Crash. Landing.

I was angry on Wednesday.

Angry at how my life sucks.

I'm good at anger. 

I've had 67-years of practice.

When you grew up with a mother who beat you and a father too drunk to notice, you specialize in rage.

And if you're not going to repeat the pattern, you specialize at repressing that rage.

At least as much as you can.

Under the circumstances of being human.

And living with humans.

I was especially angry on Wednesday because though it had been a short week, it was a long week. With client deliverables and meetings crowding me like rush-hour on the Lexington line. Get yer f-in elbow outta my rib cage.

When I was done with an arduous hour with a far-away client--it was one of those calls where they loved everything, but...I wasn't done for the day. 

Days are seldom done when they ought to be.

Not only did I have Sparkle, my sixteen-month golden retriever,  chomping at my hands in hopes of going to the beach, I had an amorphous demand from my first, my longest-running client--an amorphous demand with no clear direction, brief or information.

The problem with the agency schema is there are ways when you're in a situation as I described above to weasel out of the situation. You can blame the planners, or account, or the client for being dicks. You can blame your bosses for leaving you, once again, with a steaming turd. There are so many ways at which you can howl at the moon and not do what needs to be done.

When you have your own agency though, there's no moon to howl at. 

There's you.

Two engines are out, you have no fuel, the landing gear is busted and you have to bring the plane in.

There's no one to point at. 

No manual to read.

No heavens to curse.

It's just you and your will. 

My client had asked for a long piece. Five-hundred words, a thousand, whatever it took. Describing what it is he sells and does and hopes to do in a way he couldn't describe it. In a way that could sell it to his internal organization, investors and customers. So he himself would know.

This sucks.

Angry, I stared at my keyboard.

I looked for clues.

I thunkerated and thunked some more.

I have a meeting every Thursday morning at 9 with this client. The joys of a retainer business. 

There was no way I could say, I'll have it for you next week rather than this week.

You don't keep clients you treat like that.

Damn.

I wished I could write one of my funny ads. Or twenty of them. 

It's a damn sight easier writing an ad than figuring out who someone is. It's the difference between depicting a scene and telling the story of a life.

Fuck. 

I hate this fucking job, I self-fumed. Or immolated.

Why ain't I working at _____________? Where someone tells me what to do and I can bitch that I don't have the means to do it?

But then I walked Sparks and worked out an opening. Later, I worked out a middle. A punctuation--a joke, a promise, hope. I worked out a point of view.

There's a difference between the modern constitution of a giant holding company and an agency that works. 

Most businesses if you ask for help you get a shoulder shrug from the staff--if you can find any staff. They won't make more money if they work harder or serve someone well.  

So why bother?

No wonder 92-percent of life is spent on hold.

Agencies today are staffed like the Stop N Shop. Workers clock in and out. They don't take great pride in stacking cans of beans. There's really no incentive to do a good job. As holding companies have turned workers into interchangeable parts workers have turned jobs into interchangeable blahs. 

They don't care. So the people employed don't care.

The imprecation, the pressure, the "or else" is gone. So is the bonus, the rapid rise, the promotion, even the handshake and the encouraging word.

There are no heroes in a world run by auto-pilot.

Yeah, there are times I wish mine was. Run by auto-pilot, I mean. It'd be nice to go through the motions so long as your motions led you to a chaise lounge by the beach at the end of the day.

I could make a mediocre living just strapping in and punching the clock. Maybe the anger and angst I was born with would dissipate along with my muscle tone.

But we'll never know. 

Will we?

Fear. And Loafing.

One of the essential moments of my life happened when I was just 14 years old and the starting third-baseman on my high school's varsity baseball team.

I hadn't had my growth yet, and stood in stocking feet, just about 5'7". I was towered over by most of the boys I was playing alongside and playing against. I had always been tall, but now I seemed to have leveled off at a relatively diminutive height.

Playing ball with and against kids who had been shaving since they were nine, was intimidating. But I fought, and tried, and fought some more and despite my size, more than held my own against competition that had six inches on me and thirty pounds. That's a lot of mass to give away.

