Shred Up.

When I started GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company over six years ago, one of the first things I bought for my office was a paper-shredder. I suppose because I had to open a business bank account, get a tax ID number, and incorporate my LLC, my data and privacy were sold more often than a ride on melania's ass, back when she was a cheap hooker. Of course, the melanoma-hooker claims are un-proven, so allow me to clarify.  my data and privacy were sold more often than a ride on melania's ass, back when she was an alleged cheap hooker.

With all that horrid direct mail coming in, all those offers of $700 bonuses and 100,000 points and free checking as well as offers for solar power, wind power and lunar power, as well as free roof inspection, lawn-service, tick eradication, security services and various unreliable cable systems offering equally spotty internet connectivity, I decided to work "stupidity shredding" or "annoyance shredding" into my daily routine. 

My shredder has a lovely aggressive mechanical whirl--like a well-oiled Sten gun chopping down Nazis as the Allies try to take Remagen.

I just shredded something in a bright silver envelope from Capital One bank, something else bidding me to open now from the local bank who robs me with their fees, and a fake telegram looking thing from a "financial advisor" offering me $50 to attend an estate planning luncheon. Call me cynical, I am more likely to win the entire IBM ad business than ever collect that $50. 

About 99.676899-percent of advertisements have the ethical standards of a carnival barker. You can win a kewpie doll if you pay $1 and throw three balls and knock over the weighted bottles. But you damn well know that the kewpie doll is worth significantly less than what you paid to win in. I worked at a carnival one summer--exactly 50 years ago. I know whereof I kewpie.

Switching media gears for a minute, when you're on a social platform and you see what are allegedly targeted ads (and almost never are) you quickly get to a drop-down menu that asks you why you hate the bullshit you're being sent with such avidness. The linked in screen shot above has ten ovular choices, but they've left off most of the most egregious reasons, see below.

So much of what I see online in my very-advertising-centric feed is theoretical posturing about what makes an ad or an ad campaign successful. Is the client and/or agency spending too much on performance and not enough of fame? Is the ad reaching people when they're ready to buy? Is the ad contributing to that remarkable American quilt we call culture?

About twenty five years ago there was an agency you might have heard of that handled much of the American Express account. It was called Ogilvy.

One year, the defunct agency had shot some commercials with Jerry Seinfeld and had persuaded Seinfeld to entertain at the agency Christmas party.

He probably did about five minutes. And was very good. Because he cut through the bs with truth. Seinfeld said something like, "The great thing about advertising is that you can only really say two things about it. You see a commercial you can say, 

1. "It's good." or
2. "It sucks.'

Trillions of dollars and quadrillions of hours are spent in advertising rationalizing the efficacy of the 99.676899-percent of advertisements that suck.

We'll heat map them, and eye-graph them and come up with about 14-million reasons why a dog's breakfast might be deemed Le Bernardin-esque--research said so. The research and data will pour in, as will the case studies proving incontrovertibly that the $42 million spent on the totality was worth it.

Into the shredder it goes.

That's what real people do.

Finding a Voice.

Last week it was announced that after 32 years, the advertising relationship between IBM and Ogilvy had ended. I knew the news beforehand, as you'd expect. And to be real, the vibrancy of the relationship had ended probably ten, or even fifteen years earlier.

The two former behemoths were like long-married billionaires. They no longer cared for each other, but it would be too expensive to leave. So they tolerated each other's presence.

I worked for Ogilvy and on IBM for over a dozen years--for parts of four decades. I'd be lying if I pretended I was anything but a cog in a Steve Hayden, Chris Wall, Matt Ross (account guy)-built machine. I wasn't a power-hitter. But I could do the little, important things that help teams win. 

I could make a timely hit, I could advance a runner, I could come through in the clutch, and I could while away the hours--that is put in the work that makes work work.

