Everything You Need to Know About A.I., Advertising and Killing Our Planet.

There was an article in the Thanksgiving edition of "The New York Times" by Yvon Chouinard, the founder and former owner of the clothing retailer, Patagonia. The article was titled, "The High Stakes of Low Quality," and you can read it here. 

Before I begin, let me betray a bias.

I don't believe anything made by machine or algorithm is as good as anything made by humans. Since the beginning of humankind, the most fruitful and important work as come from an alignment of heart-->hand-->head. Any upset of that symmetry is necessarily in-human and inferior. 

There are all kinds of things machines can do better than humans. But machines need human intelligence and guidance and oversight to really be useful. A machine can sew a straight, even stitch but can't design a dress, create a pattern or add some flair. Left to consensus or algorithm, we'll soon be living in a Komar and Melamid world, ugly, bland and without truth or soul. 

Just watch TV one night. The shows, the ads or the interstitials. You'll see what happens when only artificial ingredients are used in creation. That ain't good for food, furniture, park benches, art or culture.

Here's how Chouinard begins his op-ed piece:

Over 50 years ago, my wife, Malinda, and I bought a chef’s knife of carbon steel that we still use. It could be passed down to several generations. Compare that to the junk stainless steel ones that might not rust but that won’t hold an edge to cut a tomato.

Cheap products, made poorly and thrown away quickly, are killing people and the planet.

I fear--because I've seen it happening--that junkification is happening even more-so in our industry. We are specializing in (as above) cheap products, made poorly and thrown away quickly.

Truth is truth whether it's a knife, an advertising platform or a television commercial. If it's made badly, it costs too much, no matter how much or how little you pay. And to the MBAs of the world, how cost-efficient it purports to be.

In his essay, Chouinard cites the novelist Terry Pratchett. Pratchett's devised something he calls the "boots theory of socioeconomics." Maybe GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company will co-opt it. You earn that privilege is you work reading smart people into how you make a living. 

Pratchett says, some time ago, "A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in 10 years’ time.  While a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent $100 on boots in the same time--[he'd probably have spent $20/pr. five times on five different pairs] and would still have wet feet.”

I think so many agencies are selling and so many clients are buying (and asking for) the advertising equivalent of cheap boots. They don't want to pay for a sound strategy. They don't want to pay for original thoughts. They don't want to intelligence, craft, taste, wit, or endurability.

As a consequence, they pay over and over again, for knives "won’t hold an edge to cut a tomato." Or, excuse me, ads that don't cut through. Or if they do cut through, they say nothing.

I am from a different era, so maybe this is due to some heuristic myopia--whatever that means. But all the taglines I can remember are close to 40 or 30 or 50 or even 100 years old. The enduring lines that defined companies in the minds and hearts of millions are seldom being created or used anymore.

When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight was FedEx in the early 80s.

We run the tightest ship in the shipping business was UPS in the 90s. 

Have it your way was by Burger King, created during the Nixon administration.

Apple's Think Different is more than a quarter-of-a-century old.

BMW's The Ultimate Driving Machine is more than half-a-century old.

Even Skittles' Taste the Rainbow is turning 30 this year.

Thinking like this is rare. As rare as the carbon-steel knife Chouinard describes above. But like that knife, it can last generations and like that knife still cut through--tomatoes or indifference.

Chouinard ends his piece this way. "Quality is smart business. Even during economic downturns, people don’t stop spending. In our experience, instead of wanting more, they value better. Consumers should demand — and companies should deliver — products that are more durable, multifunctional and, crucially, socially and environmentally responsible."

Advertising practitioners should likewise create ideas that are more "durable, multifunctional and, crucially, socially and environmentally responsible."

Quality is smart business.

Or could be.

 

With All Thy Getting, Get Understanding.

Herman Melville, one of my 3,459,034,987 writing heroes once said, "a whale ship was my Harvard and my Yale College." Meaning he got his educmacation not from the formal education dispensed by other people but from living life.

I love education. I'm what's known to the educated as an autodidact. Meaning that though I had a pretty rigorous formal education, the bulk of my non-hic haec hoc learning came not to the tune of a hickory stick, but from living and reading and watching and, in the words of another of my favorite writers, Robert Caro, my willingness to "turn every page." That is to start learning, to find something of interest, and not stop learning more until the great scorekeeper comes to pen my name. 

