I Kidney You Not.

Last week was the week of pain. 

On Sunday, December 14th, I went through the first of six kidney stones passing. The first was the worst. The middle four were bad. Finally, on Saturday, December 20th between 1AM and 3AM, I had one I could no longer stand. I relented and agreed to let my wife take me to a local hospital. The pain, which had been considerable became too much even for my stubbornness to will away. 

Also, to be even more of a jerk about it, I have a fear of hospitals. Especially hospitals away up here on the Gingham Coast where I feel an alien and have no doctors who refer me. And especially hospitals when they know you're on medicare. I suspect the hospitals don't make a lot of money from medicare patients. They make me feel like I'm a feral raccoon feeding at a medical dumpster. I suppose you're left only the dregs of care and that's meant to fill your convalescent belly.

Care or service in our modern era is virtually non-existent. 99.799748778-percent of every business in whatever form it takes is understaffed, and the staff that's there is over-worked, badly paid and has no future. Why should they look up from their phones? Work no longer has anything in it for you, other than a slight circumvention of homelessness, which it seems more and more people in America--with the possible exception of the six or twelve-dozen trillionaires--face every day.

Fortunately, though I was expecting nothing short of a Kafka-esque hospital experience, this place wasn't bad. The receptionist saw me, within minutes. I only had to tell her my name and date of birth five times or twenty and my wife had only repeat my name and date of birth five or twenty times more.

Within an hour, I was undressed, be-gowned and ensconced in plastic hospital gowns and plastic hospital drapes. A nurse surlied in and stuck me with an IV-needle and it only took an extra twenty minutes for the actual drip to begin. I believe it was a combination of used spaghetti water mixed with ibuprophen. 

The doctor came in, too. He explained what they were doing and what was happening and the medication they were giving me. They handed me a control device that allowed me to buzz for a nurse if I needed one and also controlled the TV so I could flip through 29-different channels all playing some version of the home shopping network. 

Before too long, I finished my IV and the doctor returned. He had called in a prescription to my local pharmacy and handed me vials of pills--the sorts of which killed millions of amerrymanikins. These pills also cost McKinsey $600,000,000 in fines for their suggestions to Purdue, who were fined $7,400,000,000 for their crimes, on how to dispense more of them. They came neatly shrink-wrapped and the doctor gave me just two with a prescription to get more.

"I don't want these," I told him. "I'm not going to use them."

"Just take them," he insisted. "I'm not a pill-pusher." 

I put them in the front right pocket of my jeans, hoping the pains I'd suffered for the better part of a week would not resume past the point where they could not be handled by enough Tylenol to autism-out a small borough like Staten Island or the Bronx. 

It's been 36-hours since I returned from the hospital and so far, I seem, for now at least to be in the clear.

I'd heard a story from a guy up here, our dogs sometimes get together to play in the evenings. He told me his father, who comes from the same stoic-school that I hail from, had kidney stones and his father said his pain was so bad he thought about banging his head against the stones of their fireplace--anything for relief.

As I near my sixth year since being shit-canned from Ogilvy, the whole megillah reminds me of a joke. It tells the story of a man, like my friend's father above, who's repeatedly banging his head on a wall. Finally someone asks him why. And he replies, "Because it feels so good when I stop."

Sometimes that the story I life I guess.

It hurts a helluva lot.

Maybe it'll feel good when we stop.

Maybe Get Yourself a Second Cuppa.

Just now, I noticed a new navigational heading on the website of "The Wall Street Journal" up there with the headings I'm so used to seeing I hardly notice them anymore. But, though it's oblique, I did notice this one.

Maybe my strength as a creative person can be described as I have been describing it for nearly forty years: "I have a wide-field of vision." I see things other people don't. Whether it's a breaking pitch a moment early from the hand of a crafty moundsman, or a stray comment from a client that clarifies a brand, product or offering.

