Stale Bread.

H, my friend, and GeorgeCo.'s Account Director often makes fun of my gift (or curse) for metaphor. Sometimes I fear she will roll her eyes so far back in her head they will do a full-rotation and she'll spend her days and nights looking backward instead of ahead of her. I have something called SERA on people (severe- eye-rolling affect.) 

Nevertheless, I spend a lot of time on metaphors because 93.8-percent of my clients come to me with complicated issues that they can barely explain. They come to me for help. Often that help involves me probing--is it like this, is it like that--until I find a commonplace comparison that makes clear what they do. What's funny about this is we often use terms as if we know what they mean (we've heard them so often) but we have no idea.

No one knows what quad-core processors are or that our internal combustion engines are powered by tiny explosions that release the stored power of ancient dinosaur juice.

Up here on the Gingham Coast, it's damn hard to find a good loaf of bread. 

Decent bread, from a bakery, was a given when I was a boy. There was a place down the block that would be bringing fresh-baked rye breads out of the oven when school let out, full of warmth and caraway seeds. Sunday bagels and salt sticks gave rise to that old Borscht Belt joke, "the problem with Jewish food is that 96 hours after a meal, you're hungry again."

Today, most bread--even bagels--come from a supermarket fakery. They are so laden with artificial additives and preservatives that they neither mold nor grow stale. It's a symbol of amerikan decay that our houses grow mold before our sandwiches do.

I find a metaphor in this, of course, for the ad industry. There used to be plenty of agencies to choose from. They were local and knew your name and their work was good. They'd also give you a sample when you came in. You seldom left hungry.

Today, there are no small bakeries or agencies. Conglomerates have taken over. Their work is bland and artificial. It gives no sustenance or pleasure. It's as artificial as an aging starlet's butt-lift.

The saddest part of all this is that most people don't know what they're missing. They don't know how good things used to be before they were mass-marketed and consolidated into oblivion. They don't know the taste of a good fresh slice of rye bread, a nice warm seeded kaiser roll from Dubrow's Cafeteria or even a tomato that hasn't been ripened in a rail car or a chicken that hasn't been fortified by poultry steroids.

I haven't gone through this year's entry on this Cannes site which links to winners going all the way back to 1954. I clicked on two things from this year, just to see, and an Apple entry was almost three minutes long and a Tiffany's entry, too, was equally as long. It was on the genius of their signature robin's egg blue.

"High Noon" by Fred Zinnemann was only 85 minutes long. It includes Tex Ritter singing "Do Not Forsake Me (Oh, My Darling)" and the surpassingly-bewitching Katy Jurado, who it is said, swept Marlon Brando off his feet and uttered one of the angriest lines in all of moviedom (above). And one of the most profound.

If High Noon is 85 minutes long and a TV "spot" is three minutes long, I ask myself before watching, "What is the likelihood that it is 3/85ths as good as Katy Jurado in "High Noon"?

That likelihood is not an angstrom more than zero. 

About the same likelihood as finding a good agency or a good piece of rye.

Something not stale.