That season as a ninth-grader was also the first time in my life I started seeing curveballs on a regular basis. I had seen curves before, but they were like comets--irregular events. When I hit high school, curves became a regular occurence. 

The curve was invented, like so much else in life, to scare the fortitude out of the batter--the guy holding the lumber. A good curve comes right at you, bearing down like a punch or a bad report card. It's going to hit you.

You're scared. (That's the point.)

You back away.

Or, worse, freeze.

Then, defying physics, the ball dips and bends. Its route switches abruptly and its destination changes from your head to just over the plate, prompting the umpire to raise his right arm and bellow, "yer out!"

The curve, like so much else in life, is a battle against fear. Do you wait and see? Or duck and crumble? Or get smacked in the bean and lose one-million brain cells to an undiagnosed concussion?

When you're 14 playing against 18 year-olds who have acquired some mastery over an assortment of benders, the curves can leave you as paralyzed as an old Greek statue. You stand there, bat in hand, frozen and the ball thuds into the catcher's mitt, leaving you looking stupid as a Times' Square caricature. 

Or, as the cliché goes, the ball leaves you flat-footed, so you swing like a rusty gate.

Mike Siganos was the best pitcher in the league. He played for St. Luke's and wound up playing two sports, football and baseball, at the University of Kentucky. I think he might have had a look-see from a couple of NFL clubs, but they looked and didn't see. It turns out Siganos played for a time for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in Canadian Football League.

No matter. He had a curveball like a Koufax, at least to my shaky 14-year-old knees.

When facing Siganos, everyone else on my team sidled to the back of the batter's box. They reckoned they'd have more time to react to his bender. They did not have a great deal of success. 

I did the opposite.

Without saying anything to anyone (my default setting) especially not Babich, our fireplug of a coach, I moved to the front of the batter's box. So far forward, my left foot seemed to be fairly on the outfield fringe. Though Mr. Paskin had given me a C- in "Introduction to Physics," I reasoned that moving up in the box might allow me to take a swat at the curve before the ball actually broke. 

This was as counter-intuitive a move as any I've ever made in my entire life. The ball would get to me faster, I knew, but maybe I'd have a better whack at it before it got tricky.

Maybe my victory by moving forward began with semiotics. Moving up the the box said something. It said "I want you." "I'm not afraid of you." "I'm coming at you before you come at me."

The semiotics of not showing fear. Of saying, instead, you should be afraid of me.

I remember--though it's been 53 years--a pitch from Siganos coming at me shoulder high, like Housman's athlete dying young. I smacked it hard, I smacked it nasty. It soared out between left and center, an easy double. I stretched that double into a triple just by being stupid and saying, "I'm not stopping where they think I should." Another default setting.

A lot of people call me for advice. Including my brilliant and accomplished daughters.

Most often what I hear from people is a sense of frustration made more frustrating because it's glazed with a thick sauce of compliant behavior. 

"Everyone else is getting X," I'm told. "They're better than I am, how can I get X as well?"

The job of living isn't about doing what everybody else is doing so you can get what everybody else is getting, it's about saying no to the status quo. When I got canned from Ogilvy and needed to set a day rate, I gauged myself not against other ECDs but against the day-rate of the head of the consulting group. That's moving up in the box.

Most people enter a negotiation without realizing they're in a negotiation. And they're starting with their foot already in the bucket. They're starting from a place of timidity and fear. They're moving back in the batters' box.

I suggest they move forward.

"Why don't you ask for double?" I ask. "You're the best in the world at what you do," I assert, "Don't allow yourself to be confined."

I suppose I could ask them to read the story above. Or even think about Roger Bannister, the first man to break the four-minute mark in the mile-run. 

For almost half-a-century people said the four-minute mile would never be achieved. The mark intimidated runners. Some scientists believed it was humanly impossible to break. And while runners got close, they leaned back when they might have leaned forward. Missing the mark.

Everyone said it couldn't be done. 

Then Bannister went and did it.

As of June, 2022, 1,755 different runners have done what couldn't be done.

