Michael Farmer

I was raised in the Midwest, and I went to Princeton University to get a degree in English literature. Subsequently, I served in the US Navy for 5 years as an officer aboard destroyers and as a Professor of Naval History, Iowa State University.

Thence I headed to Harvard Business School for an MBA and a career in management consulting, where I worked for The Boston Consulting Group and later for Bain & Company. I lived and worked in Boston, Lausanne, Rio de Janeiro, Munich, Paris, London and Istanbul. At Bain, I headed their Munich, Paris and London offices. In 1990, I left to set up my own firm, Farmer & Company, in London

I began to specialize in consulting to ad agencies and their clients, first in Europe and subsequently in the US -- and I relocated to New York in 2001 after 20 years' abroad.

After more than two decades of work for the advertising industry, and many published pieces in industry trade magazines and online journals, I wrote my first book, Madison Avenue Manslaughter, an inside view of fee-cutting clients, profit-hungry owners and declining ad agencies, published in September 2015.

The book was characterized by one reviewer as "the most important book on advertising since David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man."

In June 2023, I published my second book on the advertising industry: "Madison Avenue Makeover: The Transformation of Huge and the Redefinition of the Ad Agency Business" -- a fly-on-the-wall's inside view of an agency transformation at Huge, a digital creative global agency owned by Interpublic Group of Agencies.

I write a weekly column on SubStack called "C-Suite Blues" -- devoted to the executive leadership challenges of CEOs and CMOs who operate in the advertising industry.

I teach a graduate-level course in ad agency management at The City College of New York.