Going to the Dogs.

Sparkle, left, a purple ball, and Graham in the heat at the Madison dog run.

There's a dog run just two towns over from us where we
some times take Sparkle so she can play with her friends. 

On Saturday morning, my ever-loving, Laura, texted Graham's mother, Kayla and asked if she would like to meet there. Graham, like Sparkle is what's known as an English Cream golden retriever. They're light-toned branch off the rustier main branch of the retriever river, and they're currently all the rage in the canine cavalcade.

Sparkle and Graham were off exchanging nips, tackles and humps, and Kayla and my wife were deep in conversation. That left me to circumnavigate the grassy, fenced-in expanse in my never-ending quest to get in my 15,000 step quota of arthritic-hipped steps.

I ache, therefore I am.

There was a shaggy young man in the dog run wearing a Los Angeles Lakers t-shirt. I joked in his direction, "Is this your way of telling the world that you're the new owner of the team?" (The franchise had just been sold for a record $10 billion.) He answered back, one of the few people who actually reply to my banalities, "No, baseball is my sport."

That led us into a deeper horsehide conversation, part of which led to this post.

"Who do you play for?" I asked.

"I played for UConn," he answered, "I'm a pitcher for the Huskies. But I didn't pitch last season. I had Tommy John surgery, and then when I was in recovery, I tore up my bicep."

He lifted the right sleeve of his Lakers' tee and showed me a couple of scars swimming in a sea of tattoo ink. 

Fiduciary as I am, I asked, "Tommy John, that's expensive. Did the school pay?" 

"Yeah, I got injured pitching during a game."

I'm not one-hundred percent sure, but I imagined he's a pretty good ball-player. UConn, was 38-21 last season and plays a good collegiate schedule, including games against traditional powers like the University of Southern California, Miami, Creighton and other major baseball schools. They won games versus number-fourteen ranked Vanderbilt and seventeen-ranked University of North Carolina.

"Yanny good," I asked. His answer is where I went ontological.

"I was clocked at 95 mph." This means he has major-league speed. "As a freshman, I hit 94. But I was consistently at 95 when I blew up my arm."

I thought about how I might have answered the same question 50 years earlier. I thought about what I was expecting him to say.

I would have said, "I went 7-5 with a mid-three ERA." Or I would have said, "I made all conference," or "our team made the second round of the NCAA tournament," or "I got drafted in the ninth round by the Pirates."

I would never have given an individual data point that has nothing to do with on-field success.

It would be like meeting Jane Austen and when you asked her if she was a good writer she answered, "I type seventy-two words per minute." 

There's nothing wrong with typing that fast, or throwing that hard. But it's immaterial to real success. 

Maybe this struck me in the wake of what one of my most august of advertising friends has called "the death of advertising from Cannes."

WPP, which is literally less than half the size as it was just five years ago--half the revenue, half the people, half the clients--was just named Creative network of the Year. I think, IPG, Omnicom, Publicis, Havas, Erwin Wasey, Lord and Thomas, NW Ayer, Kenyon & Eckhardt, Ammirati & Puris and two or three dozen other defunct entities may have won similar accolades.

WPP, the Cannes Creative Network of the Year
 has lost $11,000,000,000 of market cap in 3.5 years--60% of its value.
That would be roughly like going from having a $20 bill to having a $8.

Referring to a "pay-to-play" award seems a strange way to assess the viability of a company or a person, especially, when according to the parameters that matter they are not worthy of acclaim.

Like most people these days, I often look for information online--where a house for sale sits, how far the Housatonic River is from the Quinnipiac. The internet, now that it's all been sold to the highest bidder to meet the lowest standard, repeatedly comes back with answers that would have been completely unacceptable for the last 500 years but are not questioned today.

They give you the rendering of a map. 

But the map itself has no scale. 

When I was nine and a budding cub scout, I learned that a map had to have a scale or it was useless. A map without a scale is called a sketch. Like a weigh-yourself-scale without numbers would be called broken.

Here's one example.

From the above, you have no idea how far anything is from anything else. How far the green quadrangle is from the blue that represents water? How far Cedar Ln is from E. Gillette Dr. If there's no scale, you can't tell. 

It's not a map. It's a sketch.

A ballplayer telling me he throws 95 is somewhat like that. I don't know if his ball has movement and is thereby hard to hit. Or if to get that velocity he has to groove his pitches down the middle.

Likewise from Cannes, I have no idea why if you're _____ of the year, you're shrinking by 27-percent a year. 

It's not an award, it's a sop.

Think of all the "case study" videos you've seen that herald the garnering of "trillions of impressions." Have you ever seen one of the subjects of those case studies in the wild? 

There might be an advertising, or an ontological koan, here.
Not "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" Maybe "what is the sound of one stat deceiving?" 

And what kind of trophy do you get for that?