The Concrete Club.

About 50 years ago, when I left the stalag my parents called home for points south, then college, I was all alone in the big city.

Worse than all alone, I quickly lost a filling.

I needed a dentist in a hurry.

I had no idea how to find one, so I went to the yellow pages. And I found one not far from my dorm room with the last name of Tannenbaum. That method of finding someone probably makes at least as much sense as looking at someone's reviews on whatever platform they choose. 

In any event, Dr. Tannenbaum, DDS, turned out to be fine. He did the job. And I paid my bill. That was that, but as I was leaving his office, Dr. Tannenbaum, DDS, said something to me.

"Floss," he instructed. "You should really floss everyday." 

Floss in those days was about as unheard of as eating raw fish. Why?

But on my way back to my dorm room, I stopped in a drug store (there were no big drug store chains in Manhattan at that time) and I bought, I suppose for about 99-cents a small plastic container of 30-yards of waxed dental floss. Mint.

I've always had a weakness for mint.

In the roughly 18,000 days since I started flossing (I've seldom missed a night) I've probably bought 300 containers of floss. Not one of those containers has lasted to the end of the floss. Something always breaks. Either the floss, or the container, or both.

I'm rounding into a point.

If the collective genius of the world can't make a floss container that works, how can anyone possibly think we can make anything that works.

Every agency these days seems to have more UI or UX or USuck people than you can shake an unemployment check at. Yet every e-commerce site sucks. Confusing. You can't go backward. You can't correct a mistake. And you can't find anything. You certainly can't find anything twice.

Of course, search, no matter what mechanism you're searching from, google or amazon, is now a land grab. Your search terms have very little to do with your search results. Search has no causality; it's been sold to the highest bidder.

If you search for "best pastrami" in the little gingham town I'm currently housed in, you get a Chinese noodle place and a curry restaurant. 

Search is equal to the promise of precision bombing. There's more collateral damage than real targeting. They just want you to think it works.

When I was a kid, I remember driving into the city with my mother. Even more chilling than that was hearing on the car-radio that the mafia had so taken over New York's construction industry that the cement in our roadways and our bridges was defective. It was too sandy and would soon crumble.

And it's been crumbling ever since.

This is another of my all-too-regular "O tempore, o mores" posts. Commentary on the way things are.

But the world has been turned over to a higher and deeper level of malign corruption than ever before, and because of the technological sophistication and spread of that corruption its impact is greater than crumbling roadways.

Everything is for sale. 

And ad agencies, rather than telling their clients people are getting pissed at being strip-mined, are complicit. I remember back in 2015 I said that IBM should not retarget people. I was rebuffed by someone telling me that retargeting yielded a seven-percent "lift."

(So, if you have a click through rate of 1.5-percent, on 10,000 impressions, you'll have 150 clicks. If retargeting, aka stalking people, lifts that by seven-percent, you'll see 160.5 clicks per 10,000 impressions. That is deemed a worthwhile expenditure.)

Somehow as an industry, we no longer chastise clients for bad behavior. It's the acceptable norm to buy valentine's chocolates for $22 and get three emails/week for the rest of creation.

There's no avoiding this filth.

Corruption.

Dirt.

You're being butchered by the highest and most-corrupt bidder.

Everything is crumbling.

Everywhere.

 

So Sooth Me.

As readers in this space know, I read a lot.

By a lot, I mean more than anyone I know.

If you ever wonder how I write so much, it's because I read so much.

Yet, whenever I have intercourse with others, I feel like the odd man out for my reading. 

I get made fun of.

Excoriated, even.

It hurts a little, if you must know, feeling like an outsider. But etiam si omnes, ego non. Or Ich nicht.

Now more than ever.

Now in English: even if all others, not I. Or just not I.

I'l mocked and told of all the great things I'm missing by reading about the last days of Tsar Nicholas II, or role of women in the Classical world.

Either example is more illuminating about the state of our trumpian dystopia than I wish I had to think about.

One of the things that reading gives me is a view of human foibles. Maybe TV and movies would too, but I feel books have a longer view--and more authoritative. 

For instance, over the years I think reading has led me to some simple, timeless, human truths that are missed by just about everyone.

Here. I'll write some down for you.

1. Soothsayers abound. 
We might not be reading bird entrails or the gizzard of goats like the Greeks and Romans did, but most of humanity seems to be spending most of its time predicting the future.

As in ancient days, many of those making predictions, think of themselves as in possession of some god-like wisdom. They believe they see things others can't because they've been touched by the divine. Or by a whitepaper. 