Yes, over those dozen years I produced hundreds of TV commercials, hundreds of print ads, banner ads, websites, direct mail pieces, radio spots and, even, strategy decks thanks to my adroit ability to boil 97-page decks and 34 contributing voices down into TV-Guide length-blurbs. I also wrote speeches, jokes and emails that helped the troops.

Those dozen years were the best dozen years of my long "working-for-others" career. They made the last almost seven years of working for myself possible. They gave me confidence. More important, they gave me the skill that justified that confidence. 

I am smart enough, and my hard drive is organized enough, to have saved certain documents from those years that can remind me of much of what I learned along the way. One of those documents was IBM's 2001 Annual Report. It was IBM CEO Lou Gerstner's last annual report since he led IBM's turn around. I sensed that it might appreciate in value like a Honus Wagner baseball card.

There was a time in our business, at least at Ogilvy, where creative people weren't just designers and writers. They cared about design and writing, but more than that, they were business people who could use creativity to advance a client and agency's prospects, and therefore their career. That amalgam of business-sense and creativity seems to have been wrung out of modern advertising. Creatives aren't supposed to worry their little heads about business issues. It's almost bad for your career to be too pragmatic or mercantile.

So, yes, in those days, some of us read annual reports.

In this annual report, which I have in front of me, there was this beautifully designed and written section, right at the beginning before the rows and rows of SEC reporting. I suppose to most people reading annual reports, the numbers are the most important things. Like they seem to be most salient to the holding companies today. However in this IBM annual report, the "Sixteen decisions..." section was more valuable than a B-school degree.

There as a spread in that section that does more to sum up the relationship between IBM and Ogilvy and how instrumental Ogilvy was to IBM's turnaround and ascent. I suppose in the long history of advertising, not too many people make it to pages 36 and 37 of an annual report, but I did. And I learned from it.

When an agency helps a brand "recapture something we'd lost--our ability to engage our customers and our industry in a meaningful conversation about what matters to us, and to them," that is something that is worth more than any number of trumped up and largely specious awards and self-aggrandizements. As is this, "When we rediscovered our voice, we discovered something else: our sense of direction, the courage to stand apart from the crowd and, ultimately, what it means to speak like a leader again."

Man, if I were John Wren or Arthur Sadoun or Cindy Rose, I'd hire a good stone-cutter and etch those in my executive suite. I'd then call in everyone of my remaining 109, no, make that 81, cancel that, 68 employees and have them memorize it. That's every new business pitch in just 57 words. (Not one of them 'intersection.)

In my life in advertising, this used to be what we did. Engage people in what a brand does and why they need it. Stand out from a crowd. Speak like a leader.

We didn't have these silly demarcations, like brand, performance, social, digital. We didn't have cuneiform funnels and bow-ties and ecosystems.

We had words that mattered.
Working to make brands matter.

Work that matters not merely to juries in cerise-colored espadrilles in southern France. But to people in supermarkets, on Amazon, in car dealers, when they're booking a vacation.

That is the road back.
For clients.
For agencies.

Find our power.
Find our meaning.
Find our purpose.
Find our voice.

This Will be Complicated.

This post is about two books I've read over the past eighteen months or so. I wish more people would read them for two reasons.
a) I'd like to have someone in this stupid world to talk to. And
b) I think our industry (and our world) would be a better, more prosperous place if more people took the time to think not about the day-to-day of our business, but about some larger happenings.

I read "Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation," by Bryne Hobart and Tobias Huber back in December, 2024. It's a complicated book, that I'll try to condense to a few sentences. (That's what I do best.)

You can buy it here, buy a machete here to cut your way through it, and read The Wall Street Journal review here.

The thesis of "Boom" is simple. 

All the things modern social organizations, enterprises, laboratories, research centers, universities and even ad agencies do to increase their bottom lines run counter to their need to create something great.

Cost-accounting will never produce the first lightbulb, cheese in a can, or great ad.

Yet, in every sphere of our lives, cost-accounting is our sine non qua. That's Latin for "our scrotum in a vise."

