Trouble? Double?

I got an email just moments ago from one of the Holding Companies. In it they're announcing, though they are hemorrhaging business, revenue, people and market-share, probably $10,000,000 worth of talks and agenda items they are staging at Cannes.

There's a lot of Orwellian cognitive dissonance happening in the world today. Failing companies throwing giant parties celebrating their success is yet another example. It's hard for me to reconcile a guy who quits with no successor, who's halved the size of his company, who's destroyed half a dozen major advertising brands showing up in public.

As long-time readers of this blog know, my parents, in say 1965 and still in the thrall of Kennedy's Camelot, enrolled my older brother and me in a series of speed-reading courses when we were just about nine and seven. 

Kennedy, though he had no formal connection with Evelyn Wood, the Sam Altman of rapid reading, could reportedly read 1,200 words per minute. That's roughly five pages of a book every 60 seconds. By comparison, spoken language--a podcast, or a book on tape--usually brings you about 150 words per minute. JFK could take in information at eight-times that of a normal person listening or six-times as fast as a normal reader.

At my peak, I can read faster than that. With about 75-percent recall. I'm cursed that way.

That's all to say, I speed read the Holding Company agenda that was sent to me. Not only did I see nothing that interested me in the least, I also barely saw anything I could reasonably understand as remotely related to advertising.

The analogy I'll use here, from the tips of my fingers is this: It all seems like studying manure in order to watch the Kentucky Derby. I suppose there's something to learn from the shit, but there might be a more informed way of placing a thoughtful $2 bet.

Here's what I mean. I sped-read the above and literally can't conceive I am even in the same "ecosystem" as these people. Whatever is meant by ecosystem.

It all, somehow, reminds me of an old Borscht Belt joke about two Martians who land somehow in Brooklyn. Their spaceship can't take off from earth because it has a broken wheel. The Martians are walking down the street and they see a bagel shop. To the Martians, the bagels look like perfect replacements for their broken wheel. They go in and ask the counterman for a wheel. The counterman says, "those aren't wheels, they're bagels. You eat them." The Martians each take a bite and the one says to the other, "These would go good with lox."

That's how alien I feel. 

From a completely different interplanetary ecosystem. An ecch-o-system, maybe.

But back to the agenda items above.

Baseball today, all sports, actually, are fairly incomprehensible to me. The statistics that kept track of the game since its very beginnings are no longer important to many people and new ones have taken their place. 

Hank Aaron hit 755 career home runs. Babe Ruth hit 714. Barry Bonds some drug-induced number, maybe 7800. 

They never once thought about the velocity of a ball off their bat. If they thought about it at all, they'd say something as incisive as "I got good wood on that." 

Likewise, Bob Gibson, who had an era of just 1.12 in 1968 never worried about pitch count, or any of a dozen statistical variables that dominate the jabber about the game today. In the parlance of the greensward, he "threw the ball where the bat wasn't."

Simplicity in what we do. The equivalent of throwing the ball where the bat isn't. Or in the words of Wee Willie Keeler, "hittin'  ‘em where they ain't."

As Carl Ally said, advertising should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." To paraphrase Mark Twain, the difference between Ally's quote and this Cannes' agenda, "how brands can actively mitigate algorithmic bias and champion representation in a rapidly evolving AI-driven ecosystem," is as vast as the difference between "lightning," and "lightning bug."

Fifty years ago I made a meager living for one summer playing professional baseball. My manager, Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla, aka Hector Quesadilla was one of the wisest men in the game. He is in two Mexican Baseball League Halls-of-Fame, for both playing and managing.

If we were down by four with just one or two ups left, as we seemed to be so often that long summer, he didn't trot out statistics, probabilities, moneyball and other algorithms so bestially au courant today. He did not say to Buentello as he grabbed his lumber, "Uncover the challenges facing subscription and identify strategies to thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape. From personalization and value-added services to flexible pricing models and enhanced customer experiences, discover how to reinvent your subscription model with AI for long-term success."

He'd say, "Hit a double."

Advertising--making it effective, worth watching, worth paying for, and respected once again isn't hard.

We need to hit more doubles.