Ergonomics. Not Economics.

I do not do yoga. 

I probably should.

But I'm too stiff-necked and old to start.

In any event, after a lifetime in advertising, I've developed two yoga positions that serve me well. And have served me well for over two decades.

But first a bit of employment background.

The best workers divide their job into three parts. 

I learned this back when I was a paperboy in 1968 and 1969. It's sad that jobs like paperboy don't exist anymore, because beyond making $12/week you learned a ton. And you learned to work in a teeming downpour when no one wants to work. Especially if you didn't have parents to drive you around. So you got on your bike, you pedaled your route and you got soaking wet.

No harm done.

Even someone like me eventually dried.

The main thing I learned was the "circuitry" of work. Someone good at their job divides it into three parts, like Caesar did with Gaul. "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres."

1. Finding--getting new customers/clients/subscribers.

2. Minding--keeping current customers happy--answering complaints and fixing issues. Going an extra yard.

3. Grinding--as above, doing your work even when it's like pushing water up-hill.

Most people don't want to do all three. Especially grinding. They hope to "level-up" out of it. They hope to not have to come through when it's crunch-time. There are peons for that, after all. A CCO said to me once, "I don't want to have to crack it anymore." Cracking it takes grinding.

Most jobs permit let you opt out. They blithely separate the grinders from the big wigs, the finders. Nothing could be dumber. The best big wigs I ever worked with were among the best grinders. 

Grinding is a necessary pre-condition for goodness.

If you don't do it you forget how to do it.

Back to yoga positions.

The first move I ever developed was "head-down, hand-up." 

Fig A.
Head down. Hand up.

As long as I've been working, we're always in the middle of a giant deliverable. More often than not because other people would flake, I'd write twelve of the eighteen ads in the deck, and six of the twelve spots. And most of the background, introduction and slideware. I'd keep my head-down and grind work out. Tonnage matters.

My bosses through the years were always under a lot of pressure. When to-do's were parceled out, they'd often have the 12-page or the 8-page manifesto to write. I'd always have my hand-up in the form of a quick email. 'If you wanna pass off half those pages to me, I'm up for it." I had my hand-up. 

I remember a boss coming to me once and saying, "you always have your hand up." That's a good thing.

If you ever wonder how to elevate yourself, how to get better, bigger assignments, raising your hand is one way. I have a catch-phrase that captures me. I turn the assignments nobody wants into the work they wish they did.

That's not a bad way to think about hand-raising.

Fig. B.
Heart. Head. Hand.

The other position is the one that's not allowed in modern ad agencies because it involves not creative "machinery," but actual human thinking.

Since the beginning of human-time, roughly 20,000 years ago to the machine age 175 years ago, all work has involved a synchronization of three parts of your body.

Your heart (what you desire). Your head (how you'll figure it out). Your hand (actually making it). 

I want a plowed field. I can use this scythe. Here's me scything.

Clovis points were humans' primary tools for
almost half of human existence. 

If you think about making clovis points, or weaving a basket, or scything a field, or even writing a song, your heart, head and hand were involved.

Today, in advertising, we've seemed to eliminate the heart--we usually turn to machines and "personas" or archetypes, not empathy. 

We've eliminated the head--data does the thinking for us, or the thinking has been done in a deck. We don't use our heads.

We've eliminated the hands--AI can take a better photo or shoot a better film, or some manipulation of pixels can create something flawless. We forget that our hands make flaws which are what makes work human.

So, as for yoga, once a day, stand as above for a moment. Think about your three Hs. 

And get to work.

These Boots Were Made for Leaking.

As I write this, it's nominally George Washington's birthday, you know, the father of our country.

In amerika, we haven't for about fifty years, celebrated most holidays on the days they were intended to be celebrated. We've shifted holidays around so we can enjoy three-day weekends.

When I was a boy, there was a little sketch of Lincoln on the calendar square marked February 12th, his birthday. There was a Washington figure just ten days later on February 22nd. We took both days off, ostensibly to honor important amerikans.

