Belief.

Over five years ago, my friend Eitan Chitiyat, interviewed me for his blog. In that post, I said, "I believe in factory tours." That was my way of saying you have to know a product or a company before you try to create something for that company.

Imagine for a minute, if you were to write a dating profile, a college application essay, or even give a eulogy for someone you don't really know. You might get some details that personalize the effort. But you probably don't have the closeness you need to write something that's actually personal.

There's a big difference (that most of the marketing industry fails to recognize) between "personalized" and "personal." As Mark Twain once said, it's like the difference between lightning and lightning bug. Same essential spelling. Entirely different meaning. 

On Friday, my good friend Rob Schwartz and I were talking on the telephone. We talked about the death of our mutual colleague, Steve Hayden, a little about the sump that is fast-dying liberal democracy and then about how we're each doing during this chapter in our lives. 

Rob's had about four careers as far as I can tell. He started many years ago as a copywriter, rose to CCO, became CEO (is that a rise or a fall?) and is now enjoying, yes, enjoying life as a career coach. 

The last few years for Rob and I, have witnessed probably more changes than we anticipated having to live through. Rob is now doing more and more coaching, and I was booted out of a crumbling House-of-Usher of an ad agency, and forced to start my own place. These are big transitions at any time. Maybe bigger when they happen when you're on the wrong side of 60.

When I started GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I wrote a line in ink with one of my many Pelikan fountain pens, "Don't start a new agency just to act like an old agency." That was more shorthand to myself to do things my way. The way I regard as the right way.

I was telling Rob about my practice of doing extensive interviews with different levels of clients and customers when I begin to work on a brand. In my gee-whiz, naive way I said something like, "I can't believe real agencies don't do this. Not even planners anymore. That's why, everything looks and feels the same. That's why so few brands are differentiated. And everyone seems to speak (or shout) in the same voice and say the same things.” 

Lack of knowledge leads to a surfeit of generic.

Rob, as an excellent listener, said "You don't visit their factories anymore. But of course there are no factories. But you're doing the factory tour."

Just now, I ran across this article in The Wall Street Journal. In it Wharton marketing professor Shiri Melumad says working with Large Language Models “... is like the Google Effect on steroids. We’re shifting even further away from active learning.”

Daniel Oppenheimer, a professor of psychology and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, corroborates, saying he sees in something similar in his lab: "Students who use AI tools to complete assignments tend to do better on homework—but worse on tests.They’re getting the right answers, but they’re not learning."

In today's Times, there's an essay by Gary Marcus, an author a AI-skeptic. (Remember skepticism? Questioning authority? Real facts?) Marcus writes, and doubts.

Tools, from the paleolithic clovis points, to rope, to the wheel, to the shovel, to the typewriter, to the internal combustion engine, to the Mac, have always, by definition, lightened the labor-load of humankind.

But our new so-called tools no longer lighten our load. They do our load for us. This makes AI no longer a tool, in fact, but a usurpation.

My point in all this is very simple.

In the roughly 4.5 million years since our ancestors came down from trees and started walking on two feet, progress has always been made as a result of two things: work, and risk.

In the modren computer age we have sought to eliminate both. The algorithm will, it is claimed, not only give us the right answer, it will create that right answer for us. If you think about all the "best-practices" know-it-alls you've heard via white papers, agency meetings, powerpoints, pontifications, ted talks, and presidential podia claiming they know the one true path, you know what I mean. The are people and machines who believe they are gods or they can read the will of god because they can see things no one else can.

All work comes down to work and risk.

Not, as we are being told everyday, work-delegation and risk-avoidance.

The simple fact is, the new breed of small independent agencies, GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, are still willing to take the risks and do the work. The be-tar-pitted behemoths of the industry believe some magical binary alchemy will lead they and their clients to the promised land.

I do at least ten hours of interviews.
Read at least one-thousand pages of powerpoints.

Write ten manifestos and one-hundred print ads.

Work and risk.

They're hard.

They're what I believe in.