Owned and Operated.

Maybe because I've very-nearly reached the enviable status of being essentially post-consumer, I seem to notice the aggressiveness and omnipresence of modern amerikan assault-marketing more than ever before.

Today, for instance, you are just sold via ads, but every newsfeed and seemingly half the articles in even the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal seem to be banging on about Black Friday. 

Boys and Girls, Black Friday is not a holiday. It's not a real thing. It's the point after which retailers have traditionally earned a profit. Yet there it is, like its Thanksgiving of Christmas or Veterans Day, in our calendars which are run by giant platforms which are also giant advertisers and giant retailers.

Cyber Monday ain't real either, though you'd never know it from a-merr-kahching's two most-important newspapers, aka 'pennysavers.'

Some years ago, I stumbled upon a new economic term that I stored in my prodigious memory. I thought it would catch on, but I think the same powerful forces that are ginning up a constant retail frenzy must have blocked the phrase and the concept behind it.

In fact, if you google "bionic monopoly," you get served an ad for amazon. Ostensibly because they sell the game, Monopoly.

The way I understand the term Bionic monopolies is straightforward. 

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.

Moo.™ A wholly-owned subsidiary of trillionaire.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, CVS, Walmart 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. You are not a human. You are a revenue stream.

They sell to you endlessly because they own you and your attention (and thereby your wallet) completely.

Today, three advertising holding companies (down 25% in the last two weeks) control about 70% of the jobs in the ad industry. Keep your mouth shut and your head down or you'll never work in this town again.

Here's a bit from The Nation, I'll admit, a liberal journal. Nevertheless, here are some facts. Not sure what you and I can do about any of this (even though not long ago ad agencies were proclaiming 'the consumer is in control') but it might make sense to at least know you're being fucked coming and going when you're being fucked coming and going.

Yes, it's easy for me to say, try to notice these assaults on your time, your money and your freedom. As I said above, I buy hardly anything anymore.

A screendoor screen when Sparkle paws her way through one. One Pelikan m200 fountain pen a year, in whatever is their color of the year. An occasional Ebbets Field Flannels baseball cap or two.

Of course I buy three gallons of gas a week for my 1966 Simca 1500 with 224,000 miles on it. I buy food at the grocery. And a bagel now and again and when I'm in town, some Kung Pao (not too spicy) and about three Pastrami Queen sandwiches a year and now and again an order of kasha varnishkas. 

But the jumbo walmart/costco shopping carts filled with 128-ounce cisterns of mayonnaise, well, those days are not now and never were my bag.

I don't need or want 99.9979-percent of the shit that''s being hawked my way. What's more, since I fired xfinity, six months ago, I no longer have access to television. I haven't turned the set on since April, and I don't miss it and its addictive oppression.

As the giant cigarette companies years ago loaded tobacco with to up the amount of naturally-occurring nicotine, today's marketers do much the same with their addictive additives to hook us. With incessance, flashing lights, their name on everything, to things like the text messages I got on Thanksgiving (nominally a holiday) from Verizon beckoning me the "unwrap 2 great iphone offers."

I can't help but thinking there's a giant cosmic bamboozle being perpetrated. A whipped up frenzy that tells us with each passing pixel that if we don't jump in now with both feet and buy this that and more of this and that and still more of this and that we'll miss out on all of this and that for all time.

Be passive and don't act now!

AI tells us AI is the end-all-and-be-all. And bombards us with more AI-generated content that tells us how great AI is. They then tell us that we have to build nuclear powered data centers to power the AI that AI tells us we need more of. Of course then we need more nuclear-powered data centers, for more AI and no one is supposed to talk about waste we can't dispose of that will poison our planet for 100,000 years--AI will figure a way out of it, and we need AI and more of it every day. 

 

--

The same sort of bushwa is happening everywhere. Omnicom-IPG is good for the industry because Omnicom-IPG says its good for the industry--forget about the loss of thousands of jobs, the enshittification if the industry and the few jobs that are left. We're told it one-thousand times a day. It  must be true.

If you take a moment and think about how you're treated like they own you, perhaps you can begin to understand and maybe resist. Giant malefactors of great wealth feel compelled to bang a drum to blot out dissenting voices. That's a sign of bullying. Not benevolence.