Except like most soothsayers past and present they're not divine. And they're wrong as often as they're right.

Humans always have been and always will be scared. Of today and tomorrow. We look for people and predictions we can believe even if they're wrong. For no good reason, they remove fear.

Until the fear comes back. 

Usually worse than it was.

2. Something for nothing never works.
Since the beginning of time, humankind has looked to gain without paying for that gain. We're all of us looking for the winning lottery ticket without having to buy one.

At the start of the internet era, advertisers (and agencies) bought this hook, line, sinker and stinker. We could target people exactly with no waste at precisely the moment they were hungry for something. 

Not only would cost be eliminated, risk would be, too.

I'd imagine since digital advertising started literally trillions of dollars of brand-equity have been destroyed because brands and their agencies wanted to believe telling people about what they make or do didn't matter. 

It does matter. 

Just as paying for talent who can differentiate your brand matters. You won't get it from cheap and you won't get it from AI.

Anything worthwhile costs.

3. All progress is based on a leap of faith.
Humankind has always tried to convince itself that the universe is an if-then proposition. If we pray to this god, our crops will be watered. If we use this best-practice, our business will thrive.

In fact, when the notion of best-practices first infected advertising about 25 years ago, I used to say to people, "Madison Avenue is the best retail street in the world. But one in five stores are empty. If all you had to do was follow rules, everyone would be rich. The rules aren't that good. And following isn't that simple."

4. It's more complicated than you think.
Many people today believe data is a panacea. It will give them a view into the minds and desires of consumers and will help brands sell more.

Usually, that data is based on six or a dozen variables.

Whereas your brain, yes, even yours, has over six-trillion synapses. Meaning real, human decision-making is way more complicated than even the best data-mining.

5. Hard work works.
I have a friend who runs an agency. He often assigns five teams for five days. They have to come up with five ideas a day. At the end of the week, 125 ideas are posted on the conference room wall.

Collectively or individually, that's how life is.

Do a lot to get a little.

I've written 7090 posts in this space.

About twelve have been good. Maybe fourteen.

As Yogi said, "that's not a typographical error, it was a clean single through the middle."

That's not a bad batting average.

Thanks for reading, even though I suck.

Believe.

About forty years ago, the far right mannikin president raygun said the scariest words in the English language were, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

Many people--the tea party, the anti-tax libertarians, the anti-tax billionaires bought that folderol. They don't realize how much the federal government does.

Meals for seniors. Help.
School lunches. Help.
Hospitals. Help.
Medicare. Help.
Food Stamps. Help.
Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Help.
Mental Health Services. Help.
Clean air. Help.
Drinkable water. Help.

The list goes on. Almost everybody gets something from the government. The super-wealthy get more than most. And mostly they stopped paying taxes when the abomination above was president.

And I'm not for a moment going to pretend that there's no waste and fraud.

But the real problem is that the government has a communication problem. 

The government doesn't tell those who pay taxes all the things the government does.

I remember reading "The Power Broker," by Robert Caro, the magesterial biography of Robert Moses. Moses liked building bridges, not tunnels, because they soared. They showed the towering heights of government achievement. They inspired. They showed you the power of government in the way a delivered piece of mail never could.

Years ago I helped out on a pitch of a foreign stock exchange. I wrote a line that went like this: since the seventeenth century, no organization has created more wealth for more people than the blank.

Because people don't know.

Because no one bothers telling people what the great institutions that make up democracy do.

We've forgotten what things do and have done and have always done. Call it "presentitis." 

About six years ago some friends and I tried to start an ad school. We called it Working Class. It's aim was not to teach HOW to advertise--there are a million schools that ostensibly do that. 

We wanted to teach WHY we advertise.

I wrote a manifesto. 

A launch manifesto for an idea that never launched.

It's important for brands, agencies, governments, people, lovers to tell the world what they do. Why they exist. Why they're good. Why the world would suffer without them.

Goodby, Silverstein's great Got Milk campaign was all about what would happen if milk were to disappear. 

We stopped doing that. 

For our democracy.

For our industry.

For ourselves.

Ergo, cataclysmic self-denigration.

We forgot that telling the world what you do is part of making a business or an entity sustainable. It doesn't just happen naturally.

We have to do it. Advertising is part of being.

In advertising for the last thirty years people have been saying advertising doesn't matter, or they can do it cheaper, or that some other contrivance can do a better job--influencers, product placement, conversations. 

I've been in the advertising business my whole life. My father was in it before me. His brother, my uncle, fifteen years older than he was in it before my father. For all that time people have been tearing advertising down. It's value. It's efficacy. And they've strip-mined all the value out of it.

