The Predictable Post.

At :50, see Jack Lemmon turned into a machine.

If you think about the end of a year and the beginning of a new one, as it's only natural to do--it's called 'reflection' -- it can be a little crushing to see the utter sameness, predictability and unoriginality of all those around you, or at least those in what are blithely called your social networks.

It occurred to me, I suppose just before Christian New Year's (which inexplicably has no seasonal or agricultural reason for being) that I could write all of LinkedIn for 2026 pretty much before 2026 has even shifted into low-gear.

First there will be a spate of posts reflecting on the past. Then quickly a spate of posts with portents of tomorrow. There will be a spate of posts about the 4000 (the number Omnicom has fessed up to) jobs being eliminated. There will be a spate of posts about some AI breakthrough, or AI tulip-mania, or AI malfeasance, or AI and its effects (salutary or pernicious) on our industry and lives. There will be spates on account allegedly won and dead holding companies rebounding.

Then, like an old Mussolini train-schedule will come the raft of people posting that they're judging something. Then a tsunami of CES-posts where we'll hear about air fryers and their impact on modern marketing. Then we'll have the cacoc of SXSW postings. Either 'are you gonna be there? Let's meet up' or 'vote for my panel,' or 'I heard (or said) this brilliant thing about air fryers and their impact on modern marketing.'

Next, we'll quickly transition into another flagellatory-congratulatorium on the next awards masturbation-thon, with no one no one no one barking that the last 19 network-of-the-year and agency-of-the-year winners have all gone the way of Sears, or K-Mart, or RCA, or the New York Mets.

Then the Cannes show-off-astranza, with people in pastel linen pants wearing matching pastel espadrilles and drinking matching pastel drinks that cost more than entire holding company's non-c-suite bonus pool. Tra la.

Sprinkled amid all this predictability will be the usual comings and goings. The Brazilian judging scandals, the sudden account loss, the Super Bowl spot that was crowd-sourced and cost eleven cents, next to the Super Bowl spot that was ego-sourced and cost eleven million dollars. Then the pompousticators claiming neither one of them was worth a bucket of warm spit and we'd all be better off just doing SEO, ABC, DEF, HIJ, or whatever collection of runes is currently courant.

The point in all this is simple.

And cosmic.

In our fear-loathing era, we strive for and cherish predictability. We hate chance, leaps of faith and gut. 

As AI is essentially a pattern-matching discipline that looks at everything that went before and says "here's what will follow according to what's happened one-hundred trillion times previous," or "this looks different, therefore that will happen," businesses of all sorts have embraced it.

AI could actually stand for not Artificial Intelligence but, more precisely, ASS INDEMNIFICATION. That is, a super-intelligence told me to do it. As our German friends said 75 years ago, "I was only following orders." As we say today, "I was only following algorithms."

Now here's the thing that so simple it makes me (predictably) retch.

All art, all love, all drama, all mystery, all surprise, all emotion, all surprise, all memorability, all pass-along-ness, all breakthrough comes from 

the unexpected.
the zag.
the 'I didn't see that coming.'
the gasp.
the shock.
the rug-pull.

But we, as a society, as an industry, as individuals, as 'eco-systems' abjure surprise.

We get it line.
We do what everyone else does.
We straighten our ties.
Or rebel in culturally acceptable ways.
As Dorothy Parker was said to have said about Kate Hepburn's performance in a 1933 Broadway play, 'The Lake,' "She runs the gamut of emotion from A to B."

That's us, our industry, our world today.

Attempting to punch-card creativity.
Hoping boredom is the path ahead.
As predictable as piss.

Pain.

For as long as there have been saps on earth, they’ve been told what I’ve been told for my entire sad life. No matter what pain you’re in, no matter how badly it hurts, how deep it throbs, how extensively it radiates or how long it lasts, saps like me are told to shake it off.

