The Ad Aged Interview with New York's Rat Czar.

Since it's well-known that New York City is the rat capital of the world and the advertising industry is the rat capital of New York City, I leveraged the not-inconsiderable influence of Ad Aged, a Business Insider "most influential blog," and secured an exclusive interview with Gotham's Rodent Potentate, Kathleen Corradi.

AD AGED:    
Thank you, Ms. Corradi, for agreeing to speak with Ad Aged. First of all, congratulations on your new job, though I can't say I envy you.

RAT CZAR:
Call me Kathleen. I'm very happy to be here. I'm actually relying on the help of your industry to get New York's rodent problem under control.

AD AGED:    
Because we can help educate people and spread the word as to behaviors that could diminish the rat population?

RAT CZAR:
Not exactly. Your industry has been a leader in making itself obsolete, marginal and unimportant, following advertising's lead, perhaps I can drive rats to the fringes like advertising has retreated to the fringes of the world's economy.

AD AGED:
The fringes?

RAT CZAR:
Well yes. It wasn't that long ago that Madison Avenue was on Madison Avenue--or at least Third Avenue, or Eighth. Cheek to jowl with the world's largest corporations. Now you're most often far away from the center of commerce. To strain a metaphor, you are the thrown-away crust of capitalism's pizza.

AD AGED:
Ah the wooden stick in the swill bucket, as Marx said.

Nevertheless, I see your point. Like advertising, you'll slowly get rats to accept less and less and under ever-harsher conditions. Eventually, the best and the brightest rats, like the best people in advertising, will abandon the industry. 

RAT CZAR:
You got it. As Grover Norquist said about Reaganism--or Thatcherism--'starve the beast. Then drown it in a bathtub.'

Then there's my most powerful tactic, which I also learned from your industry.

AD AGED:
What would that be?

RAT CZAR:
One word: PIZZA.

AD AGED:
Pizza?

RAT CZAR:
People in your industry already work millions, if not billions of hours of overtime--for no extra pay, for no career security, for no reason other than free pizza when they come in on the weekend or stay till 1AM.

AD AGED:
Sometimes it's sushi.

RAT CZAR:
Let's stick to pizza. Rats love New York pizza.

AD AGED:
Patsy's? V&T's? John's of Bleecker?

RAT CZAR:
Like ad people, quality doesn't much matter to rats. We can use virtually any pizza to get them to do anything we want them to do. 

If ad people will work all-night for free doing 197 banner ads and 274 mobile ads just for dollar-a-slice pizza, I can't believe we won't be able to get rats to be similarly compliant.

AD AGED:
I see your point. So you'll spread a trail of dollar-slices and the rats will follow the trail into the river where you'll drown them?

RAT CZAR:
Close. But with agencies about 45% smaller than they were in 2019, we'll lead rats into abandoned ad agency spaces. Let them live there. Outside of the improvement, landlords will never know the difference.

And then...

AD AGED:
There's more? 

RAT CZAR:
Yep. You'll help us by cutting the case study video on how we eradicated 127% of all rats past and present. All with concocted data, testimonials from agency people saying how great rat-free living is, random news-clips claiming we got over 47 billion free impressions and of course pirated Black Death footage.

AD AGED:
In other words, we're all going to Cannes.

RAT CZAR:
Oh yes. And one more thing.

AD AGED:
Yes?

RAT CZAR:
No pepperoni.
It's too expensive.

The Apple of My Eye.

I yelled at someone last week. I fairly excoriated her.

I hardly knew her, to be honest. She was junior when I was co-head of the flagship office of a giant agency. But that was twenty years ago. More recently, she lost her job. 

She asked to Zoom and I said yes. Not out of any sense of "I have to" but because in the twenty years since I had left that giant agency, I had seen via Linked In how she had grown. It's life-affirming to see people grow--whether or not you know them well. It's what life, and business, used to be about. It was supposed to be more than just Mammon.

It's good to stay in touch with good people and learn from them, so I've stayed in touch with her. And last week she picked my brain about what today we politely call "career transitions." In other words, 'what do I do now that I'm no longer doing what I set out to do and where I set out to do it?'

I'm not sure there's anyone anywhere who doesn't face that 'reinvention' question--twice a decade or more. The best people are by design or happenstance in medias res. They're always reinventing themselves. A new boss. A promotion. A recession. A baby. Whatever. You can't step into the same job twice, as Heraclitus never said.

