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.