In fact, like the Inuit are said to have 66 words for snow and corporate america has 66 times that number for firing people, I've heard about 66 trillion variations on the tough it out theme. I’ve toughed out so much for so long, bucked up up to my pupik, and bit so many bullets that often it takes a good forty five minutes of grade A harridan excruciation for me to even realize something’s rotten in the state of george.

I suppose to be acrobatic about it, you can get so used to being doubled-over that you learn to appreciate the perspective, like looking at the Grand Canyon through binoculars furnished by Marquis de Sade. Before long you accept the writhing on the wall and lather wince repeat becomes your modus operandi no matter how badly your modus is operandi-ing.

For three weeks, pretty much since i celebrated my 68th birthday, I've been in the throes of abdominal and abominable arrears. First with a series of kidney stones that made my soul feel like a nuclear test site in the Bikini atoll, without the distraction of bikinis at all. Then with a case of diverticulitis that’s lingering like the stench of urine in Penn Station after St. Patrick’s Day or an ordinary Tuesday, because either way too many boys are relieving themselves of too much beer in too many places with too great frequency.

Once as a boy I was horsing around on a ball field, helping a teammate learn to hit a breaking ball. Muttley was bending them from the hill and I had the perspicacity to crouch behind the dish wearing no mask. It wasn’t a ball that clunked me but Goldie’s Louisville Slugger, square on my prognathous just north of my right eye, so that it was rendered even more prognathous. 

I stuck my hands over the site of the infraction, feeling for the sickly sticky of warm ooze, either blood or grey matter, or the sharp shards of having-come-apart cranium. 

I’ve read in books on ancient peoples that even seven thousand years ago there is evidence of skulls having been trepanned. That is having a hole drilled in them to relieve cranial pressure. During the american revolution, doctors, the few that there were, carried trapanning drills to help a poor soldier who happened to take a 3/4 inch round lead ball in the noggin. The soldier, if he were lucky got a gram of opium or laudanum, if he were unlucky, as most are, a snort of rum, or nothing.

The truth about pain is as Tennessee Williams wrote in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." (That roof, by the way, was installed by Guatemalan roofers, now being abducted by steven-miller's-goonocracy and being shipped back to a country they never lived in despite paying taxes in the united states for three decades something our felon-in-chief never did, not once.) 

Williams wrote: "The truth is pain and sweat and payin' bills...  Truth is dreams that don't come true, and nobody prints your name in the paper 'til you die."

So much we are told, all of us, to shake off and to buck up and to chin up and to stiff upper lip. So much, then when physical pain of an errant in the wilderness kidney stone is added to it, the whole concatenation becomes life in lsd-fueled room of fun house mirrors, like the end scene of Welles' "The Lady From Shanghai," but without the sweetness and light.

My pain has subsided as of this morning. The intestinal happenstances that wracked and ruined my shell since the beginning of this month. But that's all dissipated now, except of the worst of it. Worse, even, than Welles' brogue.

 

Where, O Death, Is Your Sting?

It's possible that I may be one of the world's great stumblers. I suppose that is the lot (or the little) of an autodidact, that is someone who is essentially self-taught.

Self-taught, of course, is not entirely accurate. I have all the university degrees you can shake a stick at. And, in fact, I still attend classes--online or wherever I can find them. Also, events like The New Yorker Festival, where I've heard Robert Caro and Jill Lepore and David Remnick speak, and One Day University, when it was still operating, where you could hear lectures by notable college professors.

The other day--about two months ago, that is--I attended a zoom lecture on typography via Cooper Union, by David Quay. HERE. Because I can, I reached out to Mr. Quay and had a nice 90-minute talk with him. It's amazing what's within pixel's distance if you have a brain wired for curiosity and the frenetic front paws of a bunny digging down rabbit holes. 

As Mark Twain is said to have said, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Twain, like Yogi Berra could probably also have said, "I never really said all the things I said." But the less said on that matter, the better.

Last week I read an obituary in The Times on a guy called Allan Ludwig, with the epithet, "The Founding Father of Gravestone Studies." You can, and should read it here. 

