A Long Strange Trip.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. 

When it comes to predicting how humans are going to behave, or respond or think about a certain proposition or artifact, I have very little faith in science.

Maybe even less faith than I have in sorcery. Tea leaves. Bird entrails. Crystal balls. 

It seems to be knowing what's going to happen next, or if someone is innocent or guilty, or how they'll behave given a set of circumstances has been a human wish since the beginning of human time.

I've heard stories of inveterate gamblers choosing one rain drop over another and saying that one will descend the windowpane first. Or people betting on turtles in county fairs, or trying to figure out where fish will be so we can catch them.

We've been trying to predict the unpredictable since the early days of bi-pedalism. In fact, it's been conjectured (speaking of bi-pedalism) that our ancestor stood on two feet so they could get a better view of where food was, or enemies, on the veldt. Standing upright was a new way of seeing things, and edge.

People and companies have always looked for that edge. Very few people and/or programs and/or institutions have been right much more often than they've been wrong. 

Hans Rosling, in one of his great Ted Talks, claims (to make a point) that the professors from the institute that awards the Nobel Prize, can be right less often than a random group of chimps. (Watch the first four minutes of the YouLube link above.)

Late last week, I read a book review in The Wall Street Journal of a book called "Dots and Lines: Hidden Networks in Social Media, AI, and Nature" by Anthony Bonato. Smack dab in the middle of the review, I ran across these sentences:

It brought to my mind once again my thesis (once I get a thesis stuck in my head, the chances of me straying from it are as low as a cockroach doing the limbo in Death Valley. To say I'm a dog with a bone is unfair to dogs, maws and bones.) 

When I first came across the "science" of Customer Relationship Marketing, messages (usually in the form of variable field letters) were customized according to six or ten bits of data. The customer--aka victim--might have filled out a survey that said she had children. Every letter to her from the car company that owned that data therefore was about seating capacity and safety.

The "data" was a blunt instrument based on very little, but because we trade in certainty, we pretended it would portend great accuracy. We knew what that customer with children wanted--we had data on them, after all. And data is the answer.

What we continually fail to see is the very complicatedness of the human brain. We fail to appreciate the near impossibility of understanding how it works and how much more baroque it is than even them most ornate of human-made systems.

The most sophisticated AI systems cannot reckon with the idea of 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, much less 300,000 miles of neural connections. We look to find order or predictability despite these numbers, ignoring the very idea that decision-making, like any causality, can and will mutate based on a wisp of a chimera.

I read this bear. I don't know anyone else that did.
Certainly not ad people who pretend to know things.

A short review from the Economist.
I send these things to clients to give them more ways to ignore me.

Since the very beginning of time, humans have tried to find the locus of feelings, emotions and thinking. For many millennia, the brain wasn't considered at all. It was thought "thinking" came from the heart. Phrases like "learn by heart," "heartfelt," and "heartbroken" are evidence of that misguided thinking. Eventually, we landed on the brain as the seat of thought.

We tried to explain through metaphor how the brain worked. First, when automata were the rage, say in 16th century France, we explained the brain that way. Then as clocks and watches grew in sophistication, they were enlisted to explain the mechanistic calculus of your grey matter. Next, scientists compared the brain to telegraph system, or a computer. Then, they compared it to the world-wide web and giant networks. 

The right metaphor might be the universe itself. (Walt Whitman knew this: "I contain multitudes.") The same universe that is unfathomably complex and expanding and contracting at the same time. Take one 101 course on astronomy and you realize the vastness of things.

I understand the salesmanship behind the perennial promise that "I know what will happen next." It makes a compelling promise. And people buy it. It's like a magical drug.

The Greeks had a word they used when humans believed they were more powerful than the gods: Hubris.

It's not hard to get from "tech bro" to hubris. 

Things that start in hubris almost always end in humiliation.

It seems though we might be an industry ruled by hubris.

Hubris is an all-you-can-eat-buffet.

Where you're eating yourself.

H/T to Francisco Goya and "Saturn Devouring His Son."
He never won a Lion.

