Thank You Mr. Foch

"None but a coward dares boast that he has never known fear."

--Ferdinand Foch

I've never quoted Mr. Foch before, but I do know that to go through life with a name like Foch takes a certain amount of courage and thus his well-earned take on the matter.

I bring all this up because weeks ago I overcame one of my greatest fears. An entry I wrote for this blog was republished on agencyspy.com. To those of you in the industry, I'm sure you understand why this caused some minor trepidation.

For those of you who are not, you should know that agencyspy.com is the unofficial grapevine for the ad industry. But their stock and trade is not just the news about clients switching agencies, new campaigns about to break or even who got fired and who got hired.

People read agencyspy.com for the dirt. And there's plenty of it. With the protection of internet anonymity, ad folks from throughout the land have turned the "Comment" section into a libelous cesspool of vitriol that makes the Real Housewives of New Jersey look like a bunch of girl scouts.

Some of it is funny. Some of it is spot on. But a lot of it is unfair and ugly. Thankfully agencyspy.com was not around when my career was more high profile.

In any case, I was pleasantly surprised when the first comments started appearing. So was my wife. In fact, when one reader wrote, "Rich is one of the funniest guys to ever grace this business."

My wife noted, Rich Siegel and "grace", those are two words you rarely find in the same sentence.