Huber and Hobart talk about how in academic research roughly 47 out of 100 hours is spent on writing grants. And probably another 20 to 30 hours is spent looking for citations and precedents. Leaving about one-hour-in-five to actual thinking.

That's not counting meetings, meetings about meetings and the meetings we have to complain about having too many meetings.

The advertising parallel is there for all to see. We probably spend 47-percent of our time on award entries. 30-percent of our time studying previous award-winners for tips, and 20-percent of our time watching HR's "handy" videos. I call them handy because they're usually about not touching anyone and not greasing any palms.

In both scenarios, the dynamic leads to something very dire. Work that is only incrementally different from work that went before, that is work that is "stagnant," not "inventive." Our work doesn't go from the Wright Brothers to Lockheed's Skunk Works. It goes from a 20-watt bulb to a 20.5-watt bulb. That we get awards for.

If you want to think about it, most everything today operates under these strictures. It's why almost everything sucks. From your expensive meal to your cheap one, from your government to your subway ride to work.

What's The Least We Can Do and Get Away With It?

Huber and Hobart believe in the lack-of-common-sense-ness of bubbles. Massive expenditure of things that could change everything--that might never happen.

Those bubbles--whether they burst to build--create standards, enthusiasm, opportunity, competition and spillover effects. 

For instance, if an agency has one real account where good work is done, the entire agency improves. Everyone competes to do the good work. And people who can't get into that account get angry and work to make their business great.

That's how Boom businesses, Boom agencies and Boom careers are made.

"How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation and the Fate of Nations" by Carl Benedikt Frey is infinitely more accessible. You can buy the book here. And read the Wall Street Journal review here.

This is a simplification, but I think not a bad one:

Frey divides the world (nations, economies, businesses, etc) into two types.

There are the risk takers.
There are the efficiency-ers.

Think about those two classifications in agencies.

Risk-takers say "yes, we can do that." Great work and success often happens from those risks. Splashes are made. Victories, awards and accounts are won. Because the business, or nation, thought big and did something bold.

At this point, something happens.
The "winners," don't want to lose what they gained. They don't, in short, want to risk things. 

So, they start incrementalizing.
They start talking about processes and how to cut costs.
Before long they've cut the very verve and elan that made them successful in the first place.

"Boom" and "How Progress Ends" share this idea.

They both tell of entities that use sparks to advance.

Then they get afraid that subsequent sparks will lead to wildfires and destroy everything in their way.

The inventors--the nuts--are cast out.
The "don't make wave-people" are ascendant.

If you'd have the mind for it, you can squeeze nearly any entity and even any relationship into these binary structures.

People want Booms--but don't want to accept the Busts that make Booms possible.

People want Risk but limit it by demanding incremental risk, that is efficiency.

Risks and Busts are pre-conditions for Progress and Booms.

I read something from yet another book not too many months ago, about the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, operation Barbarosa. 

A German tank commander observed at the time that the Wehrmacht needed to stop its bloodletting at the hands of the Soviets “if we do not intend to win ourselves to death.”

Write those words down somewhere.

If we do not intend to win ourselves to death.

You can swap out "win" and replace it with "efficiency." Or "agile" or "downsize" or "cost-cut" or "get rid of the trouble-makers."

The entirety of the ad industry and/or Western Civilization has won itself to death.

 

Clarity.

Branch Rickey in his playing days.

When I was a boy, baseball was about 107-percent of my life and a full 134-percent of my happiness. Even though the sport was already in decline in the '60s, and both New York nines were or were teetering on the edge of abysmal, despite all that, baseball consumed me.

In fact, I learned a lot about people from baseball. And a lot about laughter.

First, when I was about five and playing in some kiddie game, I heard someone, maybe an older brother, scream out, "Aunt Jemima makes a better batter." (Aunt Jemima was a pancake mix--since renamed for racial sensitivity.) 