Only you can stop the onslaught.

One step, then another.

Paper Rout.

Outside of "Ogilvy on Advertising," "Reality in Advertising" by Rosser Reeves, "Pearl Harbor..." by Jerry Della Femina, and the three horsepersons of today's current advertising blogosphere, Trott, Hoffman and Siegel--with a side order of Steve Harrison and John Long tossed in like semantic croutons, I don't read books on advertising.

They're a bit, I think, like reading a book on how to ride a bike or hit a baseball. When I was a boy, and in avid pursuit of wood on horsehide, I did read Ted Williams' "The Science of Hitting." Like most instructional books, it listed things I already knew. 

1) Keep your eye on the ball.

2) Keep your swing level.

3) Wait for your pitch.

Those things, of course, are easy to know but really hard to do. They're a little like if Jim Ryun wrote a book about running a four-minute-mile. Telling me to run 15-miles-per-hour for 1760 yards doesn't get me any closer to doing it. You either have the "motor" or you don't. Reading about it only really underscores the probable inadequacy of your engine. 

It's easy to run a sub 4-minute mile. Just do this.

All that being said, one of the best advertising lessons I ever learned came from the Headmistress of the elite and expensive pre-school on the Upper East Side that each of my elite and expensive daughters went to.

My ever-loving and I were in the school auditorium for a parent-teacher night and Jean, the head of the school was fielding questions from some type A parents who had taken the night off from their Goldman Sachs labors.

A 40-year-old in a suit that costs roughly the same as a year's tuition stood to ask a question. He was like a rough Brooklyn District Attorney interrogating a mobster small enough for him to push around.

"I've had two kids here," he began. "Before they got here, their art-work sucked. After they left, their art-work sucked. But while they were here, their art-work was great."

Pause.

"What's your secret."

Even longer pause. Of the sort that showed Jean wasn't cowed by either the suit or the wearer's comportment.

"There's no secret," Jean answered. "We just know when to take the paper away."

I remember reading from Roy Grace his description of what a creative director does. He said, eloquently, "I take out the garbage."

"We know when to take the paper away," is that level of adroit. About ninety-seven point nine percent of account people don't know when to take the paper away from clients. ninety-seven point nine percent creative directors don't know when to take their paws off of your work. And about ninety-seven point nine percent CCOs don't know when to take the paper away from the CPAs who currently run our business.

Like a three-year-old's art-work in most scenarios, everything today is improved to death. Every swimming pool has been peed in. Every beef stew has been over-salted. Every guest has out-stayed their welcome.

I grew up with a mother who wanted my brother and I to follow in the footsteps of the Kennedy boys. Not get murdered, but become a president and a leading candidate. 

She drummed into us a ditty that after 112-years of therapy, I still can't shake.

Good, better, best.

Do not let it rest.

Till your good is better.

And your better, best.

That's a winning formula if you're in the therapy business. 

It ain't so hot if you're in advertising.

Sometimes the best thing you can learn is when to take the paper away.

---

I had two very rare advertising books that were stolen from me when I worked at Ogilvy. I've been looking for them since they went missing about a decade ago. You can read the story of the books on Dave Dye's great blog, here. (And no, Dave did NOT steal them.)

In any event, about twice a year I spend an hour or two trying to track these books down. Yesterday's semi-annual search led me here, to Julian Koenig's New York Times obituary. 

Julian was the writer behind "Lemon," and "Think Small." And a hundred other great ads. 

Less than a week after DDB was shuttered by Omnicom (omnicom means 'death star' in Latin) I stumbled onto the obituary of one of DDB's most-famous writers and found this quotation.

It seems like it might be an adroit epigram for the death of the industry. 

I wish more people had noticed.

“The hardest thing in the world to resist is applause,” he said at his induction. [into the advertising Hall of Fame.] “Your job is to reveal how good the product is, not how good you are, and the simpler the better.” 

Golden Ages. Tarnished.

I may be exaggerating by a factor of ten, or one-hundred, but it's been quite a while since I've seen an ad in the wild that's actually stopped me. Maybe it's been a year.

There are ads that make the rounds of various social-media cacophonies that rack-up likes like dogs rack-up fleas, but most of those, to my cynical eyes, are either a) not real, b) not very good or c) incomplete, in that they sell an entire category and not the company paying for the ad itself. 