The same thing is happening now with our democracy under trump and the heritage foundation and project 2025.

We need to advertise.

To put reasons-why into what we do and what it does.

This was my manifesto:

Advertising has created trillions in wealth. It’s built important businesses. Contributed to culture and created thousands of careers.

But as an industry today, we run on infinitesimal margins. Our attrition-rates are at unsustainable levels and the best and the brightest are finding alternative careers.

More than ever, clients are questioning the importance of what we do and are doing more and more of it themselves. We, the people behind Working Class love advertising. We believe in it. It’s power for good. It’s economic verve. 

We are forming Working Class because we believe. And we want to spread our belief to others. 

So, agencies believe again in what they sell. So, clients believe again in what they buy. So, the people of the industry believe again in themselves. So, we all believe again in our future. Starting now. 

We believe. Believe with us. 

Victim-hood.

I went to the dentist on Wednesday.

Thank goodness my teeth and gums (despite a little recession) are in good shape.

The hygienist did her thing for thirty minutes. 

I saw the actual dentist for five. 

He smiled, said terrific, poke (semiotically) and left.

Since then, I've received about a dozen emails asking me about my "dental experience." Then they bid me to upload my answers on the dental practice's google page and write a review.

Service for 35 minutes. Then an hour's worth of survey requests.

The equation of modern humanity.

I ordered Chinese food Saturday night.

Before I could check out, I was assaulted with four different offers. I could ostensibly save $20 if I turned my information over to ____. I could save $15, if I turned it over to ______. I could save even more if I turned it over to ______. Finally, some bland blur of type tried to sell me a Chase Sapphire card. 

What a time to get a new credit card, when I'm hungry for some mu shu.

I was ordering Chinese food. But I feel like an assault victim.

Even Pastrami Queen, royal as they are, gets into the act. I was disappointed a kosher pastrami place spammed me--and without the royal We.

What's going on here is a bigger problem.

It's the problem of hate.

Yes, hate.

People are no longer people. 

They are victims. Protoplasm who exist only to extract money and data from. So you can assault them with more demands for money and data.

The victimization of humanity is everywhere.

The things you don't want--that haven't the vaguest recognition of your interests and your need--that invade your feeds no matter how often and how vehemently you attempt to hide them or block them. 

In the past week I have tried to expunged approximately 1000 exxxageratedly-bosomed women from my feeds but they come back with a vengeance. As does everything I attempt to block.

Blocking is a joke.

You are the victim of what the platforms want to blight you with. From politics to filth to fascism to toxicity.

The rule in advertising--I'm not sure if it was first said by Bernbach, Hegarty, Brignull or Abbott--was that we are uninvited guests into people's living-rooms. 

I amended that for our device era. Most often we're uninvited guests into people's palms or crotch pocket, whichever comes first.

Yet, we have less-than no manners.

Advertising, for all the blather about influencing culture, is a reflection of the larger world.

What we have today is the world-view of big, consolidated capital. 

You make. Consolidated capital takes. Then sells your information to thousands of others--so they can profit more and more assault can come your way.

You are not a person.

You're a piece of shit.
You're to be assaulted.
You're to be ignored.
You exist to feed me.
Regardless of your needs.
You're the source of my wealth and I can do what I want to you because there's no one to regulate my greed. And the plutocrats have no moral or ethical or kindness-oriented center.

Most advertising victimizes its audiences. When it should be helping its customers.

Most holding companies--in the way they treat their workers and their clients--are the same. The current agency practice of hiring masses of freelancers is a cost-cutting ruse. No more health care for workers. No more "brand knowledge" for clients. Everything but my $49,000,000 parachute be damned.

This is our world, our industry, our everything today.

We've gotten exactly the politics, too, and the pastrami we asked for.

It sucks.

Revolution.

It's attributed to George Orwell, but there's no evidence that he ever wrote it or said it. Regardless, it's full of relevance today. And import, too. Perhaps more than ever.

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

As we sink ever-further into the alternate reality of amerikan politics, I wonder more and more why so many of us continue to give oxygen to bad actors like trump and his nazi-wannabe co-conspirator musk.

Why do we have to re-post the asinine and malign things they say and do. What's gained by posting, once again, the nazi salute? Why do we send their reach soaring when we should be ignoring?

Deal with the affront by pushing it back.

I didn't love the book Humankind by Rutger Bregman. It was too simplistic and too optimistic for me. But I liked this passage very much. And haven't been able to shake it since I read it six months ago.

