Fool Me Once.

About 15 years ago when I was an ECD at R\GA (if you have brain cells left, you might remember calculations like what follows) the hot metric among digital agencies was "Facebook likes." People in the agency and at at the client would routinely state that their advertising goal was to get the client to "one-million Facebook likes."

Outside of improving your Klout score, getting your client Facebook likes was the sine qua non of marketing success.

This was before Facebook had gone full-fascist and before it assumed the mantle of the world's #1 Child-Trafficking site. These were simpler times.

The brand I ran was a financial services company that specialized in helping people with their retirement planning. Their average customer was about 60 and had a couple of million dollars saved up. Their aided brand awareness was seven-percent.

There was a UI or UX or CX -guy or whatever in my group who disliked my "traditional" orientation. He was the sort person who declared everything "broken" or "dead." Especially if it wasn't popular in a four square-block section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 

He was heavily into artisanal mayonnaise.

Who isn't?

He went to the Chief Operating Officer of the agency to complain about my old skool-ness. How I wanted to raise awareness via TV that drove referrals, not via Facebook likes.

I was called on the carpet tiles for that.

Emboldened, this guy said, once again, "we have to get Facebook likes."

I exhaled through my mouth, and mouthed the words of Jack Palance in "Shane." "Prove it," I said. "Show me one brand that's converted Facebook likes to brand value and I'm in like Flynn. I'll do whatever you say." 

Once again I was called on the carpet. 

But, such is my strength (or weakness) I never relented.

On Friday there was an article in The New York Times called "The GenX Career Meltdown."

The article is the usual bemoanization about how everything we once had is gone and obsolete and eviscerated by the rapacious saliva of Pervert Equity and perverting silicon germanium technology. 

There was nothing new in the article. It made me glad my father forced me, at a stupidly young age, to take speed-reading lessons. I can still get up to one-thousand words a minute when I need to, with little loss of comprehension. Such a facility comes in handy when you're fed a giant nutburger of words.

The first thing that occurs to me that's wrong headed is GenX (or any gen) as a helpless victim of giant financial forces. You can't really have victims without perpetrators. For every murder victim, there is a murderer. And for every GenX-er (or any other gen-er) thrown out of work, there is a banker or a c-suiter in an eighteen-room Park Avenue apartment along with eleven acres in Wainscott, New York or maybe the Vineyard. 

Part two pertains to my story above.

We have decimated agencies and agency staffing. We have turned the work agencies used to do over to equations we obtusely call algorithms, though I'd imagine roughly 97.9-percent of people who use the word algorithm have no idea what the word means. They use the word the way Beckett used the word "void." As in "There's no lack of void."

No one is saying what I said to the CX or UX or UI guy I described above. No one says, "Prove it. Show me one brand that's built brand value based on Large Language Models and plastic manipulated stock photos and I'll hang up my spikes. Show me one brand that's using AI and creating a brand people like and I'm with you."

No one asks. 

No one challenges the dominant complacency that machines can do it better. We're all just going scuba diving with tanks filled (by ourselves) with carbon monoxide. Every day we hear about the splendors wrought by AI on customer service, via phone trees, via bots. We hear how fast and cheap ads are. No one has the wisdom or temerity to say, "but they suck." "But they might be doing more damage than they're creating." 

Every time I hear about the "right message at the right time," I say "when?" I've yet to get the right message at the right time. Even when I proposed to my wife.

As Chico said, "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" We believe the power of money against our own powers of observation.

Maybe the math works because everything in the world today is under monopoly control and so offers exactly the same product at exactly the same price and there's no place you can buy from that's any different. That's certainly true of holding company ad agencies.

You can't find a good airline or ad agency or telco or cable company or rent-a-car or hardware store or political party or restaurant. They're all the same. 

But sooner or later, alternatives will green shoot from out of the desiccated terrain. Sooner or later someone will realize that not everything you eat needs to have been frozen first and shipped 14,000 miles. Not everything you buy needs to work like shit. Not every ad has to suck.

Whatever gen you are, gen-erate the will to fight. To not accept. To resist.