That's what I learned that spring afternoon facing a pitcher who was better than me.

That's what I learn every day I negotiate a fee or win an assignment from a client.

Step forward in the box.

The trick isn't not to be afraid, that's impossible. Everyone is afraid all the time, every day.

The trick is not showing your fear.

Ask Me No Questions.

Today, before, during and after anything you buy, or even ask about, you're likely to get a survey asking about your experience. The survey usually asserts that the surveyor is asking for feedback so they can improve their service, but I've yet to see anything improve.

It wasn't that long ago if you wanted to make a hotel reservation you could call the hotel itself and talk to someone who worked at the actual hotel you were interested in staying in. Now you go to a central phone-bank, probably thousands of miles from the hotel you're interested in booking, and you get someone who knows nothing of anything and cares even less.

The same holds true if you're trying to get a doctor's appointment. Since every doctor now has been subsumed into a giant medical group, after pressing a number of options on a phone tree, you get to a person who has no idea what you're doing, what you need, or even what doctor you're trying to get in touch with.

What's more, at least when it comes to making a doctor's appointment, because the "medical holding company" is worried about law suits stemming from their lack of service, they have to ask you a dozen or so questions that have nothing to do with what you need, just so they can be on the record of having asked them. Such protocols do nothing for you except cause frustration.

Recently I stayed at the Hyatt Regency in Mission Bay in San Diego. I'm old-fashioned and imagined their use of the word "regency" in their name meant they had some vestige of noble service or amenity. 

Instead the hotel was slovenly. The towels one step down from those found in my high-school locker room, the carpet designed to hide filth and so on. What's more, they had the fuckiness to tack on a daily $39 resort fee--which was mandatory whether or not I decided to use the resort.

Then came the survey.

Then came a sentence in a mechanized note after I filled in my survey.

What's important here isn't my experience. It's the way we serve our customers in amerika--and that includes, if you can make the leap with me--the way we treat people and depict services and serve people through the commercials we create and air. (Yes, I am still reeling and agape at what was shown during the Super Bowel.)

Here's the sentence that got me.

"I am so sorry to see that your visit did not exceed expectations."

I'm sorry, you completely missed the point. My visit didn't not exceed expectations, as I wrote in my survey, it didn't come within one-thousand miles of even meeting my expectations. 

This is a letter that feels like a bad marriage. Not only do you ignore everything I say, you twist everything to your advantage. I didn't say you didn't exceed my expectations. I said you sucked.

The next sentence is even worse and even more emblematic of a bigger problem. It's not even in English. "We strive ourselves..."

Just because strive sounds like pride (the word you meant to use) doesn't mean they're interchangeable. You, don't even care enough to proofread or write intelligibly.

Advertising sucks today because we've somehow decided we're not supposed to help people (that often costs money) instead we're supposed be a part of culture. 

I'll handle my own culture. How about you, advertisers, trying to understand what I need for my money. Clarity. Service. A nod to my humanity. A comfortable seat. No bait and switch. No hidden charges. 

How about rather than giving me an experience, you give me what I paid for. In the case of the Hyatt Regency Mission Bay, a clean room, a reasonable cup of coffee, without mandatory charges for things I don't want.

The problem with advertising isn't just giant holding companies lowering wages so a few people at the top can make $49,000,000 annually. It's that people, customers, you and I no longer matter. All the celebrity bs and becoming part of culture is a distraction from the impecunious reality of modern amerika.

We couldn't give a rat's ass about anything but maximizing returns and minimizing service. The golden rule isn't in effect. It ain't even gold-plated. It's not even brass. It's gone.

We treat others as victims and hope they don't notice. That's why advertising sucks.

Now, what did you want to ask me about?

Ontology.

My sense when I watch an event like the Superbowel, or even the presidential election and the purported speeches and debates leading up to giant events, is that something is dramatically wrong with much of our nation.

The "dramatically wrong-ness" isn't our politics, or our climate-denial, or some ingrained-unfairness in the system, or inequitable distribution of wealth, the wrong-ness is more fundamental and ontological that those things. The wrong-ness emanates from our very core.