We are consuming news 24/7 and eating ourselves to death. 

Which brings me back to the very top of this post.

And some Variations on a Theme.

In a time of universal blowhard-ness, ignoring the noise is a revolutionary act.

In a time of universal technological and intellectual filth, ignoring social platforms is a revolutionary act.

In a time where fact-checking has been abolished, checking facts is a revolutionary act.

In a time where mean-ness has been normalized, kindness is a revolutionary act.

In a time where the (slim) majority bullies, standing your ground is a revolutionary act.

In a time where machines are trumpeted as superior to humans, being human is a revolutionary act.

Don't give air to these people.

Don't pass along their lies.

Their cruelty. Their demonic ideology.

Be human.

A revolutionary act.

More from "Humankind: A Hopeful History".

In children, the correlation between seeing violent images and aggression in adulthood is stronger than the correlation between asbestos and cancer, or between calcium intake and bone mass. 

Cynical stories have an even more marked effect on the way we look at the world. In Britain, another study demonstrated that girls who watch more reality TV also more often say that being mean and telling lies are necessary to get ahead in life. As media scientist George Gerbner summed up: ‘[He] who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour.’

Choke them off. 

The Torrid Forty.

I have a bit of patter that I use with clients. 

Just because it's patter doesn't mean it's bullshit.

I repeat my spiel, not because I'm glib, but because as obvious as it is to me, it hasn't occurred to many other people.

I usually start this way: "When I started in the business, there were a lot of magazines and newspapers. If you were working on a fast-moving consumer good, say Grey Poupon mustard or A-1 Steak Sauce like I did, you and your partner would be given a week or two to create three print campaigns of three ads each to present to the client.

"There were the seven sisters magazines in those days. Women's books, like McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, Better Homes and Gardens. We did ads to fill these magazines and to move our clients products.

"Back in 1980, their combined circulation was 45 million. By 1990, it was just 37 million. And by 2008, the seven were down to six, and the circulation was only 26 million. Today, just three of the magazines are left and their circulation is likely less than the printed version of my blog.

"We presented our campaigns to a battery of clients. After a couple of months of bi-weekly presentations and revisions, we eventually sold something. After another couple of months, we'd have shot, written and produced our ads and another couple of months later, they'd start to run.

"In those days, a campaign might include three ads and last a year and a half. If you were on a popular campaign, you might have to go through all that for another round. Three more ads. Most often, you had already moved onto something else."

If my client hasn't run out of the room screaming at this point, I'll usually continue.

"Somehow, the agency world has stuck with the number three. Even though there are a million channels today and advertising is always on, and people actually get pissed when they see the same ad over and over, agencies seem to present three ads or five or eight. Never really enough to keep a brand fresh and top of mind without being annoying."

That when I usually bring up an offering GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company developed. 

I got the idea when I worked with Joe Alexander and Cabell Harris and a few others on this corona virus campaign. 

The assignment wasn't to do an ad. It was come up with a way to be newsy and way to be different and relevant every day.

That led me to develop my Nifty Fifty™. Going into my sixth year of running GeorgeCo., it's become my second most popular offering.

It gives the clients a lot of ads. And lines they can use wherever they spread their brand. Their emails, their site, their sales-presentations.

There are three other things the Nifty Fifty does that I think are valuable and should be pointed out.

One, when you're dealing with increments of fifty, it takes away some of the preciousness that has somehow attached itself to advertising. People (agencies and clients) have so many expectations from an ad when they only do a couple, that they usually crumble under the weight of everything they're supposed to be doing and every constituency they're supposed to appeal to. 

What's more there are usually a dozen or so idiosyncrasies that further sully the work. Like someone doesn't like the word "get," or wants to imply "hamburger" without actually saying the word hamburger because that would be too limiting.

Finally, you can rightfully argue that working this way allows clients to be small-c catholic--more accepting. So what you don't like Tuesday's ad? There will be another ad on Wednesday. 

Secondly, when you're dealing with doing fifty ads at a time, the brief has to be complicit. It has to be good and simple and broad (not esoteric) otherwise you'll never get to fifty.

Good, simple and broad doesn't mean beige. It means the brief has to be able to handle a lot of selling points. 

The VW template below is a good one for Nifty Fifty's. It explains in part how DDB was able to create so many great ads for Volkswagen through the decades.

The third thing the Nifty Fifty does is maybe the most important. 

It unconstipates you.

When you have to come up with fifty of something, you have to train yourself to be more accepting. To let a joke fly even if it ain't a barn-burner. Or a word-play. Or a news item. 