Seeing things other people seem to miss ain't entirely a blessing. For one, you're very often Vox Clamantis In Deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness. Like the Trojans thought Cassandra was crazy (she was cursed with being able to see the future and have no one believe her.) A lot of people think I'm mad, or an over-thinker, or just a freaking loon. Second, I often get annoyed with people--clients, colleagues, friends, partners--who don't have my broad "Umwelt." 

(Umwelt was defined and popularized by the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909 and it comes from the German word for “environment." It is specifically the part of your surroundings that you can sense and experience—it is your perceptual world.)

In any event, soon after noticing it, I went to the Free Expression heading and found this article on the etiology or origins (and today, prevalence) of Conspiracy Theorists. 

I read it for obvious reasons. The most obvious being we now live in a country where there's no agreed upon reality, even whether or not our globe is round. To quote Shakespeare, "Foul is fair and fair is foul." And second, I wondered if there was an application to advertising from the rise of conspiracy-delusions.

The Journal's article, here, if you can squeeze past the paywall, identifies three commonalities of the conspiracy-prone mindset.

1. They are people who seek order after a traumatizing occurrence. They want a rational explanation for what seems like a random event. 

2. Believing a conspiracy theory isn’t just an odd behavior--it can become your identity. In a sense like believing the Jets will someday be in the Super Bowl, playing--strange as it seems--the Mets. 

And most reverberating,

3. Embracing a conspiracy theory gives people a sense of power. They are the ones of are manning the barricades of civilization. They're the clear-thinking members of a wised-up elite.

Some of the proceeding was prompted by a note I got a couple hours ago about a post I posted on Thursday. My post featured this ad. And the comment I received is below the ad:

The confluence of what hit me amid all this is this. For roughly the last half century in advertising, since the golden age turned to a darkening age, advertising has done everything BUT help answer the plaints in the ad above. We've tried every which way and every theory, gizmo, technique, ratiocination, white paper, algorithm and MBA-spouting under the sun to avoid the very purpose of advertising.

It occurred to me, we are acting, in fact, like conspiracy theorists. Conspiracists don't understand the very randomness of the advertising world, so they've created an alternative reality where only they can understand, read and interpret the metrics and the efficacy of work

1. We are trying to rationalize the trauma of new media by saying this doo-dad or that will explain it.

2. Those doing the rationalizing have created themselves an ownable identity. They are 'digital.' Or 'social.' Or 'new media people.' They've somehow deciphered and made sense of the upset of the traditional media world. They are enlightened. Those believing in brief in the ad above, 'harken back to the eighties.'

3. Finally, these theorists believe--and they've convinced millions others that they are the only clear-thinking members of a wised-up elite.

In fact, I read this in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, December 15.

That all led to this conclusion:

It's harrowing to read articles like the one above, with charged conclusions about the emptying of Madison Avenue stated with such firm conviction.

Especially when you read once again the "Man in Chair" ad above. None of which is even considered as a function of advertising in Rajeev Kohli's essay. (That point seems to be a painful omission, i.e. "I don't know who you are.")

When I go to the store I have no idea what makes a $9 brand different from a $6 store brand. Nobody tells me. You can look at a company like IBM, with a market-cap of $281 billion and have no idea what they even sell, much less why they're relevant. You hear endlessly about  Anthropic, or Open AI which have market caps of a quarter trillion dollars and a half trillion dollars respectively, and you have no idea how to pick one over the or what makes them different or better. Or when Campbell's Soup's own executives say they make shit food for poor people, the company doesn't even run ads to diffuse that brand and billions destroying bomb.

I know this is a lot from a stupid blog on advertising. So I'll leave you with two bits that aren't from a stupid blog on advertising and are instead from the 1980 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Czeslaw Miłosz. 

Miłosz said:

He also wrote.

Either of these, or both, should be in every agency, and read before every politician's speech every day. 

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

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Same-Old.

 

---

There was an excellent column in the Economist last week, in their "Bartleby" column (which to my mind is often the best of the magazine) which everyone in marketing--on what's left of the agency-side and on what's left of the client-side and on what's left of the media-side--should read.