My little local supermarket sells 25 brands of dried pasta. 
All of them can be splayed to look like fireworks.
Is there any reason in this ad to remember, prefer or choose Barilla?
This passes for a good ad today.

    

I abide by Dave Trott's communications upside-down pyramid. A good ad must have three things in this order. Very often the ads hailed today are what I call "one-third of an ad." They do well in the Impact tier, while failing to say what it is they're advertising and why you should buy it.

But all that isn't really the point to today's post. This post is about "Peak Human," by Johan Norberg, the cover of which is above.  I'm reading Norberg now. Would that my friends would read it. Would that corporate titans would read it. Would that politicians would read it. 

Reading Norberg and thinking about his thesis could make the world, your agency, your career better.

In "Peak," Norberg looks at seven "Golden Ages" throughout human history. 

1. Ancient Athens
2. The Roman Republic and early empire
   
3. The Abbasid Caliphate
   
4. Song China
5. Renaissance Italy
6. The Dutch Republic
7. The 'Anglosphere'

Norberg writes, "each of them exemplifies, in my understanding, what I think of as a golden age: a period with a large number of innovations that revolutionize many fields and sectors in a short period of time. A golden age is associated with a culture of optimism, which encourages people to explore new knowledge, experiment with new methods and technologies, and exchange the results with others. Its characteristics are cultural creativity, scientific discoveries, technological achievements and economic growth that stand out compared with what came before and after it, and compared with other contemporary cultures. Its result is a high average standard of living, which is usually the envy of others, often also of their heirs.”

What I wonder about in all this--while we're living the "closing down of 'liberal democracy and a-merry-kaka," is this.

If the golden ages of societies, countries and empires have certain characteristics in common, what about agencies? What are the characteristics that successful agencies share that make them successful? I've worked full-time at a dozen agencies, and rarely has the talent-pool at the "worst" been that much different than the talent at the "best." That said, why do some agencies flourish and others grind out crap?

In other words, what made Doyle Dane Bernbach thrive? Needham Harper & Steers, Papert Koenig Lois, Carl Ally, Scali McCabeSloves, Levine Huntley, Chiat\Day, Wieden & Kennedy and countless other agencies rise to the top? 

More importantly what is it about the current holding-company-agency etiology that seems designed to discourage all of the words and cultural affects I've highlighted above? 

Forget about the money the c-suite will make from "efficiencies" derived from the new concentration of advertising agencies (four hundred agencies reduced to three). Will the new monolith and how it's arranged have a propensity toward good--risk and mess--or toward bland--data and safety?

More pointedly, what does it take to build an agency where people want to come to work? That attracts clients? That produces real work that has a material effect on the fortunes of paying clients in the real world not a strip of beach in a beach community in southern France?

What does it take to build an agency that makes its employees (not just its C-suite) well-off, happy, prosperous, and that encourages them to start their own agencies which in turn propel them and the industry further along?

These, to me, seem like the questions the financial wizards that run the holding companies (if they're thinking about building the necessary pre-conditions of success) should be talking about. Not the four-horsemen of the advertising apocalypse: data, margins, algorithms, and people-replacement aka 'efficiencies'.

These, to me, seem like the questions politicians should be reckoning with as well. What makes a society, a nation thrive? Not merely what breaks into the news-cycle to get a blip.

My advertising friends often make fun of me because of the way I deride what some charitably call the "advertising press." But from a long-point of view, someone--with any luck someone other than me--would ask these simple questions, "Why are we in a dark age?" "Why is IPG no more?" "Why has WPP one-eighthed itself, going from $24B marketcap to $3 in just ten years?" "Why is advertising as an industry no longer lucrative?" 

I'm surprised, frankly, that no dying company asks for my non-beanery point of view. I'm surprised that this chart, which I wrote and published more than six months ago has been more-than-ignored; it's not even considered or discussed.

Instead we squeeze dollars out of stones and wonder why our hands ache.

Coltrane, Smith, Descartes, Burns and More.

Anytime you can find an essay in The New York Times that starts with Patti Smith quoting John Coltrane, you quickly realize why, for all its faults and all the anti-press invective hurled its way by the malefactors of the reactionary repugnican revolution, that hoary newspaper remains one of the world's greatest.

