Internal Memo from the Old White Man Who Runs Your Holding Company and Who's Never Created an Ad.

Dear Colleagues,

Well, let’s start again. Colleagues is too much of an over-promise, even for me. You’re not actually colleagues. In fact, of the 32,000 bipedal carbon-based lifeforms employed by Duplicicom, I only know 12 by name. Three of those I went to boarding school with and make up my usual foursome at Boondoggle Oaks Country Club, and the other nine are the remaining people in Duplicicom who make eight-figure salaries.

OK, dear disposable soon to be laid-off, furloughed or strategically reassessed cost centers. That’s better, but too long.

How about…

Dear Disposable Cost Center,

Due to the unprecedented events surrounding the worldwide Coronavirus, COVID-19 avoirdupois pandemic, Duplicicom is facing challenges that are also unprecedented. Though our business remains fundamentally strong, its fundamental weakness is now emerging as a fundamental counterbalance to our fundamental mediocrity.

As the impact of COVID-19 continues to evolve and our variegated business continues to devolve, we are focused on protecting the safety and well-being of our people, continuing to serve our clients and preserving the strength of our business, as long as it doesn’t cost us any expenditure in time, effort or money.

I have personally heard from sycophants around the globe the degree to which they value the shareholder value you are generating through working virtually every weekend and evening without pay and how thankful they are that you are enduring our record 23-years of stagnant wages—which our award-winning branding agency, BrandinAgenZee has renamed, “Stabilowage™.” Thank you for everything you are doing. And thank you even more for everything you are not doing.

Be that as it may®, COVID-19 has had a decided effect on the economy, on our clients’ and in turn, on ours. While we hope for a recovery as fast as a pole-dancer’s shimmy, to ensure the sustainability of our business, executive bonuses, deferred executive compensation, expense accounts and limousines, as well as our ability to continue to provide our clients with the outstanding lack of service they have come to expect from us, we have to take some profound profundities.

Some internal measures will be applied to adjust our business to the changing adjustments of the adjusting economy and the rapidly diminishing lack of needs of our two remaining agency-of-record clients: my dad’s toxic pink-slime manufacturing business and something else I don’t remember at the moment.

In concert with our award-winning branding agency, BrandinAgenZee, we are replacing “Stabilowage™” which celebrates our legacy of depressing rank-and-file wages for nearly a quarter of a century, with a series of important emendations, including but not exclusive to the following.

1. We will be rebranding Duplicicom. Henceforth, or even Hencefifth, we will be known as Im-mobile-com. The product of extensive ideation and iteration and idioteration, Immobilecom is complex and simple in its nuance. The Im conveys that nothing is impossible. The mobile suggests that we are mobile first. That leaves us proud to say—we’re not just an agency, “we are Immobile.”  

2. As always, we are concerned with the well-being of Immobilecom employees. Accordingly, we will be immediately instituting shorter hours. This will start with lunch hour, which will now be 20 minutes.

3. We have suspended our share repurchase program. At Immobilecom, even we don’t want our shares back™.

4. We have suspended hiring and increased firing. As a company focused on communications, it’s important to note the value that changing one letter can make to a word.

You are the heart of our business. The soul. And the sphincter. And the duodenum.

We are all in this together. Except for me. I’ve amassed $137 million over the last eight years.

You’re in this together.