That joke, word-play or news items isn't 33% of your campaign. If you're doing fifty, it's 2% of your work. That'll loosen the ol' sphincter in a good way.

Call me.

One Word.

My 97-year-old Uncle Slappy, who lives in a nice condo with a view of the pool, is a defrocked Rabbi.

The Board of Directors at his former Temple, Beth Youiz Mywo Mannow, removed him from his post after he had spent over 40 years presiding. They asked Slappy to leave because, ostensibly, he was getting too old to carry on. Though Slappy's mind makes Stephen Hawking's look like that of an organ-grinder's monkey, the Board wasn't entirely wrong bidding Slappy adieu.

It wasn't age that did Slappy in, however. Or even his preternatural crank.

It was the courage and conviction of his conscience. 

One Yom Kippur his sermon was just one word long. 

He said just one word: God. 

Then for twenty minutes looked each congregant in the eyes. Burning God through their retinas.

That was too withering. That was too much for the board.

The other night, as I wrote about yesterday, a group of seven other older ad people and I got together for Indian food at a nice place near Union Square. 

One of our group got up on a soapbox for a bit. He's entitled. He had been both a CCO and CEO at one of America's hottest agencies. He contended that one of the myriad issues with advertising today is that no one knows how to use products anymore. No one knows when to drink a beer or what they should look for if they're buying a car. (The average price of a new car according to the Kelly Blue Book is $47,400. Please don't tell me these are emotional decisions. For that money, you consider what and why.)

About six hours ago, I got a 271-page newsletter from an agency that used to have another, more famous name. I'm not exaggerating. It was 271-pages long. 

I subscribe to newsletters like this one because while I'm out of the mainstream ad industry, I want to keep tabs on what it's doing. I aim to offer my clients more than they can get anywhere else. To do that, I have to, in part, know what my competition are doing.

Here's a screenshot of the cover and a bit of the content from said newsletter.

All of this stuff swirled together in what's left of my Cuisinart of a mind. Uncle Slappy and his one-word Philippic. My friend saying we don't know what products do anymore. VML's 271-page newsletter, and also, Alex Murrell's essay "The Age of Average."

(Murrell's essay is about how everything today, from interior design, to how we look, to the cars we drive all looks the same. Here's a photo from Murrell's piece. I've added below the photo about one-hundred taglines I've found for various electric vehicles.)

All that came together this way.

The one thing advertising should do we've forgotten to do. 

We're talking about AI. 

Conversations. Cohorts. Generations. 

Buy-outs and mergers. 

Timesheets. Scopes. Billability. 

Attention-spans. Tik-Tok. 

We're talking about everything but what we're supposed to be doing. Making a brand stand out. Making a brand stand for something. Making product A DIFFERENT from products B,C,D,E,F,G,H and so on.

We're supposed to differentiate.

Give people reasons to buy.

Make them feel smart for knowing those reasons.

We're suppose to make sure "everything isn't the same." 

From cars, to resorts, to mayonnaise, to chips, to agencies, to presidential candidates.

We used to create ads that did this. 

Here's the copy from a Volkswagen ad that's almost sixty years old. I typed it below so you could read it. With all the quirky line breaks in-tact.

You know what makes the car different.

People bought the car. 

And they knew why.
And they probably told their friends.

And felt smart for it (that's rationality leading to an emotional connection.)

Today, we forgot our jobs.

One word: Different.

After we paint the car we paint the paint.

  You should see what we do to a Volks-
wagen even before we paint it.
  We bathe it in steam, we bathe it in
alkali, we bathe it in phosphate. Then we
bathe it in a neutralizing solution.
   If it got any cleaner, there wouldn't be
much left to paint.
   Then we dunk the whole thing into a
vat of slate grey primer until every square
inch of metal is covered, inside and out.  
    Only one domestic car maker does this.
And his cars sell for 3 or 4 times as much
as a Volkswagen.
    (We think the best way to make an
economy car is expensively.)
    After all that dunking, we bake it and sand
it by hand.
    Then we paint it.
    Then we bake it again, and sand it again
by hand.
    Then we paint it again.
    And bake it again.
    And sand it again by hand.
    So after 3 times, you'd think
we wouldn't bother to paint it
again and bake it again. Right? 
    Wrong.

Heartburn.

I was at dinner the other night with seven other ad people of a vintage similar to mine. 

That's a polite way of saying like me, they're as old as dirt. Mesozoic dirt.

Some of us started getting together at the onset of Covid. We were feeling the strain of isolation and the loss of community. We started getting together every couple of months, to bend and elbow and have some pastrami.

