The Big Game.

With the dusky light from the street lamp outside the lone window in the small extra bedroom in Hector and Teresa’s square cinderblock home lighting the bed we shared that summer, Karmen traced the map of the scars on my head like Henry the Navigator or Gerardus Mercator mapping terra incognita.

 

The routes of the scars on my 17-year-old barely-kissed face were as interwoven as the LA road-network, weaving in, out, around and through major natural landmarks. They were semi-human in my case, not geo- or topo-graphical.

Below my lower lip was a one-inch gash from a two story fall onto the linoleum of my mother's house, my baby teeth biting through my still-tender skin. From my eyes there were small red roads like all those that led to Rome, millennia ago. Rudely healed reminders of not-so-long-ago bloodspurt. Bloodspurt that came from no one watching and no one caring and no one not pushing me around because I was littlest, and they could. Maybe, for the very reason that they had been pushed around before me, they needed me to push around now.

Karmen began with a twin set of roadways running from my right eye back halfway to my temple. The permanent gash from where one-year-old me met brick corner when he was pushed and no grown up was sober and in the vicinity.

The mountain on the forehead, a tectonic up swelling from where head met Hillerich and Bradsby’s Louisville Slugger, a concussion hidden from adults because their anger would have hurt more than cracked skull. 

There was the Passo del Stelvio of my nose, twisting like a hundred 'S' turns through the Alps from batted balls, bats and bully's fists because I grew up never backing down. 

The viaduct below my lip was the worst one, the one I re-opened with frequency when I shaved too quickly and nicked it aggressive.

Finally, there was the open gully midway between my left-eye and my hairline. It was an ancient excavation of my brain that had somehow gone wrong.

"There are so many rivers in the desert of your face, Jorge," Karmen traced with the small of her fingers. "There are so many hurts."

She traced one softly and kissed it when she reached the end. She traveled then to my cranial Vesuvius, circling it like a military battalion then ending her encroachment with another soft kiss.

"How does one young boy have a face that looks like a fisherman's hands," she asked. "Full of knife cuts and fish bites and hooks that have stung with anger like steel wasps."

"Karmen," I answered in a whisper, turning away so she would not see the tearing of my eyes. "My life is in those scars, if it were not for those scars, I would not be here."

"Those scars were your bus ticket," she laugh-kissed.

"Those scars and the ones no one can see are what sent me here so far from everything I know."

"But how, Jorge, how come the scars?"

I turned away from more to hide from her deep brown all-seeing eyes the hurt that was in my all-revealing eyes.

"How come the scars, Jorge."

"We are all bearing scars, Karmen. We are all bearing scars. There are those you can trace with your fingertips."

I thought to myself of some words I had memorized from Richard Wright's great book, "Black Boy." Until this moment I wasn't sure why they struck me hard enough to store in my head.

"With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity...And that if men were lucky in their living on earth, they might win some redeeming meaning for the having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars."

She could not hear my silence or read my memory. No one can.

"I count six on your head."

"Six," I answered. "Five before I was three. Maybe because no one was home yet the edges of the house I was born in were sharp and fractured. They would attack."

"Six." She circumnavigated my cuts counter-clockwise counting in a simple Spanish that even I could understand. "Uno." Kiss. "Duo." Kiss. "Tres." Kiss. "Cuatro." Kiss. "Cinco." Kiss. "Seis." Kiss. 

"Let us have no more scars, Jorge. You have a life of hurt in your head already and you are just a boy."

"It's a rough game." I turned back to her. "You cannot play backing away, backing down, turning your head. I have bad hands but I am good in the field because I stop the ball with my chest and sometimes my head."

"Hector says you use your cabeza."

We for a moment laughed.

"No more scars," she said. "Because," she again kissed softly m forehead. Her mouth was warm and wet in the dry cool night. "No more scars," she repeated. "Because you have already in your head six and."

I said nothing. My eyes were ready to sleep in the cricket-quiet of the night.

"Because you have already in your head six and six-hundred more no one will ever see."

She kissed again softly and we slept with little air between us.

No More Bore.

As I've written many times before, when you write a blog as assiduously as I write this one, it changes your life.