I came upon this section of the obituary, and quickly made my long-eared passage to abebooks.com.

I soon found a near-mint edition of this book for less than a week's-worth of extortionate chain-store coffee. It arrived by post post-haste in less than a week.

I read somewhere that the great writer Umberto Eco had amassed a library, over the course of his long life of over 30,000 books. To read that many books, you'd have to read a book a day for 80 years and you'd still have 80 left un-read. No matter, there's a wisdom to be gained by just flipping through things, just being nearby things that fill your soul, even if you can't dive into their deep end. I'm no Umberto Eco--I probably have 10,000 books. But adding 20,000 is not a bad or unreasonable goal to see me through my remaining dotage.

Sometimes I pick up a book like the one above. I imagine after I'm dead it sitting in a card-board box in my driveway as some estate-sale operator is getting rid of my crap. The box will be labelled 50¢ or 'free.' I think my daughters will net about $12 from those objects that have sustained my life for so long.

It's the week between Christmas and New Year. I'm not only not working, I'm still sick. My kidney stones have been followed by a case of diverticulitis, which is painful in a kidney stone-like manner. In all, the pain prevents me from resting, reading, speaking or viewing. And of course, writing is near impossible, though I pecked out this post, along the way, spelling "the" "te" and "though" "thoh". And "apologies" "abologies."

I realized how blessed I am in my misery. How amid all the corruption and societal crumbling all around us, amid all the marjorietaylorgreening of amerkin-life, I have been given a mind and a curiosity and a drive to stumble upon the next thing and the next. What's more, I have the will and the money to buy the book and sit with it and learn from it and rabbit-hole thanks to it to get to the next rabbit-hole. 

Maybe it's the stumbling and the rabbit-holing that keeps me whole, or at least whole in part. Where a song, or a joke or a 90-year-old Laurel and Hardy clip will lodge in my head and make life bearable for another twenty minutes until the next acute pain episodes forward. 

In Graven Images I took an iphone snap shot of a epitaph Ludwig found on a particular New England gravestone from about 250 years ago. Feeling as I feel, it seem written for me and will serve to end my post.

As always, thank you for reading.

I Kidney You Not.

Last week was the week of pain. 

On Sunday, December 14th, I went through the first of six kidney stones passing. The first was the worst. The middle four were bad. Finally, on Saturday, December 20th between 1AM and 3AM, I had one I could no longer stand. I relented and agreed to let my wife take me to a local hospital. The pain, which had been considerable became too much even for my stubbornness to will away. 

Also, to be even more of a jerk about it, I have a fear of hospitals. Especially hospitals away up here on the Gingham Coast where I feel an alien and have no doctors who refer me. And especially hospitals when they know you're on medicare. I suspect the hospitals don't make a lot of money from medicare patients. They make me feel like I'm a feral raccoon feeding at a medical dumpster. I suppose you're left only the dregs of care and that's meant to fill your convalescent belly.

Care or service in our modern era is virtually non-existent. 99.799748778-percent of every business in whatever form it takes is understaffed, and the staff that's there is over-worked, badly paid and has no future. Why should they look up from their phones? Work no longer has anything in it for you, other than a slight circumvention of homelessness, which it seems more and more people in America--with the possible exception of the six or twelve-dozen trillionaires--face every day.

Fortunately, though I was expecting nothing short of a Kafka-esque hospital experience, this place wasn't bad. The receptionist saw me, within minutes. I only had to tell her my name and date of birth five times or twenty and my wife had only repeat my name and date of birth five or twenty times more.

Within an hour, I was undressed, be-gowned and ensconced in plastic hospital gowns and plastic hospital drapes. A nurse surlied in and stuck me with an IV-needle and it only took an extra twenty minutes for the actual drip to begin. I believe it was a combination of used spaghetti water mixed with ibuprophen. 