 

As a nation, we are no longer reality-based.

We have a president who thinks the Gaza, which has been battled over for 6,000 years, can become the Cote d Azur. He redraws weather maps to change the course of hurricanes. He fabricates and lies.

The list is nearly endless--and empirical--not political.

The same can be said for our industry.

Advertising is no longer reality-based.

By that I mean the messages in our work, and the people we show in our work, are not real. They worry about running out of chipped and formed potato products. We act as if stentorian affirmations about yessing will compensate for the closure of american freedom. We pretend celebrities live lives like ours, wear funny clothing and care about coffee so much they actually immerse themselves in a slurry of coffee sludge.

 

The driving goal of our political discourse and our advertising discourse is no longer to communicate what we do or how we can serve people--how we can make a problem better--it's to create a spectacle, most often ridiculous (like immigrants are eating our pets) so that we dominate the news-cycle.

We no longer inform.

We entertain.

Don't get me wrong. Entertainment is valuable.

 

But in politics and advertising entertainment should serve a purpose. To promote or make more palatable something--an idea or a product--you want to sell.

 

Most of the spots played on the superbowel, told me nothing. Or their high-octane glib-grab overwhelmed any definitional sense of a brand or product's reason for being. I believe the impact of most of what I saw will disappear like your fist when you open up your hand.

 

I'm not picking on the pringles work but the pringles work is a good example. First, pringles are gross. An ersatz potato product in a can--the words chopped, processed, reformed and shaped come to mind. Does anyone since the beginning of time think anyone since the beginning of time will be so bent out of shape because there are no pringles left that they'll a) care, b) say something, c) yell into a can.

Not only was the spot devoid of any truth--people care more about pringles than everything else in the world--flying mustaches is about as unappetizing an association you can make with a finger-food. I can only picture little hairs on my artificial chips.

 

The spectacle was there.
A party nicer than one I've ever been to.
Better looking people than I've ever seen (and not a single heavy person though amerika is the world's fattest nation.)

Flying mustaches.

Celebrity a-go-go.

And a re-scored and re-recorded pop-tune from 1967.

 

A spectacle.

 

I might be unqualified to judge advertising these days.

99.89-percent of my clients come to me not knowing how to define what they do or how it's different from anyone else.

 

They've not done the work, nor have their previous marketing partners, of marking out like a dog a playground, its territory. They've not done the work of un-parity-izing their offering.

 

In politics, too.

 

If you're the same as everyone else by definition it means you have nothing to say.

 

So stand on a chair and scream it.

I am perfectly bland and I stand for nothing, pick me!

 

In other words, make a spectacle of yourself.

 

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is doing the opposite. And entering our sixth year in business, we are earning more revenue by defining and differentiating clients than 186 of Ogilvy's 144 offices.

 

I don't want to choose a beer, or a vacation, or a car, or an anything based on spectacle. I might remember your name for a bit. But there's a good chance I'll associate you with excess, profligacy and waste.

 

I like a good joke.

I like a nice production.

I even like celebrities.

But if those things aren't linked to an idea and a message, you're pissing money away.

 

I don't like that.

Fifty-nine Spots.

Someone, not me, counted how many commercials were on the Super Bowl broadcast emanating from the racist, sexist, fact-denying auspices of the Murdoch-owned Fox empire. 

They said there were 59.

For professional reasons, I had to watch them all. 

But now we're about one-hundred hours post-game and I scarcely remember a single one. The ones I do remember, pringles' mustache and little caesar's eyebrows, I remember only because they sickened me.

Unappetizing. I don't like hair in my ultra-processed food. I'm funny that way.

It's hard to be an old person and not look at the $560,000,000 of media time (an estimated 70 :30-second slots multiplied by $8,000,000) and not feel that the work could have been better. 

I went through some of the hundreds of spots I store on my hard-drive, and picked roughly 59--the same number aired on the Super Bowl. (I probably pasted more below. Some of them are parts of longer reels.)

Never-the-less, you decide.

Did things used to be better?

Or am I just an angry old man?

Or both?