Anything you do as regularly as I write this blog changes your life. For good or bad. For me, I think, blogging has been good. It's helped me in many ways.

For one, it makes me a better writer. In the same way that swimming every day or running or practicing French would make you better at those pursuits. 

When I worked in an agency and I was "competing" with another team (though I worked, generally alone) I would find confidence based on the fact that I've written a couple million more words than everyone else. 

That's a lot of practice.

I've worked with words long enough to know how to make words work to solve a problem. That's why whenever there was a crisis in the agency and a lot had to be done in a little time, my cage was most-often rattled. I often felt like a wily pitcher. Not only do I have command of my "stuff," I've faced this circumstance before and amn't likely to get all hetted up because there are two-on and none out. I've worked my way out of jams before. 

Second, writing every day forces upon the writer an acuity you might not otherwise possess. It's like being an avid coin collector. You get in the habit of noticing things that gallop by most others. When you're always looking for the next thing to write, you have to be aware of your surroundings. You have to be like a detective looking for clues at a crime scene. You have to heighten your awareness and your <er> perspicacity. Otherwise, you'll soon run out of subject matter.

Third, you get in the habit not just of noticing things but of noticing that you're noticing. If you don't notice that you've noticed something, you'll forget what you noticed.  By the time you have to write something down there's nothing around to write. That's no good.

One of these noticings I've made a habit of noticing happened just an hour or so ago when I was driving to the grocery store. The song I pasted above came on the car stereo.

I listened and heard all the missed notes, and the double-hit notes. Ray Charles playing "Low Society" reminded me a bit of Thelonious when he played "Dinah, Take 2." It seems to my unmusically-trained ears that Charles and Monk miss as many notes as they hit. Neither do they give a hoot.

I pressed 'back' on my car stereo and listened to Low Society again. Yep. I heard right.

Stopped at a light, I violated the law and typed myself a note about the missed notes. I typed, "Genius means making the best mistakes."

Mistakes are what make the world go round. Change. Improve. Mistakes are what make laughter. Love. Discovery. More.  Mistakes are what make humans human. 

And as I wrote for IBM Watson, when I tried to give Watson voice, "humans are my favorite carbon-based life-form."

Mistakes--not hallucinations-- are what the technocrats and the dweebstocracy behind the $4,000,000,000,000 being spent annually on AI do not, will not and cannot understand.

Just like the space between the notes makes the notes better, the errors, the ers, ahems and likes between thoughts, the mis-hit keys, make the keys eventually hit with precision more loaded with impact.

Many things are funny only because they're stupid.

Same thing here.

Many of the most interesting things in the world happen by happenstance not planning. Yet people plan their lives away then wonder why they're sad, or bored.

There's no real point in any of this other than the world should maybe take a step backwards and lighten up a bit. We should stop trying to weigh every word, process every thought and calculate causality out the wazoo.

In doing that--mankind and machinekind--perfect themselves into absolute boredom.

And if genius, as I wrote to myself makes the best mistakes. Boredom is the worst.

And will be the end of us all.

My Version

Some say the world will end in fire.

Some say in ice.

I say it will end in boredom.

Which really won't be nice.

I'd rather be consumed by fire.

Or frozen in a block of ice.

But I'll probably die by reading shit like this.

Eighteen times, not just twice.

Ho-hum.

Some months ago, a guy contacted me on LinkedIn. He wanted to talk to GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, about helping him launch a vodka with a minor-celebrity's name attached and the minor-celebrity's 45-years-younger-than-he wife as their creative director.

The guy, whom I won't dignify with even an initial (I'll just keep referring to him as 'the guy,') sent me to a site and sent me a powerpoint that showed how much money we could all make when the vodka brand that had no awareness, no distribution and no real differentiation somehow went from selling 2,000 cases a year to 700,000.

I know fuckall about the liquor business, but I'd imagine that everyone who attempts to get into it and launch a new brand has wetdream fantasies about their product becoming Absolut like I dreamed of becoming Willie Mays. 

This guy had convinced himself that he had the next Absolut. All he needed was me to write some ads, like the ads I write for GeorgeCo., and off we'd fly enjoying that "hockey-stick-thing" along the way.