 

Trouble? Double?

I got an email just moments ago from one of the Holding Companies. In it they're announcing, though they are hemorrhaging business, revenue, people and market-share, probably $10,000,000 worth of talks and agenda items they are staging at Cannes.

There's a lot of Orwellian cognitive dissonance happening in the world today. Failing companies throwing giant parties celebrating their success is yet another example. It's hard for me to reconcile a guy who quits with no successor, who's halved the size of his company, who's destroyed half a dozen major advertising brands showing up in public.

As long-time readers of this blog know, my parents, in say 1965 and still in the thrall of Kennedy's Camelot, enrolled my older brother and me in a series of speed-reading courses when we were just about nine and seven. 

Kennedy, though he had no formal connection with Evelyn Wood, the Sam Altman of rapid reading, could reportedly read 1,200 words per minute. That's roughly five pages of a book every 60 seconds. By comparison, spoken language--a podcast, or a book on tape--usually brings you about 150 words per minute. JFK could take in information at eight-times that of a normal person listening or six-times as fast as a normal reader.

At my peak, I can read faster than that. With about 75-percent recall. I'm cursed that way.

That's all to say, I speed read the Holding Company agenda that was sent to me. Not only did I see nothing that interested me in the least, I also barely saw anything I could reasonably understand as remotely related to advertising.

The analogy I'll use here, from the tips of my fingers is this: It all seems like studying manure in order to watch the Kentucky Derby. I suppose there's something to learn from the shit, but there might be a more informed way of placing a thoughtful $2 bet.

Here's what I mean. I sped-read the above and literally can't conceive I am even in the same "ecosystem" as these people. Whatever is meant by ecosystem.

It all, somehow, reminds me of an old Borscht Belt joke about two Martians who land somehow in Brooklyn. Their spaceship can't take off from earth because it has a broken wheel. The Martians are walking down the street and they see a bagel shop. To the Martians, the bagels look like perfect replacements for their broken wheel. They go in and ask the counterman for a wheel. The counterman says, "those aren't wheels, they're bagels. You eat them." The Martians each take a bite and the one says to the other, "These would go good with lox."

That's how alien I feel. 

From a completely different interplanetary ecosystem. An ecch-o-system, maybe.

But back to the agenda items above.

Baseball today, all sports, actually, are fairly incomprehensible to me. The statistics that kept track of the game since its very beginnings are no longer important to many people and new ones have taken their place. 

Hank Aaron hit 755 career home runs. Babe Ruth hit 714. Barry Bonds some drug-induced number, maybe 7800. 

They never once thought about the velocity of a ball off their bat. If they thought about it at all, they'd say something as incisive as "I got good wood on that." 

Likewise, Bob Gibson, who had an era of just 1.12 in 1968 never worried about pitch count, or any of a dozen statistical variables that dominate the jabber about the game today. In the parlance of the greensward, he "threw the ball where the bat wasn't."

Simplicity in what we do. The equivalent of throwing the ball where the bat isn't. Or in the words of Wee Willie Keeler, "hittin'  ‘em where they ain't."

As Carl Ally said, advertising should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." To paraphrase Mark Twain, the difference between Ally's quote and this Cannes' agenda, "how brands can actively mitigate algorithmic bias and champion representation in a rapidly evolving AI-driven ecosystem," is as vast as the difference between "lightning," and "lightning bug."

Fifty years ago I made a meager living for one summer playing professional baseball. My manager, Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla, aka Hector Quesadilla was one of the wisest men in the game. He is in two Mexican Baseball League Halls-of-Fame, for both playing and managing.

If we were down by four with just one or two ups left, as we seemed to be so often that long summer, he didn't trot out statistics, probabilities, moneyball and other algorithms so bestially au courant today. He did not say to Buentello as he grabbed his lumber, "Uncover the challenges facing subscription and identify strategies to thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape. From personalization and value-added services to flexible pricing models and enhanced customer experiences, discover how to reinvent your subscription model with AI for long-term success."

He'd say, "Hit a double."

Advertising--making it effective, worth watching, worth paying for, and respected once again isn't hard.