Probably both.

OmniInterLieCom.

 

I've just read a regurgitated press-release in Ad Age. Ad Age, like Adweek, used to do legitimate reporting. When I was starting out in the business, you could read the trade-press and know who was growing, who was shrinking, who was hiring and who was firing. You can no longer get that information. Nor do you get any perspective.

When I started at Ogilvy my second tour in 2014, I believe they employed between 1000 and 2000 people in the New York office. I'd be shocked if they have more than 300 today. You'd expect changes of such muskian-magnitude would be reported upon. Instead, we get a whole lot of nothing, stories about "best places to work," or "articles" by a "publishing partner" i.e. an ad or a press release masquerading as content.

To my tired blue eyes the worst effect of all this is the effect it has on our language and on our relationship with the truth.

Somehow, CEOs who have eight-or-nine-figure compensation packages are using the Language of Plutocracy and they're getting away with firing thousands of people and closing dozens of agencies.

Here's the lede from the Ad Age/IPG press-release cited above:

Linguistically, the oligopoly holding companies have replaced the word "firing" with the word "restructuring." In an industry where about 75-percent of your costs are salaries, there's no way to save $250,000,000 without firing people. A lot of people.

Last week, the CEO of omnicom projected cost savings of $750,000,000 via a slightly more honest admission of, "post-merger job cuts and consolidation of back-office and operations." Wren's prevarication was much less subtle than Krakowsky's. Wren said, "cost savings will arise from streamlining holding company, middle office and regional positions, as well as from eliminating duplicative overhead, back-office, and third-party expenses across our larger combined global footprint.”

CUT TO A CROWDED CITY APARTMENT. KIDS SCREAMING IN BACKGROUND. THE WHOLE THING LOOKS LIKE THE CRATCHIT'S HOME UPDATED TO 21ST-CENTURY BROOKLYN.

PERSON 1:  No, honey. I wasn't fired after eight-years of seventy hour weeks. 

PERSON 2: Thank goodness, the kids...

PERSON 1: I was duplicative overhead, a back-office, and third-party expense, and was let-go across a larger combined global footprint.

PERSON 2: Oh, honey. I'm so proud of you.

Then there's this as re-press-released by Ad Age: When asked if the restructuring would lead to job cuts, the company provided a statement. 

“The goal is to design and implement the right organizational and operating structure to ensure we remain innovative and competitive. This work will change the composition of some teams as we look to invest in talent and technology capabilities in areas such as AI, identity resolution, content management platforms, commerce and data.”

Wren and Krakowsky have been in their jobs for a long time. If they were minding their stores in a manner worthy of their compensation, how could the companies they're ostensibly running have a combined $1,000,000,000 in duplicative and unnecessary costs?

This use of language--from two of the largest so-called "communications companies" in the world is jaw-dropping. It makes Orwell's Newspeak look genuine and truthful.

Firing thousands of people and calling it restructuring is like throwing out the garbage and saying "I'm restructuring egg shells, coffee grinds and banana peels."

Here are two more twisted statements from Krakowsky, a man set to pocket $49,000,000 if the purger/merger goes through.

Krakowksy attributed the fourth-quarter and full-year results [a large drop in revenue] to the “impact of account activity”

throughout the year.  ie "We lost accounts, revenue fell." Just like, "We poked a balloon with a pin, it popped."

And this Stalinist-coded lie, “We were on the wrong side of the outcome in defending a number of very significant media accounts.”  We were on the wrong-side aka "there were two sides, winners and losers. We lost."

CUT TO A BADLY-DESIGNED CONFERENCE ROOM IN AN NEARLY EMPTY OFFICE SPACE

ACCT PERSON 1:  How did the pitch go? Did we win?

ACCT PERSON 2 :  Yes, but we were on the wrong side of the outcome.

 
Here's one more take on the holding company whose lead agency used to have "Truth Well Told" as their slogan. I pulled the visual below from the Ad Age press-release I started this post with. Look past the hackiness of the concept and design. Focus on the lies in the words.

Don't get sick on your Mac.
There's no app for that.

