The End Slide.

I think it started with the rise of PowerPoint.

Another reason to dislike PowerPoint--as if we needed more.

But along the time agencies started presenting creative via PowerPoint, or PDF or Figma or whatever--along the time we started presenting electronically, someone decided to add at the end of creative presentations a concluding slide that read, "Thank You."

I can't imagine doing that when we used to present in person on foam-core. But today, every presentation seems to end with a page that looks like this.

I suppose life could be worse. We could, and many agencies do, end even more treacle-ly--with something like this:

Some agencies make matters even worse. They're so thankful, they're so exclamatory, they're obsequiously gushy. If you're kowtowing that much after a presentation, you're really bending over backwards too far.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that we aren't thankful for our clients and their business. But when you're showing them work, 

I'm not sure we should have to thank them for their attention and time. That's not "thanks-worthy." It's the nature of the relationship. It's part of the value exchange. 

I dunno. 

Any of these end-slides make more sense to me. Even if they would get me fired.

Everyone Gets a Trophic.

I realize that though Ad Aged is ostensibly a blog on the ad industry, I very often deviate and start writing about topics somewhat meatier and more important.

A lot of my "depth" comes from a simple practice of mine. I don't read books on business to learn about business. I read books on life--a much deeper topic--and apply what I've read to advertising.

My Account Director, H (whom I call the smartest person in advertising) about a month ago recommended this book to me. It seemed very much up my alley. I only started it last week and I'm just about 160-pages in, but I've already used it to win a piece of new business. That's not a bad ROI from a $19.99 Amazon Kindle purchase.

I'll start here, with a quotation from the great Dutch naturalist and geologist Geerat J. Vermeij. He said, "'the ability to create a future has been intrinsic to living things for billions of years.' Humans, however, were more adept at creating futures than any other species." 

Hmmmm, I underlined, "create a future," that's what good advertising people do for brands. They don't just create a sale, they create a future--a long-term viability.

(That the holding companies have abandoned that is evinced by the way over the last ten years or so they've shed on the order of forty percent of their employees.) They're not trying to create a future, rather a quarterly vig so they can gin up their bonuses.

Author David Miles says, "It is worth emphasizing that hunter-gatherer populations are generally small – the ecologist Paul A. Colinvaux made this clear with the book title: 'Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare.'  Big-game hunters like Neanderthals and modern humans living on the mammoth steppe had small populations for the same reason as polar bears, tigers and great white sharks...."

"To put it simply, plants form the broad base of the pyramid at trophic level 1, with herbivores at level 2, predators at level 3 and carnivores or apex predators forming the peak. 

"...the basic rule is that the consumers at one trophic level convert only about 10% of the energy of the level below into their own organic tissue, so apex predators are relatively inefficient consumers and must be rarer than the species below them. This is inevitable for tigers and great white sharks..."

When you're big, you don't have a lot to feed on. Or eventually your food supply disappears. Then you perish.

When I started GeorgeCo., off the bat I started making more money than I ever dreamed of. My wife and I decided to buy a small cottage along the sea on the Gingham Coast about two-hours northeast of the teeming fleshpots of Madison Avenue. Interest rates were low at the time and we went the local bank to get a mortgage. Naturally the bankers asked for my employment history and saw that I didn't have a steady paycheck from one gigantic source. That's usually grounds for denying your mortgage application.

I said to the banker, "I used to have one source of income. Now I have six. It's much better to have multiple streams rather than just one." Apparently that worked and we got the loan we needed. 

Essentially, I explained that I can feed, as above, at many trophic levels. I can earn my financial calories, so to speak, from meat, fish, plants, birds, beans, legumes, leaves, algae and more.

I used this etiology in pitching a client this morning. I said to them, "you don't have one off-the-shelf-solution. You make things that work for your customers. An apex predator, only has one way to amass calories. It had to go for a mammoth. You can get sustenance from a dozen sources. That's the way I work, too.

"It's exactly why humankind transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming. When we became farmers we found many different sources of sustenance. Grains. Beans. Fruits. Not to mention the animals they could hunt, fish they could catch, birds they could kill. That's the methodology that successful businesses build to succeed."

You take nourishment from many sources. It's the opposite of "if all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail." If you have a brain and you have elbow grease and you give a shit, you'll find a way. It's TWTW. The will to win, too.

I'm not sure they understood much after I said trophic.

I'm not sure I understand much either.

But I got the business.

Survival.

Sound, Fury, Signifying & Nothing, LLC.

Usually when I read something I like online, I make a pdf of it and file it away. Especially when that something teeters on the brink of being profound and intelligent. I must have thousands of articles saved this way. 

Last week I read something. However, I failed to save it and now I can't seem to find it again. That's lamentable. Because it was good.

Fortunately, I remember the principle in the article that appealed to me.

