• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, July 12, 2018

Is there something in the water? It hasn’t been a great week for the advertising and marketing industry. A troika of senior executives, who should be industry role models, find themselves out of jobs, due to behavior that crossed the line.

That said, justice seems to have been served swiftly and correctly, so the news isn’t all bad.

What we have here is a threesome of humans, who happen to be bigwigs in the ad-marketing space, acting like themselves (read: A#s holes). They got called out for it and lost their lofty positions as a result.

This has been going on forever. In all industries.

The good news: society seems to be moving in the right direction, which means companies are responding to pressure to create systems where the rank-and-file can raise grievances that are actually heard and responded to.

The latest examples of the bad behavior I’m talking about includes Jeremy Perrott, a top creative veteran at McCann Health, and Ogilvy Chief Creative Officer Tham Khai Meng. Both men were dismissed from their posts after their agencies received complaints about their behavior, investigated, decided the complaints had merit and canned them.

Both men have been mum up to this point, regarding the allegations, which the agencies did not spell out in detail.

Oh, and the third misbehaving poohbah of the week — none other than the founder of pizza chain giant Papa Johns, John Schnatter, who apologized for using a racial slur about African Americans. I  believe it was the “N word” that he used during a conference call in May. On Wednesday, he resigned as chairman of the company he founded.

There’s something about success.

In some people, it seems to generate a false sense that they don’t have to play by the rules that are put in place for everyone. It’s like success equals some sort of god-like status.

Nope. Wrong. Good riddance.