A Joiner.

Joinery. 

In a couple of weeks from now, or less, depending on when I wind up posting this post, I'll complete my sixty-eighth circle of the sun. It's 584,000,000 miles to complete one orbit times sixty-eight. That puts me at having almost forty-billion miles under my worn leather belt, not counting the twelve marathons I've run and sundry meanderings along the way where I tried my best to avoid being roped into another three hour meeting discussing a 'social strategy.'

Joinerrhea.

In all those years and through all those miles, I never willingly joined anything until about five years ago. In fact, through all those years and miles, I think I willingly chose to socialize after work fewer than one-time per year. I put all I have into the work itself, and rarely have anything left by the end of the day. Besides, conviviality ain't my metier.

However, back around the descent of Covid, my friend Bill Oberlander formed a group of older ad people he called the JCrew. We get together for a good laughter-and-food-filled non-death SLO (shiva like object) about six times a year. We have a text chain that we all check about six times a day. It's a connection of the sort I've never had before.

We do what we do. Rail about the demise of amerika and the ad industry. Brag about our kids. Share things we like. Kibbitz. 

In a sense, what we're doing in all this, in the words of Rick Blaine in Casablanca, doesn't amount to "a hill of beans." But somehow, because we let each other know there are beating hearts in the world and kindred spirits who still have inside them some fight left, these little things make a big difference.

Also, about two years ago, up here on the Gingham Coast, I joined (the very word makes me scratch like a dog with fleas) a dog group. There are three or four other age-peers in the neighborhood, owned by great canines who insist about a romp before sunset. About three or four times a week we gather in a fenced in yard and dig up the grass, while watching our dogs talk about what's on Netflix.

There's nothing special about either of these groups. Or either of these 'joining' instances but they make a difference.

It's a little like the difference between watching something funny while alone or watching something funny in a theater. Funny in a theater is much more fun than funny alone. Even for iconoclasts like myself, community matters.

I had read once that when the Marx Brothers started shooting movies they would perform some of their sketches before live audiences up and down the California coast. A producer would time the laughter. That told the director how to pace the movies so audiences wouldn’t miss the next joke while laughing that the first one. That's just one instance of a solo-showing not being as enjoyable as a group viewing. You miss the crowd-effect.

The kindness of stranglers.

The hardest part about being up here on the Gingham Coast, running my own next-to-solo business is the isolation. Sure I have my wife and my kids and my friends and my dog, but there's nothing really like, in the words of Tennessee Williams' Blanche DuBois, "the kindness of strangers."

I guess if I were king, or working for a big company again, I'd recommend just trying to be nice to people. Say hello. Please. Thank you. I like your tie. Just casual little things that might elicit something that resembles a smile.

It's those casual interactions, so much a part of city life that remind us that we all share this pale blue dot. I think it's a city thing, too. Those little moments we share with the people we bump into whom we'll never see again. A smile. A laugh. A tiny bit of grace.

There's a Jewish concept called Tikkun Olan. It means 'repairing the world.' The 'net' is that saving a single life is the equivalent of saving the universe.

We can't for instance remove the trillions of tons of plastic in our seas. We can remove a bit of trash when we see it. We can't, for now, negate the piggy cruelty of amerika. We can try to share a little kindness with others, asking nothing expecting nothing in return.

Maybe a return to humanity starts with returning a smile.

Thanks.

Life and Death.

A lot of people make fun of me for reading obituaries. They think that reading death notices is somehow morbid. They mock me and tease me for having a lugubrious mien. 

What they don't realize is that obituaries--especially obituaries of the non-super-famous--are two-or-three-minute summaries of lives of interesting people who did interesting things. The best of these obituaries are about people who did quotidian things--every day things--that you'd not otherwise have heard of because you're too busy living life and their accomplishments are too ordinary.

Watch the commercial here.

