Welcome to Metaphor-Land.

Drones are among the newest and most-advanced weapons on battlefields and besieged amerikan cities today. According to M. Gessen, writing in The New York Times, "Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city is just 20 miles from the front line. In the center of town, one cannot walk a block without seeing boarded-up windows where glass was blown out by bomb blasts. In the bedroom suburbs to the east, entire blocks of Soviet-era high-rise apartment buildings lie in ruins."

Much of this damage, and countless casualties have been caused by drones. 

Ukraine has some of the world's most-advanced weaponry to battle Russian drones, including the Patriot missile system and F-16 fighter jets. A single patriot missile costs $4,000,000. And F-16, about $70,000,000. (About what the trump family takes in every week from crypto "sales.")

The Ukrainians also have theYakovlev Yak-52. A propeller plane was originally built as a training plane by the Soviets. It has a top speed of just 177 mph and a ceiling of just 13,000 feet. People drive faster on the FDR than the Yak 52 can fly.

But in the skies above Ukraine, between ten-percent and twelve-percent of all Russian drones are being shot down by amateur soldiers in drones.

The pilot is usually an amateur. The kind of guy who flies from New York to the Hamptons to beat the investment bankers. The gunner is a guy with an automatic weapon or a shotgun. He's usually shooting rabbits. The pilot gets as close to a drone as he can. The gunner leans out and shoots it. Sometimes the pilot will tip a drone off course with the brush of a wing. 

The Wall Street Journal wrote about this phenomenon in the paper on Monday. One of the gunners they profiled had never even been in a plane before.

It made me wonder what if we in advertising tried going back to the low-tech way we used to fight our wars for consumer attention and product preference. Sure, we'll use every high-tech tool we can. We'll use so much AI, our algorithmic sphincters will begin to hemorrhage. 

But what if we used the advertising equivalent of a prop plane and pop gun?

What if we gave some old people some magic markers and tissue paper and had them scribble out a storyboard. The copywriter could type it two-fingered on an old selectric. We could find some celluloid somewhere and an old Arriflex in someone's closet and we could shoot the thing. We could find real musicians to play real instruments and record a track. And a whisky-throated stentor to do the VO, recording originally on tape. I'm sure we could dig up a moviola and find someone to cut the thing. We could send out for opticals.

Old school.

I bet, just doing this a few times, we could shoot a lot of sophisticated tech right out of the sky.

And we might, also, teach the world a thing or two.