A.I. Ain't.

I'm sick of it.

Tired.

Angry.

I don't want to hear anymore about the splendors of the artificial. How for nine cents we can create a great photograph or video or feature-length film of Albert Schweitzer playing ping-pong against Isadora Duncan atop the Eiffel Tower in a storm where it's raining Skittles.

I don't care.

In fact, in the f-in' AI era, in the trump-era, I don't think it's any surprise tha humanity has gotten great at un-real, great at fake, great at phonus-balonus, great at artificial.

We're a society that accepts lies as normal and regards truth as unusual--and wrong somehow.

We've gotten good at lies. 

We've gotten shitty at real, authentic, human. We've gotten shitty at telling the truth.

Truth, in the words of Bill Bernbach, simple, timeless, human truth is what makes communication, society, brands, advertising work. Technical sleight of hand is a communications card-trick. 

Yesterday, the New York Times, which our liar-in-chief calls the  "failing" New York Times, though its circulation (including digital subscribers) is up 500-percent from 15 years ago, ran an article called "How Photography From the Vietnam War Changed America."

 
Maybe I've missed photography and reporting similar to this from our own times. We've certainly had wars to report, and massacres, and hate, and racism, and more. But we seem not to be focused as much on vivid living as we are an Instagram photo of the perfect scallop garnished with chives. And the stock-photo-i-zation of advertising.

Instagram, owned by Meta, the world's #2 Child-trafficking site, decade after decade.™

We extoll and post shit that looks like this. Plastic, staged. Vain-glorious.

I'm tired of artificial, in all its lying forms, usurping reality. 

I'm tired of living in an Empire of Illusion--which will collapse, soon--as Ozymandias did and ozytrumpias will.

I think we need to think about this.

And people. 

Not just profit, pixels and pomposity.

There's more "real" in these photos below than in all the photos uploaded to all the world's social media sites since the beginning of time.

I don't think artificial is intelligent.

Artificial is bad in people. In food. In connections. In intelligence.

I don't think artificial is intelligent.

Nor are we. 

If we believe it is.

Planking.

Last Tuesday I had a bad client call.

A client I've had since I opened the metaphorical doors of GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company almost six years ago, decided they no longer wanted to pay my (very reasonable) monthly retainer.

I suppose this is, somewhat a rite of passage: Losing a client. And it happens to every agency.

Though it's not happened to GeorgeCo, before.

The client came to me on the recommendation of two of the most luminous of old-time Ogilvy luminaries. And to look on the bright side, as you must when something like this happens, I don't think anyone anywhere expected I'd keep them--and keep getting paid--for six long years, Net f-in' 90 after Net f-in' 90.

About a year ago, before amerika was trump-dumped, the Economist ran the article below as a cover story.

As you'd expect from a scrupulous and fact-based magazine like The Economist, they provided data to support their headline. Data that shows what they mean by "startup" boom.

During the six years I've been in business, the bulk of my business comes from startups. I've even developed an offering that I tailor to help those many startups.

Of course what follows is self-serving, but if I'm not serving myself, what am I? Horn & Hardart's?

I wish the Economist had asked me about the start-up boom. I'd have something to say. Something valid.

Every start-up I've ever worked with underspends on marketing.

I'll say that again.

Every start-up I've ever worked with underspends on marketing.

It's the opposite of the dot com craziness of 1999.

Every start-up I've ever worked with underspends on marketing.

What's more, most start-ups can't even describe what it is they do. And virtually zero can describe what they do in a way that makes consumers (or investors) say "break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar."

That said, when they finally have a product or offering that works, when--through working with me--they finally can define what it is they do and what makes them different, and how to tell it--when they've finally get through the hardest work of establishing the stuff that brands are made of, they're gun-shy and don't pull the "spend-trigger."

Every start-up I've ever worked with underspends on marketing.

I'd say the client that fired me suffered from that situation in spades. 

It's like owning a bakery and having the next cronut or bagclair (the famous bagel-eclair combo that didn't take off) but never telling anyone about it. The practice, in a twisted Georgian-way, reminds me of a line attributed to Yogi Berra"

"Sure we're lost. But we're making good time."

We finally have something special, but why tell people? That would only ruin it.

If you're a start-up and you're not under-capitalized, why not call me?

At the very least I can throw a good, maybe even wise, Yogi Berra-ism your way.

Or we can share a bagclair.

Faith.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here. You know, Dante.

Faith is a tough word for me.

Given that I have none. 

Or very little.

When you grew up as I did, the product of entropy, what Heidegger might have ascribed to "thrownness" (geworfenheit),
you grow up alone, without the pillars of family, love, tradition, caring, rules, protocols, regimens, discipline, trust.

When you grew up as I did in a world ruled by a missing father and an angry, borderline mother who hit with a closed fist, not an open hand, faith--KNOWING--that something is there to help you out, is absent.

I'm 67 and for 67 of those years, that missing-ness, has been a major part of my prevailing gloom.

Lugubrious they call it. If, like me, you're still studying for your SATs.

Perhaps the most deadening fact of faithlessness is even when something or someone shows up that you can have faith in, something that proves itself to be faithful, you think instead that it's got some ulterior motive and will fuck you in the end.

The practitioners of the psychiatric arts rarely get this because devoidness is often not in their cosmology or makeup. Once I read this description of life, which if you don't get you don't get: "Suppose you're up to your neck in shit and someone starts throwing baseballs at you. What do you do, duck?"

For many, especially men, of my generation, their world view--for worse, not better--is tied to how work is going. Like me, they have little beyond work, so they rely on it inordinately for their succor, identity, and ballast. They have no "work-life" balance simply because work is life.