This morning, I read about Burt Meyer, the toy-designer who invented Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robots. He also created Gooey Louie. The game (fun for the whole family) which invited children to pick “gooeys” out of Louie’s nose. (Choosing the wrong one caused his head to open and his brain to fly out.)

The real subject of today's post, however, is not Burt Meyer, the toy designer. It's of a guy called Robert Propst, who was the director of research at the office-furnishings maker Herman Miller. 

Propst's "new vision of the workplace...radically altered the way offices looked and function." The Journal writes, "Propst saw the offices of his day—often rows of identical desks surrounded by private areas for managers and executives—as stagnant and stifling...He envisioned an office that could be more dynamic and social, that had a greater flexibility to meet the different needs people had throughout their workday.”

Propst designed offices that could be "flexible and flowing." That looked modern, comfortable, inviting and could be configured in almost as many ways as Lego blocks.

The Journal says, “Propst created Action Office as a tool of liberation, as something that was supposed to be good for people, but it turned into what he once famously called rathole places,” says Amy Auscherman, archives director at MillerKnoll, now the parent company of Herman Miller. “He had these very utopian, lofty intentions, but he didn’t account for the constraints of business and real estate. He couldn’t dictate how his system was used, and its main feature is that it can be adapted and changed to suit an organization.”

In much the same way modern holding-companies shoved the long-desk of noisy mediocrity down the throats of the agencies they stripped-mined and called their cheapness "a way to foment collaboration and communication," the "companies that purchased [Propst's] furniture—or one of the many imitations offered by his competitors—were more often drawn to his design because of economics rather than organizational psychology. 

"As real-estate prices and building costs rose, Propst’s creation offered businesses an inexpensive way to reconfigure their floor plans. By using components to create small, boxy workstations, companies found they could pack more employees into tighter spaces. The cubicle as we know it was born.

[Propst's] "annoyance with the implementation of his design led Propst to deride his own creation in the years before his death in 2000, telling the New York Times: 'The cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity.'")

Monolithic insanity. Eventually, it catches up with you.

------

To my non-amerkin readers.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in what Lincoln once described as the "last best hope for man." 

Ad Aged will not have a post. 

We will resume on Friday, if I'm not deported illegally.

 

If Dishes Were Wishes.

This is the time of the year when, if you run your own business--and a project-based business at that, you begin to really worry about the year to come.

Even if you have a six-year-running-my-own-business track-record as GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company does, and each year has essentially been an improvement to the year before, you worry if you've finally played out the string. 

I suppose there's an (un)healthy heaping of Jewish neurosis in this. But I cant imagine that successful generals don't worry if, despite hundreds of successful battles, this is their Little Big Horn. I'd bet even a Warren Beatty worries now and again about getting turned down, running fallow and unable to get a date.

Ted Williams, the greatest (white) baseball hitter of all time, hit 521 home runs in his career. He hit one in his last at bat at age 41. I have to believe he worried he'd strike out if he went up to the plate again.

Just now I was doing something no one likes doing around the house, and I'd imagine most people schluff off hoping their spouse will lose patience, give in and do it themselves. (A lot of work is like that, too.)

A lot of work is like emptying the dishwasher. 

I was mid-cereal-bowl-to-the-cabinet when the Ameche rang--and I could see from my caller ID, that it was a prospective client to whom I submitted my 2026 proposal around Veteran's Day. I was more than a little annoyed that the proposal she asked for and said she'd get back to me on in two days took her two weeks to respond to. 

You learn through the years not to let shit like this get you crazy, or to be "judgey" because of it. If you do, your 120/70 will quickly ascend to Himalayan heights and those little veins at your temples will start ululating like Salome in front of Herod.

My (new) client and I--in dishwasherus interruptus--had our phone call and had a telephonic handshake. My first tranche of 2026 revenue seems to have been booked.

Touch wood.

Quickly I went back, as I do, to emptying our too-expensive Miele. 

I realized that emptying the dishwasher is a perfect metaphor for why I'm surviving in business. 

