There is a certain irony in being asked to describe oneself. Stuart Elliott spent the better part of three decades at The New York Times covering an industry whose central preoccupation was the careful construction of image — and he did so, for the most part, without constructing much of one for himself.
He wrote the Advertising column and, later, the Media Decoder blog. He showed up, he made his calls, he attended the upfront presentations and the awards dinners and the press conferences at which holding company executives announced, with great solemnity, that two agencies whose names no one could keep straight were being merged into one agency whose name no one would be able to keep straight either.
He had opinions, which he expressed in parentheticals. He had a memory that stretched back to when Mitsubishi was introducing the Diamante and "dudes" were a fresh idea in youth marketing, which he deployed with the patience of someone who has seen this particular movie before and knows how it ends.
He was, for many years, a fixture at breakfast in the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue — a room that served, in those years, as an unofficial annex to Madison Avenue itself. If Stuart Elliott called and suggested breakfast at the Regency, you went. And when you got there, and he ordered his usual, and settled in to ask his questions with the unhurried attention of someone who genuinely wanted to know the answer, you understood, in some quiet way, that you had arrived. Not at the Regency, exactly. At something larger than that.
He was, by trade, a reporter. By temperament, something closer to a very dry and well-informed friend — the kind who would tell you, without particular alarm, that the thing everyone on Madison Avenue was excited about this quarter was the same thing everyone on Madison Avenue had been excited about in 1987, more or less, and that the results had been roughly comparable.
He retired from the Times in 2014. The column did not survive him.
This site is an attempt to imagine what he might make of what has happened since.