Aunt Jemima makes a better batter was an order of humor and wit on par, to my young ears, with anything Oscar Wilde could have said, or Dorothy Parker. 

"You swing like a rusty gate," was pretty high up on the Pantheon as well. Nice metaphor. Nice picture drawn in my mind, complete with audio.

There were two other barbs that persisted through my youth, both for ragging pitchers.

One was, "We want a pitcher not a belly-itcher." From the moment I heard that I put the speaker in the 'not worth talking to category.' That's no kind of a putdown, I judged. Especially in comparison to my favorite, "We want a pitcher, not a glass of water." To my tender ears, that was the apotheosis of wit. The guy is not a pitcher...he's merely a weak component of that--a glass of water. Loser.

All this, believe it or not has a semantic point and given that this is a blog nominally on advertising, an advertising point.

We were taught growing up to make words a vector. Spears with points. We were taught--indirectly at least of their power.

Some time ago, something crossed my eye, something I hadn't seen before. They were digitizations of typewritten scouting reports by the great baseball general manager, Branch Rickey. Rickey was the man who signed Jackie Robinson for the Brooklyn Dodger--to his major league contact. 

He's in the Hall of Fame, Rickey is. And with the signing of Robinson probably did as much to change the game as Babe Ruth, or more.

During his over 50 years in the game, Rickey played for three teams, managed two and was the general manager of four more.

Rickey's scouting reports were little works of art--like fine caricatures. In just a few lines, a facsimile of a player was created.

Before I get to a selection of Rickey's reports, a counter-point. Late last week I read an article in the horrible sports section of the New York Times--a separate website they call the Athletic. 

I found these two scouting reports in the above. And these two underscored assaults on the English language and communication itself.

Those words I've underlined stopped me. Because they annoyed the pine-tar out of me.

Back when I was five, we'd have said "good stick" to say someone could hit. Or "he gets good wood on the ball." Never in one trillion years would I have thought something as dumb and pure as baseball would resort to "very strong bat-to-ball skills," or "ability to impact the ball for damage." Be careful out there, mbas are everywhere.

As my friend Rob wrote when I shared these clips above:

In any event think about the writing above and below when you're looking at work. Or evaluating people you work with. 

Think about the difference between very strong bat-to-ball skills and good wood. One's bs. One's real.

CAVEAT:
You must forgive certain words in Rickey's reports. He calls African Americans "coloreds," and "boys." Those are marks of the time. They are not redolent of white supremacy or racism.

Fake news.

Human Universals.

To a Denisovan, this might have been Margot Robbie.

If you look at the history of homo-sapiens--though it probably goes back further, to Denisovans and Neanderthals and other ancient human forms that were subsumed by sapiens--there's one thing we have always strived for: the ability to make sense of a world we don't really understand. 

Viagra. 30,000 years ago.

So began religion, cave painting, myth, story, and a thousand other practices that were attempts to control the uncontrollable uncontrollable. And most things, if you spend a moment thinking about them, are uncontrollable. 

You should meet my dog, for instance.

Right now I'm reading about the wisdom of the ancient Mesopotamians. It's easy and very Western of us when learning of different cultures to put them down and scoff at their superstitions and oddities. Just like we might laugh at a commercial like this, as the nadir of sophistication, and say "what could they possibly have been thinking?"

Just as Pulitzer-winner Ed Yong talks about in his great book on animal perception and adaptability, "An Immense World," it's easy to think of "others" as dumb because we don't take the time or have the sensitivity to appreciate their unique acuity. Or, as Einstein never said, "If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

Just to go all hoity-toity on you, as the writer Marcel Proust once said, “The only true voyage… would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes… to see the hundred universes that each of them sees.”

Ashurbanipal won no FIFA peace prize.

But, back to Ashurbanipal in Assyria about 2700 years ago. When Ashurbanipal, the king of the world's mightiest empire. When Ashy wanted to know what was going to go down (as the kids say) he consulted his seers, intellectuals and sages. They, in turn turned to extispicy, which is not a Kentucky Fried Chicken offering.