These days, only a few holidays have stayed in place. Like Christmas, the 4th of July, and New Year's. But many more have lost their original meaning in a flurry of barbecues, mattress sales, and time off from work.

I've always been against time shifting, believing that we should actually think about the things that make a country a country, not just beer and a day off. But that integrity was lost long ago. How long, I wonder, until we start holding "Martin Luther King 'I Have a Dream' mattress sales?"

There's a bigger point here, I think. And it somehow has to do with efficiency. 

As a MBA-sullied culture, we are always looking for efficiencies. How can we do task A with few steps, quicker, so we can get more done for less money? With a grain of salt, that's essentially the operating principle of everything today no matter what. From dating, to divorce. From manufacturing, to creation. From hiring to firing. 

How can we do it cheaper and faster?

[By the way, if doing everything cheaper and faster is your modus operandi, eventually everything is cheap and fast. And so fast that it's no longer cheap (because you have to do it over again) and so cheap that it's no longer fast (because you have to do it many times.]

You might now consider Terry Pratchett's "Boots Theory," above. It might take a little cogitation to make it fit here, but I think it might.

The expedience of convenience--I'll say it absolutely--has destroyed the advertising industry.

Because while you can efficiency-ize making brass screws or bolts, or even a clock, you can't efficiency-ize having an idea.

Clients and agencies rush and do it cheaply and badly, and so have to do it every few months as their business and people flee the premises. I wonder if anyone involved in the Omni-IPG merger can read.

What's more, "Just in Time" manufacturing might work for an assembly line. But it doesn't work for human resources. Today, every agency is 88-percent staffed by freelancers, hired at a peak of frenzy and fired at the first sign of frenzy-abatement.

A friend of mine works as a freelancer. He's always booked and always unbooked at the same time. It doesn't matter what the workload, the only thing that matters is the margin. 

I dunno, somehow managing to margin not quality or even efficacy seems a product of the same thinking that moves holidays around, tosses away their social-glue meaning, and thinks it's all ok because it's good for business.

The thing is expedience is rarely good for business. Actually, it's rarely good for anything. As above, you'll wind up with wet feet, maybe pneumonia and maybe in a hospital, with no health-care coverage because it's more expedient to just deny coverage to all for the benefit of the few.

One thing I've learned along the way is that there are no shortcuts. I'm about the fastest creative you'll ever meet, but not because I do things slap-dash, but because I never stop working and thinking about what needs to be done. There are times, of course, I feel like phoning it in. Everybody feels that way now and again.

As a human, as an agency, as a husband, a father, a friend, I provide, as above, $50 boots.

Yeah, paying me sucks.

But not as bad as not paying me.

Perspective.

One of the problems of the world--and there are no shortage of problems--is "present-ism."

We think the age we're living in is the peak. 

The most-important.

The scariest.

The worst. Or even the worsterest.

The most dire and cataclysmic.

We think the age we're living in faces the most existential of all threats the world has ever faced.

We think the now matters.

That we are approaching the 'end times.'

Such is the ego-centricity of humanity.

We think we are important.

My children might say this to me today.

"So what the Russians were pointing 10,000 nukes at you and the Chinese 5,000 more. So what you had a mad president who claimed all you needed to survive a nuclear exchange was a shovel and a foot of dirt. So what, today we have __________."

In his new-ish book "Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World," Dorian Lynskey writes:

"The corpus of end-of-the-world stories is immense and ever-growing. In the past decade or so, we have seen dramas, horrors, war movies, comedies and satires; sitcoms, animations  and songs; TV shows based on comic books, computer games  and bestselling novels . 

"These stories are increasingly pessimistic: the comet hits, the zombies reign, the planet burns. ... There is simply no end of ends."

Living in the present sucks if you haven't the historical acuity and apprehension to understand that life on earth--everywhere and at all times--has always had a huge helping of horror, misery and doom. They are the "forever chemicals" of life on earth.

If you don't read history--or even think about life when your parents were young or your kids--you acquire a certain ego-centricity that could lead you to traipse to the side of suicide.