In any event, back to me yelling.

The woman I was talking to said, "I've taken my time off, now I'm beginning to look and I'm not sure exactly how to do it."

I scoffed. "As long as you're not one of those people who puts. green circle that says 'Open to Work' on your Linked In profit, you'll be fine. I can't believe how stupid that is."

Pause.

"I have one of those. I'm one of those people."

"NO. You don't tell the world, you don't tell prospective employers that you don't have work." My temperature was rising.

"Goddammut, steal a page from Steve Jobs or the hot restaurants where you live. Jobs always had a line outside his door. He always had a shortage, a waiting list, he always made Apple easy to want and hard to get. 

"Same thing with hot restaurants. The pretty people sit in the window. It's hard to get a reservation. How does it help you to tell the world you need something."

This is not about lying or faking it until you're making it. This is about marketing. 

Marketing yourself.

Nobody wants things there's too much of. Very few people want things they can get any time. As Keats said, 

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

 Are sweeter;..."

There's so much absolutely asinine information out in the world. So much temptation to do what everyone else does--like putting a green circle on your picture. There is so much me-too-ism-ization. 

There is so much bad marketing.

And so little good marketing.

If when it comes to looking for work, you can't reject the bad marketing and embrace the good marketing, maybe you don't deserve to work. Because you're not using your intelligence in service of your self.

As Rabbi Hillel said: "If I am not for myself, who am I? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?"

I ain't going all Jewish on you. But if you have to get a tattoo or have a mantra, that ain't a bad place to begin. 

Neither is 'treat your own work-hunt with the same reverence Apple treats its hunt for new buyers and new markets." Show  what you do well. Show what you do differently. Show your self with elegance and intelligence. And price yourself accordingly.

It works for a company with a $2.6 trillion market cap. It will probably work for you.

AI YI YI.

Because I worked on IBM's Watson for so many years, both as a creative director and a strategist, I flatter myself into thinking I know more than a little bit about Artificial Intelligence. And because I've studied history for virtually my entire life, I flatter myself I know more than a little bit about the history of hype--technological and otherwise. 

With these two things in mind and despite so many voices barking the contrary, I believe four things about AI.

1. 
It will not make our lives better. And

2.
It will not, ever, write well. (Maybe it will be fine for things like the J. Crew catalog or what to do in an elevator emergency.) but...

3.
The plutocrats who run our lives won't stop there. With the scent of money in their greedy nostrils they will turn everything over to AI and before long everything will suck worse and before slightly longer everyone will accept shit as gold.

4.
AI is essentially (for now) an ornate pattern-matching machine. Humans do this too. We pattern-match the word "Untimely" to "Death." We pattern-match "4th of July" to "Mattress Sale." Original thought is hard--and most people and machines default to simple.

I'll leave this space now, having said my piece and resting not in peace for the future I foresee. I will turn this over to my friend, an erstwhile George, Eric Arthur Blair, who knew a bit about words and their effect. He wrote about Newspeak--but you might when you see that cognate replace it with AI:

 “You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words–scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone.”

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great advantage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well–better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words–in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?…”

“…In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning…”

...That sentence, with its description of shades of meaning as “useless” made an impression on me. I had to put the book down for a second to ponder on it…and I came to equate Standard English as we know it today (and really any language in the world that isn’t Newspeak-like), as being a language for human beings, for expressing all that encompasses the multi-faceted human condition; whereas Newspeak reduces the human down to an automaton machine, who’s primary goal in speaking is efficiency in its exactitude.

The true purpose of Newspeak, the reason for holding efficiency above all else: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

I realize at the age of 65 I am as obsolete as a wide range of thought. But AI is a writing, thinking and creating good night that we should not go gentle into.

Somehow, and by dint of whatever synapses I have remaining, I think of this poem, perhaps one of the most profound and funniest in the 200,000 years of what we once called "human life" on our dying orb.

Do you want to abandon things like this?

Epitaph on a Waiter

by David McCord

By and by
God caught his eye.

Chirrup.

The crush of work being what it is, when you're of a certain vintage, the end of the year when people in offices used to try to coast into Christmas and New Year's doesn't feel like the end of the year anymore.

