Michael Farmer

"The urgent need for agency transformations"

Summary

Agencies have become more passive over time, accepting ill-conceived fee arrangements, bloated Scopes of Work, unacceptable levels of rework and insecurity about their relationships. As a result, agencies add much less value than they should – clients should be growing rather than slashing costs. A major transformation of agency relationships and internal operations needs to take place. What is the nature of the required transformation? Who should take the initiative to transform relationships – agencies or their clients? What can be learned about 2021-2023 transformation of Huge (an IPG agency)? What did Huge do well? What did they do poorly? How can a major transformation be begun in 2024 or 2025?

Biography

Michael Farmer is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Farmer & Company LLC, a New York based strategy consulting firm for agencies and their clients. He also serves as Professor of Branding and Integrated Communications at The City College of New York (CCNY). Farmer is the author of the award-winning Madison Avenue Manslaughter, an inside view of fee-cutting clients, profit-hungry owners and declining ad agencies (3rd Edition 2019), and Madison Avenue Makeover: the transformation of Huge and the redefinition of the ad agency business (2023). Farmer has published over 100 industry articles on Media Village and on his Substack column, C-Suite Blues. Previously, Farmer was a Director of Bain & Company, heading (in turn) Bain’s Munich, Paris and London offices.

Farmer has an A.B. degree cum laude in English literature from Princeton University and an MBA degree with highest honors from Harvard Business School. He served for five years as an officer in the US Navy — first aboard destroyers and subsequently as Professor of Naval History at Iowa State University.

He has been consulting to agencies and their clients for the past 32 years.