Wow, I said to myself, my bank account, the 529s that I've set up for my two-grandsons, J and R. Wow, I said to H, my long-time friend and Account Director. Wow, I said to L, my wife who cares about me feeling that I'm fruitful, creative and relevant.

We duly met with the minor-celebrity, over zoom, and his shapely amalgamation of silicone, lips and more silicone for good measure. We talked for over an hour. They quizzed me, I answered with my usual perspicacity and humor, we all laughed and slapped each other's virtual backs.

The guy asked for my address and H's, so he could send us some bottles. He asked for a scope, which H sent in fewer than six hours. 

I did what I always do when I get to work. I create a word doc with the client's name and the word "running" next to it and a date. Then, I write down everything I think of for the client and the brand. In a short while I had a dozen lines, with H scowling at me, as she should, about thinking before having a signed scope.

Then.

Nothing.

No bottles. 

Nothing.

Then.

You cost too much.

Then, we cut down the scope.

Then from the guy: "Minor celebrity doesn't want to agree to the scope until he sees the work."

Click.

Last night I saw something from another vodka brand called Neft. I have no real interest in vodka per se. But I thought I'd look at what they're doing. 

Once again, another brand that has all their digital ducks in a row but they've spent no sweat, money or real effort to get known outside of the six-person-reach of their infinitesimal website.

There are about 97,000,654,934,384 brands like this in the tech world. 

About 478,384,038,937 candidates like this in the political world.

 About 344,930,028,080 hamburgers like this in the fast-food world.

About 830,038,112,021 white SUVs like this in the automotive world.

They're all dressed-up,
With no place to go,
They didn't spend the dough,
To let anyone know.
So, they don't grow.
They disappear like August snow.

Maybe the worst offenders of not telling people what they do or why you should buy them are advertising agencies and the holding companies that ate them.

I'm not sure what any of the words above mean. And I'm edumacated. The slogan of my college was NOT "Close Cover Before Striking."

I do know what this means:

Years ago, when I worked on what at the time was a major tech brand and is now a virtual irrelevancy, I would actually spend time reading their annual report to find out what the brand was doing that no one felt was important enough to tell the agency about.

In today's WSJ. The article noted IBM has 270,000 employees. 
In 2010 they had 400,000.

The client and the agency at this point had devolved into full messaging puffery. Never say something strong when you can say something "me too." 

I was trying with ardor NOT to produce another ad anything like this.

I found a fact in the annual report and my partner and I made an ad out of it.

When I presented it to the client they "shit a brick." 

"Where did you get that information," they stammered.

"Well, the 70% fact was in your annual report. Page 7. The 2.3% fact is available to anyone. You can Google it in less than a second. I just put the two together."

"We can't say that." 

"It's in your annual report. Your annual report goes to the Security and Exchange Commission." 

"We can't say that," they repeated. This time in all-caps. 

No one helped me. 

Not planning. Account. Creative colleagues. Not even a client who understood advertising.

If you don't find anything differentiating about your brand or your self, and you don't spend any money making a name for yourself, everything we do, every hour we spend, every dollar we burn is a waste.

Clients have come to realize that advertising in its current form is a waste. A cost center, not a profit driver.

That conclusion leads me to conclude:

Change its current form.

Newspeak.

You have to be suspect, I think, when you reach an age of "maturity" in your career (or in your life) and all at once, a phrase or phrases you've never heard before, you can't go a day or an hour without hearing.

I'm not talking about hearing of actual physical things that might actually change life on earth, like a remote control, a microwave oven or an EZ-Pass reader. Or a disaster or death that crowds the consciousness. And I understand if, say, you get a new golden retriever puppy with more energy than the large Hadron Collider, your conversations will alter. I'm talking more about semantics that seem to sweep over companies, social groups, even, today entire nations.

All of a sudden everyone is saying the same thing.

I had been working in advertising for 30 years before I heard:
Agile.
Digital first.
Robust.
Content.
Story-telling.
Algorithm.
Interactivity.
Project management.
Chief People Officers.
Social strategists.
Customer experience/user experience/experience design.

And a whole host of other terms that to my mind are the tail wagging the elephant. 

Focusing on these things when you're trying to reach people is like trying to sell a $323,000 Porsche based on the novelty and brilliance of its floor mats. 