We need to hit more doubles. 

A Post Fahdah's Day Repost.

 

One-hundred years ago this week, Yankel Tannenbaum or Tennenbaum or Tanenbaum or Tenenbaum (everyone in the family spelled our last name differently, part obstinance, part bad translations) my grandfather--my father's father-- stepped off the Hamburg-American liner, SS Leviathan and became the first, however it's spelled, Tannenbaum, to set foot on Amerikansche terra firma, soon to be pronounced in the Queen's Bronxian Latin, terrer firmer.

Yankel, just thirteen at the time, had lied about his age, claiming he was eighteen. He boarded in Hamburg, the SS Leviathan alone--though he called it the SS Limburger, being unfamiliar with Roman letters. He quickly found a hammock in the deck two decks below steerage, the decks well-below the waterline on the ship, where every crash and rattle and belch of the mighty engines, every shovel-full of coal, spewed out a Stygian effluvium of magma-heat onto the rotten rope of his swinging, stinking accommodations amid one-thousand farting men.

Yankel lost ten pounds on the three-week voyage, having eaten nothing but water they called soup and the soup they called water. He hadn't yet learned to get soup last--the bottom of the pot is where the potatoes lay--but as recompense, he stole three suits of clothing from other woebegone passengers and stuffed them all into the single rope-secured bundle that he hoisted on his already-bent Sisyphusian-back and he stumbled down the rickety gangplank and onto the beaten schist of Ellis Island.

He called it Smellis Island.

Appropriately.

Official gentiles with officer's hats and clipboards inspected him, looking at various papers, greasy from wear. They poked at his ears, his eyes and his mouth. They scrunched his scrotum. And then they pointed him to line three, gate four, the longest of the lines of wretched refuse on our teeming shores and Yankel, like a soldier in the Bataan Death March shuffled over under the weight of his bundle.

He saw an official eating an apple, about to drop the asymmetric core to the dusty, grass-deprived grounds and Yankel, always on the lookout for an opportunity or an angle, sensed one.

"Schexschuse Schmee, Your Schexcellency," Yankel spat. "Jew want see wut I can do mit der apple."

The tall, be-whiskered gentile handed Yankel the masticated core. It was already browning in the humid heat of a New York summer a century ago and tiny gnats had already arrived on the core. The air crackled with heat--it was not much cooler then than today, miserable and cornea-cracking.

"Vatch dis," Yankel said. "Jew see dat schmeegull ovah deah on duh piling?"

Yankel had noticed a fat fowl four-hundred feet away standing on one leg on an algaed post. 

"Your Highness," Yankel mustered, "Vatch me bean him."

Yankel had learned a pidgin of Hanglish listening to American sailors down in waterfront bars in Hamburg.

The official smiled and tucked his clipboard under his arm and nodded to Yankel.

"That's gotta be faw-hunnert feet," he mocked. "Like from centa to home at duh new Yankee Stadium up in duh Bronx."

"Yankee Stadium--I'm Yankel Stadium," my ancestor said. He then twirled his licorice thin right arm like the sidewheel of an old Mississippi River boat, lifting his left leg for power and torque and let the apple core fly.

It ran straight like an old Junker aeroplane and knocked the unsuspecting bird's legs out from under him. The bird tumbled into the viscous water, came up for air and screeched in anger. He spread his wings, drying them in the sunshine then flew high and circled over the people below, looking for someone to shit on in retribution. But by that time Yankel and the custom's official were walking arm-in-arm toward the processing center some one-hundred yards away.

"O'Malley," the official said shaking Yankel's calloused paw. "You've got an arm on you like Lefty Grove. And wit da Yankees not six miles away, I gotta getchu in for a tryout. You sticks with me. What did you say your name wuz?"

"Yankel. Yankel Tannenbaum. Schmere didja say you were takin' me, Yankel Stadium? Whas dat, schomewhere duh Jhoose like me-self schmives?"

"Noyadumbbell. Yankee Stadium. It's where dey play baseball, d' American past time. It's up in d' Bronx. D' house that Ruth built?"