Dishwasher-emptying is the kind of task that no one gets promoted for. You don't even get the 'but-I-did-the-dishes"-credit. If vacuuming the floor gets you uxorial points, emptying the vacuum-cleaner bag gets you uxorial fuck all. Dishwasher-emptying is dumb, dull, prosaic and as glamorous as clipping your nose-hair on the Lexington line.

Many years ago, probably the mid-1990s, when I was starting my second-decade in the business, I wrote the list below on "How to Be a Good Account Person." I was running my own creative group thenand I wanted my account team to know what I expected.

I remembered just now, number nine. It's probably the point that's gained the most commentary through the years.  I suppose the metaphor is old-fashioned, maybe gendered and besides, who washes windows anymore.

Nobody really.

But some of us empty dishwashers.

It's what we do.

We're better for it.

So's our work.

And our business.

How I Got In Like Flynn.

Flynn.

The first time I was at Ogilvy, I rose probably further and faster than about 94.7-percent of everyone else in the creative department, or any other department. 

Many people disliked me because of that. Every time I'd round a corner or would enter a room where no one expected me to be, I'd hear someone say something about me kissing ass or being political. Usually accompanied by being called a hack.

It drained me of my energy. I made me angry. It upset me. 

Many purported-friends and colleagues would disparage me behind my back. Very few people take the time to say, 'he works really hard,' or 'he listens well' or 'he thinks about the problem' or 'he's just good.'

Chris Wall and Steve Hayden both had dealt with a lot of crap like this in their careers. I saved a single note below from Chris. It came to me after I shot a package of eleven IBM spots--five brand spots and six drtv spots--that were almost universally-acclaimed. And then I was moved into a smaller office adjacent to a spewing roof-top exhaust fan by a petty and jealous manager who had rip-the-wings-off-of-flies-authority to hurt people who were upsetting her status quo.

I called her the Nurse Ratched of the creative department. Every creative department has one.

I suppose in the wake of Steve Hayden's death and memorial, and various reminiscences of Chris along the way, I remembered a piece of creative I did--extemporaneously--in real time in front of the people I was presenting to. It was probably the best piece of creative I ever did.

My partner and I were presenting those eleven spots to very important muckety-mucks from IBM. Since the eleven spots were in-effect the work of two different disciplines--direct response advertising and brand advertising, which at the time were represented by two different agencies and two different bottom lines, the question came up from people bigger than I, 'how do you want to present these?' That is, in what order. Which agency so-to-speak will have the upper-hand?

I remembered the "brief" Matt Ross the head of the IBM account at Ogilvy had given me months before. He said (and I remember this verbatim) 'we already have one-hundred-percent mind-share. How do we drive our market-share?'

That's a damn good brief. 

It presented the problem. And left it to me to find answers.

With that in mind, I stood up to present to IBM, with Chris and Steve in the room.

I said something like, "Most people would start with the brand work. It's cooler. I'm starting with the direct work. We have to sell stuff." 

After that, I could have sold practically anything.

It was one of those too-rare moments when I could almost physically see all client-resistance evaporate. I could almost hear them saying, 'this guy gets us.'

I also got up before I presented and drew this. I hadn't rehearsed it, or even thought about it beforehand. Like I said, it was 'creative' that just came to me.

I said something like, 'we're showing you eleven spots. Five brand and six direct. But in totality the work works like this. 

The work builds your brand. The brand builds your sales.

No one said anything after I drew that. 

They looked at our spots. They laughed in appropriate places. And laughed some more. 

They signed the estimate.

Chris ended his note to me this way.

Even though this note was to me alone, there's an industry that could learn from it.

You can learn a lot from thirty-year-old memos.

Silence.

When you run your own business, even if you're located near a road crew with jackhammers next to a maga rally next to an edm concert, the loudest noise you'll ever hear is the sound
of your phone not ringing.