It's been over five years since we started out group. And five years is a good amount of time. Enough time to grow into, or grow out of a job. Enough time, to experience rises and falls, to try new things or to hunker down with old ones.

I had just started my business five years ago--I can rightfully look back at what I've done, what I've learned and count my blessings for going my own way. Others have enjoyed similar lessons and travails. It's called life.

Collectively, among the eight of us gathering on Inauguration night, we had probably amassed over 300 years of advertising experience. There probably wasn't an agency in New York one of us hadn't touched in one way or another. And while we try, all of us, even me, not to wallow in the decrepitude and ruination of the business, it's hard to feel good about the state of advertising today.

The compensation data I pasted above from Ad Age is one reason why. The recent news about Philippe Krakowsky's $49,000,000 parachute package was another.

I had that figure in my head and I did some figuring. 

Not long ago, I read in Ad Age, BBDO New York, which used to be among New York's larger agencies employs today only 300 people. If each of those 300 had a median salary of $150,000, the total payroll for the agency would be $45,000,000.

That means one man would make $4,000,000 more than an entire well-paid agency.

Or, if you use the median salary in noted in the clip above, approximately $71,000, my math says that Philippe Krakowsky is equal to over 690 median-waged workers. Imagine that. One man with 2.5x BBDO's worth of salary. 

Or still one more way, with say a production budget of $7,000,00, for $49,000,000 you could shoot a spot with Brian Buckley and air it six times on the Super Bowl.

I thought about agencies subsumed, strip-mined and disappeared after having been bought by IPG, the company Krakowsky leads.

I thought about Ammirati. Draft. Lintas. SSCB. Bozell. K&E. And more whose names still linger but are essentially gone. It seemed to me like a lot of wealth, a lot of jobs, a lot of lives have vaporized.

Not vaporized, exactly, but consolidated into five or a dozen individual's wallets.

Over the last 25 years or so in the business, when people like myself and my age peers I saw last night get together, we try to put our finger on what happened to our industry. We try to identify the cause of the industry's ruination.

Most often, someone mumbles something about the end of media commissions, or the unbundling of media and creative. Someone else says something about the "fractured media landscape." Someone else will pipe in and talk about how young people today don't know who Bernbach is, that is, they have no sense of advertising history. 

Those are the usual suspects, though there are usually one or two more like stray candidates at the bottom of an election ballot. 

But very little is said about greed at the top. Greed and malfeasance.

A couple of times in this space, I've written about "The Radical Potter" by Tristram Hunt. I couldn't give a rat's ass about fine china, but the I found the demise of Wedgwood--an erstwhile craft industry that was once run by artisans--an interesting parallel to what's happened to what used to be be advertising.

Read it and weep, as they say.

Burp.

Yo, Boyko

I've been writing in this space for almost eighteen years. What started as a short walk in the woods has turned into probably the single most-significant accomplishment of my long and mediocre career. After all these years, this blog has brought me more attention and renown than any ad I've ever writ, any award I've ever won, or any creative director I've ever impressed.

Evidence of that is below: A thoughtful blog post from Rick Boyko, a creative leader who's been doing great work, leading teams and teaching people since before many of my legion of readers were even born.

By the way, it's only fitting that a creative leader like Rick is responsible for perhaps my longest single post ever. Rick's scope is vast. His career is still ongoing. Like the Everyready bunny, he keeps going and going.

Also, Rick's post is here the day after the presidential inauguration. Whatever you feel about what's next, Rick's passion, intelligence, humor, craft and dedication resonate hope for making things better.

Thanks, Rick.

In Dec of 2020 George reached out and asked if I would contribute to AdAged his blog. I of course said I’d be happy and honored to be part of his long list of interviews. Needless to say its taken some time to actually get around to it. So thank you, George, for your patience. 

Having created a documentary series called "Inspiration" in conjunction with the Advertising Club of New York, I suggested to George that we delve into some of my inspirations. 

ed. note: My questions and Rick's answers follow.

How did I find my way into the ad business? Was it on purpose, or like so many, by mistake? Who or what then inspired you to follow your path? 

On purpose. My father had his own little agency in Fontana, CA, and I would routinely sit by him after dinner as he did layouts and ads in our garage. From then on I knew I wanted to do the same thing. 

In school the only subject I cared about was art. When looking at magazines or watching TV, I would analyze the ads. Helmut Krone, Mary Wells, George Lois, Roy Grace and Sam Scali, were my inspirational teachers while magazines and television were my classroom. 

Do you have a single “all-time favorite” ad? Because I’m a nice guy, you can choose three. 