Land of the Fee.

There's practically a truism in the ad-business, the steaming remains thereof, that the richer the client, the less they want to pay for services.

This must be a side-effect of the MBA-mania that's ruined amerika for all-but the wealthiest .25-percent of the one-percent: no one deserves any money except the people who least need it. 

On the other hand, most things you buy, from a cable plan, to a phone plan, to a hotel room, to an airline seat, tack on a variety of fees that are wholly un-optional if you have the scent of humanity about you or are completely un-optional in most-circumstances.

While I'm visiting my younger daughter in San Diego, I'm staying at an nominally over-priced but shitty Hyatt Regency. The room rate is bad enough, but then completely un-optionally, they add on a resort fee of $35/day. 

These sorts of fees are everywhere today. I think president Biden tried to make an issue during a speech about "junk fees." Here are just a few examples according to US News and World Report, a magazine I haven't read since Richard Nixon (speaking of junk) was president.

Not too many minutes ago, I text-bitched to an industry friend of mine about a negotiation I started having with a prospective client. Though this client earns literally billions in revenue, somehow my prices were way beyond their willingness to pay. 

My friend wrote something like, "those mofos don't get out of bed for less than $25K. So F them."

But business is business and as I once over-heard the ex-CFO of Ogilvy say, "there's nothing bad you can say about revenue." 

With that in mind, I wonder if it's time to lower GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company's fees, but compensate by adding additional "hidden" charges.

Here are a few I'm thinking about.

• Resort fee. If you've resorted to talking to GeorgeCo., you should surely be charged extra for it.
• Baggage fee. A fee to assure that I leave behind all my emotional baggage.
• Freeces fee. A fee to not have to deal with the usual big agency feces.
• Clarity fee. A fee for not making you pay for 128-page powerpoints that are, in the words of Shakespeare, most often, tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
• You see, fee. A charge for the breadth of GeorgeCo's knowledge, erudition and references.
• Laffee. Why shouldn't I charge extra for that most valuable of reactions: laughter.
• ClichéFree fee. An extra charge because I promise never to use banalities like "circle back," "robust," or "transparent," in either creative or while chatting.
• Fat fee. A fee for assuring that dead-weight never comes to a meeting.
• Celebrifee. A small additional charge for an actual idea and not using a celebrity (or his eyebrows) to overwhelm your product.
• Small-talk fee. GeorgeCo., makes none. You'll gladly pay for the silence.
• Tro-fee. A charge for work that's focused on genuine business results rather than award-trophies.
• C-fee. An additional charge to keep GeorgeCo., LLC, 100-percent CEO-free.
• Coveefee. My largest additional charge. For incoherence.

We'll start with these for now. 

I'm sure more will come to me, that is, if with these fees in place I don't become a ripe takeover target for whatever holding company is willing to pay the fee.

Two Books.

Of all the things that frighten me about the modern world, the worst to my eyes might be this: I think we're forgetting how to be human. We're forgetting what it means to be human. I think we're normalizing that it's ok not to be human, and not to treat others as if they are human.

There are two books I'm thinking of right now. Both were written in the aftermath of World War II, when half the world had decreed that another half of the world was not, in fact, human. 

You know, something like today.

The first was written by the great German philologist Viktor Klemperer. He was captive as a Jew in Germany (he wasn't murdered because he was married to a non-Jew and somehow got dispensation, though his rations were limited and he was sentenced to live in "Jew house".) Klemperer wrote a book called "Lingua Tertii Imperium," in English, "The Language of the Third Reich."

Not too many years from now, someone will write for amerika and for the marketing industry, a book similar to Klemperer's. 

Maybe it will be called "The Language of the Plutocrats," or "The Language of Surveillance Capitalism," or trumplishIn any event, it's there for us to see. People today are targets. Or users. We have to accept terms and conditions--often thousands of words of dense legalese--before we order take-out. We have to accept self-violation (identity-theft and tracking) in order to buy something online. 