The doctor came in, too. He explained what they were doing and what was happening and the medication they were giving me. They handed me a control device that allowed me to buzz for a nurse if I needed one and also controlled the TV so I could flip through 29-different channels all playing some version of the home shopping network. 

Before too long, I finished my IV and the doctor returned. He had called in a prescription to my local pharmacy and handed me vials of pills--the sorts of which killed millions of amerrymanikins. These pills also cost McKinsey $600,000,000 in fines for their suggestions to Purdue, who were fined $7,400,000,000 for their crimes, on how to dispense more of them. They came neatly shrink-wrapped and the doctor gave me just two with a prescription to get more.

"I don't want these," I told him. "I'm not going to use them."

"Just take them," he insisted. "I'm not a pill-pusher." 

I put them in the front right pocket of my jeans, hoping the pains I'd suffered for the better part of a week would not resume past the point where they could not be handled by enough Tylenol to autism-out a small borough like Staten Island or the Bronx. 

It's been 36-hours since I returned from the hospital and so far, I seem, for now at least to be in the clear.

I'd heard a story from a guy up here, our dogs sometimes get together to play in the evenings. He told me his father, who comes from the same stoic-school that I hail from, had kidney stones and his father said his pain was so bad he thought about banging his head against the stones of their fireplace--anything for relief.

As I near my sixth year since being shit-canned from Ogilvy, the whole megillah reminds me of a joke. It tells the story of a man, like my friend's father above, who's repeatedly banging his head on a wall. Finally someone asks him why. And he replies, "Because it feels so good when I stop."

Sometimes that the story I life I guess.

It hurts a helluva lot.

Maybe it'll feel good when we stop.

Maybe Get Yourself a Second Cuppa.

Just now, I noticed a new navigational heading on the website of "The Wall Street Journal" up there with the headings I'm so used to seeing I hardly notice them anymore. But, though it's oblique, I did notice this one.

Maybe my strength as a creative person can be described as I have been describing it for nearly forty years: "I have a wide-field of vision." I see things other people don't. Whether it's a breaking pitch a moment early from the hand of a crafty moundsman, or a stray comment from a client that clarifies a brand, product or offering.

Seeing things other people seem to miss ain't entirely a blessing. For one, you're very often Vox Clamantis In Deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness. Like the Trojans thought Cassandra was crazy (she was cursed with being able to see the future and have no one believe her.) A lot of people think I'm mad, or an over-thinker, or just a freaking loon. Second, I often get annoyed with people--clients, colleagues, friends, partners--who don't have my broad "Umwelt." 

(Umwelt was defined and popularized by the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909 and it comes from the German word for “environment." It is specifically the part of your surroundings that you can sense and experience—it is your perceptual world.)

In any event, soon after noticing it, I went to the Free Expression heading and found this article on the etiology or origins (and today, prevalence) of Conspiracy Theorists. 

I read it for obvious reasons. The most obvious being we now live in a country where there's no agreed upon reality, even whether or not our globe is round. To quote Shakespeare, "Foul is fair and fair is foul." And second, I wondered if there was an application to advertising from the rise of conspiracy-delusions.

The Journal's article, here, if you can squeeze past the paywall, identifies three commonalities of the conspiracy-prone mindset.

1. They are people who seek order after a traumatizing occurrence. They want a rational explanation for what seems like a random event. 

2. Believing a conspiracy theory isn’t just an odd behavior--it can become your identity. In a sense like believing the Jets will someday be in the Super Bowl, playing--strange as it seems--the Mets. 

And most reverberating,

3. Embracing a conspiracy theory gives people a sense of power. They are the ones of are manning the barricades of civilization. They're the clear-thinking members of a wised-up elite.

Some of the proceeding was prompted by a note I got a couple hours ago about a post I posted on Thursday. My post featured this ad. And the comment I received is below the ad:

The confluence of what hit me amid all this is this. For roughly the last half century in advertising, since the golden age turned to a darkening age, advertising has done everything BUT help answer the plaints in the ad above. We've tried every which way and every theory, gizmo, technique, ratiocination, white paper, algorithm and MBA-spouting under the sun to avoid the very purpose of advertising.

