Time and a Hoff.

I spent the first 112 years of my 117-year career never hearing the word "content."  Now, you can't go four minutes without hearing it, without running into someone called a "content strategist," or a "content copywriter," or without someone spouting off about how "content is king."

A few days ago I was Escher-ing up, around, over and under various rabbit holes looking for an idea, or for back-up to an idea. Somehow I remembered an illustrator from my early childhood whose style I always liked--long before I even knew he had a style. The illustrator was called Syd Hoff and his book I remember best was a charming story called "Danny and the Dinosaur."

I found a site featuring many of Hoff's illustrations and there I read about a booklet he helped create for a "popular-priced liquor brand called Calvert. Calvert are still around, oddly-enough, but owned by another company that I'm sure is owned by another company which I'm sure is owned by another company. I'd bet seventy-five cents that no one that works for any of those associated company has ever tasted anything by Calvert and those brands of albatrosses though they probably earn a fortune.

Fifty years ago, I worked the 4PM to midnight shift in one of Chicago's largest liquor stores, I'm 99-percent sure I never sold a bottle of anything Calvert. And I sold a lot of bottles that summer.

I found a bunch of ads Syd illustrated on here. I know I'm both old and old-fashioned but I'm a sucker for cartoons and I found these more fun than about 99-percent of the ads I see today.

I also read about this:

I quickly went to abebooks.com and for $10.85, tax and shipping included, I got Hoff's Calvert booklet delivered to my door.

I don't give a rat's ass about content and I absolutely abhor the term. Never once in my 68 years on this darkening and dumbening orb have I used it. 

That said, everything that follows makes me content.

Stiff-Necked.

My best friend of half a century, Fred, died four years ago. He had the big C and after ten years of battle, C finally defeated Fred.

Of all the people in my long life, outside of my wife, Fred probably helped me and guided me and bolstered me more than anyone else. At his memorial, I cried through the short eulogy I gave recounting the words Fred said that changed my life, maybe saved it.

Fred and I met at ninth-graders at an elite private school in Rye, New York. That was 1971. 

In all that time, we had one major disagreement. 

About ten years ago, maybe more, I stopped watching Fox television on principle. I saw the network--whether sports, entertainment or what they somehow call "news" as a factory of hate, lies, and a lot of -isms I can't abide. Racism. Sexism. Anti-semitism. Climate-denialism. And more. More bad.

Stiff-neckedly, I started with a metaphor.

I said to myself, and Fred, when Woolworth's (amerry-kaka's largest chain store at the time) refused counter service to Black people, I would have boycotted Woolworth's. 

And so, I never again turned on and watched anything on any Fox channel, including Tubi. Not the World Series. Not the Super Bowl. Not the Simpsons. Nothing. 

If they ran a seven-part mini-series on the genius of George Tannenbaum, I would boycott that as well. (Seven-parts would have been too brief, anyway.)

I couldn't give my eyeballs, and therefore my money, to the terror Fox propagates.

Fred disagreed. 

"Bomber," he said (my old baseball nickname) "Life's too short. Watch the game." 

But I couldn't and I can't.

Sorry. I happen to believe anger and stubborn-ness are forces for good. Or can be. (I don't care that Owen, my therapist of 40 years disagrees. I don't care that everyone disagrees.)

About ten years ago, I also turned off Facebook and Instagram and about three years ago Twitter. The first two are the world's most popular and successful child-trafficking sites, not to mention their fascistic politics. Twitter might well be worse.

When I read the Athletic, the garbage that passes for a sports page from the New York Times, if I want to see a clip from a game, they force me to "X." 

Why?

Why do we as a society, as a people, as a voice abide this? Why do we go gentle into a cruel abyss? Why do we give up our ethics so we can watch tall men dunk a basketball?

Why do we share sunny photos of runway-ready scallops and artisan-cocktails on Insta--a site over-run by sexual predation?

What incenses me the the casual embrace of the horror these "platforms" represent. And how difficult they are to avoid. What incenses me is our casual embrace can easily turn normal people, you and me and Fred, into willing executioners. Otherwise good people who support cruelty, hate and torture because the game is on. Or in the case of 1960s Woolworths, because they have the cheapest hair-nets in town.

These platforms make themselves practically un-avoidable. (And yes. I succumb and read Murdoch's Wall Street Journal.)

It's hard to be pure in a filthy world.

It's hard not to do business with modern-day nazis, slavers and child-fuckers.

But we have to try. I know I am a rigid, unforgiving, Old Testament son-of-a-bitch.

Sorry Fred.

Our only fight.

But I'm still fighting.

Boiling Frogs.

Watch the promo, here.

One of the things that never fails to shock me about the advertising business is how its esoteric-ness has skyrocketed in the forty years since I entered the business. 

When I was young, we used to talk to companies about how they did business, how they treated customers, the way their stores looked, how they answered the phone. We wrote ads for them, of course, and Christmas cards. But many of us realized (and acted on) a larger idea that we were here to improve the public's perception of a company not just its ads. 

Public perception happens in a trillion ways every day. Ads are seen by fewer and fewer people and seem to matter less and less. Ads, in fact, are a small part today of the complex amalgam that makes up how people feel toward a brand. What's more, so many ads are created with the care given the 107th of 108 Xerox copies, that most of them have a life expectancy about 1/10th the longevity of the common mayfly.

Even so, more and more, ad agencies do ads that don't even run where real people (not awards' juries) can see them. And they're about smaller and smaller topics and further and further removed from 'the reality-based community.'

I remember when I was at Ally & Gargano my boss Ed Butler when told of an offer or offering from the bank we worked on, would often cite a segment that appeared on the news of the local affiliate of CBS. It was called "Shame on You." It would featured companies that engaged in heinous mistreatment or said one thing and did another. Ed would often say, "You're going to show up on 'Shame on You.'" Often the client would heed Ed's advice. 