Likewise, when I played ball and things weren't going well, the loudest sound you were likely to hear was your bat not hitting the horsehide or the whisper of your manager beckoning you into his small office with the words, "can I see you for a minute?"

In so many walks of life the loudest sound you can hear is the sound of what you want to hear not happening.

There's only one way to deal with this universal malady.

That is, to keep showing up.

This year, my sixth running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, has had more extended periods of slow than any of my other years. Those slows were made worse because I lost a retainer client who paid me $9,000/month since I opened my doors. That fee was security. I was earning something, even when I wasn't earning anything.

When you get old and things start slowing down, I suppose you feel like a 33-year-old gorilla in an enclosure in a municipal zoo. 

You say to yourself, "maybe I've played out the string. Maybe my best bananas are behind me. Maybe my own personal simian symphony has reached its last page and I'm coming to the end of my score."

You start to ask yourself if your act has gotten old. If you're like a mediocre TV show in the last year of its run. If you've gotten broad, desperate and no-longer funny.

You can, if you know how to tap-dance, also blame external events. You can say to friends who ask, "I think the tump economy is biting me in the ass. No one wants to spend money." Or "everyone is so cheap now-a-days, no one wants to pay me when they can get AI to do it."

It's not hard to find excuses if you know where to look and everyone knows where to look. Just read a soon-to-be-defunct-holding-company press release. You'll find enough excuses in the first paragraph to sink a battleship.

There is a way to silence the cacophony of silence. 

Whether you're running your own tin-pot agency, trying to play one more season, writing a sitcom or in a zoological park, as most of us are.

It's showing up every day. 

It's re-doubling your efforts, not halving them.

It's rooting around in the dirt and the brambles and your forty years of sweat and sinew and finding faith.

Faith that blood, sweat, toil and tears can conquer, or at least subdue, most things. It's not searching high and low for a temporary painkiller, panacea or magic bullet. It's dancing with the partner you brought to the sock-hop.

Everyone, now and again, starts doing high-dives into the end of the pool that's shallowest.

Take the hit.

Shake off the shake.

Climb up again.

Do the things you've always done that have always paid dividends. Work. Hunt. Think. Try things. Work some more.
Hunt some more. Blather, rinse, repeat.

Listen.

Eventually you'll hear it.

The blaring lack of silence returns.

Steve. Believe.

On Tuesday night, starting at 5:30PM and lasting for about four hours, there was a celebration of Steve Hayden held at the Harvard Club.

There were dozens of Ogilvy luminaries there. And client luminaries. And people like myself not so luminous but who had light shined on them by Steve when he was Vice Chairman at Ogilvy.

The great art director, my sometime partner and friend Marc Klein had a lot to do with putting the event together. And Marc built this website, as well, called The Remarkable Life of Steve Hayden. It's a remarkable job.

Every one of the thousands of people Steve guided has a thousand stories to tell about something surpassing Steve did for them, or gave them the confidence to do. Steve was so kind and generous, the paranoia in me thought he must have an ulterior motive. No one is that fine. Except for Steve.

But this post, really, is not about Steve.

There has been plenty about Steve. 

This post is about something that at least in an advertising sense is bigger than Steve. Something fifty-percent of our industry has forgotten. And the other fifty-percent never even knew existed.

All the great work that Steve had a hand in, all the people whose careers he helped, all the clients he guided and whose share-prices he bolstered was based on one thing.

All of it.

A powerful, human idea.

A powerful, human idea.

A powerful, human idea.

An idea that made you want something. That clarified a promise. Most important, a powerful, human idea that made you feel optimistic about what's to come. Optimistic about tomorrow. Optimistic about life on earth. That it's not a zero-sum game. That there's joy and hope and love and laughter.

The above is not the same as so much of the platitudinous pablum you see everywhere today. Like Oprah Winfrey administered through a rose-colored morphine drip. Or those socks that say "you go, girl" on them. This was optimism and hope based on products that delivered on their promises.

That's not a bad definition of what advertising can do.