Advertising--my profession for 62 of my 66 years--used to be a business filled with the curious and the self-educated. People with an eye and or an ear for life and wants and needs and desires and dreams and failures. Mostly people filled with the power of observation and the deep generosity of caring for our fellow humans.

Today, the industry is almost wholly professionalized. People go to school and learn techniques and cases and hows and theories on how to win awards and get into annuals and parlay, via plasticene trophies, your way to a decent living. 

I liken advertising today to learning to hit a ball through reading a book or learning to ride your first bike by watching YouTube videos then suing because you've scraped your knee.

The scraped knee part is as good a metaphor as you're likely to get. Because like Melville's whale ship, or my long days and longer nights in the Mexican Baseball League, being a human doesn't happen if you've spent your formative years having had your immune system protected by helicoptering parents and analgesic sprays that will somehow shield you once and forever from both harm and living.

Cough. 

Life is pain and hurt and injustice and crying foul with no one listening and that's the way you learn to be a human and, yes, how to reach people.

Today, well, today...

The more I look at the business the more "gameified" it seems to have become. Ads, or whatever they are seem to be targeted at 12 people on Twitter or Agency Spy. But they seemed designed to have such little, non-solipsistic impact that I assume they're a vanity project and not real.

Not too long ago, a client of mine was having a hard time getting his salesforce to actually sell. To get through to their customers with an impactful, sensitive and motivating story.

"Have you seen McGraw Hill's 65-year-old 'Man in Chair' ad," I asked.

"Whose what?" He blitherered.

"McGraw Hill's 'Man in Chair' ad."

"No."

I sent him it.

I don't care that certain clients or certain industry experts might consider me "dated."

I don't care if I don't get business because I reference old ads.

I don't care if Mark Read fired me with the vicious accusation that a) I harken back to the 80s and b) there's something wrong with harkening back to the 80s.

Disagree all you want.

There's not an agency or a company or a brand today that wouldn't gain from looking at the ad above and asking themselves, "do my potential customers, customers or employees know who I am?"

I don't know what anyone does anymore, why it's different or why I should care. 

Because as an industry, we're too busy standing on chairs and waving our arms trying to get people to notice us. Rather than imagining ourselves in the chair of an outsider and saying, "who wants me to do what for them and for what reason?"

Go on.

Ask the questions of the telco you buy.

The gum you chew.

The agency you work for.

The candidates you vote for.

Even the country you live in.

They're just logos designed by machines with no soul, essence, meaning or guts,

We're more educated than ever.

Yet we don't know what we do for a living.

Dumb.

The Third Way.

You can't spit today--or yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or tomorrow--without hearing somebody, somewhere--probably a futurist, whatever that is--pomposticating about the glorious era of AI humanity is on the cusp of entering. 

Human potential will be unleashed.

Diseases will be cured.

Air will be cleared, poems will be written, operas will be sung.

An Age of Peace, Prosperity and Harmony with settle upon our not-so-green-earth and the sins of the fathers will be ameliorated by a generation that will make things right and will, in so doing, create the best of all possible worlds.

I'll say it right here.

I don't much cotton to futurists who have no vision of the past. Most everything that's happening today with AI, or Quantum, or cold-fusion, or driverless-Cuisinarts, or the internet of schwings, has happened before in similar ways with similarly (for the time-frame) advanced technologies.

Technology--I'll make this really simple--regardless of its micro job description, say, attaching a bumper onto a car frame, or ploughing 50 acres-a-day where a human with a yoke of oxen could plough one, is 99.99999-per cent of the time a tool to drive cost out of the system.

What's more, since technology costs money, it's usually concentrations of capital that benefit first from technology. They own the machines, they get rid of the people who used to do the work. They get more money.

That's how the rich get richer and the poor die younger. 

That's how it's always been and always will be.

Now, there's another virtually indisputable facet of technology and industrialization. 

Quality almost immediately decays.

Early printed books were not as artful as those made by scribes on vellum. Early machine-made furniture was not as beautiful and finely-made as hand-made furniture. 

Around 1800, when England switch from its primary cottage industry, weaving and clothing-making to loom-made and factory-made textiles, the quality was decried. Machines couldn't do what human hands could.

See if you can find one not un-true statement in this one minute time-suck. Or one statement that's now, not 'what will happen.'

Just yesterday, I saw an ad for AI-derived customer-service technology made by an ex-client of mine. The bullshit about the splendors of this technology improving "the customer experience" and service etc. etc. was as soul crushing as a speech by donald trump or joseph goebbels. Every word was so absolutely divergent from lived reality as to be more-than-comical.