The article itself isn't specifically on "advertising." It's on the death of differentiation in almost every aspect of our lives. This particular column started this way. (I'll paste the entirety at the end of today's post because I don't know anyone in the entire ad industry who subscribes to the Economist, though David Abbott and company made it--for me--and absolute must read.)

Welcome to the Marryattilton Hotel. We’re delighted that you have chosen to spend time with us, and look forward to making your stay as enjoyable as possible. We offer an entirely commoditised experience which somehow manages to be part of the attraction. Please do take a few minutes to read the following notes.

The "entirely commoditised experience" is everywhere today. Everywhere you look, everything is the same.

Everything is "an experience."
Everything is "redefining luxury."
Everything is "elevating your senses."
Everything is happening at "the intersection of...."
Everything is "bespoke."
Everything car offers to "drive you forward."
Unless it's electric in which case it offers "an electrifying ride."
Every question is "frequently asked."
Everyone offers a "first bag free," "a convenient 24/7 drive-thru," "points," "delivery," and a panoply of other crap that is unremarkable because everyone does it.

Orwell wrote, in his great essay "Politics and the English Language" six rules for better writing, for better communication. Though I've shared this Orwell a dozen times in this space, I'd wager fewer than ten-percent of my readers have read this list, much less memorized it. I'd wager fewer than one-percent of clients have.

Orwell didn't write these rules to bring poetry and euphony to writing.

He wrote these rules so people would notice writing. So it wouldn't wash over readers because they've seen or heard it so many times and with such little freshness and variation

Today, in what seems to me every sphere, we are happy only with clichés and things we have seen before. Anything different, thought differently, written differently, shot differently, presented differently is an anathema. It makes us uncomfortable because we are only comfortable with things we've heard or read or seen before. Our prevailing notion is "it must be right. That's how everyone else does it."

Successful communication starts with, it must be wrong. That's how everyone else does it."

This must be the right way to sell air travel. After all, everyone does it.

Alex Murrel illustrated his essay "The Age of Average," with these photos. 

And I reckon things will get worse, not better, with machines taking over and no human supervision.

Next person to urge me to use the word bespoke, might get a bespoke punch in the kisser.

The article I promised. 

Welcome to the Marryattilton Hotel. We’re delighted that you have chosen to spend time with us, and look forward to making your stay as enjoyable as possible. We offer an entirely commoditised experience which somehow manages to be part of the attraction. Please do take a few minutes to read the following notes.
• Guests must check out at midday. If you wish to extend your stay, please just let us know and we will happily charge you a lot extra.
• The WiFi password is your room number. You will see a warning that your messages may not be securely protected. Please wonder briefly if you should take this warning seriously and then ignore it.
• We have given you two room cards even though you are clearly on your own. Make sure to carry them both around with you so that if you do lose one, you will be sure to lose both.
• You have two complimentary bottles of water. Your name will be displayed on the TV screen when you turn it on. For some reason both of these things will make you feel well treated. 
• Some of our larger rooms come with a bowl of fruit. You would not be excited by the sight of a grape at home. Here you will see it as a mark of very high status.
• You have two flannels, four handtowels and eight large towels. If you need more towels, you’re almost certainly doing something wrong.
• Our amenities include an origami masterclass in your bathroom. The loose end of your toilet roll will be laboriously folded into a swan each morning. The flannels will be shaped into bows. The large towels will be rolled so tightly that this creates a vacuum.
• All our carpets have been specially designed to make you feel dizzy. 
• The windows may or may not be see-through. You’ll be able to judge by the behaviour of the office workers across the street from you. 
• We have given you 20 times as many pillows as you need. Please do not attempt to use them all. It would be like sleeping standing up.
• The sheets will be tucked so aggressively under the mattress that it will take you several minutes of intense effort to ram your legs down the length of the bed. Please do not try to create more room by kicking out furiously. You will only do yourself an injury.
• All your drinking glasses will be wearing little paper hats.
• We take extra care to make the corridors as featureless as possible, so that you have maximum difficulty finding your way back to the lifts.
• You have the use of an extremely large, white dressing gown. Please wear it just because it is there.
• For people under the age of 25, that thing on your bedside table is a landline phone. Simply dial “0” and no one will pick up. These phones are also placed on a table beside the lifts on each floor, where they must never be used.  
• We are committed to using entirely unnecessary packaging. Unwrapping the soap will require both time and incredible determination.
• There is a safe in the wardrobe. Do not use it. It is not safe.
• Sockets are available everywhere throughout the room except close to the desk where you want to work.
• To add a bit of fun to your stay, we always have one light that refuses to turn off no matter which switches you press.
• All our rooms come with two sets of curtains as standard. One for you, and one for your non-existent companion.
• Breakfast is served from 6am. Our scrambled eggs are made of rubber. Our bacon is extremely brittle and will shatter if you apply any pressure. Cereals are available by slowly turning the handle on a dispenser for 20 minutes. If you are tempted to complain, remember that you can go back for more.    
• The air conditioning has two modes: silent and jet-engine take-off. 
• If you try to get up in the middle of the night and find that you cannot move, do not panic. You are not paralysed; it’s just those sheets again.
• If you ask someone at reception for restaurant recommendations they will ask if you would like a map. Despite the fact you have a device in your pocket that can guide you to a point anywhere on the planet, you should say “yes”.
• A coffee machine is located above the fridge. It takes roughly 30 minutes to make it work. The results are disgusting.

