Disposable.

From Raymond Bernard's "Wooden Crosses" (1932).
The man knew is way around a match dissolve.

Sorry about the quality. It's not available on YouLube.

If you work in metaphors like I do, you can learn a lot from the ongoing war in Ukraine and Russia. Basically, it seems like it might someday be called "the first AI war." 

I'll ™ that now.

It's removed from the AI war we read about in advertising everyday. Which mostly consists of rich people firing poor people and replacing them with algorithms. 

That said, basically I believe that the ongoing war in Ukraine and Russia will be the "past is prologue" for the ad industry's AI war.

Some months ago, I drew the illustration below.

It sucks, I know, but it explains how things work.

It explains why you probably have eleven boxes in your apartment full of old chargers, wires, devices and batteries. You buy tech to fix something, then another something arises.

It's pretty simple, really, as ugly as my drawings usually are. Every solution causes another problem. 

That's about as macro a statement as you're likely to get in a blog on advertising.

In advertising, and in warfare, or in just about any other pursuit, people buy something new because they buy the promise that it will do something magical for them. 

But you can't have a dog if you're not willing to vacuum up dog hair. You can't have a kid if you won't change diapers. And you can't replace your creative people with AI if you're not willing to give up a certain degree of perspicacity, humanity, laughter. Connection.

In the "first AI war," Ukraine, with 40,000,000 people is fighting Russia, with 140,000,000. They're out-peopled by 350-percent. Ukraine's defense budget is about 20-percent smaller than Russia's. So, as in advertising (or the way advertising used to operate) if you can't outspend, you have to out-think.

That's the derivation behind Ukraine's recent drone attack which damaged or destroyed a significant number of Russia's most sophisticated airplanes. 

The problem: Ukraine is out-resourced. The solution: AI-enable drones that can evade detection and penetrate thousands of miles within Russia. Hide them on trucks and...go!

As Benjamin Sutherland, the Security and Technology correspondent writes in "The Economist," 

For this sentence: "increasingly capable flying robots promise to reshape warfare," substitute something we might have already heard from any of 38-dozen agency moguls: "increasingly capable AI promises to reshape advertising."

But here's the rub. And what everyone forgets.

Every solution creates a new problem.

Which demands new tech. Which creates new problems. Which can only be fixed by new tech. 

See my illustration above.

And then this, from Sutherland:

It won't end here, of course.

Because underdogs always find a way around problems. As Ahab might have said, "where there's a whale there's a way."

Today, it seems every Holding Company agency seems hell-bent for leather to eliminate every person they possibly can. The data on headcounts in advertising is hard to come by. Transparency and holding companies go together like cleanliness and the #4 train.Bbut in 2016, WPP had just over 200,000 employees. Today, they have closer to 100,000. 

Even a CPA realizes that's almost a 20-percent drop.

The Holding Companies are going all in on the latest technologies--AI and other algorithmic sleights-of-hand. However, like the eventual use of microwaves that can disable a drone's circuitry, eventually something will displace AI. And the same companies working to get rid of people will realize they might need them.

They over-indexed. ie fucked up.

When you get right down to it, no matter how sophisticated the world gets, there's very little that can vanquish a determined populace even with merely bricks and sticks. In other words, sometimes the oldest technologies (people and elbow grease) can defeat the newest (AI.)

A century ago Henry Ford thought through, somewhat anyway, the problem of retaining his workforce. He was smart enough to know (despite his virulent Jew-hate) that nothing ruins a company faster than unhappy employees.

As "Forbes" magazine writes:

Too late the Holding Companies will realize that no one wants to buy from companies that destroy people, humanity and life on earth.