Last week, tump, who never legitimately graduated from the college his father paid for him to graduate from, and who spends over $3,000,000 annually on personal grooming (at tax-payer expense) called the Times "a rag." He objected to this article:

However, for all its faults, and regardless of what you personally think of the paper's stance on various issues, you rarely see articles like this anywhere else. 

I can't even imagine anything like this from the sites so much of our benighted nation is being poisoned by. These items are from fux news:

Back to the Times' essay and the bit that drew me in. 

The author, Jonathan Biss, a concert pianist writes, 
"That’s from Patti Smith, a great and uncategorizable artist, describing the saxophonist John Coltrane’s influence on her.... Classical musicians are not trained to talk to God. We are trained not to make mistakes."

We are trained not to make mistakes. In advertising as well. 

We are trained to 'play it safe.'

We are trained to follow, follow, follow 'best practices.'

Last year's award-winners.

Last evening's trends.

The last shiny object we saw.

We are trained to strive for perfection. Perfection defined by that which imitates that which we already saw, so it doesn't challenge us, doesn't make us think, doesn't show us anything new and therefore uncomfortable.

We give perfection a name. Craft. And venerate it. 

Real craft is being human.

As so many educators lament--students today know how to get "A's." But they don't know how to write or think or zag.

At Harvard, a small Massachusetts University on the outskirts of Boston, A's account for sixty-percent of all grades awarded--up from twenty-five-percent at the turn of the century. What's worse, of course, is that as grades get almost universally higher, literacy, reading ability, the ability to think and reason, have withered. 

Further, the recency heuristic--driven by malevolent ill-formed algorithms are such that no one knows, learns or cares about anything, any history, any literature, any tv, any art, any sneeze that's more than 12 seconds old. If Rene Descartes were alive today, he might utter, "Feedito, ergo sum." I am my feed. And our feeds have no reference point other than the latest cosmic flatulence.

You can read Biss' essay here, if you still know how to read. 

Here's a long passage worth, I think, thinking about.

Social media might well be ground zero for this phenomenon [of perfection.] The obsessively curated and controlled Instagram profile has become so ubiquitous that it has birthed a new profession: the influencer... 

...They peddle a lifestyle without the messiness of life. We see idealized homes, idealized bodies, idealized dinners on idealized tableware. What we do not see is the struggle that forms the core of the human experience, that forces us to think in new ways and encourages us to forge connections with people who might see the world in ways we so far have not.

 
And here's a bit that might be printed on the walls within agencies, if agencies cared about anything anymore but their PR and their next quarterly earnings (or losses) reports.

True perfection is an illusion, just as true safety is an illusion. Seeking perfection keeps us from exploring, even when we sense that we would be happier and more fulfilled if we did so. It makes us live smaller lives and stymies our creativity, both as individuals and as a society. It is the enemy of art.

There's more. Deep and meaningful, that Biss somehow boils down into a useful, mnemonic epigram. 

Recently, midway through a chamber music tour, I played a concert in which I felt absolutely connected to the music.... 

That evening, though, something magical happened. I felt that I had found the essence of the pieces I was playing, that they and I were in total alignment...

I awoke the next day with a knot in my stomach. A lifetime in classical music had conditioned me to clamp down, to aim to reproduce everything that had gone so well the night before. I suspected this was impossible. The concert was no longer a source of joy; it was a noose around my neck. 

Then the colleague I had played with texted me: “Last night was special. We have to find the truth of tomorrow.”

 

A lot of people in advertising think only about advertising. They use, repeatedly, dumb empty words that are essentially meaningless and void. Brand. Storytelling. Authentic. And as Samuel Beckett once wrote, 'there is no lack of void.'

What we should be thinking about is life. And how to apply giant issues to our work. It's not an AI protocol or overpromise that brings us to truth. It's our eyes and our brains and our heart and our hands and our ardor and our application of those human qualities.

There's an old Yiddish saying, Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht. 

Man plans and god laughs.

Or as Robert Burns wrote to a mousie, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley." (go haywire.)

In short, start not planning. Start fucking up. Not trying not to.

That's how you can find your god.