Ashurbanipal's advisors read sheep livers, and could foretell the future that way. Here's a 4-minute video of Assyriologist and author of the book shown above, Selena Wisnom, showing us how extispicy works. It's said that some markings in sheep livers actually looked like Mesopotamian writing--Cuneiform. It's as if the gods had written messages just for us. 

Extispicy was one way the ancients believed they could see the future. After all, the gods we're always sending us signals. They weren't distant and far away. They were always around if you knew how to look.

The other Assyrian manner of prediction was Astronomy. Their chief astronomer during the time of Ashurbanipal was a guy called Balasi. Winsom, above writes, “Balasi would not have cast a horoscope for the king, or sought his own destiny in the stars, but saw himself more as a translator of a divine code, reading the messages that the gods were sending in the sky and conveying them to their intended recipient.”

If you read the underlined above there's a lot to take in.

I'd argue that most of the tech-world believes at some level that data and its concomitant crystal-ball, AI, are "divine code." That is, "messages that the gods were sending...to their intended recipient" (musk, altman, karp, amodei--the pantheon of AI visionaries.)

At some point, maybe, humanity will develop some sort of accurate predictive capability. We'll know exactly when a stock should be bought, when the steak is perfectly medium rare, when to get an on-time flight to Mustique at a value price, when the bomb the shit out of an adversary real or imagined. We'll know what combination of words and images will drive sales through the roof with virtually no media support. We'll know whether or not to kiss the girl when we see her home. 

We'll have entrails or stars or algorithms or super-positioned electrons that will tell us exactly when to flip our predictive pancakes.

My guess however is that accurate predictive capability will always be just over the horizon. It'll always be next quarter, or like cleaning carbon out of the atmosphere, something we'll do by 2030.

It's worth remembering that Isaac Newton, a once-in-a-millennia-mind who today is famous for his advances in physics and mathematics, spent most of his time working on alchemy. He considered alchemy--turning base-metals into gold--a godlike area of enquiry.

In other words, next time you hear about a splendiferous advance in our ability to see and predict the future, think about how close we are--not how far we are--from looking at ovine offal and saying, "I'm betting on the Knicks. That blood vessel tells me to--it looks like Jalen Brunson."

Much of technology, many of the world's pundits, are based on magical thinking. Thinking that a year or a decade or a century from now will be derided and laughed at. Next time you hear about some splendor of machine "learning," or artificial "intelligence" consider that the worse client or account person you ever dealt with has over six-trillion synapses in their brain. Most of our technologies are run on a series of "yes/no" options--that despite all the bluster and private equity money being raised are right about as often as they're wrong. The first three minutes of Hans Rosling's 4,200,000-million-view Ted Talk is more than worth your attention. 

Of course science has advanced since 1000BC, 1000AD and even 2025AD.

But not as far as our humanity--our core need to believe we're in control of big-bang-randomly-exploded and propelled particles--wants to believe it's advanced.

That'll happen tomorrow.

What's In a Name?

I ran into the kitchen not too many minutes ago and saw a half-used bottle of the Stop-N-Shop brand dishwashing liquid leaning against a new bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid that I bought at the store just a few hours ago. 

My wife and I both grew up with Depression (and depressing) parents and try as we might, neither she nor I can 100% get over the "re-using ziplock bags," "saving bakery string," and buying store-brand soap. A few weeks ago, I was in the city. Some friends and I were going to dinner at a place in midtown--a place I'd never heard of. But nonetheless, when I opened the menu, there was a steak listed on it for $87. 

When your first apartment cost you $90/month in rent, I don't think--even if Mackenzie Scott for whatever reason decided to give me billions, I don't think I could ever spend a rentsworth on dinner. Even if the agency or the client was paying.

Despite my impecunious side, I'll tellya something about Stop-N-Shop brand dishwashing liquid.