Even things that seem temporarily good for business and turn out to be catastrophic for business if they're based on lies or deceit.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've seen what to my eyes seem like important articles in The Wall Street Journal. If you're in the business of helping clients business (once the sine qua non of advertising) you'd think such articles would be noticed. You'd think they'd be talked about. You'd think agencies might be advising clients on how to improve their customer relationships and their overall perception.

Alas, CMOs are as far removed from how customers are treated as lofty politicians are from the needs and concerns of their electorate.

So, people--you and I--hate brands more and more. Yet the commercials and ads we make pretend such disdain just doesn't exist. Cue the happy family eating bottomless breadsticks or the happy family luxuriating on a plane that's spotlessly clean, well-lit and accoutered with flight-attendants that make Heidi Klum look like some old bag.

The subject-object split in advertising has never been more of an abyss. What's shown has never been farther removed from what's real. (I think the same is true of agencies themselves. They're "network of the year," but they dropped from 1000 employees four years ago to 100 today.)

Or people don't like/trust advertising, yet we tack on 20 seconds of disclaimers to a 30 second spot read at a rate that screams "we're speaking fast because we're pulling a fast one," or "you need this drug even though it gives you projectile vomiting and can cause death."

At its very core, marketing and capitalism are about trust. Trust. As in if you don't trust us you won't buy from us.

That's why our industry ignoring trust (and the current administration destroying trust) is so terribly dangerous and threatening.

Sixty-one years ago, an agency Omnicom just shut down ran this ad for Avis.

It's an ad based on caring. 
It's an ad made-better by empathy.
It's an ad that speaks human.
It's an ad that understands the woes of consumers and how hard it is to get helped.
It's an ad that defined a brand as different, better.

I've talked to clients about running ads like this. The best reaction I got to such a suggestion was to be shunted aside as "naive."

When you look at present day data like this, it would seem to me what's naive is doing nothing at all and pretending customer disdain doesn't exist or will go away because you want it to.

• More that 3/4 customers had a product or service problem in the last twelve months.
• More than 7/10 customers think companies need to improve their customer experience.
• A University of Michigan study shows consumer sentiment dropping by roughly 33-percent since the beginning of the year.

Our industry claims to want to keep abreast of culture. Dissatisfaction with current course and speed is a huge part of our lives--and culture. We ignore anything that doesn't show people smiling.

As Scott Broetzmann, the president and chief executive of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting, which conducts the National Customer Rage Survey with the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, recently said “I can order dental floss and it’ll be at my doorstep in 30 minutes, but when it comes to problem-handling, it’s still an effortful, frustrating, emotionally stressful.” 

Forrester principal analyst Pete Jacques sums it up well. “Like the proverbial frog that doesn’t feel the water becoming increasingly hotter, many North American brands are inching into more treacherous positions with their customers’ loyalty."

As Rich Siegel over at Round Seventeen might conclude, "Mmmmmm, boiled frog."

Aweirds.

There's no award like this award. Rowan and Martin's "Flying Fickle Finger of Fate." 
(My birthday gift from my wife yesterday.)

--

With the shuttering of DDB by its owner, Omnicom, last week (a shuttering accompanied by the shuddering of an entire industry) a lot of people have pointed out the purported irony that an agency that won the Cannes Network of the Year both in 2023 and 2025 should be closed so soon after winning such acclaim.

I've yet to see anyone question the value of awards shows. What they award, what they measure, what they mean and if they're an at-all viable way of judging the business value of an ad agency, which is the only criterion on which an ad agency should be assessed.

Anyone who brings the smallest portion of 'show me' to the awards-show-industrial complex would question DDB's victories. Just like would question the viability--even the non-fiction-ness of these items below.

Since 2015, WPP's market cap was decreased by more than 85-percent. They were worth $31B in 2015. They are worth $4B today.

That is not what you would call, in an ordered-universe, 'award-winning.' Nevertheless, the charade persists that these things count for something. 

Again, if you look at the chest-beating around the awards reputedly won, and the performance of the entities in question, you MUST question what we as an industry are doing--how we're evaluating ourselves and our meaning.

Somehow it all brings to my mind this quotation often attributed to Albert Einstein.

In other words, if the measurement is wrong, the results the measurement reveals will be faulty.

Not to long ago, I saw somewhere (I didn't screen shot it) that an Emmy award was given to a dry cleaner or something like that. It made me question the meaning of the Emmy if those in industries extremely tangential to the TV industry can win one.

With five minutes of research I found out that in 1949, the organization behind the Emmy awarded just six awards. Last year, they gave 51-times that number, 306 awards.

I also found out this, which makes me, someone who thinks about 98.92384-percent of awards are absolutely stupid believe that 98.978986-percent of awards are absolutely stupid.

My guess is the advertising networks spend more on winning awards than they do on creative bonuses, training, office decor, retention and diversity efforts, combined. Paying to win is about as craven as a system gets. It reminds me of the old adage I've heard from people who play golf, "You drive for show, you putt for dough." 

Awards are for show, thinking is for dough.  And there ain't any real brand guidance anymore. Just stunts.

I look at the whole thing this way.

Imagine eating the worst hamburger you ever ate. 

Frozen pink slime full of gristle, bone and chopped cow anus. 

Imagine eating that and finding out it won an award for "hamburger served on the sesame-seed bun with the most sesame seeds." The most seeds. And a diamond-award. The CEO accepted the award in France. Meanwhile, the people serving the burger hate their jobs. The restaurants owned by the chain were filthy and the waits were long. The chain itself was bleeding money.

But, award-winning.

You have question what we're doing.

Why we believe it.

Why we keep believing it.

Even when it kills us.