The central gist was simple.

As a "culture," we no longer make art.

We only do "entertainment."

I haven't been to the movies for about twenty years partly because I have no interest in seeing a movie about comic book characters, ie. the Marvel universe, or a sequel on a sequel on a sequel.

I used to read Marvel comics when I was a boy. They cost 12-cents back in 1968 and they were a pretty good deal. I enjoyed things like Spiderman when I was a ten or eleven. Probably up to the time I turned thirteen. Then I started being more interested in girls than in fictional superheroes, my reading changed. I moved onto other things. I outgrew the Incredible Hulk, etc. 

The point is simple.

As a culture, entertainment has overwhelmed art.

We care more about how much revenue something generates, how much it's earning from licensing and spin-offs than we care about what it's trying to say.

There's no more Carol Read's "The Third Man." We're more today about "The Fantastic Four." The math hasn't helped us.

I wonder if there's an industry parallel as well.

We no longer do messaging. That's hard work. Intellectually demanding. Serious. A value exchange. You give us attention, we help you make a wise purchase decision. 

That's too much for today.

I'm told repeatedly no one wants that.

They want Gefilte Fish flavored ice cream.

So, we do "entertainment."

We no longer do meaning.

We do stunts.

I think it all comes down to an axe I've been grinding for quite a while. We no longer have the patience or the belief in what we make as ad agencies or clients. We don't believe there's anything important or interesting about what we do. We so don't believe in what we do, we replace the art of advertising with au courant "entertainment."

I saw a Porsche monstrosity with Dua Lipa not too long ago.

Dua Lipa is a long way from righting the ship-a.

So, we spend scarce marketing dollars and do shit like this. Which I would imagine actually depresses sales, and people. It's notorious, yes. And nauseating.

Like so much today.

...it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

I know fuck-all about QSRs, but I know Burger King is a poster-child for failed attempts at relevance. Right now, despite a successful $5 meal promotion, same-store sales are still down. And have been for three or four decades and thirty or forty agencies.

Yet, rather than redouble their efforts and try to sell food people want and are willing to pay for, 

they waste their time doing crap like this. 

Back in ancient times until, I suppose about 40 years ago, people used to call behaviors like this "fiddling while Rome burned."

Like the ad industry entering awards shows, hiring a CEO for every month of the year, and banging on about being network of the year when they have 80-percent fewer employees than they had in the year 2000.

Many years ago, and by way of conclusion, back in 1999 when dot-coms were all the rage--pre dot-com bust--I worked with a brainy account guy who summed up our client's business model this way: "They lose money on everything they sell, but they make it up in volume."

That seems to be our way today.

Most of what we make contributes to our destruction and the destruction of the people paying us.

A couple thousand years ago, Cicero exclaimed, "O tempore! O mores!" Oh the times, oh the customs.

I prefer, "O tempore! O morons."

Word.(s).

More and more I don't understand the world.

For about 4,000 years, since the development of the first written alphabet, humankind has written things down. That's how you keep records. That's how you can recall things. That's how you can say, "this is what I said, promised, did, saw."

Some archaeological sites in the what are now Syria or Iraq have shards of hundreds-of-thousands clay tablets. They're buried or laying around. When archaeologists had access to those regions, they began translating the writing on those tablets. They were usually records of transactions, trades, inventories or debts. 

Those things were written in media that were fairly permanent. Writing, for about 4,000 years, was a way of recording facts and statements and promises. Hammurabi's Laws, the Justinian Code, the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights are all examples of this age-old practice. 

The written word has advantages over other forms of communication. 

The word is there and easy to find. It's written and permanent. It's accessible and can be recalled. You can pick it up and put it away and pick it up again to see if you're getting what was promised. 

That used to be the function of a lot of advertising.

The confines of a printed piece and its tactility forced you the advertiser--the one making the promise--to clarify and codify things. Writing them down forced decisions, clarity and and what we would call today, "transparency." "But you said"- accountability.

Then, as an industry, advertising stopped writing things down. We let print perish.

Sure, print as a medium has all but disappeared. But we allowed writing to disappear with it. We decided it was ok to never to the hard work of figuring things out and writing it down so people knew and could refer to it over and again.

For years when I worked on IBM I asked every media person I worked with, and there were plenty, give me the digital equivalent of a double-truck with gutter. (Journalism does it.) They came back with a 300x250 banner. All but invisible and 97% of the time blocked by (b)ad blockers.

Last week, I had dinner with a bunch of my-age advertising people. As we all talked about how our agencies were doing, I did my usual thing. I said "My belief is that most people don't know what anything does anymore or why they should buy one thing over another. I work closely with CEOs and founders to help them understand what they make and sell."

One of my friends lit into me.

"Your problem, George, is you're too smart. You're too rational. No one cares anymore. They buy a feeling."