These powerful, human ideas were always sentinels. Beacons that told people like me--a pair of hands--how I had to write, what I had to express, the belief I had to help spread. And because the advertising had convinced me, I could readily convince others.

Advertising is not after all, and I repeat, about the latest doodads and gimmickry and trends and awards and fake awards and more fake awards. It's not about margins and borderless-ness and financial legerdemain. It's not about panels and pontificating and pomposity. It's about truth.

As Bernbach said and Hayden embodied, it is and always will be leveraging simple, timeless human truths for client advantage.

I spoke last night to Ogilvy's CEO Emeritus, Shelly Lazarus. Shelly's always been kind and a clarifying voice. When she spoke to the assemblage she recounted this story, which I first read in Steve's New York Times obituary from back in September, 2025.

I mentioned this to Shelly. 

That the powerful, human idea or the "ability to distill complexity to simple, marketable concepts," is where the "value-add" is in our business. 

It's the part of what we do (when we're at our best) that makes us (when we're at our best) worth all the bullshit agencies so often put clients through. It's the part of what we do that when we do it well means we're always always always worth more than we cost.

That's the opposite of the commoditization that's the reality of the place today--where agency "brands" are meaningless, because everyone produces the same work, under the same rules, for the same 'race-to-the-bottom' prices, and then proffers the same excuses for the same crap.

That ability to distill is what allows a campaign to grow, to take on a life and to give a dopey faceless unknown company meaning.

It allows people to like you and me to care. 

It's the part of what we do that we've forgotten.

That many of the industry's leaders don't even know exists.
That we no longer believe in.
That we allowed clients to "procure" out of existence.

Without that distillation, without that power, as an industry, we're just a noise machine. 

We're tales told by idiots.
Full of sound and fury.
Signifying nothing.

Or, Steve.

Squeeze, Geez.

If you want to know what rubs my goat the wrong way, what really makes my brain frizz out, I can sum it up in just three words.

I hate bullies.

I hate people and institutions that are big and powerful. Who use their size and power to gain more size and power. And with that size and power, they beleaguer people to gain more size and power.

That's vague. 

Let me clarify. 

Bullying is how you're treated by your cable "provider." Bullying is how you're treated by the current amerrygrift tax system which because it no longer taxes the super-wealthy and their corporate holdings, lays more and more taxes on you. Bullying is making someone talk to a bot "that is dumber than a cat."

Bullying is consolidated wealth and the deafness and lack of empathy that comes from consolidated wealth.

Bullying is chanting USA! USA! USA! when, for instance, the greatest basketball team ever assembled elbows in the neck an Angolan athlete in the 1992 Olympics and is not rendered toxic. Bullying is institutionalized rape by trumpstein-acolytes. Bullying is when roughly half-a-dozen men take over 70-percent of an industry, destroy its viability, depress wages, halve the workforce while taking nine-figured payouts for themselves and their cronies, disparage the public by beaming them ugly, insultingly dumb, machine-made crap and calling it creative. Bullying is destroying jobs then calling yourself a 'job creator.'

Bullying is what's taken over my world on both macro and micro levels.

Bullying is stealing.
Bullying is resurgent racism, anti-semitism, anti-womanism, anti-humanism, anti-earthism, anti-Enlightenment.

Bullying is what is being called Neo-Feudalism, aka serfdom.

As Joel Kotkin wrote not terribly long-ago:

Our society is being rapidly reduced to a feudal state...,  Millions of small businesses are near extinction, millions more losing their jobs and many others stuck into the status of a property-less serfs. The big winners have been the “expert” class of the clerisy and, most of all, the tech oligarchs, who benefit as people rely more on algorithms than human relationships.

Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. 

If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging.

I wish I found the above inaccurate and shrill.

But if I had my way, it would be the strategic under-pinning of how perhaps we could slowly begin to puncture the bloated bullies. And undo some of what's happened.

Clip 'n Cower.

 

 

 

 

Agents of Agency.