In an era of universal technology, being a human is a revolutionary act.

Revolt.

Robert Frost won four Pulitzer-prizes for poetry. To my ancient and glaumy eyes that means he might be worth considering at times.

He wrote in "The Mending Wall,"

Maybe we can think about the algorithm he describes and repurpose it for today.

Over the course of my five decades in advertising, I've never once had someone within the agency or a client do something "because I said so." Even that old parent joke, "because I'm your father, that's why," never really worked for me.

But when it comes to AI and other unproven technologies wiping out whole industry, we buy the notion without a shred of proof. We buy the efficacy of the algorithm on faith.

We buy it on faith.

Which is what suckers do when charlatans sell them a bill of goods.

They pay full price.

Shop elsewhere.

There Is a Season. Turner, Turner, Turner.

I was first introduced to JMW Turner in September, 1979. 

I was in a graduate seminar at Columbia University. I forget the name of the course and even the professor's name (though he, to a degree, changed my life.) 

I was just 21 and it was the first time I had a literature teacher make me look past the words on the page into the tectonic happenings of the world and how those happenings were influencing everything around them.

The painting was "Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway." And I had never seen anything like it. 

Have you?

All at once we could see the tumult of the industrial age.

The New York Times runs a periodic column called "10-Minute Challenge." In it they ask you to look, closely, at a painting without distraction for a full ten-minutes. Here's their piece on Bruegel's "Hunters in the Snow."

The thinking behind the Times' column is a useful reminder of how rare it is to actually focus, and think, and examine, and think some more and then, importantly, to follow the interstices of your thinking. You know, where one thing leads to another, like falling in love.

I remember back to the hot of 1979, New York falling apart, four years after bankruptcy, two years after the violence and burning of the 1977 black-out riots. I remember listening to the great Columbia radio station, WKCR, and their disc jockey Phil Schap. He was the world's leading authority on Yardbird Parker. Schap's show "Bird Flight," provided the soundtrack for the crazy, runaway train of New York when I was a boy.

I realized then, you can't listen to Bach in New York. It's too orderly. It has to be Bird. 

Today, as I write this, I am an old man. Prior to my cataract surgeries, which take place on April 9 and 16, I am practically blind in my left eye. My right eye is holding out, but I'm having it done on the second date, before the trump cataclysm takes away the healthcare I've been paying taxes for since 1962, when I, as a "child star" in TV commercials, joined SAG-AFTRA and paid my own way for coverage before Medicare was even passed. 

I'm thinking lately of JMW Turner, because back in February, 2024, Yale University republished a facsimile of his last sketchbook. If you have just a few of the ten-minutes I mentioned above, you can browse a digital replica of those sketches. 

I came back from a seaside walk last week, soaking from a light drizzle that turned heavy. My wool baseball cap taunted me. Its brim held the rain, and when I least expected it, a cold drop would land on my face. It made me crile--cringe and smile at the same time.

When I entered our small house I ran downstairs into my book-lined office and grabbed my copy of Turner's notebooks. I leafed through it.

Yep.

Fifty years after my first Turner, Turner is how my cataracts occlude my world.

I see now in JMW Turner.

I've never seen with such clarity.

Drip. 

The Naked and the Clothed. An Accounting.

You feel naked.   

You have been axed from a job and 

you feel all alone.

But you're clothed.       

You have been axed from a job and you have decades of friends and connections who care.      

You feel naked.   

You no longer have a paycheck every week.

But you're clothed. 

You can now earn money from lots of different places. And for every hour you work.

You feel naked.  

You no longer have a client.

 

But you're clothed.   

Every client you've ever worked with and helped (many) is potentially your client again.

You feel naked.   

You're not quite sure how you'll fill 

all the hours of the day.

But you're clothed. 

You won't be filling them in mindless meetings and bureaucratic beatings.  

You feel naked.  

Your Microsoft calendar is blank for the first time since you started using Microsoft calendar. 

But you're clothed. 

You can take a walk, pick up the kids from school, and work according to what you need and when you need it.  