There used to be, though this might just be nostalgia speaking, the sense that the year was done. You had made it through 50 weeks of toil and now you had a bit of time to maybe breathe, watch a Yule log on television, or see Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," interrupted 37 times in two-hours with insipid and ill-timed commercials screaming at you to buy worn-out dreams you never had.

There also used to be some sense that you belonged to something. 

That in return for your long year of labor, you had a bit of a respite. That in return for your dedication, you had a 401(K) and health insurance and a desk on which to put a picture of your kids. But now those appurtenances of liberal community have evaporated in a rip of robin-hood republicanism where the working people finance the tax-avoidance of the plutocrat-class, only to be told by the plutocrat class that they're a lazy no good bunch of dolts and lucky not to be fed petri-dish-grown soylent green, now with twenty-percent more dark people.

Now it seems like the world is a giant buffet about to be closed and you're the last plate of shrimp. Everybody's grabbing at you to get all they can from you before the plate disappears at year's end and heaven forfend you take three-hours away from the computer and being told by people who take 120-days to pay you what to do and that it's due right now.

As a boy, I remember walking lonely through the city, the broken asphalt even more broken by the hiss of broken steam pipes. An orphan in the city, raised by wolves who were either out of town on a secretary-boffing-business trip or even more out of town on a Miltown-high, sitting in the dark and howling at every noise to stay away. Walking through the city in the cold, with a too-thin last-season's brother's hand-me-down unbuttoned against the wind roaring down the avenue like a city bus driven by a blind man and through my 75-pound frame like buckshot through an unlucky grouse. 

I had eighty-five cents in my pocket, the leftovers of a week of lunch money not spent, enough for two hot pretzels and a grape soda from the cigar that sold them from a wagon on the corner near the hissing steam so he could stay warm. That would be my dinner that night, because there was never dinner from the rooms that housed the orphans. Just a scraping by of scraps that could be found in the detritus of death that was my life.

Today, so many years later, the smell of burning pretzels and burnt-up lives are still in my nose every time I walk the streets that line the litter of New York and all at once, I am no longer in the city at all.

When I feel like this, as I feel so often in a world that seems mad and madder still for not recognizing its very madness, I leave, somehow, the present-day and find myself back in the purple light of a Mexican evening and sitting with the first people to show me love: Hector Quesadilla, my baseball manager when I played for the Seraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League and his wife and my first mother, Teresa.

I am sitting on the small front porch in a large rocking chair in the chirruping heat Mexican desert night in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, tossing stones at the sounds where the crickets might be and listening to my first second father, Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla.

I was just 17, you know what I mean, when I ran away from the sonic-boom silence of my parents' home to do the one thing I did well and with abandon, play baseball. It was the summer of 1975, and the Seraperos, on the strength of a note from my high school coach, translated into Castillian Spanish by Senor Cowan, my high school Spanish teacher, gave me a tryout under the nasty June sun of the Saltillo heat.

The first pitch, though still stiff from a four-day bus ride from New York to Corpus Christie, Texas and then to Saltillo, I uncorked my swing and lined a shot literally through the desiccated burgundy wooden fence that girded leftfield, 330-feet away as the horsehide flies.

"Jorge," Hector began that night on his porch. He was holding a one-foot square Saltillo tile he had taken from a corrugated box in his kitchen. He was laying a new floor. 

The tile was then the second most famous export from Saltillo, the first being cheap serapes--a tourist memento, the third, and soon the second, Chrysler Town and Country minivans which were rolling out by the thousands from the new man-eating factory that befouled the air around the city.

"All of the world is in here, Jorge Navidad. In here is the sweat of a thousand hands. In here is a thousand years of clay. In here are a thousand horse-backed Spaniards raping a thousand bent-backed Indians and stealing their land, their loves and their lives."

"The multitudes," I said. Thinking vaguely of Whitman, who, until that moment I could never understand.

"There," Hector said "is the sadness of a boy like you, hit by the closed, not open, hand of his father. There is the theft of a farm that was farmed by the people of a small village for a thousand generations until the pale people came and told them it was not theirs because they had no paper saying it was theirs. There is the Gog and Magog of power reducing us all to dust and dirt and sweat and clay and mud until we too are a Saltillo tile baking in the sun. There is everything that is wrong overtaking everything that is right and never looking back."