If you think I'm being hyperbolic, read a stern timesheet email from your company. Or listen to an inflight announcement. Or think how seven commercials are piped in over a plane's loud-speaker and you have no way of opting out. You've paid for your seat, and a charged once more for your captivity, against any will you have left. Because someone believes selling you another credit card is more important to your right to be left un-sold-to. 

This is inhuman treatment.

And the list is nearly endless.

The second book is called "The Parnas," and it's by the great Italian psychiatrist and one of the world's foremost authorities on schizophrenia, Silvano Arieti.

Arieti was a Jew in Pisa, Italy, about to be murdered by a Nazi lieutenant. Like me, Arieti believes in the ancient idea of "Lycanthropy." That is a delusion or a reality that a human can transform into a wild animal, usually a wolf. 

I'm fine with you thinking I'm crazy. But lycanthropy has been around for almost as long as human history. Arieti saw that Nazi turn into a wolf before his eyes, snarling and feral. I've seen it too. Up-close and lupine.

And not for nothing have we all seen about 22,008 movies called "The Wolf Man."

I think when politicians say people are eating dogs, or are carrying bacilli, or are from shithole countries, or are a somewhat lesser species, it's evidence of real-life lycanthropy. I think when people are fired by fax after working for a company for twenty years, that too is evidence of lycanthropy. I think when 5,000 people are fired so one person can be granted a $49,000,000 pay package, that is also lycanthropy.

I know lycanthropy is weird to believe in. Just as my ersatz-Klemperer-like linguistic mania are also hard to take.

That's ok.

I'm just being human. 

Tells.

If I had to again work at an agency, or freelance for an agency, or somehow be involved in a TV production, I'd enter the assignment looking for certain tells.

Tells: those signs that let you know the stuff someone is made of or what they're thinking before they're even thinking it.

Tells in baseball might be a pitcher who sticks out his tongue as he's preparing to snap off a curve. In cards, it might be someone involuntarily raising an eyebrow as he looks at his hand. In politics, it might be a politician who kicks a kid when he thinks no one is looking.

In the ad industry, there are as many tells as there are smells.

68-page powerpoints are a tell.

Trademarked processes for ideation.

People who use the word ideation.

For me, the most blatant tell is people who call commercials "films."

If you hear someone do so, I'd run from the scene as fast as I'd run from a doctor who says "this won't hurt a bit." Or a stock-broker who's selling a "sure thing." Or a politician who says he's for restoring law and order.

Anyone who calls a commercial a "film" is a pompous twit. Worse, they don't understand the distinction between art and commerce. A distinction fundamental to the very purpose of advertising.

In advertising, we do commercials. 

Commercials are moving images meant to convey information and create a feeling that make you want to buy something or try something. 

Films have a much more elevated purpose. Involving art and beauty, and the kind of truth that is on a plane higher than a mere product truth.

I saw this Volvo commercial the other day and can't brush the taste of pretense out of my mouth. Creating a commercial about a car that fits "all your yous" and expecting it to be regarded as non-generic, that is a commercial that could be for any car ever made, is ludicrous. 

But the sequence that really gets me lasts an interminable amount of time between seconds :15 and :18. The "film" match cuts different circles. The spinning of a car tire, a bike tire, the turning of a knob, pottery on a wheel, the circular Volvo logo.

I can hear the blind Greek chorus of agency people and clients marveling at that spinning symmetry and saying aloud, "that's a beautiful film." 

The problem I have is that I can't see any purpose behind the chosen images. They tell me nothing about the car or the car company except that maybe they don't understand what people want from a car. They also tell me that no one involved in the spot understands how people watch TV. There's nothing in that sequence, or any of the other 720-frames of film, that tells me anything unique, interesting or anything that might make me look up or think.

My sense of most of the world today is that we're too interested in doing cool things or talking about the latest cause célebrè to focus on what's important. 

We're making films. 
Not selling products.

Not searching for that truth that makes something worthwhile. That makes something stand out.

We're trying to out "beauty," or out "poetry," and somewhere along the way "out-real and out-relevant and out-empathize" have gotten lost.

We seem, as an industry, to care more about the films we make than the people we serve.

That's the most shocking tell of all.