You feel naked.  

There's no one telling you what to do. 

But you're clothed.  

You haven't needed someone telling you what to do for about fifteen years.

You feel naked. 

You're alone. No office mates. 

No friends in the cafeteria.  

But you're clothed.    

You have more friends--who care--than you
ever imagined possible. 

And no cafeteria.

You feel naked.   

You haven't gotten a project
or even a nibble in a week.

But you're clothed.  

Next week you might get eight.
Or twelve.

You feel naked.  

You have no extrinsic 'status.'
No agency name behind you, no title. 

But you're clothed. 

You have the three things you need
to be successful.
1) Your network.
2) Your portfolio.
3) Your reputation.

You feel naked.  

You're scared. 

But you're clothed.  

You're pinching yourself.  

You feel naked.  

You wonder how you lasted so long.

But you're clothed.  

You wonder what took you so long.  

The Unmistakable Metaphor.

One of my strengths as a writer or, stretching it a bit, a creative person, is my gift (or curse) of metaphor. Professionally, I'm often charged with explaining difficult ideas or solutions. Metaphor often answers the bell. That last bit in itself is a metaphor.

Even as a father, you're faced with similar obstacles. Often, the best way to make something complicated understood is by comparing that complication to something people already grasp.

Not long ago, I wrote this about the fleeting nature of a technology advantage in business.

When I was a boy, I taught my baby sister the rudiments of fractions using the different sections of a Hershey bar to explain the different pieces of a whole number. (I haven't had a Hershey bar in a while. In those days a nickel bar was divided into 16 pieces.)

In short, I'm good at metaphors. 

Almost as good as I am at dad jokes. Like the one about the guy who's taken up two new hobbies: taxidermy and explosives. He once made an otter you can't defuse.

Even at the doddering old-age of 67--just three years from the Bible's "three score and ten" -- I am still trying to figure out how the world works. Like Dashiell Hammett's Flitcraft in his great novel "The Maltese Falcon," I am still trying to take the lid off life and “look at the works.”

Metaphors help here, too.

Just now I read a book review in "The Wall Street Journal," of a new book called Unreliable: Bias, Fraud, and the Reproducibility Crisis in Biomedical Research" by Csaba Szabo. 

Reading the review, I couldn't help but wonder if the book's title  could "metaphored" into "Unreliable: Cheating, Fraud, Fakery and the Demise of Advertising Efficacy."

In particular, I saw in these two passages from the Journal's review, parallels to the industry's-awards-mania.

The WSJ writes:

Ad Aged rewrites:

The WSJ goes on:

Ad Aged rewrites:

When Advertising worked, advertising worked. Rolled up its sleeves and worked. (BTW, I once had a fight with an ECD telling me to add a call to action. I said "the whole ad is a call to action. What will adding "learn more" do besides muck it up?" I was fired from that job for being insubordinate. But do any of these ads need a learn more button?

Famous agency brands were built on the advertising work they did to make real brands famous. The best agencies had a certain "inextricable-ness" with the best brands. 

They had no "one-offs." There was no, as mentioned above, "reproducibility crisis." Day after day, year after year, team after team, ad after ad, brands (and agencies) were built. Yesterday I saw some work hailing the ugliness of oatmeal. It's a stunt and a one-off. And if it ever ran in the wild, I'd be shocked. We are writing academic papers so to speak, for our peers, that make no difference outside of our closed loop.

Whereas:

DDB--VW.
Scali--Volvo.
Ally--FedEx.
Chiat--Apple.
Wieden--Nike.
TBWA--Absolute.
Ammirati--BMW.

Leo Burnett--Kellogg's.

DKG--Talon Zippers.

The list is long. 
The list was without fakery and awards' jockeying.

Today, agencies seem to be places brands go to die. 

I can't think of anything today (excepting Apple/TBWA and Nike/Wieden) that comes close to anything like these. 

Ads that built brands and agencies. That didn't need to fake results.

(h/t to Brian Burch for his efforts in posting great ads.)

Snappy Snappy Answers.