"Like Ruth 'n Esther? That Ruth?"

"No, ya' stoopid Yid. Babe Ruth. The Bambino. The Colossus of Clout, the Behemoth of Bam, the Maharajah of Mash, the Mammoth of Maul, the Wizard of Wallop, the Rajah of Rap, the Vizier of Vector, the Caliph of Crash, the...the...the Sultan of Swat."

"Yer onny cornfusing me," Yankel said with barely a spit. "I have no ideer who this Ruth lady is."

"He's only duh greatest baseball player in the forty-eight states. And he plays up in da Bronx for the Bronx Bombers. I think wiff an arm like yers, I can getcha a tryout for d' Yankees. With an arm like yers, you could be making $5000 per annum, easy."

"$5000? Schmy wiff schmoney like dat, I could bring my twenny-nine bruddahs and sistas and aunts and uncles and muddahs and faddahs over. An all twenny-nine of us could share a room anna quarter with a cold-water bath just seven flights up and four blocks ovah."

"Dat's d' ticket, Yankel me boy. And wiff me taking only 125-percent of yer money for me agent's fee, you'll see that the streets in Amerika really iz paved with pickle juice and cel-ray."

"One-hunnert and twenny-five percent of ev'rything I schmake? So, I makes five thousan' and you takes sixty-two-hunnert and fifty dollars? That izza bargain! As soon as I learns t' schmite me name, I'll schmign on duh dotted line."

"Yer right as rain, Yankel, me boy."

And that my friends was how the Tannenbaums came to be in America.

Follow up questions (these may be on the test):

Did Yankel ever make it in amerika?

And what of officer O'Malley's 125% cut?

Were the streets really paved with pickle juice and cel-ray?

Was Yankel able to bring over his "twenny-nine bruddahs and sistas and aunts and uncles and muddahs and faddahs?

10 Gifts For the Holding Company CEO that Has Everything.

1. A single vinyl record. To remind him of when he had Agency of Record accounts.

2. Black Ink. An obsolete metaphor of the harkening back to times (like the 80s) when agencies were profitable.

3. Pineapple (Revenue) Upside-Down Cake. The cake recipe can be applied to agency data: revenue, head count, overall outlook. Just look at your financials as if they were upside down.

4. 3-D Lion. Printer. Perfect for printing replicas of faux Cannes Lions for ads that never ran, for results that never materialized, for clients you no longer have, by people you no longer employ. Why go to Lion hunting when you can breed your own?

5. Synonym Buns. After two-decades of industry contraction, stultification, firings and lowering of fees and wages, even the wiliest of Holding Company CEOs is running out of euphemisms for precipitous decline and abject failure. 

Our Synonym Buns will provide endless tasty ways of saying 'we're fucked.;
ex. "Downgrowth." "Negative Profit." "Downvaluation." "Right-sizing." "Write Downs." "Shrinkgrowth." Deceptive, yes. Delicious? You bet!

6. Silicone Butts, 100%  Fake Buttock Enhancers. Perfect for the CEO, who, after he's shed two out of five employees, wants "asses in seats," when he has no more asses to justify his seat expenditure. Your RTO mandate? With our buns, consider it done!™

7. Yachta, Yachta, Yachta. For the CEO who's tired of hearing the accusations about his incompetence halving revenue during his tenure. A simple way to remember the $1,700,000 you spent for a yacht rental while laying people off, plus a little reading about income inequality.*

(* Offer not applicable for CEOs who can't read.)

8. Custom-printed t-shirt. (Spinal cord not included with purchase.) After all, as Schattner said to Marx, clothes make the oligarch.

9. The Camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle chainsaw. Jesus apocryphally said, "it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven." 

Our deluxe high-powered "Camel Chopper," can help cut your own personal camel down to size. Works with both Bactrians and Dromedaries. Or try it on a llama, alpaca or other ungulate. 

10. A pink slip. This one needs no explanation. Human not included.

Disposable.

From Raymond Bernard's "Wooden Crosses" (1932).
The man knew is way around a match dissolve.

