About Michael

Michael Farmer is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Farmer & Company LLC, a New York based strategy consulting firm for major advertisers and their creative and media agencies. He also serves as Professor of Branding and Integrated Communications at The City College of New York (CCNY).

Farmer has consulted to the advertising industry for the past three decades, and he is considered an industry expert on the strategic problems and opportunities for ad agencies and their clients.

Farmer is the author of the award-winning Madison Avenue Manslaughter, an inside view of fee-cutting clients, profit-hungry owners and declining ad agencies (3^rd Edition 2019), and Madison Avenue Makeover: the transformation of Huge and the redefinition of the ad agency business (2023).

Farmer has published over 150 industry articles on Media Village and his Substack column, C-Suite Blues (https://michaelfarmer.substack.com ).

Previously, Farmer was a Director of Bain & Company, heading (in turn) Bain’s Munich, Paris and London offices during Bain’s high-growth period in Europe.

Farmer has an A.B. degree cum laude in English literature from Princeton University and an MBA degree with highest honors from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar.

He served for five years as an officer in the US Navy — first aboard destroyers and subsequently as Professor of Naval History at Iowa State University.

He has lived and worked abroad in Rio de Janeiro, Lausanne, Munich, Paris, London and Istanbul.

He speaks English and French.