Yet today, I read of a efflorescence, a renaissance of sorts to be propagated by AI.

The way tech works is always the same.

We're told there will be a "mother and child reunion." A mating, for the benefit of all of humans and machines. Coal-mining will be safer. Cars will be affordable. The $5 wage will raise all ships. John Henry can knock off early and eat boneless buffalo- style wings while a steam shovel does his work while he benefits.

Yet, there's hardly ever an enhancement of product quality of the life of the masses due to machinery and technology. The rapid adoption of machinery has almost always caused massive disruption and misery. Adoption must happen fast--because if you own a company and your competitors do and you don't, you're out of business.

Almost 40 years ago, New York Times op-ed writer Flora Lewis wrote a column called "The Third Way." An hour ago, I tried to post a link to it here, but in our hyper-modern world, a storm--made more severe by the effects of our hyper-modern world--has knocked out the power. Our $32,000 generator isn't working. Ostensibly because the bot that supposed to tell the technician to service the $32,000 generator is vacationing in Aruba or is gambling at Foxwoods.

Surely, however, in lieu of the service I pay for, I'll get sixteen texts asking me how to fill out a survey to tell a bot how my customer experience was.

That's merely an emblem of what happens when technology drives costs out of a system. It drives people and humanity out of the system as well. 

Agencies today are big box retailers. Ask a client--any client--if they're happy with the undifferentiated product, the constantly changing staffing of their account, the lack of accountability--I'd imagine agency invoices are nearly as convoluted as your cable bill, and more. 

But it's all ok.

Cost has been driven out of the system. And twelve white males at the top of the holding company are aok. 

Here's the bit, at long last, from Flora Lewis that set this off. Lewis' third way thesis requires thinking, planning, kindness and accepting 188-percent margins rather than 189-percent margins. So, it will never happen.

Any futurist reading this--anytime, anywhere, any who, let's debate this.

Mano a mano.

Or mano a machino.

"Real quality requires craftsmanship, hand-finishing. Historically, it was reserved for the rich. The second industrial revolution can be used to provide it for everybody, just as the first made possible mass production and distribution. That was achieved by an economic model based on great quantities of cheap goods. Henry Ford's assembly line made the automobile everyman's transport. The robot can now replace low-skilled workers. The next step is the equivalent of a Rolls-Royce for everyman..."

Quid Without Quo Pro.

I think it was Comrade Stalin who famously said, "It's not who votes, it's who counts." 

If you read a lot of history, you'll quickly realize something of a parallel construction exists in most social and political organizations. In most agencies, for instance, and in fact, in America, "it's not the laws, or regulations, or standards that matter, it's which ones those in power decide to enforce."

For instance, in days of yore, in England, it was against the law for workers to unionize. It was also against the law for businesses to fix prices and wages. The laws against unionization were enforced. The laws against price and wage collusion were not. So rank-and-file workers got poorer and owners got richer.

Today, in the ad industry, four Holding Companies that control about 80-percent of all advertising jobs. It's clear to anyone who works in the industry that price collusion is in effect. If you freelance for a living, as so many of my friends do, you're quickly told "this is the max we'll pay." It doesn't matter which of the four holding companies you work for, the wages are virtually the same no matter what.

Price fixing is illegal. Whether it's perpetrated by the three or four petroleum and chemical companies that control 80-percent of the fuel sold in amerika, or by the two or three telcos and ISPs, that control 80-percent of amerikan bandwidth, or the three or four airlines that control 80-percent of amerika's travel, or the four holding companies that rule our industry.

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Of course, the law, as it's written, has an out. We can abide by the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law, and I suppose, most people can sleep at night with that sort of malfeasance. The 'out' in this instance, is the word "unreasonable." Since little people, people like you and me, no longer have any government representation, there's no one who will fight to treat people well
--there's no one willing to enforce the laws that are already on the books.

As we enter yet another election cycle, we're sure to hear all kinds of reactionary blather about how the rich shouldn't have to pay taxes because they are "job creators." trump paid $750 in taxes over the four years he was president. He will probably be reelected. 

We'll also hear a lot about how workers are greedy and ungrateful and lazy. When workers quit, the reactionaries call them lazy. When workers strike, or sick out, or as the New York Police Department did one year, 'blue flu,' they're called by the radical right 'bloated and entitled.' The illegal monopolistic practices of corporations are deemed ok. 