It occurred to me, we are acting, in fact, like conspiracy theorists. Conspiracists don't understand the very randomness of the advertising world, so they've created an alternative reality where only they can understand, read and interpret the metrics and the efficacy of work

1. We are trying to rationalize the trauma of new media by saying this doo-dad or that will explain it.

2. Those doing the rationalizing have created themselves an ownable identity. They are 'digital.' Or 'social.' Or 'new media people.' They've somehow deciphered and made sense of the upset of the traditional media world. They are enlightened. Those believing in brief in the ad above, 'harken back to the eighties.'

3. Finally, these theorists believe--and they've convinced millions others that they are the only clear-thinking members of a wised-up elite.

In fact, I read this in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, December 15.

That all led to this conclusion:

It's harrowing to read articles like the one above, with charged conclusions about the emptying of Madison Avenue stated with such firm conviction.

Especially when you read once again the "Man in Chair" ad above. None of which is even considered as a function of advertising in Rajeev Kohli's essay. (That point seems to be a painful omission, i.e. "I don't know who you are.")

When I go to the store I have no idea what makes a $9 brand different from a $6 store brand. Nobody tells me. You can look at a company like IBM, with a market-cap of $281 billion and have no idea what they even sell, much less why they're relevant. You hear endlessly about  Anthropic, or Open AI which have market caps of a quarter trillion dollars and a half trillion dollars respectively, and you have no idea how to pick one over the or what makes them different or better. Or when Campbell's Soup's own executives say they make shit food for poor people, the company doesn't even run ads to diffuse that brand and billions destroying bomb.

I know this is a lot from a stupid blog on advertising. So I'll leave you with two bits that aren't from a stupid blog on advertising and are instead from the 1980 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Czeslaw Miłosz. 

Miłosz said:

He also wrote.

Either of these, or both, should be in every agency, and read before every politician's speech every day. 

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

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Same-Old.

 

---

There was an excellent column in the Economist last week, in their "Bartleby" column (which to my mind is often the best of the magazine) which everyone in marketing--on what's left of the agency-side and on what's left of the client-side and on what's left of the media-side--should read.

The article itself isn't specifically on "advertising." It's on the death of differentiation in almost every aspect of our lives. This particular column started this way. (I'll paste the entirety at the end of today's post because I don't know anyone in the entire ad industry who subscribes to the Economist, though David Abbott and company made it--for me--and absolute must read.)

Welcome to the Marryattilton Hotel. We’re delighted that you have chosen to spend time with us, and look forward to making your stay as enjoyable as possible. We offer an entirely commoditised experience which somehow manages to be part of the attraction. Please do take a few minutes to read the following notes.

The "entirely commoditised experience" is everywhere today. Everywhere you look, everything is the same.

Everything is "an experience."
Everything is "redefining luxury."
Everything is "elevating your senses."
Everything is happening at "the intersection of...."
Everything is "bespoke."
Everything car offers to "drive you forward."
Unless it's electric in which case it offers "an electrifying ride."
Every question is "frequently asked."
Everyone offers a "first bag free," "a convenient 24/7 drive-thru," "points," "delivery," and a panoply of other crap that is unremarkable because everyone does it.

Orwell wrote, in his great essay "Politics and the English Language" six rules for better writing, for better communication. Though I've shared this Orwell a dozen times in this space, I'd wager fewer than ten-percent of my readers have read this list, much less memorized it. I'd wager fewer than one-percent of clients have.

Orwell didn't write these rules to bring poetry and euphony to writing.

He wrote these rules so people would notice writing. So it wouldn't wash over readers because they've seen or heard it so many times and with such little freshness and variation

Today, in what seems to me every sphere, we are happy only with clichés and things we have seen before. Anything different, thought differently, written differently, shot differently, presented differently is an anathema. It makes us uncomfortable because we are only comfortable with things we've heard or read or seen before. Our prevailing notion is "it must be right. That's how everyone else does it."