I had been an a-merkin for 58 years before I heard:
Fake news.
Unwillingness to transfer power.
Kakistocracy.
Vaccine denial.
Shutdowns.
Stop-the-steal.
McConnellism.
Christian nationalism.
Originalism.
Trumpism.
And more.

Basically these things--the phrases and concepts--are shiny objects meant to keep you from noticing the truths (or the lies) around you. When someone tells you they're serving you an artisanal A5 Wagyu beef in a Tajima-Wagyu Kobe cut originating from the Tajima cattle bloodline raised in Hyogo Prefecture under strict guidelines, what they're really doing is bullshitting their way into being able to charge you 20X for something worth .5X.

Similarly, when someone tells you they're going to make something great again, they're really selling you a way they can enrich themselves and their friends while impoverishing you. Lyndon Johnson, one of the wiliest politicians that ever was saw this picture clearly. As did Franklin Roosevelt when he appointed bootlegger and incipient gangster Joseph Kennedy to be the first head of the Security and Exchange Commission (back when government had regulatory power) and said "It takes a thief to catch a thief.")

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When an entire government abides by vaccine denial, for instance, it's not vaccines they're denying, in fact. It's bigger than that. They're destroying, purposefully, the very notion of truth. 

Here's proof that vaccines don't work:

Now, to the point of today's post. If there is one. 

There's been a broad tendency, a consensus even, to blame the demise of the modern Holding-Company-dominated advertising industry on all sorts of exogenous particulars:
The dominance of social media platforms.
The splintering of media channels.
The shortening of attention spans.
The cynical consumer.
The age of post-capitalism.

All those reasons deny the fundamental reason for the perishing of advertising as it is constituted today.

Advertising no longer defines a product and tells us what makes it different in ways that breakthrough, interest and convince people. 

Advertising no longer works because the advertising industry no longer does advertising. 

We do grinvertising. (People gushing over mayonnaise.)
Celebrityising. (Celebrities gushing over mayonnaise.)
Fakevertising. (Un-seen ads purportedly for mayonnaise.)

We no longer tell people why they might need mayonnaise thus compelling them to buy a rancid jar. In fact, 99-percent of the ads I see as heralded these days do nothing but sell a category--not the essential components of a particular product or service in that category.  And 99-percent of them use the same footage, music, techniques and voice-over to do exactly the same thing as everyone else. Then they assert that advertising doesn't work.

I have no reason to believe the five things below would work today. Advertising stopped working because the advertising industry stopped working at advertising.

One thing along these lines that I've noticed over the last 15 years or so that I never noticed during my first 50 years is this: Companies or people paying massive fines but admitting no wrong-doing.

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I don't understand the ratiocination that's operating here. Why do you pay a fine if you did no wrong. And why do we allow it?

I bring this back to advertising for the simple reason that predominantly men with no advertising experience or belief in advertising, but great experience in sharp-pencilling expenses, have taken hundreds of millions of personal wealth from the advertising. In Melanie's words, they've "picked it like a chicken bone," and put the blame for the destruction of advertising and hundreds of thousands of jobs not on them, but on things that have somehow turned them into innocent (wrongdoing-denying) victims.

Or as the Andrew formerly known as Prince might squeak, "I didn't rape the girl, my penis did."

In advertising, it's "Me and my $500,000,000 net-worth didn't destroy the ad industry, Amazon did."

NYTimes review here.

Things in the world change every day.
I suppose that's why our planet spins.
(The round earth, not the flat one.)
One thing doesn't change.
The holiness and essentiality of being responsible for who you are and what you do.
It's not saying, "It wasn't me that said what you heard me say."
Once accountability and owning up is no longer,
the whole thing collapses.

Acceptable.

How can a book about Augusto Pinochet, a book more about not his crimes, but his immunity against consequences for murder, rape, pederasty, kidnapping, torture, embezzlement and more, lead me to think about both the current state of the advertising industry and the modern world?

That parallelism came, for me, into sharp focus this week. Cindy Rose, OBE, the new CEO of the advertising holding company WPP called the performance of her company "unacceptable."