It's no wonder people hate their jobs. And so much of the work that we produce sucks.

Why should anyone care.

No one cares about us.

Of Frogs and Humans.

When I came back to Ogilvy for my second tour of duty about a full-decade after I left, having maxed out the first time, the leadership team on IBM--the account I was honored to work on--had a mandatory Monday morning meeting. It started at 9AM. That kept the attendance down.

Usually, I was the first one in the fluorescent room. I chose a seat near the head of the table but not at the head--it was a careful calculation I guess I had gleaned from watching old movies about gangland crime syndicates.

I chose the seat where I was least-likely to be hit by a fusillade of bullets.

The power to kill someone came from the head of the table, but the power to influence the table came from where I chose to sit.  You can learn a lot watching old Jimmy Cagney movies or "Untouchables" reruns when you're battling insomnia. 

After I was in my seat, the next people to show up were usually the people in charge of media. They invariably had a hard-stop and were gleaming with perks and impatient. They clearly didn't want to be there.

Then my boss, the chief creative officer would arrive. Then the head of the account, the agency CEO. Then others would stagger in, late, guilty and usually with 32-ounces of too-sweet coffee.

In those early minutes before others arrived, I would talk to the media people. And no, I wasn't just trying to cadge tickets. I was way too unimportant to be nice to.

IBM was an account where a few customers spent millions of dollars on just a couple of products or services. In the decade between the time I left Ogilvy and came back to Ogilvy two major things had changed.

One: IBM was no longer a big fish in a big technology pond. Their status had been usurped by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and a few others. Two: Print advertising had all-but vanished. 

However, what hadn't changed, at least for me was my almost stoic-belief in David Ogilvy's dictum that "the consumer isn't a moron." In other words, I believed--especially when you're spending millions of dollars on something--that you don't buy it because it's cool or people in a commercial start dancing because of it. We don't buy non-impulse things for impulse reasons. That would be moronic. And see above.

I still believe that from automobiles to expensive steaks to giant technology infrastructure, people want a reason why beyond, in the words of Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, "a smile and a Shoeshine." (Miller capitalized Shoeshine. I don't know why.)

Consequently, in this early morning meetings I would barrage the media people with a simple edict. "You have to find a way so we can have the impact of a 'double-truck with gutter ad online.' Impact beyond creative impact and craft. Impact from sheer presence. From size and placement and front-and-centerness.

A double-truck with gutter is a holdover from my Bloomingdale's newspaper advertising days. It's the center-spread in a paper, including the space where the pages meet--the gutter. It's important. And it's built for impact.

The media people ignored me, as they do. And, frankly, the agency and the client ignored me too. They filed me away as 'not digital first.'

Like Aristophanes' chorus of Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax-ing Frogs, the chorus in this conference room, morning after morning, week after week was always the same.

Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax became Why 'break not your ass, no read, no read.'

Today, I see ads that say nothing but with style. A well-crafted circle with a gradient of colors. Some nice motion. And an inscrutable line, about ten rungs down from fortune-cookie wisdom. And such stuff is meant to sell a complex offering (one that no one really understands) from a not-hot company (one that no one really likes) in a competitive market (one where you're being outspent.)

But you see, we have a sentence for that.

Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.

We have wisdom for that: no one cares. It's not a rational decision. No one has time. No one reads. Digital first.

Civilization has been lamenting how busy everyone is, how no one has any time since we came down from trees, certainly since the "sapiens" bested the Denisovians and the Neanderthals. 

It's like saying teenagers don't listen, my wife doesn't understand me, and if I miss the 6:17, I'm fucked.

I'm not going to bother citing the famous Howard Luck Gossage quotation here. If you don't know it, you should. And if you do know it, you should know what I'm talking about. And if you don't care, then you wouldn't have read this far.

This dopey blog, written by one person, every day, reaches 80,000 or more readers a week. It's just copy, girls and boys. There's no twenty-percent off coupon at the end, and you don't get an "A" on your spiritual report card for reading. 

As far as I know, in all 7,000 posts, this blog hasn't inspired anyone to dance.

Without being more arrogant than is my norm, people read the tips of my fingers because they say something unusual and interesting. Even if my references, in the case of Aristophanes, are 2800 years old, and in the case of Arthur Miller, 80 years old.

People read because they get something of value.

When you give people something of value, they generally like you.

When they like you, it's generally good for you. They might even buy from you.

That's how it works.

Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.

The Fault. Lies.