He threw a small stone into the dark and for a wee moment the chirruping of the crickets silenced and you could hear the trillion stars blinking off and whispering, go to sleep weary hobos, go to sleep.

Hector went inside his small, clean symmetrical house. To the glass of lemon-water Teresa had left, one for each of us on the square kitchen table. He drank at the glass and walked to his bedroom, to Teresa, to speak-away the darkness of the world. 

I followed twenty seconds later, sipping at my lemon-water and returning to my bedroom and my summer's love, one dark-eyed Indian girl from a small shtetl in the mountains who took my teal Seraperos jacket one night against the cold and we fell deep and bottomless into an abyss of love that even of loneliness could not begin to fill.

The chirrups chirrupped.

The lemon-water warmed slowly in the cool desert dark.

The bodies brushed against each other.

No matter where I am in the world at any moment I am there.

Multitudes.

Are We Human or Are We Not?

With every third article on social media--or non-social media--these days being about AI and the huge sweep of changes its advancement portends, it baffles me that very few people, if any, are asking the right questions about AI.

I believe what we should be asking is simple.

How many pleasing machine/human interactions have you had in your life? If your internet goes out, or your cable, or your phone, were you able to get it resolved without wanting to throw something at the wall?

If you have to rebook a flight or switch from a noisy hotel room to a less-noisy one, were you able to do it without getting cranky? Now imagine the same operation when it snows or it's two in the morning.

And as you travel through the world, which do you prefer--spreadsheet-designed spaces or human-designed spaces. Do you prefer being optimized or treated well? 

At about 1:30 in this short documentary about the razing of  Mead, McKim and White's Penn Station, there's a quotation by the Yale Art Critic Vincent Scully. Scully says, "One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat."

That quotation for me frames the entire debate (if there is ever really a debate and not a foregone conclusion when humanity squares off against giant monied interests.)

How do giant corporations treat people? Have you ever been well-treated by a machine-derived communication or interaction?

This is the central question of civilization.

Will the masses--that's you and I, the little people--be treated as humans. Or are we beings that exist only to make the few, the powerful and the strong, immeasurably richer? 

Are we people or are we serfs/cannon fodder?

Will the governments that rule us and the corporations that grow ever-richer from our labors and our spending treat us like gods or like rats? 

Will they, in return for our sweat and brains, help us grow, help provide us with security, healthcare, the means to better our lives and those of our families? Or will they treat us as a coal seam--something from which to extract wealth--and when emptied, something to be left behind to sully and mar the natural landscape.

Concomitantly, how will these giant corporations speak to us and sell to us? Will they, as so many advertisers do today, scream at us, track us, steal our data and try to wring every last dollar from us by selling our data and harassing us with blandishments until we cry uncle just to stop the assault. 

The question I ask is simple. I think it should be the question we're all asking.

Do we want to be treated as humans--spoken to as humans and given courtesy and respect, or will we accept a mercantilist folding, spindling and mutilating?

And we in the ad industry, do we have any say in this? Or are we just here to follow brutalist orders?

For many years, certainly since I read George Packer's "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America," I've started looking at the giant corporations who, by consolidating vast amounts of capital and power, now rule virtually every corner of our lives, as "Colonial powers."

By that I mean, that Walmart, like the East India Company removes wealth from where it was originally sited and sends it to boardrooms and executive suites in faraway lands. In so doing, they replace middle-class jobs that kept money in their original locales with poverty-jobs that ship wealth elsewhere. Think of what happens when Walmart or McKinsey come to town. The same happened in the ad industry when WPP, IPG and their merry band of CPAMBAs bought the industry. 

The wealth that was created and shared by hundreds of local agencies was bought up and taken over by a few global entities. Never have so few profited from the work of so many by giving so little in return.

That to me could be an apt synopsis of the artificial intelligence era. Skilled jobs like writing will be replaced by machine jobs. The costs will drop by 400% while the price will only be halved. Profits will therefore increase while quality will decline. All to the point of ultimate collapse.

That seems to be what we're hurtling toward.

Forget humans. Forget treating people like humans. Forget human creative output.

We have money to make.

P(a)ins and Needles.

Lately, I've been busier than a knife sharpener at a mohel convention and also lately, I've been speaking to a lot of friends and colleagues who are looking for work.

As disparate as these two things are, I'm finding they go together. 

