Newspeak.

You have to be suspect, I think, when you reach an age of "maturity" in your career (or in your life) and all at once, a phrase or phrases you've never heard before, you can't go a day or an hour without hearing.

I'm not talking about hearing of actual physical things that might actually change life on earth, like a remote control, a microwave oven or an EZ-Pass reader. Or a disaster or death that crowds the consciousness. And I understand if, say, you get a new golden retriever puppy with more energy than the large Hadron Collider, your conversations will alter. I'm talking more about semantics that seem to sweep over companies, social groups, even, today entire nations.

All of a sudden everyone is saying the same thing.

I had been working in advertising for 30 years before I heard:
Agile.
Digital first.
Robust.
Content.
Story-telling.
Algorithm.
Interactivity.
Project management.
Chief People Officers.
Social strategists.
Customer experience/user experience/experience design.

And a whole host of other terms that to my mind are the tail wagging the elephant. 

Focusing on these things when you're trying to reach people is like trying to sell a $323,000 Porsche based on the novelty and brilliance of its floor mats. 

I had been an a-merkin for 58 years before I heard:
Fake news.
Unwillingness to transfer power.
Kakistocracy.
Vaccine denial.
Shutdowns.
Stop-the-steal.
McConnellism.
Christian nationalism.
Originalism.
Trumpism.
And more.

Basically these things--the phrases and concepts--are shiny objects meant to keep you from noticing the truths (or the lies) around you. When someone tells you they're serving you an artisanal A5 Wagyu beef in a Tajima-Wagyu Kobe cut originating from the Tajima cattle bloodline raised in Hyogo Prefecture under strict guidelines, what they're really doing is bullshitting their way into being able to charge you 20X for something worth .5X.

Similarly, when someone tells you they're going to make something great again, they're really selling you a way they can enrich themselves and their friends while impoverishing you. Lyndon Johnson, one of the wiliest politicians that ever was saw this picture clearly. As did Franklin Roosevelt when he appointed bootlegger and incipient gangster Joseph Kennedy to be the first head of the Security and Exchange Commission (back when government had regulatory power) and said "It takes a thief to catch a thief.")

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When an entire government abides by vaccine denial, for instance, it's not vaccines they're denying, in fact. It's bigger than that. They're destroying, purposefully, the very notion of truth. 

Here's proof that vaccines don't work:

Now, to the point of today's post. If there is one. 

There's been a broad tendency, a consensus even, to blame the demise of the modern Holding-Company-dominated advertising industry on all sorts of exogenous particulars:
The dominance of social media platforms.
The splintering of media channels.
The shortening of attention spans.
The cynical consumer.
The age of post-capitalism.

All those reasons deny the fundamental reason for the perishing of advertising as it is constituted today.

Advertising no longer defines a product and tells us what makes it different in ways that breakthrough, interest and convince people. 

Advertising no longer works because the advertising industry no longer does advertising. 

We do grinvertising. (People gushing over mayonnaise.)
Celebrityising. (Celebrities gushing over mayonnaise.)
Fakevertising. (Un-seen ads purportedly for mayonnaise.)

We no longer tell people why they might need mayonnaise thus compelling them to buy a rancid jar. In fact, 99-percent of the ads I see as heralded these days do nothing but sell a category--not the essential components of a particular product or service in that category.  And 99-percent of them use the same footage, music, techniques and voice-over to do exactly the same thing as everyone else. Then they assert that advertising doesn't work.

I have no reason to believe the five things below would work today. Advertising stopped working because the advertising industry stopped working at advertising.

One thing along these lines that I've noticed over the last 15 years or so that I never noticed during my first 50 years is this: Companies or people paying massive fines but admitting no wrong-doing.

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I don't understand the ratiocination that's operating here. Why do you pay a fine if you did no wrong. And why do we allow it?

I bring this back to advertising for the simple reason that predominantly men with no advertising experience or belief in advertising, but great experience in sharp-pencilling expenses, have taken hundreds of millions of personal wealth from the advertising. In Melanie's words, they've "picked it like a chicken bone," and put the blame for the destruction of advertising and hundreds of thousands of jobs not on them, but on things that have somehow turned them into innocent (wrongdoing-denying) victims.

Or as the Andrew formerly known as Prince might squeak, "I didn't rape the girl, my penis did."

In advertising, it's "Me and my $500,000,000 net-worth didn't destroy the ad industry, Amazon did."

NYTimes review here.

Things in the world change every day.
I suppose that's why our planet spins.
(The round earth, not the flat one.)
One thing doesn't change.
The holiness and essentiality of being responsible for who you are and what you do.
It's not saying, "It wasn't me that said what you heard me say."
Once accountability and owning up is no longer,
the whole thing collapses.