Sorry about the quality. It's not available on YouLube.

If you work in metaphors like I do, you can learn a lot from the ongoing war in Ukraine and Russia. Basically, it seems like it might someday be called "the first AI war." 

I'll ™ that now.

It's removed from the AI war we read about in advertising everyday. Which mostly consists of rich people firing poor people and replacing them with algorithms. 

That said, basically I believe that the ongoing war in Ukraine and Russia will be the "past is prologue" for the ad industry's AI war.

Some months ago, I drew the illustration below.

It sucks, I know, but it explains how things work.

It explains why you probably have eleven boxes in your apartment full of old chargers, wires, devices and batteries. You buy tech to fix something, then another something arises.

It's pretty simple, really, as ugly as my drawings usually are. Every solution causes another problem. 

That's about as macro a statement as you're likely to get in a blog on advertising.

In advertising, and in warfare, or in just about any other pursuit, people buy something new because they buy the promise that it will do something magical for them. 

But you can't have a dog if you're not willing to vacuum up dog hair. You can't have a kid if you won't change diapers. And you can't replace your creative people with AI if you're not willing to give up a certain degree of perspicacity, humanity, laughter. Connection.

In the "first AI war," Ukraine, with 40,000,000 people is fighting Russia, with 140,000,000. They're out-peopled by 350-percent. Ukraine's defense budget is about 20-percent smaller than Russia's. So, as in advertising (or the way advertising used to operate) if you can't outspend, you have to out-think.

That's the derivation behind Ukraine's recent drone attack which damaged or destroyed a significant number of Russia's most sophisticated airplanes. 

The problem: Ukraine is out-resourced. The solution: AI-enable drones that can evade detection and penetrate thousands of miles within Russia. Hide them on trucks and...go!

As Benjamin Sutherland, the Security and Technology correspondent writes in "The Economist," 

For this sentence: "increasingly capable flying robots promise to reshape warfare," substitute something we might have already heard from any of 38-dozen agency moguls: "increasingly capable AI promises to reshape advertising."

But here's the rub. And what everyone forgets.

Every solution creates a new problem.

Which demands new tech. Which creates new problems. Which can only be fixed by new tech. 

See my illustration above.

And then this, from Sutherland:

It won't end here, of course.

Because underdogs always find a way around problems. As Ahab might have said, "where there's a whale there's a way."

Today, it seems every Holding Company agency seems hell-bent for leather to eliminate every person they possibly can. The data on headcounts in advertising is hard to come by. Transparency and holding companies go together like cleanliness and the #4 train.Bbut in 2016, WPP had just over 200,000 employees. Today, they have closer to 100,000. 

Even a CPA realizes that's almost a 20-percent drop.

The Holding Companies are going all in on the latest technologies--AI and other algorithmic sleights-of-hand. However, like the eventual use of microwaves that can disable a drone's circuitry, eventually something will displace AI. And the same companies working to get rid of people will realize they might need them.

They over-indexed. ie fucked up.

When you get right down to it, no matter how sophisticated the world gets, there's very little that can vanquish a determined populace even with merely bricks and sticks. In other words, sometimes the oldest technologies (people and elbow grease) can defeat the newest (AI.)

A century ago Henry Ford thought through, somewhat anyway, the problem of retaining his workforce. He was smart enough to know (despite his virulent Jew-hate) that nothing ruins a company faster than unhappy employees.

As "Forbes" magazine writes:

Too late the Holding Companies will realize that no one wants to buy from companies that destroy people, humanity and life on earth.

Show Me.

Not many people today think about Manichaeism, the ancient and defunct religion that saw in the world an ongoing struggle between light and good and darkness and evil. 

Before the spread of Islam, Manichaeism was the chief rival to Christianity. There were churches and scriptures that had spread from China through the Roman empire and Mani was revered as the final prophet, after Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses and Jesus. (The religious figure, not my doorman.)

However, bygone it is today, it seems to me that much of our world is caught in a sort of modern-day Manichaeism. 

Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Authoritarian, Red or Blue, we see the world as the struggle between major irreconcilable forces. Most often, this is a nuance-free world. Like a serious marital spat there's no going back. Middle-ground and compromise seem to be missing. As Beckett wrote in "Godot," "There is no lack of void."

Beckett was funny that way.

In advertising, I see a Manichaean struggle happening as we speak, or as I write, which I do more often than speaking.

There are those who are buying the AI thing whole hog. And there are those who are resisting. Cascading from that position, the AI-ers believe in something I call advertising inundation: Messaging doesn't have to be impactful to be effective. It just has to be so persistent, that sooner or later it wears you down. That's why I have four ads pop up if I order take-out and three ads on my metrocard.

The Manichaen counter-point to inundation is impact. That's where you create something that may be short on ubiquity, but is long on stopping power.

A metaphor might be the difference between carpet-bombing and a targeted strike. They'll both, the thinking goes, eventually take out the enemy. There's a stylistic and philosophical difference in which is the most effective.

I will say, I am not in the inundation camp. 

In fact, the glut of advertising in the world today has turned me even more Wordsworthian than I've always been. My solution for feeling like "the world is too much with me," is to turn off the TV, block the ads, and ignore if not boycott most everything I see from every brand that's forced on me. 

I realize I am old, but inundation advertising (which is inherently non-consensual) has turned me post-consumer. I don't buy anything anymore, save gasoline, lox, pastrami and toys for my grandchildren.

What strikes me as odd about all this is how rapidly the inundation side of the dichotomy has gained precedence over the impact side.

Especially since I've yet to see a scintilla of proof that inundation works. (Agency case-study videos claiming "billions of impressions" are heinously fictional.)

Not too many weeks ago, the world saw evidence of the power of AI. 

Ukraine, out-spent, out-manned and out-gunned in fighting the Faux-viet Union, used AI-enabled drones to destroy or damage an estimated 41 Russian air-craft, including their version of the amerikan AWACs system, which is way up in the Pantheon of technological sophistication. They launched drones from trucks. Their AI eluded all the Russian's defensive systems.

These AI advances I can see with my own eyes. And when someone in The Economist (even if he's selling something) says something like "the Digital Targeting Web” can make the army ten times more lethal," I listen. Especially because I've read a thing or two about what defense contractors like Palantir and Anduril are already selling to the (dis)United States. (It's scary.)

I would rather a defense infrastructure run by the engineers at either of those companies than one run by people at  Lockheed or Boeing or Raytheon. You don't want a billion dollar aircraft carrier if it can be destroyed by five-hundred $100 drones.

Mind you, there's a runaway "Wehrmacht" quality to these companies, and they scare the crap out of me. But that's not the point.

The point is this:

They are showing proof that AI works. As are the battlefields in Lebanon, Ukraine and Gaza. (And probably LA, too.)

Advertising agencies are claiming AI works too.

The difference is in the real world I see reports like this. They talk about advances and things that couldn't be done before to give someone, some organization or some nation-state an advantage:

In the advertising world I see reports on how cheap and fast something was done. Never in how it moved people. There's nothing to recommend the AI-generated commercial below except that it's as genuinely human as plastic vomit.

I've yet to see any evidence of AI communication efficacy. (Evidence of parsimony doesn't count.)

To my slightly informed technologically-aware eyes, I'm not even sure why we'd think AI would work for creative endeavors. It seems fine for sizing up a battlefield or collecting high-way tolls or routing UPS trucks through a busy city. But, making people feel something? Show me.

Show me AI that:

reaches people.
resolves a problem.
comforts the afflicted.
makes a bad day better.
makes someone laugh.
does something unexpected.
can actually anticipate.
brings joy.

Because it allows the moguls in the advertising industry to fire literally thousands of people, they're flogging it as hard as the Dutch flogged tulips five-hundred years ago.

The Dutch got pretty flowers.

We're getting nothing more than twelve men with perennial golden parachutes.

A Smile from Pyle.

I didn't ask Lesly for her permission to use this from her site.
But why wouldn't I?