When I was at Ogilvy, along with a bunch of other senior people, I was sent to David's Castle in Touffou, France. A 12th-century chateau complete with a dungeon, a chapel and its own moat. 

I remember standing against an old stone wall with another writer. It was summertime and we were wearing shorts, our knees against the ancient stones. He said, "When this wall was built, if you scraped your knee, you could die."

Comrade Lenin famously said, "There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen." 

Clearly today, under the projectile-vomistration of trumpism, decades seem to happen every minute. Decades of cruelty and injustice that undoes so much of what so many have believed in for so long.

Bringing this back to advertising--the nominal topic of this blog--we have lived over the past 30 years through centuries of change. I have sat in so many meetings, have heard about so many trends, technologies, channels, gizmos and fads that were the sine qua non of changing-everything-ness that it leads me to believe that a lot of these so-called earth-shaking events weren't even tremors. They were cosmic farts that evaporated before they could clear the room.

I think most of the horrors of today will fizzle about as quickly as Google+, the Metaverse or the Omnicom-IPG merger. Sure jobs and maybe fortunes will be lost--people will be hurt. But life will go on.

As the great historian and two-time Pulitzer-prize winner Barbara Tuchman once said,

The whole thing is worth clipping and saving. Because the saving might be saving your sanity.

But especially mind this thought, which I've edited. (When you run a famous blog, you have permission to sully Pulitzer-winners.)

"The persistence of normal is strong."

Try to keep that in mind.

Try to keep your mind in mind.

Stop minding the "news," which is designed to frighten you.

Frightened you = controlled you.

Pay it no mind.

 

Crying Out Loud.

I don't believe in god and never have.

Certainly not the bearded anglo patriarch that's come down to us from Renaissance art. And not the god you find in synagogues or homilies or Hallmark. Or emblazoned on our currency as an entity we're meant to trust, when we trust only currency, and not enough not to choose to make an alternate fake currency so we can launder our original currency.

I don't know who said it, so hand it to me. I'm not sure god exists, but if he, she or it does, they're an under-achiever. 

That is, 'yo, bro. Where you been?'

I just can't get over doing nothing while people slaughter other people. If you're not an under-achiever, I mean. In corporate amerika, it happens every day. But corporate amerika is "where underachievers go to succeed.™"

In any event someone I don't know--a good writer, but a struggling one (if that's not synonymous) just sent me an email. I don't know this guy. I've never spoken to him. But he opened up to me like a transfusion.

And that made me think about god. 

And my almost fifty years in this industry.

It was just before Yom Kippur, and I was fired by the worst agency I had ever worked at, FCB. 

The worst agency by far.

So, naturally I was fired for being "insubordinate." 

When they told me I was insubordinate, I probably answered, "I thought we were supposed to be insubordinate."

In any event, it was just before the Jewish New Year. I felt alone and friendless--as I feel so often. I had no money in the bank. No parents to speak of. No safety net. Worse, I had let my advertising portfolio get old. 

I felt irrelevant.

What's more, I had rent to pay on a decent Upper East Side apartment, and two young daughters in expensive New York City private schools. Without losing my job my margin for financial error was already razor-thin. Losing my job made that margin anorexic-razor-thin.

I wandered lost and lonely as Wordsworth's cloud, and came back to my desk and someone--or god--had left a book on the desk I was in the middle of clearing out.

There was no note, no sign, just this book.

And here, with a prettier, but less legible cover.

My newly old office was just across the street from Grand Central, and I thought about weeping, but being too strong for my own good, I went home and kept myself together.

We keep ourselves together too much.

This morning when I got the email from the writer I don't know, I wrote him back. I can't always write back--I'm already taking care of a lot of people. But for whatever reason, I wrote back to this stranger:

I wrote.

Try crying in a public space.

Really.

Let it pour out of you.

Feel it.

Good will come from that.

And I sent him a cover shot of the book above.

