Aside from being a storied, ancient city in what is now Iraq, Babylon has become a metaphor for a place (or state of mind, I suppose) that has fantastical characteristics but with a possibly unsavory subtext. The diamonds with the dirt, you could say.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language defines Babylon, in a secondary usage, this way:

  • Bab·y·lon (bāb’ə-lən, -lŏn’) n. 1. A city or place of great luxury, sensuality, and often vice and corruption. 2. A place of captivity or exile.

Wait. Doesn’t that sound suspiciously like the definition of most ad, marketing and brand agencies? As a frequent denizen of the agency world throughout my career, both as a client and insider, the parallels are self-evident:

  • There’s that intoxicating mixture of big bucks and swank trappings with the slightly unclean sensation that comes from a lot of the work that gets done – more precisely, why the work gets done.
  • There’s the whole thing about building monuments to oneself.
  • What lower-tier agency creative or account prole doesn’t feel a sense of captivity or exile.
  • Then there’s the polyglot communication that occurs within an agency and certainly with clients (insert obvious reference to the Tower of Babel).

And don’t get me started on the internal workings of agencies, from agency culture and innovation to business development. Or rather, do let me start because that’s the purpose of this blog: to capture the good and the suspect, the thoughtful and the misinformed, and most of all: the possibilities.

[The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.]