Like Walt Whitman, today's guest-writer, Lesly Pyle contains multitudes. She's funny. Warm. Ambitious. Brave. A connector. And a bit of a trouble-maker, the characteristic I most-admire in another human being.

Lesly wrote me last week with the news a lot of ad people are dealing with these days. I wrote back with my usual old man wisdom. "Don't hide the news," I said, "Use it." And moments laters, Lesly sent us (it's for all of us, after all) this wonderful post.

Enjoy it.

And enjoy Lesly's Lesly-ness.

And hire her.

When you do, you owe me one.

Copywriting Portfolio: PyleOfWords.com

LinkedIn CV: LinkedIn.com/in/Friscomoon
Email: friscomoon@mac.com

Best-Selling Dementia-Fundraising Book (with more stories like the one below): PyleOfMemories.com

Angels & Demons | A Tale of Two Agencies

By Lesly Pyle

 

_____ 

 

Cut to 2000.

 

I graduated from the University of Oklahoma in June and moved to San Francisco shortly after. You could say I was a Sooner fresh off the Schooner.

 

My first post-collegiate job was at an incredible ad agency called Foote, Cone & Belding. FCB for short. FCB was known for its creative work — and its equally creative pranks.

This story is about the latter.

 

I was only a month old at FCB when my fellow creative assistant, the mysterious Michael Burbo, approached my desk with a mischievous grin on his face. This was not rare. Michael Burbo was always up to something. He spoke from a 3/4 angle, never quite making full eye contact. This kept him in a stance poised for a quick escape should the need arise.

 

“Look, kid, Bacino called,” Burbo said.

 

Oh boy.

 

Any sentence with the words “Bacino called” was worth leaning in for. Brian Bacino was our boss. He was a Group Creative Director who was kinda like a don. But the fun kind. If Burbo was scheming, Bacino was likely behind it.

 

“Bacino’s at a Giants’ game with the Top Brass,” Burbo said. “They’ve ordered ‘Black Ops’.”

 

Burbo and Bacino spoke in code. It was a great education for this small-town Okie to learn how to decode their cryptic language. But, by four weeks into my four-year tenure at FCB, I had figured out some basics. If the Top Brass were at a baseball game during the workday, this meant two things:

 

They were drinking.

 

And they were thinking.

 

A few days before this fateful phone call, the ad agency across the street from us, GMO Hill Holiday, put up a little sign in their window facing our building. It had basic black letters on a white sheet of copier paper. The lack of visual panache plus its punchy tone made us suspect that it was designed by a Copywriter. It had only two words:

“FCB SUCKS.”

 

“FCB SUCKS.” We got a big laugh about our little brother from another mother calling us out. Both agencies were owned by Interpublic Group — a giant holding company that got gianter recently when it merged with the mothership, Omnicom.

 

FCB was the big kid on the block and felt no guilt about humiliating our brethren publicly. In fact, the command to do so had come from FCB’s executive leadership at the last game of the Giants’ regular season. They were masterminding a sinister plan between overflowing cups of overpriced beer, whilst cheering their hearts out to send the Giants to the post.

 

Bacino gave Burbo a budget.

 

Burbo gave us the green light.

 

The FCB Fox Force Five was led by Michael Burbo. He recruited the rest of us. Brian Tocco, a fellow creative assistant, who was Burbo’s best friend and best pranking accomplice since childhood. Ward Evans and John Benson, a creative director team, who played in a band with Burbo. And the Okie who nobody really knew but trusted with Top Secret intel anyway. I wondered if it was my Gomer Pyle naïveté that got me the nod. My band of brothers shouted my last name like Sergeant Carter repeatedly: “Pyle!” “Pyle!” “Pyle!” That joke never got old. For them, anyway. But if that’s what it took to be part of the hijinks, I was happy to fall in line.

 

FCB’s and GMO’s buildings were smack dab in the middle of the San Francisco “Ad Ghetto.” Yes, that’s really what it’s called. The Ad Ghetto. Our office was seven stories tall with a modest roof deck. GMO’s was only three stories but they had a much larger rooftop. The kind where you could throw all-staff parties. In three days, the Blue Angels would perform their annual Fleet Week Flyover. Ad agencies were always looking for excuses to party. Fancy flying was more than reason enough.