Once again, thank you for choosing the Marryattilton. If you have any other questions, please just dial “0”. We hope you enjoy your stay.■

A Report from Iowa.

A good amount of people read this blog. Not as many readers as I used to get. But I keep meeting my desired numbers. 

Long before I was in advertising, back when I thought I might want to be a print journalist (that was when I was 17, when journalism was a paid profession) I always figured I wouldn't be good enough to make it to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. So I set my sights elsewhere.

I assumed I'd find my place at something like The Des Moines Register. A small but prestigious paper in a city where even on a lowly journalist's salary I could afford an apartment without too many cockroaches. 

Since I set my sights at that fairly moderate-level, I've had the same goal for this blog. To get the kind of readership I'd get if I was walking the "cat-stuck-in-tree" beat out in Ioway. I'd be ok with what I estimate would be my readership if I were working for the Des Moines Register.

There are no longer any advertising trade journals that do anything more than reprint press-releases from private equity companies that own the holding companies and the associated award shows that dominate our industry. As a consequence, most of my readers are from the ad industry. They're looking for something that regurgitation of holding-company press-releases can't deliver, or won't. As an industry organ, I'm about the only show--and the most-read show--in town. In short, many ad people read me. Mostly creative people. But people who wear proper clothing, too and who aren't the first to be fired because they're contrary.

All that being said, considering the size of my readership and their closeness to the advertising industry, I wonder how many of my readers have seen, read and, finally, thought about the ad below. I think about it with some regularity. It's profound, but also simple and obvious, like the statement "teenagers enjoy sex."

(Today, we call that an "insight.")

Not too terribly long ago, I was working with a prospective new client trying to zero-in on a set of deliverables and a fee for the help the client was coming to me for. 

Admittedly, I was a bit pissed about the whole wrangle, because the client found me through a client they knew and whom I had worked with for over five years. Nonetheless, if you say "f-them" every time you feel like saying "f-them," you'll have a whole lot of principles and a whole lot more of poverty.

Finally, the client said to me, "Do you have anything that proves what you do works?"

Of course I don't.

I have Effie Awards, naturally, for what they're worth. And reams of client quotations, and the same ginned-up case-studies virtually everyone else has. But that kind of "proof" really only convinces people who are willing to be convinced. 

I even thought of calling industry friends who have run agencies and I went to various "trade organization" sites and pulled veritable nonsense like the item below to bludgeon the client over the head with.

Along the way, I remembered a quotation by a World War II German tank general whose adjutants had urged him to proclaim victory after he had suffered catastrophic losses. He said something about "not wanting to victory himself to death."

I pulled a bunch of items and neatened them up into something prettified and presentable when you're trying to sign a deal. I kept all this a secret from H, my business director and L, my wife. I didn't want them to know the depths to which I would sink to get a couple dozen days at my day-rate.