 On Friday, March 21st, my elder daughter had her second son. Mother, daughter, father, first son, and puppy are doing well. As are the maternal grandparents.

So on Saturday, my wife was like me when I played ball.

Man, I couldn't wait to get up to bat and take my swipes at the old horsehide. It was all I could think about.

As Senator Claghorn from the old Fred Allen radio show might have said, my wife's "tongue was waggin' like a blind-dog's tail in a meat market."

She just couldn't wait to drive the 125 miles to Boston, hug all involved and drive back to our sturdy (formerly ramshackle) cottage on the Gingham Coast. 

So, without benefit of lunch or toilette, we fired up our aging car and dodged the Spring potholes to the Hub of the Universe. 

A lot of people ask me, "George, how have you written a blog every working day for nearly eighteen years?" I usually give the same reply. 

I say, if you were a baseball scout in a rich territory, like the Dominican Republic or Southern California, you'd quickly realize that around every corner could be the next Clemente. A blink could cost you a five-tool-player. So you learn to be always on, always aware, always with your note-book and check-book. Always observing.

It's the same with being in advertising. Or writing a blog. Or to be vainglorious about it, being a writer.

The sins of the Fodder are visited upon the children. In other words, you don't take a blink off if you're looking for an idea--and you should always be looking for an idea.

I got one in the hospital on Saturday.

There was a chain food place (I won't call it a restaurant; it's hard enough to concede that though they sold things to eat that it was food.) It was a place called Panera, a part of a conglomerate called JAB that seems to hold dear (at least in the way they treat customers) to their Nazi-past.

You are met in the fluorescence by four dirty computer screens. Each festooned with offers (to buy the highest margin crap) none of which allow you to scroll to see the entirety of their limited menu.

Giving up on the screen, I grab from a luke-warm-erator case (it wasn't really refrigerated) two small orange juices, a yogurt cup with granola, two fruit cups and from the counter a bag of cookies for my son-in-law who has a sweet tooth. When I pick up the $7 orange juices my hands get sticky.

When I get to the checkout counter, an unshaven grunt grunts at me. He says "Thirty one dollars." I say, "Do you have iced-tea? It wasn't on the computer screen." He points to the back of the store. 

I hadn't been wise enough to bring my own cups so I ask him for two. He hands them to me. 

I now have seven items to carry. "Do you want a bag," he grunts. I feel like answering "No. I'm a cephalopod." But I don't bother to answer.

I walk to the iced-tea machine and fill my petroleum-based cups with ice and tea. I cannot find lids that aren't all stuck together or that fit. But finally, I make due.

Then I say to him. "How about utensils?" Because of course the napkins and sweeteners are in one place or two, with no spoons and forks to be found. He points in another direction like a weather vane having ingested lysergic acid or grain ergot. 

I grab my teas and by the forks I see an artificially-yellowed banana, roughly the temperature of an Arctic ice-core. I take it and put it into the bag.

"I'm stealing this and the ice-teas," I grunt at him. The Panera is in a hospital, and I suppose that's good, because he has no pulse. I walk out of the store having over-paid for seven items and stolen three. I am still, by my pecuniary acuity, in arrears. Not even counting Nazi-ism.

I walk back to see my daughter with $31 of crap plus stolen stuff, all of which tastes like shit.

I bring this all up in a blog on advertising, because in a sense ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That is, the development of an individual looks like the development of an entire species.

In other words, the same Pervert Equity MBAs who have efficiency-ized every food-outlet, airline, customer-service-bot, big-box store, and government bureaucracy have been, for about thirty years, loosed inside every ad agency and ad agency holding company.

The details are different.

The experience is the same.

The net-take-away is identical.

I am buying here. Though it sucks. Because everything sucks. And there's no place else. And the experience is so deadening, I no longer expect anything better anymore. I have been beaten to death by efficiency.

I'd imaging most clients feel this way dealing with BlandOcom or whatever they're called this week. 

Dirty and used.

And for all the purported cheapness and efficiency, ripped-off and time-stolen.