It sucks.

It comes out like bubble soap, thin and watery. It doesn't foam. It doesn't clean. It doesn't even smell good.

I don't really give a hoot or a holler about it, but it sent me down a spiral. You've heard me rant and rave about how major advertisers stopped advertising. They stopped telling people why their dishwashing soap was better than the store brand. They stopped letting people know about the R&D they do, and the secret ingredients they add that cut washing time by 22%. They stopped all that in favor of meaningless garbage. Now when you see their brand in the store for $7 and the store brand for $4, you buy the store brand. The georgesurvey estimates one trillion dollars of brand-equity has been destroyed over the last thirty digital years--all in the name of saving on advertising expenditure.

The thing I did notice on the Stop-N-Shop brand dishwashing liquid was how they named the scent of their blue SLO (soap-like-object.) 

I silently applauded the copywriter, or the committee, or the "naming team" that came up with "Waterfall Mist." What a perfectly evocative aerosol of verbal nothingness.

When I was a boy, still in college, I worked as a writer for the Montgomery Ward catalog, specifically in the shoe department. The worst part of that horrid $225/week job was when the featured photograph on a catalog page showed a pair of women's pumps, or a slingback or something, that came in a variety of colors.

Because the type had to be "dropped out" (white over a color photo) you were in a lot of trouble if you got one of the colors wrong or left one out. It cost a lot of money to fix that sort of printing bollocks.

One catalog season, the task of demarcating color names fell to me. It usually went to the women in the department. They wrote more of the women's pages. But I was either "moving up," or being punished and it became my job.

I've had a career full of pressure. I've been towered over by 6'10" Chris Wall. Growled at by Pytka. And maniacked at by Tony Kaye.

Nothing came close to being on the wrong side of Rocco Imbriale, the catalog's Joe-Pesci-like production manager. 

I quickly figured a way out of ever being asked to write the colors again.

I typed

Black
Navy
Red
Yellow
Pink
Green

And then I thought and rewrote.

Black power
Navy bean
Red scab
Yellow jaundice
Pink elephant
Green mucus

I handed the copy in to Rocco and left for the day.

He never said anything, but they never gave me the color job again.

I missed my chance at Waterfall Mist.

The Four Hs.

When I started GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company nearly six-and-a-half years ago, though I was somewhat in the grip-of-unemployment panic, I was methodical about what I was doing.

First, I posited what I had heard from so many clients over so many decades in the advertising business. "We love working with you. We despise working with agency name goes here." With that bit of direction, I tried to think like Richard Branson when he started Virgin Air or Steve Jobs when he started Apple.

You might say, I used this ad as my brief.

I found everything that makes and agency hurt and threw it a way. Or how could I open a new that acts nothing like the old? Put another way, what sucks about ad agencies (or airlines or computers) that I can do something about?

So, while agencies decked, I would ad.
While agencies bloated, I would streamline.
While agencies complicated, I would simple. 
While agencies jargonned, I would English.
While agencies talked, I would listen.

Second, like a good ball club, I did my scouting. I went to every website of every agency. I looked at their "about" sections. I looked at their "leadership" sections. I looked at the way they spoke to viewers and about themselves.

I didn't come up with a 164-page white-paper on the state of agency marketing. But as I used to say to my older brother, Fred, about the neglectful/abusive parents we shared, "No one is totally useless. They can always serve as a bad example."

The website carnage of 2020 was a great bad example.

Today, so many newly-freed senior ex-agency people come to me and ask how they can start their own business. They sometimes ask how I established (seemingly with such felicity) GeorgeCo.

Looking at your competition is always a good place to start. 

I'm always surprised how few people see that the right fielder sucks, but still pull the ball to left. For my entire baseball career I was guilty of same.

I've learned.

In any event, late last week as the cacophony of my client roster had begun to quieten, I began another round of competitive research.

First I looked at Omincom's site.