I've gotten that comment virtually every day of my 44-year career. And I don't believe it.

Just moments ago in "The Wall Street Journal," I read an article on a $1,000 wastebasket. As the saying goes, I toss nickels around like manhole covers. But I read this article and I want this thing.

I'm not looking for rational reasons why if I'm buying a can of soda. But if I'm thinking about something expensive and important, I don't want the nagging neuroses that I made a dumb or hasty decision. I want what in bygone advertising days we used to call "permission to believe." Someone will surely say that's not how Gen% or GenZ or GenJen does things today, but I don't buy that. Everybody says whatever generation is completely different, but their kids are just like they are.

In what used to be amerika, we're about to have an important election.

You know what I want from the candidates, I want a print spread in every major newspaper that says in simple language, this is what I intend to do when I'm president, these are the sort of people I will hire, this is who I will defend, who I will tax. This is what I believe. 

Politicians will do no such thing because it pins them down.

And that's the point of writing things down. To be pinned down. So you can be held to the standard of truth.

My point is simple.

We see more messages than ever. More messages that say nothing.

I'm tired of always-on marketing that's always empty.

I want a promise.

I want it in writing.

A Guest Post from Rich Siegel.

Rich Siegel and I are growing old together. As Rich writes below--in a blog post I never asked for--we met decades ago and have been friends ever since. 

Rich is good.

I've been around a lot of great creatives in my life. I've worked for six Hall-of-Famers. No one's done a campaign as laughed about and ubiquitous and shared as Rich's "ABC Yellow" campaign.

Rich and I met through blogging. His Round Seventeen is Chandler's Philip Marlow to Hammett's Sam Spade. They both do their job with inelegant efficiency. Rich, a lightweight, takes Friday's off from blogging. But outside of that, he's as stony and permanent as a Greek Kouros.

Thanks Rich. For being you.

And for the post. And for day off.

xxx

From an undated photo. 
Rich and George in the Bronx.
At play in the fields of the lord.

I read George Tannenbaum’s blog every day, that is from Monday to Friday, and the occasional times he feels compelled to chime in on a breaking news story that through some Georgian machination is related to advertising.

 

George and I are friends, more in the digital arena than the one where one agrees to meet on a Tuesday afternoon for a cuppa. In fact, to the best of my knowledge we’ve only broken bread once when he and his lovely wife Laura were passing through Los Angeles to see one of his daughters.

 

Nevertheless, I feel a closeness to George.

 

And not just because we are advertising copywriters and life doppelgangers. Consider this: we are both native New Yorkers, born a mere 3 months apart. Both from The Bronx. Both of lapsed Hebraic Seasonings. Both have two daughters. And both happily married for a long, long time.

 

In fact, when George and Laura found out about my late wife’s liver cancer they went out of their way, pulled some strings and arranged for us to have a one-on-one consult with Dr. Fong, a leading liver cancer specialist, and worldwide speaker on the topic, who worked out of City of Hope in Los Angeles.

 

It was the menschiest of menschy things he could do.

 

You can imagine how shocked I was to read one of George’s posts last week when from deep in the ether sphere, George wrote:

Thems’ writing words, my friend.

 

When I showed this to Ms. Muse, she mused (that’s her job), and suggested I write a retort. I went one better and said ,”No, I’ll demand equal time to contest that scurrilous contention and request an opportunity to refute my alleged stubbornness.”

 

Stubborn? Me? How am I stubborn.

 

Do you mean because I refuse to sleep with a top sheet. And haven’t for a good 66 years and 7 months? And find all unnecessary bed linen-age to be excessive and disruptive? No, I thought, that’s personal and George knows nothing about my lifelong top sheet abhorrence.

 

Perhaps George was referring to my bull-headed obsession with Donald Trump. As well as my compulsive need to “burn” him, cryptically and non-cryptically, in the public arena of social media. I don’t see that as stubborn as much as I see it as a relief valve for the synapses that are still firing but are no longer getting paid to pimp brown sugar fizzy water, underpowered SUV’s and overpriced men’s toiletries via Dollar Shave Club.

 

Bear with me, I think I’m getting closer.

 

Advertising, that must be it.

 

Ironically enough George is good friends (IRL) with Rob Schwartz my former TV writing partner and colleague at Chiat/Day. Rob can speak with a certain authority about my alleged obstination. And like all good Ad Aged blog posts it always comes back to advertising.

 

When in the gainful employ of ad making:

 

I picked apart briefs written by freshly minted college graduates who despite having no life experience would nevertheless assume they had the wherewithal to solve major brand problems.

 

I fought with account people who, having never written or art directed an ad, even a lowly disposable banner ad in their entire career, would tell me, a one-time seasoned veteran 44-year old, how to “fix” what we had created.