I probably shouldn't write this today. Ad Aged is a family blog and what follows is heavy. What's more, it's Monday, Monday of a mattress-sale-week in what used to be the last best hope for humankind, and maybe I should just give it a rest and cease flapping my lips and swiftly become a Swifty. But, I can't help myself. 

As Con Edison used to say at every road excavation site when I was growing up and being kept down during my prison of a childhood, "Dig, We Must." So I dig. I must. (BTW, I wrote a tagline for an earth-despoiling petroleum company once that said, "Dig Deep." Any hardships that accrue to me, I warrant.)

I am reading Adam Nicolson's latest must-read book, "How To Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks." There are a lot of ways to live your life, but living your life thinking about your life might be the best way. 

As Socrates said 2500 years ago, "An unexamined life is not worth living." But that's the deal with most people who seem to lurch from one crisis to one trend and onto the next mishap like "oy, we're out of sour cream."

This is heavy, I know, for a blog on advertising but fear not, it will only get worse. As all things do in our entropic universe. I promise, there's a point to all this, and an advertising point to boot. Like most points, however, they take me a few moments to arrive to. That's how it goes.

At the start of Western thought, say 3000 years ago, there was a huge transition point. You can discover this transition--and it's a big one--bigger than switching from OTT viewing to Netflix--just by taking fifteen hours of your leisure time, turning off whatever screen you spend your days anesthetizing yourself with and reading in close succession, two epics. Real epics. Not an epic catch in a CTE-resulting football game between one team that's 2-9 and another that's 3-8, that you simply must see because it beats thinking and living and being in the moment.

The epics are "The Iliad," written around 800 BC and "The Odyssey," written around 650 BC. The transition that happens in those 150 or so years is huge and the topic today, and still going on in ways that affect our lives, our politics and the advertising industry.

Nicolson writes in "How to Be," "Pondering scenes in the Iliad are resolved by divine intervention in over 70 per cent of cases; in the Odyssey, the people themselves decide quite unaided in over 90 per cent of cases."

Holy shit. There it is.

In the pre-modern world, gods guide us. 
In what became the modern world, we guide us.

Shakespeare's Cassius in "Julius Caesar" was still reckoning with this almost 2,500 years after the Iliad and Odyssey. Cassius says,

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, 

When I look at the advertising industry today, and the world today, I see entities that have regressed. We've gone backward from the Odyssey to the Iliad. We blame for the woes of our worlds, woes large and small, giant, external, inscrutable cosmic forces rather than ourselves.

On Thursday, I posted the above on LinkedIn. By this morning, it had gotten 32,000 views and a fair number of comments. Many of those comments blamed the collapse of our industry on external forces. AI. Digital. Holding Company greed. No comments say 'we took our eye off the ball.'

Similarly in amerika, we blame globalization for disruption, or climate change, or darker people in some shape and form. We never go back to Economics 101 and recall those rudimentary lectures we might have slept through on guns and butter. Since the end of WWII, a mere scintilla of time in a cosmic scheme, we've probably spent $500 Trillion (my estimate) on military materiel and weaponry. 

All the problems of our modern world, poverty, disease, lack of education, climate change, crappy roads, even the Knicks not having a great three-point shooter, could have been solved with that $500 trillion. The fault is in ourselves. But no.

In advertising, we've forgotten--almost all of us--what it is that we are supposed to do and for whom we're supposed to do it. So while we're blaming our demise on the four horsemen of the advertising apocalypse, we haven't looked, really, at how to provide clients real thinking and real value. 

I've yet to hear anyone in the industry look at the simple geography of the industry and think. And draw an internal lesson from an external happening.

In 40 years, from the 1980s to today, agencies went from being located on Madison, Park, Lexington and Third, to the east Podunk areas of Manhattan. We're on the fringes because we are of fringe importance. 

We did that.

We are not the first ones CEOs call. And WE did that. We forgot how to be vital and important to CEOs--and to customers. 

We forgot to define. 
We forgot to differentiate.
We forgot how to demonstrate.
We forgot to learn.
We forgot to simplify. 
We forgot kindness.
We forgot the verities of communication established since humans decided to go bipedal. 
We forgot accountability.
We forgot that it costs money to make money.
We forgot honesty.

I could easily give away my secrets here. It would only take a few more sentences. But, no.

Suffice to say, I don't have a meeting or even a phone call with anyone less than a CMO. And usually I have a CEO on the call. I have clients from pre-revenue start-ups to the Fortune 50, who call me before they sneeze because they need what I do and they pay me for it.