 

The FCB Fox Force Five had little time to prepare our disproportionate response to the 8.5 x 11-inch “FCB SUCKS” sign taunting us from across Pacific Ave.

 

Cut to October 5, 2000.

 

At 0900, we enlisted the FCB championship softball team. We drafted the players with the strongest arms and the tightest lips. Until our strike, you could count the number of people who knew about our secret mission on two hands.

 

At 16:00 hours, from our lookout atop FCB’s building, we saw trays of charcuterie and tables of booze being carefully arranged on GMO’s roof deck. Perfect. It would soon be full of unsuspecting victims.

 

We waited for the right moment. The GMO crowd was at a quorum. The Blue Angels’ aeronautical acrobatics appeared overhead.

 

Ward Evans was a creative by day and a musician by night. He played a few instruments but on tap for this day was one in particular. His trumpet. He tooted the iconic “Attention” bugle call. Everyone across the street turned their awe from amazing circles in the sky over to us. We stole the Blue Angels’ thunder. Our plan was working already.

 

Ward’s bugle call was our team’s cue too. John Benson and I unraveled the first of two king-sized sheets which cascaded down the side of our building. It held our giant two-word retort:

 

“HEY GMO.”

 

Ward trumpeted again. Burbo and Tocco released our second sheet to reveal the ultimate call to action:

 

“SUCK THIS.”

 

It might not have won a Titanium Lion for copywriting excellence but it got the point across.

 

For the next several minutes, the FCB bombardiers pelted GMO over and over and over again with water balloons. We had buckets of balloons in our armory. Allegedly, our assault was all caught on tape. The softball team’s captain also ran the in-house A/V Studio.

 

With the help of long-range slingshots and throwing arms like cannons, we targeted GMO’s trays. Splash! Food went flying. We targeted their booze. Splash! Bottles went flying. We expected all of this.

 

But what we didn’t expect was their reaction. Or lack thereof.

 

We thought our sibling rivalry would just keep escalating into an “Ad-nerd War for the Ages” with antics press-worthy enough for the front page of trade magazines like Ad Age. First things first. We needed GMO’s counterattack. Aside from a half-hearted attempt to dump buckets of water on our heads during a Pacific Avenue block party, it never came.

 

A different headline made the news instead. GMO had just laid off much of their San Francisco staff. Many of the people we had just soaked from head to toe had just lost their jobs. We literally rained on a parade that had already been deluged.

 

We eventually got ours.

 

A few months later, FCB went through a large layoff of its own. It rendered our big seven-story building that housed 500 people unnecessary. And we had to move.

 

Our office was converted into luxury condos. We watched this sad transition take place from FCB’s new home, across the street, in none other than GMO Hill Holiday’s recently vacated space. FCB continued to shrink and had to move again in a few years. “600 Battery” has since been known as a doomed address for ad agencies. Commercial real estate seekers beware.

 

Cut to 2022.

 

I moved again. This time, to an agency far, far away: The Richards Group (TRG) in Dallas, Texas. On my first day, I met one of TRG’s group creative directors and fellow copywriters. He’s a neighborly fella named Mike Bales. He told me he had also moved to Dallas from San Francisco.

 

“Where did you work in 2000?” Bales asked.

 

“FCB,” I said. “You?”

 

“GMO Hill Holiday,” he said.

 

Mischievous grins appeared on both of our faces.

 

“And to answer your next question,” he said, “Yes, I was there.”

 

But he’s yet to admit if his was the infamous window that faced FCB.

 

Cut to 2025.

 

In another twist of fate, the author of this story, Lesly Pyle, was laid off from TRG and she’s now looking for a job. Contact her for creative positions and/or creative shenanigans. She’d like to thank George Tannenbaum for giving her this space so this story would finally see the light of day in an official advertising trade magazine: Ad Aged, not to be confused with Ad Age.