A little more than two decades ago, I was co-head of the flagship office of an agency that was really only interested in selling itself to a bigger entity. 

That was when I started hearing my colleagues in "leadership" say things like, "we don't want to call ourselves an agency." Or "we're not an agency, we're a consultancy."

That's when I started thinking about what the word agency actually means.

It means you or your business act on behalf of the people or companies paying you. You are agents of their success. George Clooney's agent, or Jennifer Lawrence's work not for their aggrandizement but for the success of their clients. The more an agent helps George Clooney get great parts and great deals, the more money the agent makes. That's the equation. And it's a pretty simple one. 

Along the way, I suppose when the holding company era came to full-flower, that equation broke down.

An agency's clients were no longer important, the agency's value, and therefore its awards were. Quickly an agency's raison d'être went from making clients look great to making the agency itself look great. The better to gin up their share price and bonus thyself.

Agencies--tautologically--were never supposed to be about self-aggrandizement. They were always supposed to be about client aggrandizement. That's the way agents work. Do well for clients, and my business will do well.

For about a decade now, WPP has been more focused on promoting its success and elan than that of their clients. The visuals above I took from one of their leader's linked in pages. We're connected, having worked together in the 1990s.

Agents in a sense operate behind the scenes. I have a compendious memory and can only think of three agents who are above the line. Swifty Lazar. Michael Ovitz. And Ari Emanuel. 

Agents aren't supposed to be known. They're supposed to make those whom they work for be known.

No agency network could take this ad, change some names and run it for itself. No holding company could claim, "The world's best businesses work with XXX."

Trumpeting such specious accomplishments as I've pasted above reminds me of something David Ogilvy himself said many decades ago. "The consumer is not a moron; she is your wife." 

Forget the gendered nature of that statement. Think about an even bigger issue. WPP, as a communications company, is treating people like morons. They're lying to he world, thinking the world is too moronic to know fact from fiction or reality from fantasy.

The subject object split between the above and the items below is a chasm, wrapped in an abyss, shrouded in a press-release.

Two things are in evidence here. 

One: WPP is obviously expert in gaming the award system. How do you win network of the year one month while your value falls from £24 billion to £3 billion? If awards made sense--and you're most-awarded why did you suffer such a precipitous drop in worth? If you provide value to your clients (an agent's ostensible reason for being) why has your value dropped 65-percent already in 2025?

That's like starting the year earning $3000/week and ending it earning $1000/week, while being named "employee of the year."

The sad truth is that most agencies today, especially the giant ones (or formerly giant ones) are run by people who do not have the skills to actually help clients. 

They can't art direct. They can't write. They can't strategize. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

In my eyes, all they can do is spreadsheet and cut costs and finance, so they can get their eight-and-sometimes-nine figure payouts. They really have nothing to do with the agencies they "run." In fact, they're usually not even co-located with their agencies. Whatever they do, it seems that they do it poorly--or why would their value have dropped in the case of WPP by 88-percent?

Then they do this. Again, it's all about them. And when you've lost five of every six dollars of value you had, maybe you don't fly to Brasil for a ribbon-cutting. Optics by Braille.

I've been in advertising my whole life. Not just my grown up life, since my father was in advertising before me as was his 15-years older brother, my Uncle Sid. In effect, a Tannenbaum has been in the ad business since just after World War II. It's kinda the family business.

I've always wanted to be a star. Have written novels or screenplays or great histories of life on earth. I knew early on I didn't have the "sleep on the floor in alphabet city" tolerance  pursuing such dreams demands if you don't come from money. 

So I started in the agency business fully-accepting that I was working to aggrandize others because I didn't have the talent, money or stamina to be a star myself. I can be disappointed in working for others--I wish, in the words of AE Housman, my garland wasn't briefer than a girl's. I could spend my life wishing. Or I can say as Joe Louis said when he hung up his gloves.

I did the best I could.

And I never lied about it.