When I finally cried after being fired that time, I was sitting on the broad, bluestone steps leading up to the Central Park reservoir's running track. I sat achey and tired from my six miles, and sweaty and mostly scared.

What would become of me? Was I stupid for running when I should be looking for work? Was I just a big fat failure who couldn't care for himself much less an entire family, and two young girls I was hoping I could give more than was ever given me.

I sat down and wept. 
And wept.

People looked at me like you'd look at a one-winged pigeon or a squirrel who had gotten a foot nabbed by a glue-trap somehow. They looked at me though I tried to notice not them looking, but me weeping.

I don't know how long I sat on those steps. 
I don't know when I decided to pick myself up, tuck in my t-shirt,
stand up straight and walk home.

I don't know when I dried my tears and put on my face.

I don't know what happened to those tears.

I do know they worked.

I do know, it's good sometimes to let yourself weep.
And who cares if the world knows.

Strip-Mining Humanity.

A friend whom I've never met, we're connected on LinkedIn and we exchange notes, sent me this quotation the other day. That's one of the weird things about life today. If you have a big social footprint like I do, you have "relationships" with people you're almost sure you'd like to know IRL, but you never will.

There's nothing wrong with that. Just the way of the world, like an old movie with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan falling in love in old Budapest, from Lubitsch's "Shop Around the Corner."

My friend Kathy, my ersatz Margaret Sullavan, sent me this on Saturday. Admittedly, if you know me even vaguely, you'd know that the modus operandi described below is the kind of thing that sets me off. 

Actually, it's probably the kind of thing that sets everybody off. At least everybody awake enough to realize what's happening in our world and our industry.

What's happening in the world is simple.

You are no longer a human with human rights.

You are a passel of data.

The cow below could be slaughtered and butchered into eighteen constituent parts. But you could sell each of those parts only once.

You, as a passel of pixels can be sliced and diced, sold and resold in-perpetuity. Mr. Potter screamed at George Bailey in Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," "George Bailey, you're worth more dead than alive." Well, dear reader, you're worth more as binary code than you are as a biped. And you are being sold over and over again.

I removed myself from two of the world's leading child-trafficking sites two months ago (Facebook and Instagram) yet still get almost daily emails from them telling me someone posted something. Which is news in the same way "wave crashes on shore," is news. They have me email. They think they own me. 

Or, as The Wall Street Journal noted:

As advertising people, of course, we are complicit in all this. We work for and we therefore support the giant octopus of surveillance capitalism, where at least one tentacle is gripping your genitals, one your privacy and six or eight more (they are countless) your bank-accounts.

I was always amused by the agency people talking about saving the world with fake ads for fake clients to win fake awards, while what 99.7-percent of most advertising has so stolen our independence and souls and while we're flapping our gums about changing the world, we are sullying it with yet another BOGO banner ad, devoid of wit, craft, kindness or any trace of humanity. 

Treating the world as an extractive industry is everywhere today. The giant oligopolies come in. They strip mine away everything of value. They leave economic and environmental despoilation in their wake. 

They grow richer, more powerful, more evil.

There's little avoiding this.

Some years ago when my best friend Fred was still alive we used to watch old boxing matches on YouTube. I was always a Joe Louis man. Fred's tastes ran to Muhammad Ali.

I watched a video of the fight and reported back to Fred.

"Was it horribly brutal," he asked. "I can't really take these fights anymore."

"The most brutal thing about the fight was the announcer referring to both fighters as 'boys,'" I answered.

That's what I mean about the prevalence of evil. It's in our bloodstream and veins. It's so infiltrated we no longer notice it. Like calling men boys. Or treating the world like a victim.

I don't have an answer. I don't know a way out. Except to redouble your own humanity. Except to say daily, "etiam si omnes, ego non." Even if all others, not I.

Get off social. Stop passing things on and spreading muskism or zuckerism or bezosism, or their active-ingredient, trumpism.

Remind yourself that everything they say is a lie. 

They're not coming for you. They already have you.

All this from an email from an unknown friend.

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.