately hoping that in whatever time they have left, that miracle will come along that proves to the world just what its missed out on. Of course, the world doesn't care. It doesn't even know who they are. And that's when people go sideways at sixty.

All of these people have lost their parents, who were their safe harbor, constantly assuring them of their over-valued self-image. But now there's nobody left to offer those assurances. Their lives have been shattered by the lonely realization that all of their hopes and dreams were just that. And now there's no more hope.

I guess the lesson here is that life is all about adaptation. Knowing when to stay and when to go. Making difficult decisions and never believing your own press. The fact is that you have to adapt or die -- or die sooner.