The trade press, here Adweek, did their usual crappy job explaining all this in a "2 minute read." Though through the numbers they chose to throw at the reader (in their truncated coverage--it's as if one of the biggest stories of our time deserves but two-minutes) they missed the big numbers. 

They missed badly.

This is big news covered by Adweek, the journalistic equivalent of Bazooka Joe comix.

The big numbers--the real ones--are these: 

In 2017, WPP claimed they had 200,000 employees. Today, they have fewer than 90,000.

In 2020, WPP had a market-capitalization of $32,000,000,000. Today it's around $5,000,000,000. If they had $5.20 at the start of the decade, by the end of the first half of the decade, they're left with just $1.

This chart might help if you have a hard time with numbers.

It makes sense here, I think, to introduce the German concept Persilschein into the conversation. When the trump era finally burns down amerika, if amerika rebounds, I have a feeling a lot of trump's willing executioners will buy for themselves the amerikan equivalent of Persilschein. We don't have wonderful linguistic cognates like the Germans. But let me propose one for this inevitability, Cheetobleach.

Certainly Pinochet, above, Persilscheined his way to a immunity and impunity. Like Sammy 'the Bull' Gravano, he got away with murder. The Ratline Nazis, like Walter Rauff, who built Pinochet's state torture, disappearing and murder infrastructure got off scot-free. Earlier, Rauff invented the Nazi's 'killing vans' and was responsible for the deaths of 125,000 Jews. He Ratlined to a new life (after causing so many deaths) in Chile.

The basis for my comparison is attached to Cindy Rose, OBE's, use of the word "unacceptable," above. WPP's performance is unacceptable.

What she didn't call out as unacceptable is the corporate mob's perfectly acceptable pillaging of the corporations they run and their manipulation of their corporate "Compensation Committees."

There are hundreds of mostly-men from WPP and countless other corporate entities who "presided" over their plummet. They were running those places into oblivion. 

They leave with nine-figure compensation packages and in-perpetuity pensions. (They put the ptui- in in-perpetuity.)

Some of these pillagers like Mark Read, came to the company, stripped all its wealth, drove it into the ground, and now live in 33-room mansions in Mustique, Cannes, Geneva and in 107-story sun-blocking buildings on "Billionaires' Row" in Manhattan.

Their's is an un-punished villainy.

OK. Maybe this is too harsh.

They didn't murder anything.

But an industry.

Perfectly acceptable.

Modern Yiddish Curses for the A.I. Era of Advertising.

Thanks to Rob Schwartz for inspiring both this post and for adding
a couple of adroit curses below.

Music to read by. Ella tears your heart.

1. May you do with the utmost efficiency that which should not be done at all.

2. All your hallucinations, may they come true, and be like a chandelier--hanging all day and burning all night.

3. May you grow like a holding company ad agency, that is, may you shrink.

4. May your CCOs win every creative award at Cannes and you lose every piece of real business you have.

5. May a Woodstock attendee hallucinate less than your AI platform. 

6. May you win an account selling slop just when your AI stops producing it.

7. May your virtual assistant make hundreds of real mistakes.

8. May your technology outstrip your humanity and may you be able to re-boot neither.

9. May you have answers to questions that are never asked and questions about things that are never answered.

10. May the timesheet police of happiness punish you for being late by making you watch HR-compliance videos.

11. May you win accounts promoting branches of the government that teeter on the edge of fascism, and may their funding run out when you've finished the work but before they pay their bills.

12. May all the people judging your ads have lots of opinions and little taste.

13. May senior management return from Cannes more eager than ever to make an 'impact.'

14. May you only be judged by the work other people don't steal credit for.

15. May you wake up one morning and hear Martin Sorrell calling you "Shorty," and Mark Read calling you "Smiley."

16. May a technologist take over your holding company and may she actually believe her own PR.

17. May your holding company's senior executives grant themselves ten-digit compensation packages then blame the parlous condition of their agency on their business model.

18. May your "hot-desk" cause third-degree crotch burns.

19. May the all-white, all-male, all-Oxbridge, all over-50 management at your holding company lecture you for 23-hours a day on diversity. 

20. During the 24th hour may you have to eat agency catering.

Thanks to Martin Galton for the uncanny drawing of me.
In a good mood.