 

And I occasionally went toe-to-toe with CCO’s, CEO’s and even clients, in the spirited stubborn defense of work that I rightly, and perhaps wrongly, believed could have changed the playing field. Had I not engaged in a little obstinacy, there is a good chance I would have surely been destined for a dirty nursing home, laying on 75 thread count sheets and sucking on pureed chicken tetrazinni.

 

OK, I’m stubborn. But I’ll take that as a compliment.

Thanks George.
--

 

A Lesson from a Stranger. And My Father.

For the first twenty years of my advertising career, I never told anyone who my father was. 

My father, a prominent advertising person, and my mother, a prominent witch, were dead-set against me going into the ad business and did everything they could to discourage me. They did everything they could to discourage me from anything but law school.

As Maimonides once said, "that didn't work out."

In the first half of my career I kept mum about my father because I didn't want people to think I was a "Nepo-baby." That he had used his connections and lifted a finger to help me. He didn't. So I built a Maginot Line between his successful career and my career--which was a struggle to get started.

In the second half of my career I kept mum about my father because his career had blossomed so long ago it would be like a Homo Sapiens praising his Australopithecus ancestors. Or like Aaron Judge, the Yankee Slugger of today, praising Frank "Home Run" Baker, who led the American League in homers  with 11 in 1911, 10 in 1912, and a whopping 12 in 1913. By today's judgments, those numbers are almost comical. It's better off cosigning people like Baker, and maybe my father, too, to Comrade Nikita's "ash heap of history."

To say I had a fractured relationship with my father would be like saying j.d. vance has charisma issues. As the grey-eyed, owl-holding goddess Athena said to Odysseus, "Few sons are the equals of their fathers. Most fall short, all too few surpass them.” Suffice to say, I saw the fist-side of my father more than I had wished, and never quite adjusted to the taste of full-frontal linoleum. I fell short in that. And so many other ways.

Now and again, I run across an old old-timer. As opposed to me, a mere old-timer. About once a year one of these people will ask me about my dad. It's been almost a quarter of a century since he died, and he and I have found more peace than we ever before shared when he wasn't dead, drunk or en-coma-'d.

Just yesterday my scheduled Friday post was pre-empted.

From out of the blue, I got a note from ad legend Tom Yobage on LinkedIn. I had heard of Tom. In ad circles he was well-known. However, though we had 18 connections in common (a full 25% of his total connections) we had not LinkedIn. 

I dunno what prompted Tom to write to me. But he did. And I bring you his note in toto, and a lesson he learned from my father without changing a single poignant word.

Thanks, Tom.

tomyobage@xxxxxx.com <tomyobage@aol.com>	10:32 AM (6 hours ago)
to me

George –

Many years ago, when I was a young copywriter working at Doyle Dane Bernbach on the Volkswagen account, late one night my TV producer Jim de Barros and I were flying west when we met your father on the plane.

Those were the glory days in advertising.  Full 15% commissions.  We flew first class.

Your father, Jim, and I were the only ones sitting upfront.  We quickly learned we all worked in advertising.

Jim and I were heading west to meet up with DDB art director Charlie Piccirillo. We were over-the-top with enthusiasm.  We were about to shoot a network TV spot.  A full :60.  Big budget.  Famous name director.

Your father said he was Chairman of Kenyon & Eckhardt. Said he was on his way to a big Lincoln Mercury dealer meeting/convention.

“Oh, are you going to present a new campaign?” asked Jim.

“No. Something more important,” said your father.  His goal, he said, was to have the Lincoln Mercury dealers stay with their current campaign -- and not ask for a new one.

Your father said the current Lincoln Mercury campaign was a rarity.  Something really special: The client loved it. The agency was proud of it.  And it was working with car buyers.

He said conventional wisdom in Detroit was:  new model year = new advertising campaign. 

But, he said, before you throw out a campaign that’s pleasing the client, pleasing the agency, and working with consumers --- you should look very carefully at what you have that’s working so well for you before you replace it with something new, something you’re doing just for the sake of doing something new.

A few years later, I moved on from VW --- and created campaigns for cameras, copiers, breath fresheners, antiperspirants, frozen entrees, gasoline, motor oil,  airlines, typewriters, computers, and tater tots. (I stayed at Doyle Dane Bernbach forever.)

Not often, but every once in awhile, I’d hear a client say:  “Great campaign, Tommy.  What are you going to do for us next year?”

But why change a campaign that both client and agency like and that’s working?  I always thought of your father and used the arguments he outlined that night on the plane. They always made perfect sense to me. Sometimes I’d win. Sometimes I’d lose.  But I always used your father’s thinking.

That night on the plane, your father taught me one of the most important lessons in advertising.

-

Thanks, Tommy.

For teaching me something I didn't know about my father.