When you are stripped in your 50s or 60s of your workplace or profession of 30 years or 40, you are left bereft. We coddle all sorts of people and give them biographical "free-passes," owing to the hardships of their backgrounds. We don't do the same for the thousands of people who are tossed into unemployment and made to feel useless because of their age and the modern drive to force experience and cost out of every system. 

Simply put, cutting costs means cutting the elderly, which can lead, sadly, to cutting wrists.

But, then a light comes in, somehow, like Sandburg's fog, on little cat feet.

Someone is there when you're sure no one is.

Someone else takes some pressure off.

Someone, somehow, somewhat inexplicably shows they care, in a little ephemeral way.

Maybe a client calls with a tranche of work.

An old client, a new client, a borrowed client, a blue client. A sixpence in your shoe client.

Along with those arrivals are inklings. People who affirm who you are who see things in you you can't for your cosmic myopia. Your soul.

Someone wrote to me, a veritable stranger:
"Beyond the sharp thinking, there’s clearly a beautiful soul steering the ship. "

Someone else, "I'll never leave you, till I'm dead."

Someone else, I haven't spoken to since 2008, "George has been the genuine article from the first handshake."

Someone else, an old account person. "You always knew how. And you always made it fun."

Someone else, a young producer, "People stay with you forever."

A funny thing happened on the way to this post. I'm not making this up.

I cleaned my Mac and the "S" key became recalcitrant, you know, stuck. I'd type on it and it wouldn't imprint.

That's not good if you're a writer, on deadline as I've been for those aforementioned 67 years.

I not only watch my S, I need my S.

In the gloom of my faithless brain, I marked my broken S as a   ymbol. A symbol, I mean of my demi e. Demise.

But like Macs and life often do, somehow, the universe repairs. I think of rivers and lakes and people given up for dead. Then comes the force that through green fuse drives the flower.

Those voices above helped.

My stubbornness too. Not giving up when I felt worse than forlorn. Not when I feel five-or-even-six-lorn.

And my S began again.

It's still tentative.

Not consistent.

Sometimes I have to backspace and hit it again.

I do.

Ever-so-slowly, ever-so-death-defyingly, I find it.

Faith.

Branding, Schmanding.

It's funny to me how, and this is completely Orwellian, how so many people and corporate entities use a passel of words over and over again and those words are essentially devoid of meaning.

This morning (it's Sunday as I write this) I saw someone advertising on LinkedIn that they can build your personal brand. That's what set this off.

No one can build your personal brand. Period.

Someone else can promote it, but only you can build it. 

The same with corporate brands.

A brand is not a logo, a tone of voice, a palette of colors, or a store or an office building. A brand is way more essential than that.

It's who you are, how you behave, and what you do.

A brand is not supposed to be a Potemkin village. But most are.

If you can sum up who you are in the artifacts I mentioned above, fine. But if you start with blue, and a bunch of designy-squiggles, that's just bull-shit. If it doesn't define and capture the essence of your actions, it's not a brand, it's a decorative representation of a brand.

TBH, I'm more than a little bit tired of this confusion and people who say they're in "branding" when what they really are is in coloring-in.

In fact, in all of the world, I can think of thousands of companies, and people and politicians (who fall under a category separate from people) who are branded. And very few that are actually brands.

Apple is a brand. (Except for the slave labor in Asia thing, and the not paying taxes thing.)

Nike is a brand. (Except for the slave labor in Asia thing, and the monetization and destruction of what used to be amateur sports thing.)

But Verizon isn't a brand. They say they're reliable. But they're not. And all they really advertise is cheap and free phones, which are never free. And that reliable network? Just try to get help.

trump is a brand. But a mean, lying brand, sell-aggrandizing, thieving brand. In fact, everything trump does is on brand. Moreso than almost any other brand in existence.

Drug companies that spend billions promoting the splendors of their drugs are not brands. With the possible exception of Moderna, saying a drug is from Pfizer, or Lilly, or Merck or anything else means nothing to me. I could say the same about car companies. The name on the back of an indistinguishable too-large SUV identifies its manufacturer but not its values or etiology. 

The same to my mind holds true with ad agencies and the cabal of colluding holding companies that own them. An Ammirati ad used to mean something, a BBDO ad, a Chiat ad, or an Ogilvy ad used to mean something. I was proud to be an Ogilvy writer in the Ogilvy-tradition. Today the same algorithm, essentially, makes and places all ads and they are as alike as ball-bearings made in an old German factory.

There are a host of other linguistic markers that are similarly devoid of meaning.

I was always stunned by the cruelty of the nomenclatura of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Diversity was always exclusionary (old and Jewish didn't count as diverse, so diversity itself was selectvely-selective.) Equity is a mockable idea in a corporation where a CEO makes 300-times the wage of a median worker and that median worker has no real share in the company, no voice and no security--where's the equity? And Inclusion is a charade in organizations where management is segregated from those they manage--usually behind closed doors and on a separate floor. 

Similarly robust in describing infrastructure with no back ups for an outage. Or agile in an organization that takes seventeen days to produce a tweet. Or nimble in a business that has more project managers than project creators.

Maybe growing up as I did during the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and the era of Vietnam, I got used to looking beyond mere words into their meaning--to what was behind the words.

Soon, as I've said many times (too often) before, everyone on Linked In, every agency, every holding company will be trumpeting their Cannes-n-ization. While their work sucks, they lose 44-percent of their employees every year to attrition and expulsion and year-over-year they shrink in revenue, margin and headcount. Yet, they'll be agency of the year, or network or the year, or most awarded, or 40 under 40.

Like "freedom," "liberty," "justice," and "rule of law," you have to look at the discord between what's being said and what's being done.

Or, not