I've boiled this down to an acronym or two and that's basically what I sell. At "full-freight."

It ain't external forces that have fucked up the world and our world.

As Cassius said to Antony, as Terry said to Charlie, as I say to you...

 

A Zach Attack.

Each time I was at Ogilvy, I was there from 1999 to 2004 and then from 2014 to 2020, the place was special. 

Most agencies are fairly teeming with talent and ambition. But few have the assignments that measure up to the standard of the people. But Ogilvy, for at least 75-percent of my 12 years there, wasn't playing a Zero Sum game. There was enough goodness to go around and you didn't need to stab people in the back to get it. You could stab them in the front.

Along the way, as an old person (and I was old--by WPP standards--both times I was there) you meet a lot of young people. Some of them stand-out and make you notice them. They're funny. Or they're in early. Or always have their hands up looking to help. Or they're there in your in-box wanting to talk to an old guy (you know you're old when people start calling you a legend) about the craft of the business.

Zach Buckner was one of those people. I heard a story about when a 19-year-old Barbra Steisand was on Broadway as Miss Marmelstein in "I Can Get it for you Wholesale," people just knew. 

Out of the blue, Zach sent me a note the other day. One of the best things about being an old person is when young people write to you. 

Zach had just watched the 1980s TV show "Thirtysomething" for the first time and wrote an essay on it. He thought it would be good for Ad Aged. He sent it to me, and I agreed. Along with Zach's bio, his piece is below.

You should get to know Zach.

Zach's Bio.
My career in advertising started like so many before me: Deciding between a copywriting internship at Ogilvy or working at a campground in Big Sur. 

After realizing the campground was thirty miles from the nearest Chinese takeout spot, I delayed my return to nature for a sprint into advertising. My first accounts were working on NASCAR and Citizens Bank. On my first day, I learned people actually watch and care about NASCAR. On my fourth day, I was forcing my family to turn off an old Columbo episode for the battle at Talladega. They still haven’t forgiven me. 

I worked at Ogilvy for the next six years, and in that time worked with mentors and friends who took the time to teach me the secrets of advertising. My favorite secret? Always sit on an email for at least the amount of time it’d take to eat a sandwich before sending. 

After Ogilvy, I worked at Pereira O’Dell. I went from working in an 11-story building in Hell’s Kitchen to a one-floor shop with gorgeous chandeliers in SoHo. I loved it. Everything happened fast and you had to wear more hats than Jackie O. 

I’m back at Ogilvy now and trying to take with me all the wise words my old mentors left me with. Always find the other Jews in the room. Always know the ins-and-outs of your coworkers jobs as if it’s your job too. Always find the free food in the building. Check, check, check.

--

Zach's Post.

A Thirtysomething Watches ‘Thirtysomething’ 

Thirtysomething Years Later

By Zach Buckner

When we have kids, do you want to have a bris," Rachel, my girlfriend, asked me.

Why can’t they just do it at the hospital?”

 

“You trust a doctor over a mohel? Gotta have a mohel,” I said.

 

“Where do you even find a mohel?”

 

“I can find us a mohel by tomorrow afternoon. We’re in Brooklyn. We can get mohels my ancestors only dreamed of,” I said.

 

A pause.

 

“Would you want to raise your kids Jewish?” Rachel asked.

 

“Let’s see what Michael and Hope do,” I non-answered.

 

Like so many episodes before this, ‘Thirtysomething’ and all its chaotic, Boomer bliss was wedging itself directly in the middle of my relationship. Here I was, thinking we were going to passively watch a forgotten 80s classic, and instead it’s become a launching pad for the soul-deepening, relationship-defining conversations Rachel and I have been circling around for years.  

 

Is it possible to continue growing alone as you deepen your relationship? Eliot isn’t so sure. Is marriage just slow asphyxiation for women as they juggle between what they want and what’s expected of them? Hope would like to have a word. Can backwards suspenders be a look? Melissa says yes.