Let me explain.

The other day, I was speaking to a colleague--a former boss, actually. I'll call him, as Kafka might have, X, you know, for anonymity's sake. 

X had risen to nearly the highest heights in three or four different agencies, but is now on the other side trying to scale the mountain again. I don't know what he said or how he said it, but somewhat from out of the blue I asked X an unexpected question.

"You're a middle child, aren't you?"

X fluttered his eyelashes at me. He was baffled by my question.

"Yes, I am," X answered. "How did you know?" He might have stammered.

"I just did," I said. "I am, too."

Clearly, I had seen something in X that reminded me of me. Something of the underdog--that we were never the primary focus of our parents, so we always had to fight for attention. We always had to be loud, or we'd have been ignored. 

My mentor and ex-boss, Steve Hayden, taught me that. Steve believed that the best ad people are second children or third or last. We were always an after-thought. We learned from an early age to stand on a chair and holler. It was get attention or rot.

Back to being busy.

I had a presentation today where I showed the client about 25 ads. 

That's a lot of ads. Even for me.

Again, not being heard as a child--which was clearly detrimental to me in so many ways--turned into an advertising positive.

I am able to write 25 lines on a single theme--on a positioning or a brief--because it might take a neglected child 25 tries to get heard once.

I couldn't just say, "I'm bleeding, Freddy hit me," 25 times the same way. I had to learn to shake things up so I'd get noticed. My birth-order and emotionally austere, even cruel, parents--were a real liability when I was a kid. 

As a grown-up, I learned to turn those minuses into pluses. 

I think everyone has a fairly long assortment of minuses in their corpuscles. Some endogenous. Some exogenous. Some from using words like endogenous and exogenous.

There's no pill or therapeutic technique or HR protocol or 9-week-training program that can cover them all. If you're just a fucking neurotic mess, you won't get a week or even a day where the world claims they're celebrating your infirmity.

Mostly all you can do to compensate is work a little harder. Work your way through issues. Talk yourself away from the ledge and try again.

There are plenty of nights I curse the gods for not having had loving parents or even liking parents. For having had to raise myself the best I could, like a Dickens' character sans benefactor, being shaken upside-down by Magwicg in a cemetary. For having to fight like a mongrel for whatever emotional table scraps I could beg.

But then I write 25 ads.

And maybe 25 more.

It ain't the same thing as feeling loved. But I can do it. I've learned to get attention.

It's a living.

Pains and Needles.

Lately, I've been busier than a knife sharpener at a mohel convention and also lately, I've been speaking to a lot of friends and colleagues who are looking for work.

As disparate as these two things are, I'm finding they go together. 

Let me explain.

The other day, I was speaking to a colleague--a former boss, actually. I'll call him, as Kafka might have, X, you know, for anonymity's sake. 

X had risen to nearly the highest heights in three or four different agencies, but is now on the other side trying to scale the mountain again. I don't know what he said or how he said it, but somewhat from out of the blue I asked X an unexpected question.

"You're a middle child, aren't you?"

X fluttered his eyelashes at me. He was baffled by my question.

"Yes, I am," X answered. "How did you know?" He might have stammered.

"I just did," I said. "I am, too."

Clearly, I had seen something in X that reminded me of me. Something of the underdog--that we were never the primary focus of our parents, so we always had to fight for attention. We always had to be loud, or we'd have been ignored. 

My mentor and ex-boss, Steve Hayden, taught me that. Steve believed that the best ad people are second children or third or last. We were always an after-thought. We learned from an early age to stand on a chair and holler. It was get attention or rot.

Back to being busy.

I had a presentation today where I showed the client about 25 ads. 

That's a lot of ads. Even for me.

Again, not being heard as a child--which was clearly detrimental to me in so many ways--turned into an advertising positive.

I am able to write 25 lines on a single theme--on a positioning or a brief--because it might take a neglected child 25 tries to get heard once.

I couldn't just say, "I'm bleeding, Freddy hit me," 25 times the same way. I had to learn to shake things up so I'd get noticed. My birth-order and emotionally austere, even cruel, parents--were a real liability when I was a kid. 

As a grown-up, I learned to turn those minuses into pluses. 

I think everyone has a fairly long assortment of minuses in their corpuscles. Some endogenous. Some exogenous. Some from using words like endogenous and exogenous.