Successful communication starts with, it must be wrong. That's how everyone else does it."

This must be the right way to sell air travel. After all, everyone does it.

Alex Murrel illustrated his essay "The Age of Average," with these photos. 

And I reckon things will get worse, not better, with machines taking over and no human supervision.

Next person to urge me to use the word bespoke, might get a bespoke punch in the kisser.

The article I promised. 

Welcome to the Marryattilton Hotel. We’re delighted that you have chosen to spend time with us, and look forward to making your stay as enjoyable as possible. We offer an entirely commoditised experience which somehow manages to be part of the attraction. Please do take a few minutes to read the following notes.
• Guests must check out at midday. If you wish to extend your stay, please just let us know and we will happily charge you a lot extra.
• The WiFi password is your room number. You will see a warning that your messages may not be securely protected. Please wonder briefly if you should take this warning seriously and then ignore it.
• We have given you two room cards even though you are clearly on your own. Make sure to carry them both around with you so that if you do lose one, you will be sure to lose both.
• You have two complimentary bottles of water. Your name will be displayed on the TV screen when you turn it on. For some reason both of these things will make you feel well treated. 
• Some of our larger rooms come with a bowl of fruit. You would not be excited by the sight of a grape at home. Here you will see it as a mark of very high status.
• You have two flannels, four handtowels and eight large towels. If you need more towels, you’re almost certainly doing something wrong.
• Our amenities include an origami masterclass in your bathroom. The loose end of your toilet roll will be laboriously folded into a swan each morning. The flannels will be shaped into bows. The large towels will be rolled so tightly that this creates a vacuum.
• All our carpets have been specially designed to make you feel dizzy. 
• The windows may or may not be see-through. You’ll be able to judge by the behaviour of the office workers across the street from you. 
• We have given you 20 times as many pillows as you need. Please do not attempt to use them all. It would be like sleeping standing up.
• The sheets will be tucked so aggressively under the mattress that it will take you several minutes of intense effort to ram your legs down the length of the bed. Please do not try to create more room by kicking out furiously. You will only do yourself an injury.
• All your drinking glasses will be wearing little paper hats.
• We take extra care to make the corridors as featureless as possible, so that you have maximum difficulty finding your way back to the lifts.
• You have the use of an extremely large, white dressing gown. Please wear it just because it is there.
• For people under the age of 25, that thing on your bedside table is a landline phone. Simply dial “0” and no one will pick up. These phones are also placed on a table beside the lifts on each floor, where they must never be used.  
• We are committed to using entirely unnecessary packaging. Unwrapping the soap will require both time and incredible determination.
• There is a safe in the wardrobe. Do not use it. It is not safe.
• Sockets are available everywhere throughout the room except close to the desk where you want to work.
• To add a bit of fun to your stay, we always have one light that refuses to turn off no matter which switches you press.
• All our rooms come with two sets of curtains as standard. One for you, and one for your non-existent companion.
• Breakfast is served from 6am. Our scrambled eggs are made of rubber. Our bacon is extremely brittle and will shatter if you apply any pressure. Cereals are available by slowly turning the handle on a dispenser for 20 minutes. If you are tempted to complain, remember that you can go back for more.    
• The air conditioning has two modes: silent and jet-engine take-off. 
• If you try to get up in the middle of the night and find that you cannot move, do not panic. You are not paralysed; it’s just those sheets again.
• If you ask someone at reception for restaurant recommendations they will ask if you would like a map. Despite the fact you have a device in your pocket that can guide you to a point anywhere on the planet, you should say “yes”.
• A coffee machine is located above the fridge. It takes roughly 30 minutes to make it work. The results are disgusting.

Once again, thank you for choosing the Marryattilton. If you have any other questions, please just dial “0”. We hope you enjoy your stay.■