My all-time favorite ad or ads. Loving ads and advertising as long as I have it’s impossible to select an all time favorite from the many that have inspired me, but in the interest of time, I’ll stick to three, here goes: 

1: In my estimation Helmut Krone is, and was, absolutely the best art director of all time. Everything he did was unique and from his amazing body of work I found this Polaroid series, the pinnacle of his art.

2: Speaking of art, Hal Riney and his art director partner, Jerry Andelin, teamed up with director Joe Pytka to weave this beautifully crafted story for Perrier that elevated the brand while cleaning up in the awards.

3: Last but not least, after Steve Jobs returned to retake the helm of the company he founded, he discovered there were no new products in the pipeline. So he called upon the agency who helped him launch the brand, Chiat/Day, and creative partner, Lee Clow, for a stop-gap campaign to buy him time to develop a new product line. 

The Think Different campaign they created not only bought him time, it re-positioned Apple and set it on the path to become one of the biggest brands in the world. 

This poem created by the agency became the mantra for the company and the execution using mostly outdoor media was truly inspired. “Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” 

Where do you look for inspiration?

I have always found inspiration for any problem to come from staying open to all input, not being closed-minded, and keeping my eyes open to new possibilities. Example; creativity is not structured, there are no steps to it, it is not a science, it is art. Yet, clients are always asking for the steps we take in creating, they want to know the “process”. You see a MBA is taught that risk is dangerous, that you must analyze every step, and build metrics around your decision. Creatives are taught just the opposite, we are taught to think outside the box, color outside the lines, and failure is ok, to quote the Wieden & Kennedy mantra “Fail Harder”. 

Two different ways of thinking and being taught or to put it another way two different languages. And when you don’t speak the same language what happens? You can’t understand what the other is saying which can lead to mistrust. So how to bridge the gap? 

I found in looking at Universities around the country that there were no schools teaching MBA’s and creatives together? No where. So while being on the Board of the VCU Adcenter, I realized and posed the idea that there was need for both to be taught collaboratively. So I stepped down from my position at Ogilvy and with the help of Mike Hughes CCO of the Martin agency, and patron of the Adcenter, I set out to create a curriculum that did just that. 

To the art direction, copywriting, and strategy tracks I created and added a new Creative Brand Management track followed shortly thereafter with the Creative Technology track. We then designed a curriculum that not only had them practicing their individual disciplines but also had all the tracks working together in collaboration in two classes each semester. In so doing we changed the name of the school from the Adcenter to the Brandcenter and began to mint creatives who better understood the client mindset and potential clients who better understood the creative mindset. 

The inspiration for this came from my keeping my eyes open, realizing a need, and not being closed-minded enough to think there wasn’t a solution. 

Do you ever get stuck? Do you have those moments where a deadline is looming and you feel “your have no more ideas? How do you “break” your “stuckiness”. 

I love your word “stuckiness” it’s so descriptive. So true. We all get stuck at some point, usually when the deadline is getting short. I think Calvin said it best: 

That said, when I get stuck, I get out in search of new input, go to a museum, to a movie, or read a book, anything to take my mind off of the problem. Then, when not thinking about it, something comes into my head. Often prompted by some new input I experienced when not thinking about it. 

How many times have we each lost the name of someone or something, and no mater how hard you try you can’t call it to mind, then twenty minutes later when thinking about something else there it is. Damm, that was the name. Distancing myself from the problem is when I most often find the answer. 

When you have a problem to solve, what “implement” do you reach for? I worked with Milton Glaser once and he doodled with a pencil with four colors of lead in it. I write longhand. What do you do to start wrapping your head around a problem? 

Like Milton Glaser, I too pick up a pencil, although not one with multiple colors. It’s how I learned. Long before there were computers, you had to put your ideas down on a piece of blank paper. Nothing fancy or tech about it. The brain moving the hand. A craft sadly that has been lost by many art directors today. 

Interestingly you mentioning Milton Glaser, I began thinking I wanted to be a designer. Not an art director. Because designers work on brands' identities and to me that is the true advertisement of a brand. A brand is imbued with meaning that is much more than its ads. 

Early on Mary Wells demonstrated this best when she took Braniff Airlines and was able to influence the entire brand, including the planes being painted wild colors. It’s why I hired Brian Collins to create the Brand Integration Group (aka BIG) within Ogilvy which allowed us to influence our clients brands like Motorola, American Express, Barbie, and Hershey’s to name a few. 