Yes, this is a metaphor. But I don't think it's exactly like reading something obtuse by Gerald Manly Hopkins or Ezra Pound in a psychosis. 

It's pretty easy to get.

We're so efficient we've made everything suck efficiently.

That's not a joke, son.

And They're All Following 'Best Practices.'

Just about everyday, or at least every month, yet another 100+ store retailer seems to go out of business. In the last couple of weeks two stores I've never visited, Joann's, which had 800 stores in 49 states, and Forever 21, which had 540 stores went belly-up.

Not to mention another agency. Usually one that's just won agency of the year, though it's lost 30-percent of its business and fired 52-percent of its people.

Sign my petition to replace the Bald Eagle as the symbol of amerika with a dead goldfish.

If you look at this Wikipedia site, (assuming your memory is all out of memory) you'll find a list of literally hundreds of stores from your past. They used to anchor malls across the country. Now they're liquidated and no more.

During my long years in the ad business, I only worked on two fast-food chains. And I never worked on a giant retail brand--though I spent two early years working for Bloomingdale's in-house advertising on the 11th Floor, way above the selling floors. There, I wrote ten ads a week, usually with scintillating headlines like "Save 30%-40% on plush cotton towels."

As for fast-food, I worked intermittently on Dunkin' Donuts and even more sporadically on Rax Roast Beef restaurants. While I did a brand commercial or two for Dunkin' (I helped introduce their low-fat muffins) most of what we did were :15s that filled a donut in a brand spot. "Now that we've made an airtight case for Dunkin' Donuts world-famous coffee, get this airtight case to 
keep it in."

Yippee.

If you go to the Wikipedia list above, I'd argue that just about all those retailers, and about one-thousand more I haven't included, did everything everyone said they were supposed to do.

They followed best-practices.

They had door-buster sales. Then door-buster savings events. Then door-buster BOGO hamentaschen-day savings events. They cut costs. They hired salespeople who barely sold and were even less likely people. 

In store, the merch looked like shit, you couldn't find out the difference between X and Y and you left feeling like you spent a lot of time for a lot of plasticine junk.

I'm tired of Kohls in my stockings. 

Today in the world, especially the marketing LinkedIn world, you hear all kinds of bushwa about brand and experience. It seems half the people in the industry are user experience people. 

But try to find something in a store (or online) that is from out of the top 20 SKUs. You can't. 

My wife often sends me to the 75-store grocery chain up here on the Gingham Coast. They claim to be A) "A world-class market." And B) "Family-owned." And C) Un-staffed.

I can do the entire 100-item shopping list in about 12 minutes. It takes me an hour to find the green lentils my wife needs. And there's never anyone to ask. Or to even ask when I check out if I've found everything I needed.

My sense is that almost every business in every vertical operates in the same manner. From the giant 40-brand hotel conglomerates (Like IHG or Marriott) to airlines to telcos to ISPs to Banks to Advertising Holding Companies.

Once you get past their purportedly door-busting prices, there's no brand in their brand.

There's only cheap. And purportedly efficient.

As efficient as moldering ever is.

And in case you haven't checked lately, efficient never is. Staffing is so lean, if one person in any store, bank, agency or what not takes a bathroom break or calls in sick, the whole "streamlined" operating goes up in cheap Chinese smoke.

This is all to say simply that under the guise of "best practices," thousands of companies have gone under. They provide low-prices but the cost of those low prices is too high.

That's the agency business, too. No one knows the clients' needs, the agency's capabilities, or even how to answer a brief, much less a question or a need. No one even uses the clients' products, spends time with engineers, or visits the factory.

None of that fits on a best-practices timesheet calculus.

Best practices are usually the worst thing you can follow.

Lemming me your ears.

But follow we must.

Into the Abyss.

Sn Sn Snappy Answers

On Friday, March 21st, my elder daughter had her second son. Mother, daughter, father, first son, and puppy are doing well. As are the the maternal grandparents.

So on Saturday, my wife was like me when I played ball.