 

A little background for the uninitiated. ‘Thirtysomething’ was a slice-of-life drama that aired on ABC. It debuted on September 29, 1987, and focused on seven thirtysomething friends as they tackle life and all its joys, uncertainties, and mundanity. There’s married couple, Michael and Hope, the linchpins of the show. Michael, Jewish, self-righteous, and reserved; Hope, a social worker turned stay-at-home mom with eyes and judgments that pierce through hearts and pantsuits. There’s Elliot, Michael’s advertising partner, with a goofy kid-like sensibility who acts first and regrets later; Nancy, Elliot’s wife, a pushed-aside, suffering artist. Ellyn, Hope’s romantic, ambitious best friend who works for City Hall. Melissa, a quick-witted, aspiring photographer, fashion sage, and Michael’s cousin. And then Gary, golden Bjorn Borg locks, equal parts charm and flakiness, English professor, and Michael’s best friend. Over four seasons, creators Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz throw our cast into a gauntlet of loss, love, grief, sickness, infidelity, casual sex, serious flings, and conversations centered on gender roles, gay rights, AIDS, hippy idealization, and yuppie conformity.  

 

I was 110 days old when the season finale of ‘Thirtysomething’ aired on Tuesday, May 28, 1991. My biggest needs revolving around apple juice, naps, and my mom – who at 10 P.M. on that Tuesday night would be ignoring my juice-induced cries to see how her favorite thirtysomething Philadelphians faced their future. And now, 32 years and 4 months later, I’m cranking up my DVD/Blu-Ray player, skipping through ads for other forgotten 80s TV shows, and saying goodbye to my Boomer friends.

 

Watching ‘Thirtysomething’ is like a trip to the past. Literally. It’s not available on streaming services, so the only way to watch it is by buying or renting the DVDs. Unsure if I wanted another bulky DVD set to collect dust on my shelves, I rented the first season from my local library. I’m pretty sure I put the first ever hold on ‘Thirtysomething’ in the history of my library’s existence.

 

I didn’t expect ‘Thirtysomething’ to crash into my life and become a focal point for my conversations with coworkers, friends, family members, strangers, barbers, bartenders, and, most importantly, a tool to strengthen my own relationship with Rachel.

 

How is it a show by Boomers starring Boomers for Boomers would help us realize we’re ready for marriage and all mysteries that come with it? It’s ‘The Big Chill’ extended into four seasons, I thought. Not a mirror showing us our past, present, and future.

 

Let’s start with the basics. Like Michael and Hope, I’m Jewish and Rachel isn’t. She was raised Evangelical turned Episcopal, while I grew up Reform Jewish complete with a Bar Mitzvah and countless Rodney Dangerfield jokes ready to be fired off on command. Faith, religion, and how to balance the two have been recurring conversations of ours well before we started ‘Thirtysomething.’

 

What did being a Jew mean for Michael in 1987? A lot like what it means for me in 2023. A struggle to define, a blanket always nearby.

 

And what’s it mean to be with someone who isn’t Jewish? Does getting a Christmas tree make me a traitor? When I told my mom we were getting a tree, she responded with, “WHAT!?” It could’ve shattered mountains and split babkas. She followed with her trademark Brooklyn, Jewish escalation: “You’re not converting, are you?” I can’t help but wonder how she reacted to Hope and Michael having the same conundrum thirty years earlier. After Michael’s initial dismissal, he comes back with a tree and Hope surprises him with a menorah.

 

I know this doesn’t seem like major stuff, but like all of ‘Thirtysomething’ the action is an acceptance. After my own mini freak-out over our tree, Rachel and I shopped for a menorah. It lights up the corner of the room the tree doesn’t reach. Because ‘Thirtysomething’ isn’t about overtaking or overpowering. Whenever characters try it, they regret it. It’s about doing our best to hold everything at once. The endless push-pull to understand each other, toe the always moving line.

 

Watching ‘Thirtysomething’ makes me emotional and scared. It came to me like a secret passed between generations. A forgotten relic mentioned in passing by parents, aunts, and since laid-off older coworkers. I’m terrified of getting older. At 32, I already feel aged out of my industry. I regale younger coworkers with stories of advertising campaigns devoid of TikTok ideas like a Town Crier traveling through a square. Layoffs are a given. They swirl through like a hurricane that devastates every six months. I’ve seen talented writers and designers in their fifties and sixties laid-off via Zoom, Teams, and text. People with so much more to give, so much more to teach.

 

‘Thirtysomething’ is absolutely of its time. There’s big hair and bigger shoulder pads. Reagan undertones and failed hippie overtones. Everyone can own property, have families, and not worry about foreclosing on their homes. And yet, in each episode truths from the comically small to the brutally big emerge – from finding first babysitters to second look cancer screenings. There’s still so much to learn from it.