I could find nothing either semantically or aesthetically that indicated they deal with creativity and ideas and stopping power. What someone smarter than I (Bernbach?) called the "last unfair advantage in business."

Not only was there no mention or way to link to any of the storied creative agencies Omnicom had subsumed, there wasn't a smile within one-hundred miles of any of their expensiveized corporated pixeljargonization. 

Their site, under headings "corporate leadership" and "capability leadership" showed about 30 or 40 headshots. Not one ever sweated over finding the right word, looking at a cut for the hundredth time, finding an insight on page 99 of an annual report. Their site is the intellectual equivalent of learning to fuck by reading instructions from a nunnery.

I will only say that WPP's site was worse, like the East Germany's Stasi might have been worse than the Soviet's KGB. Levrentiy Beria not withstanding.

Mostly because WPP's site started with a lie so big and Orwellian that it made me even more nauseous than lunch in the WPP cafeteria (which for a time was their number-two source of profit, behind expense-padding.)

How can a company that by about 27-different measures has shrunk between 75% and 89% over the last ten years, lead with this mendacity? I think the sine non qua of the words "growth partner" should be growth. And WPP are in free-fall in a coyote- off-a-cliff-chuck-jones kinda way.

WPP's market cap has reverse-grown from £23B to £2.5B in ten years.

(That's like losing 89-cents out of every dollar.)
But they want to be your "trusted growth partner."

Maybe Daniel Lambert (13 March 1770 – 21 June 1809) an English jail-keeper
and at 700lbs the heaviest man on record, should be your dietician.

In their leadership section, WPP featured one creative. And you could see some work they had purportedly produced for clients. So their site was slightly less of an SEC filing than Omnicom's, in the way that stomach cancer might be less bad than brain cancer.

Years and years ago, I was at the "Digital Agency of the Decade" when Sheryl Sandburg's book title was on everyone's lips (and no one's night-table.) 

I got into a row with the head of trend-parroting aka the agency's "head of planning." She said two things that were so painfully au courant that they still twist my duodenum.  She said:

1. No one watches TV anymore.
2. When people get home from work they want to 'lean in.'

I replied with some asperity--not unusual for me when my politesse levels are running low, as they so often are.

"Andrea, when I get home from work, I'm exhausted. I had a long day of corporate nonsense and too many things to do. I had to avoid four drunks and six puddles of urine on the C-train. The kids are screaming and my wife is pissed. And I see their point. I hate me, too--who doesn't. All I wanna do is lean back and watch the Knicks lose by fewer than 18 points."

What I meant by that I mean in light of the mean financial-services takeover of the ad industry.

When I turn on the TV, or the radio, or go to a site, or hear something on ferstunkeneh Gas-Station TV, dammit, I want something that makes me laugh and/or smile. Something that welcomes me, comforts me, appreciates me by showing a little care. I don't want to hear about a free something I don't want when I buy something I don't want.

I don't want to be screamed at and mouse-typed. I don't want to be bad-joked. I don't want to be actor-grin-fucked. I don't want a piece of crap badly produced that shows the efficacy of "world-class production at scale for the always-on world." 

I don't want gyrating teens showing me their cell-phones and orgasming over some Famous Footware BOGO deal. I don't want to hear about the $49.99/month Verizon deal which I know winds up costing me $89.99/month by the time all the hidden charges are un-hidden. Likewise I don't want to hear about your network reliability when it's been ten years since I've been able to have a phone conversation without one side of the call dropping at least once.

I want empathy.
Not oligopoly.
I want truth.
Not press release.
I want humanity.
Not legalese.
I want common-sense.
Not ratiocination.

Back to the friends who call me for advice in setting something up for themselves.

I usually go on a tirade like I just have. And conclude by saying, "I think there's a need for what we do.

"A need for the Four Hs.
Honesty.
Humanness.
Humor."

"What's the fourth H?" they ask.

"How much do I owe you?"