The first time I ran across your name was probably 1985 when I saw your handgun control ad. Which came first? The data? The “clincher” God Bless America. Or the “American Flag” gun? Was it a hard-sell? 

See the :30 TV spot here. 

The gun control ad came out of the feeling of impotency after the assignation of John Lennon. I was and still am a big Beatles fan and John in my estimation was the genius of the group. After hearing of his death, I like so many was totally depressed and was trying to find meaning in it. 

One night a week or so afterward I sketched out the flag on the gun. The next day I showed the sketch to the writer I was working with Steve Diamont. We instantly decided to make an ad and came up with the idea of comparing US gun deaths to other democratic countries. 

Problem was when we begin looking there was no one source for the gun death statistics, so with the help of a friend, Steve began working with Interpol to collect the numbers. Once we saw the numbers side by side for the first time, the last line “God Bless America” wrote itself. 

Then Dennis Manarchy, a good photographer friend had the gun painted and photographed it. Given this was all being done by the two of us, I did the entire paste up and then we looked to find a media source to get published. I had been working
freelance doing the layout for for a small local newspaper called “Chicago Lawyer”. The owner agreed to run the ad, but more importantly was good friends with Christie Hefner, the President of Playboy publishing. He got us in to see her, and she loved the ad and agreed to run it in the magazine as well as make 250,000 posters. 

Her only requirement was that we find an organization to add its name for a call to action. So off we went, and again serendipity helped, a cousin of my wife’s was associated with Handgun Control of America, and introduced us to its founder Pete Shields. When we met with Pete, he was excited but fearful of the flag painted gun and asked if we could just have the gun without the flag. No was my answer. 

Later, Cosimo a director in NYC saw the ad and said he’d like to do a commercial with us. We did one but with no real dollars it only ran a couple of times on a few local networks. Sadly they did little to move the country when up against the wealthiest lobby in the country. I have often said our politicians should be forced to wear coats similar to race car drivers, emblazoned with patches of all who sponsor them. 

I saw a commercial not long again white people sitting on a sofa watching a football game. Someone brought out Tontonno’s pizza rolls and it was declared “genius”. I’d imagine you have a more stringent denition of “genius”. Have you worked with any “geniuses”? Did their game raise yours? 

This question reminds me of that terrific “Real Men of Genius” Budweiser radio campaign created by DDB. I have been fortunate to have worked for and several real people of genius throughout my career. There are three in particular, whose game indeed raised mine. 

In Chicago I was hired at Benton & Bowles by David Kennedy and for one year prior to his moving to Portland to work with Dan Wieden, he taught me the importance of attention to detail and the meaning of craft. 

At Chiat/Day Lee Clow’s leadership style and “good enough is not enough” philosophy inspired everyone in the agency to think creativity and in doing so, differently. From him I learned the importance of an agency culture and was something I worked hard to emulate and create while I was at Ogilvy. 

Finally, I would include my partner of 14 years, Bill Hamilton in my real men of genius. A writer who’s real genius was in understanding the clients' business better then they did. There simply was no one who raised my game more than he. 

Would you let your kids go into advertising today? Related, what are your thoughts on the current holding company merger and agency consolidation and its effect on the business? 

Funnily, two of my three daughters did find their way into the business. One was an art director at Y&R, BBDO and Radical Media who after becoming a mother, left. 

The other was a producer at Chiat/Day NY and then after having survived the continued agency consolidations at McCann since before Covid, found the workloads put upon the reduced workforce demoralizing and untenable so she left the industry in 2024. 

That said, if my kids wanted to enter the business today, I would suggest they find a small independent agency that attracts clients who are looking for and need creative problem solving. Agencies the likes of Mischief, Arts & Letters, HighDive, and least we forget the king of independents, Wieden & Kennedy. 

As for your question, on my thoughts of the holding company and industry consolidation and what it has done to the business; let me just say, nothing good. 

George, I thank you for asking me to share some of my inspiration with you and your readers. I hope you find it to your liking.   

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One last thing from me. 

Like Rick, I grew up in the days before advertising schools. I learned by looking at the work of others. Before I was making any money whatsoever in the business, I would take what little I had and head down to the Strand bookstore at lunch and buy used annuals.

These were my Harvard and my Yale College, to steal from Melville. In these books, I assimilated what makes a great ad. I was also able to construct my pantheon of ad heroes--people whose work I admired and felt I could emulate and learn from.

Rick, is responsible for putting together a series of videos that everyone in the industry who cares about advertising should watch. In fact, they should be required viewing--and learning. They are among the best films on advertising that you'll ever see.

Find them here. No password. No fee. No end to the wisdom.