 

I don’t want ‘Thirtysomething’ to wash away into the Content Sea. Every few years, a retrospective piece like this pops up but then the old makes way for the new. It’s shaped and strengthened my own relationship. And once people get past the suspenders, colorful ties, and puffy hair, it could help them too. Or it could annoy them to no end. Both responses were the norm for the initial run of the show and are valid now depending on who’s watching. 

 

Rachel and I haven’t figured it all out. We still don’t have a definitive answer for how we’ll raise any future kids. Maybe they’ll get a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. Maybe they won’t. We’re still working on balancing our own individuality within our deepening relationship. If we’re ever struggling with work, sex, kids, friends, parents, religion, I know the perfect septet of thirtysomethings to help us get there.

Meetings and Beatings.

Let's start today's post in a very special way; a way I know you'll like. Let's start it with just a little modern agency math.

Let's take a typical employee of a typical agency. Let's say they are a full-time employee--an FTE. The math says they'll probably work around 45 five-day-weeks a year. I'm rounding down, but give me that. 

45 weeks times five days equals 225 days. 

Now, say that typical employee has to go to two meetings a day, every one of those 225 days. That's 450 meetings a year. 

You might go to more meetings than that, I did. But there's little chance you go to fewer meetings than that.

450 meetings a year. Now, let's say you work thirty years before your typical agency kicks you out for being too old and making too much money. The math says, you went to 13,500 meetings. If those meetings average an hour each, that's 337 and a half 40 hour weeks of nothing but meetings, or roughly eight and a half years of your thirty year career sitting in a meeting.

You can do the same math with emails. If you get 100/day times five days/week times 45 weeks/year times 30 years, that adds up to 675,000 emails. If each of those emails takes you a minute to read, that's 11,250 hours of email, or 1,400 eight-hour days. If you work 45 weeks/year, that's 6.25 years doing nothing but reading emails. Cheers!

All that is to make a point.

The quantity of things that fill our days is not the point today. The quality of those things is the point.

If I went to 15,000 meetings in my life, I remember, I think, exactly one. One person, a planner I love called Teresa Alpert cared enough to make a meeting do more than impart information. She worked to make it memorable and different and motivating and honest.

I stole this triangle from Sir John Hegarty. It's a way he evaluates ads. It might be how we should start thinking about how we spend eight years or more of our working life.

The meeting Teresa called was, to be technical, a talk on how to reach small-and-medium-sized business people. That might be as exciting as counting the fungal spores in a pair of rental bowling shoes. 

Speaking of shoes, Teresa called her meeting T.O.Y.S. Take Off Your Shoes. 

And we did. And we sat on the floor. And we talked about the pressures small-and-medium business people felt. And the slights. And the ignominy. And the angst. And, yes, the boredom.

Teresa's T.O.Y.S. meeting was not about some alchemical ruse to reach people. We never discussed the efficacy of putting a "click now" button in gold and making it glow. Or writing copy that ham-fistedly attempted to kowtow to the audience. We never said ass-wipey things like, 'this is for people like you.' 

First we had to understand who we were talking to. 

The precipitant behind this post was a book review in The New York Times of a new book by Sly Stone. I was absolutely smitten by the title--the absolute genius of the title. A unique, idiosyncratic articulation of the most-human of all problems. Not being able to be yourself. 

I'd imagine that 99% of people in those lifetime of 13,500 meetings or 675,000 emails never once felt seen or heard or cared for. When I saw the book cover above, it jumped out at me. It said, and I steal these words from Arthur Miller, "Attention must be paid."

When my daughters were little, my wife and I went through that most-New York-of-all tortures. We went through the horrors of applying to private nursery schools. 

Fortunately, my daughters are very bright. They were accepted at a lot of schools and they had a lot of choices. Now my wife and I had to decide on a school. How?

Quickly we got appointments at three nursery schools and went in to meet various heads of school. We had nice meetings with every head, but one of the heads got out from behind her desk and took us into a classroom. There, with a teacher or two, we sat on the floor and talked about teaching and talking and being human. It wasn't a meeting. It wasn't a recital. The virtues of the school were not transmitted by PowerPoint.

Reaching people, regardless of your creed or education or your religion or what agency philosophy you follow, is mostly about getting down on the floor and meeting people where they live. It's mostly about not talking down or talking over someone but feeling what they're feeling. And using that feeling in a constructive way. That's a lot of what advertising is supposed to be about but seldom is as we practice it.

In the words of Sly Stone, “There’s no point in blaming the mirror if your face looks strange."

It's about lettinya be mice elf agin.