In the end however, I sent none of the so-called evidence (or evidentiary-material) I found. 

Instead, I sent my client this note.

It appears it did the trick.

I'll let you know when the check clears.

Something's Fishy.

 

Something stinks. And it ain't just the fish.

About a year ago, I got rid of a monopoly cable and internet provider called (in my neighborhood) Xfinity which is owned by Comcast, which has a market-cap of just about $100 billion.

The service I had been paying for was non-Xistant. At that point I unplugged my television and since then have only watched about ten minutes of TV, a Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy game with my son-in-law who for some reason kept insisting the Patriots were playing.

By the way, Xfinity refused to come to my house to pick up their equipment and are now threatening to charge me $300 if I don't return it, though they were the ones who left it with me. What's more, while they had collected taxes from me, they've paid, most years, $0 in federal corporate tax. 

Sounds like a felon-in-chief I know.

Next time you hear someone say "the system is rigged," they're probably not talking about things like this, but this is rigging at its very repugnant-can worst.

A few weeks ago I got an inkling through the floorboards that my wife wanted to me to figure out how to restore TV service. My son-in-law (who is good with these things) had suggested YouTube TV (owned by another monopoly, Alphabet--they own roughly 91-percent of search). Alphabet is another company that loopholes its way out of paying billions in taxes. If you ever wonder why your taxes are so high, it's because there's are so low.

In any event, I went to sign up for YouTube TV. I found it cost $72.99/month including a bunch of things I didn't ask for, don't want and will never use. But, I figured, paying $875.88/year for commercial-free TV would be worth it.  

Except YouTube TV is not commercial free. 

And, I think the $72.99/month fee is promotional only and will rise after three months. Only I couldn't find out for sure because 
YouTube Paid Service Terms of Service legal copy is 36 pages long or 12,592 words. I couldn't even begin to make my way through it.

After all, it's 46 times as long as the Gettysburg Address, 3.5 times as long as the Magna Carta, and 2.86 times as long as the US Constitution (the document, not the ancient warship.)

This is a long overture to the opera that's about to begin:

Everything in amerika, as it is currently constituted, is a lie. The YouTube TV is a good example. 

Of the people, by the people, for the people? OK, boomer.

I grew up in an amerika where a half-hour TV show was 27 minutes of show and about three minutes of commercial. The ratio of programming to commercial was, back then, about 9:1. 

Watching that "1," gave us our TV shows without out-of-pocket costs. Today, a 30-minute show is between 20 and 22 minutes of programming and 8-10 minutes of commercials. Putting the ratio of programming to commercial at between 2:1 or 2.4:1. 

We spend between 28% and 33% of our watching time paying. Then we pay once again in dollars to get access to watch commercials.

Today, you are paying twice for about 25-percent less programming.

As much as this post is about the TV ripoff, as I said above, it's really about everything. It's about searching for a hotel in Nebraska and getting listings for hotels in California, because someone's sold my search terms. It's about service charges for no service. It's about the subscriptions you can't cancel. The resort charges you can't opt out of. The plethora of tiny cuts that wound us all, because amerika is a rip-off-ocracy.

It's the vacation days you can't use because your agency is so understaffed and you can't carry over. It's the prices that go up when commodity prices go up, but don't come down when they go down. 

As advocates for companies, we in advertising should be denouncing practices like the above--practices that are perpetrated by virtually every company and every ad agency and now, every government agency. We don't, because those who employ (and therefore control) us are profiting from them. 

Ad Holding Companies, which are largely owned the same institutional investors that own award shows like Cannes, pay the award shows to boost the agencies who then boost the award shows. Or Mark Read, when he was CEO of WPP sold Kantar, then (though he's still being paid by WPP) is hired by Kantar as Chairman. 

This is all legal of course. But it's the most venal sort of backscratching I can think of.

If a fish begins to rot from the head, we seem already to be heading quickly anus-ward at the speed of an out-of-control self-driving electric car.

You'll be charged for that, too.