Man, I couldn't wait to get up to bat and take my swipes at the old horsehide. It was all I could think about.

As Senator Claghorn from the old Fred Allen radio show might have said, my wife's "tongue was waggin' like a blind-dog's tail in a meat market."

She just couldn't wait to drive the 125 miles to Boston, hug all involved and drive back to our sturdy (formerly ramshackle) cottage on the Gingham Coast. 

So, without benefit of lunch or toilette, we fired up our aging car and dodged the Spring potholes to the Hub of the Universe. 

A lot of people ask me, "George, how have you written a blog every working day for nearly eighteen years?" I usually give the same reply. 

I say, if you were a baseball scout in a rich territory, like the Dominican Republic or Southern California, you'd quickly realize that around every corner could be the next Clemente. A blink could cost you a five-tool-player. So you learn to be always on, always aware, always with your note-book and check-book. Always observing.

It's the same with being in advertising. Or writing a blog. Or to be vainglorious about it, being a writer.

The sins of the Fodder are visited upon the children. In other words, you don't take a blink off if you're looking for an idea--and you should always be looking for an idea.

I got one in the hospital on Saturday.

There was a chain food place (I won't call it a restaurant; it's hard enough to concede that though they sold things to eat that it was food.) It was a place called Panera, a part of a conglomerate called JAB that seems to hold dear (at least in the way they treat customers) to their Nazi-past.

You are met in the fluorescence by four dirty computer screens. Each festooned with offers (to buy the highest margin crap) none of which allow you to scroll to see the entirety of their limited menu.

Giving up on the screen, I grab from a luke-warm-erator case (it wasn't really refrigerated) two small orange juices, a yogurt cup with granola, two fruit cups and from the counter a bag of cookies for my son-in-law who has a sweet tooth. When I pick up the $7 orange juices my hands get sticky.

When I get to the checkout counter an unshaven grunt grunts at me. He says "Thirty one dollars." I say, "Do you have iced-tea? It wasn't on the computer screen." He points to the back of the store. 

I hadn't been wise enough to bring my own cups so I ask him for two. He hands them to me. 

I now have seven items to carry. "Do you want a bag," he grunts. I feel like answering "No. I'm a cephalopod." But I don't bother to answer.

I walk to the iced-tea machine and fill my petroleum-based cups with ice and tea. I cannot find lids that aren't all stuck together or that fit. But finally, I make due.

Then I say to him. "How about utensils?" Because of course the napkins and sweeteners are in one place or two, with no spoons and forks to be found. He points in another direction like a weather vane having ingested lysergic acid or grain ergot. 

I grab my teas and by the forks I see an artificially-yellowed banana, roughly the temperature of a Arctic ice-core. I take it and put it into the bag.

"I'm stealing this and the ice-teas," I grunt at him. The Panera is in a hospital, and I suppose that's good, because he has no pulse. I walk out of the store having over-paid for seven items and stolen three. I am still, by my pecuniary acuity, in arrears. Not even counting Nazi-ism.

I walk back to see my daughter with $31 of crap plus stolen stuff, all of which tastes like shit.

I bring this all up in a blog on advertising, because in a sense ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That is, the development of an individual looks like the development of an entire species.

In other words, the same Pervert Equity MBAs who have efficiency-ized every food-outlet, airline, customer-service-bot, big-box store, and government bureaucracy have been, for about thirty years, loosed inside every ad agency and ad agency holding company.

The details are different.

The experience is the same.

The net-take-away is identical.

I am buying here. Though it sucks. Because everything sucks. And there's no place else. And the experience is so deadening, I no longer expect anything better anymore. I have been beaten to death by efficiency.

I'd imaging most clients feel this way dealing with BlandOcom or whatever they're called this week. 

Dirty and used.

And for all the purported cheapness and efficiency, ripped-off and time-stolen.

Yes, this is a metaphor. But I don't think it's exactly like reading something obtuse by Gerald Manly Hopkins or Ezra Pound in a psychosis. 

It's pretty easy to get.

We're so efficient we've made everything suck efficiently.

That's not a joke, son.