There's no pill or therapeutic technique or HR protocol or 9-week-training program that can cover them all. If you're just a fucking neurotic mess, you won't get a week or even a day where the world claims they're celebrating your infirmity.

Mostly all you can do to compensate is work a little harder. Work your way through issues. Talk yourself away from the ledge and try again.

There are plenty of nights I curse the gods for not having had loving parents or even liking parents. For having had to raise myself the best I could, like a Dickens' character sans benefactor, being shaken upside-down by Magwicg in a cemetary. For having to fight like a mongrel for whatever emotional table scraps I could beg.

But then I write 25 ads.

And maybe 25 more.

It ain't the same thing as feeling loved. But I can do it. I've learned to get attention.

It's a living.

Say What?

 

Back so many decades ago when I was a sullen teenager (in contrast to today, when I'm a sullen octogenarian) I had an English teacher who worked--above and beyond--to make sure I'd become more than just another angry young man.

Mrs. Chapin got me and slugged me into semi-human.

While I tried assiduously to escape into the deep blonde winsomeness of various adolescent crushes, she would assign me libraries of mandatory extra reading. Somehow while being caring, she was also stern. It never occurred to me that she couldn't really do anything to make my life difficult if I decided to say 'fuck the complete plays of Eugene O'Neill, I’ll just shoot the shit with my friends.' So I obeyed.

One day, Mrs. Chapin wrote me a poem--encouraging me to read. Sadly--that was almost 200 years ago and I've lost it. But I do remember the closing couplet (which was based on a poem by the great Dudley Randall which you can read here.)

"If praise from me you wish to brook,
Go stick your nose inside a book."

More than any other advice I have ever received, I've followed Mrs. Chapin's. Come to either of my homes--my city or my country seats--and you'll leave covered with generative booklice that will probably change your life in unimaginable ways. And itchy.

For the last week, I have been nose-deep in the laborious "Magesteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion" by Nicholas Spencer. You can order the book above and read a review from "The Economist" here. But I warn you, this ain't exactly "The Real Housewives of the Holy See." 

In fact, if you're a contrarian--and I'm rounding into a point, Magesteria might be one of the year's top books. It aims to upset a couple thousand years of pre-conceived notions in its 600-pages, thus recalling Galileo's apocryphal "eppur si muove," "and yet it moves."

What I quickly realized in reading Spencer is that every organization--from the aforementioned Holy See to a Little League baseball team in Bridge Mix, New Jersey (population 17,429) has its own code and its own Codex--a listing of "acceptable" thought and its more austere and grudging cousin, an "Index Librorum Prohibitorum." Its listing of unacceptable thought.

The advertising minindustry is no different. 

There are reams of things you can't say on pain of being either "out" and ostracized and/or fired. I can only imagine if someone at a place I used to work said, even after their fourth client-expensed cocktail, 

"Borderless creativity is a crock."
"Award shows are an even bigger crock."
"Our diversity efforts are all show and no dough."
"77% of our award-winning ads never ran."
"Our creative-staffing as a percentage of client spend is lower than ever no wonder our fees have plummeted."
"AI is not an answer much less a panacea."
"NFTs, Crypto, Web 3.0 and the Metaverse are modern-day abracadabra."

Statements like these, true or not, would all violate the unwritten "Index Librorum Prohibitorum." The utterer would have his utters removed and be subject to, at the very least, "low-level background corporate terrorism." Been there.

Conversely, there are an equal and opposite number of Codex-endorsed statements, which in the absence of an investigative function don't get examined any more than the 16th Century Catholic Church asserting that the sun and the planets rotated around the earth. (In fact, the Catholic Church did not repeal its abnegation of Copernicus until Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical  "Providentissimus Deus", issued in 1893--about 200 years after Newton.)

So, agencies expect their people to talk about the salutary effect of targeting and cookies. The efficacy of triple-play bundles and horrible telco commercials. The verity of customer journeys and the vaunted funnel. And of course, people dancing because their wash smells good.

Most of these affects--woven within the accepted language of our industry--don't stand up to SHIT (simple, human, intelligent, tested) but we spew them nonetheless. 

They're truths we all buy into. 

We're paid to.

And it doesn't matter, of course, if none of those truths are true.

It only matters that we have to say them.