A 9000-Years History of Humans and Advertising.

In Williamsburg this room would be $4700/month + utilities.

If you can roll back the clock to say about 9,000 years and if you somehow find yourself in Çatalhöyük, one of humankind's first cities, in what is today Turkey, you could probably learn something about advertising that most people today can't quite put their finger on.

In Çatalhöyük there were probably two people selling goats' milk. They were equidistant from your dwelling. They sold milk from essentially the same goats, they charged exactly the same and they had the same availability of supply. 

However you, as a consumer--even back then in the early, pre-money days of commerce--developed a preference for one milk-seller over another. Without really knowing why or even thinking about it, you chose the milk-seller that seemed friendliest. The one most apt to smile and kibitz. The one for whatever reason you seemed to like the most.

If a spouse asked you why you chose one milk-seller over the other you might say, "I dunno. X seems like a nicer guy than Y."

There's a good chance--and I'm not an anthropologist--that for as long as there have been humans we've chosen to interact with people who acted most like people we like. 

If you strip away all the Sinekky Godinisms away from modern marketing pablum, if you shred into a trillion little pieces all the 168-page decks ever created, if you toss all that CD* out, you can get to a simple, I think indisputable, conclusion. 

*CD= Civilizational Detritus.

The primary reason hundreds of billions are spent on advertising is to make corporations, brands, products, services, political candidates MORE HUMAN.

We love certain brands because they seem nice. Friendly. Easy-to-do-business with. Likeable.

Think Different.

Just Do It.

We could hate Apple for not paying tax, charging $59 for a wire and employing ersatz-slaves as assembly labor.

We could hate Nike for not paying tax, charging $350 for running shoes and employing ersatz-slaves as assembly labor.

We could hate them.
But we like them.
Because of advertising.

I got a note this morning from someone inside the "belly of the beast," i.e. a giant consultancy, the sort Holding Companies pay millions of dollars to to revitalize them. I don't know the person, but he/she/they wrote to me re Cindy Rose at :

Let me break this down a bit more.

For Sale. Holding Company. Badly Worn.

Advertising exists to make corporate entities human. 

For the last thirty years advertising has been run by technologists.

If my steak house sucks and we lost 92.79-percent of our business to another steak house that served better steaks, I would not be trying to revitalize my restaurant's business by making our check-out system "frictionless."

I'd hire the best practitioners of red-meat-ism that I could find and say, "Let's sirloin the other guys out of the water."

I wouldn't take a steak business and try to fix it by hiring a gardener. Just like if I were running a baseball club that couldn't hit a lick, I wouldn't hire someone who could kick a field goal.

But that's what's happened.

Having been caught unawares by giant "bionic**" monopolies, FAANG, (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) who today dominate advertising via algorithms and monopolistic platforms, the giant holding companies decided to act like FAANG in the hopes of becoming FAANG-like.

[**As for Bionic monopolies, here's how I understand the term. Old time monopolists, like Frick, Schwab, Rockefeller and Carnegie, dominated markets. You went to them or you went without.

Frick, Schwab and Carnegie sold 95% of the steel in the US--but they could only sell it once. Rockefeller sold 90% of the oil--but only once. Swift and Armour, 90% of the meat--but only once.

FAANG and their ilk sell you products, but own your data identity. They sell it and sell it and sell it and sell it. You and your endless stream of data are their product.]

Trying to "out-tech" a tech company seems as much a fool's errand as trying to out-curveball Sandy Koufax.

About a dozen years ago, I wrote the line above for a client. They looked at me like I was radioactive.

You learn to move on.

Today, I'm putting this out there.
I expect the same response.