A Guest Post From a Leader.

What an honor, George, to be gracing the pages of adland’s most erudite establishment. Thanks for having me.

 

And hello there, Ad Aged readers.

 

By way of a quick introduction, I started reading George’s blog years before I had the incredibly good fortune to sit next to him at Ogilvy New York for five years. When I first started at The Chocolate Factory in 2015, I spotted George roaming the halls, and I remember thinking: “Oh, sh*t. There’s George Tannenbaum. I’ve finally made it to The Show.” I clumsily introduced myself as a fan of Ad Aged, and we’ve been friends ever since.

 

I mention this because there’s a lot I learned from reading George and working alongside George and just shooting the breeze with George that’s in my new book, Zombie Brands: How brands lost their humanity—and how they can regain their appeal in the age of AI.

 

In a nutshell, it’s about how the smartphone-centric digital media ecosystem and short-termism gradually chipped away at the stuff makes brands alluring, and explains how creatives and marketers can reinvigorate brands’ ability to seduce.

 

The inspiration for the book actually came from goofing on Twitter—my “How it started / how it’s going” thread—which George actually wrote about back in 2022. It’s still at the top of my Twitter (I refuse to call it anything else) profile.

 

I kept staring at the above juxtaposition. On the left, one of the 1500 or so brilliant ads TBWA created from 1980 through the early 2000s that transformed an obscure Swedish vodka brand into a global spirits powerhouse. On the right, well, I still don’t know what the hell that is on the right. There was a story here, I thought. How did brands go from making these expertly-crafted, gorgeous communications that people wanted to hang on their walls to the disposable, completely invisible junk you see on the right?

 

I don’t think this is a particularly controversial take, but the advertising industry is suffering from a crisis of confidence. Storied agency brands are being shuttered, consolidation is eliminating jobs, and all anyone seems to want to talk about is AI. Agencies are in a defensive crouch. And there’s a feeling that people at agencies are spending a lot of time making stuff nobody cares about. Let’s face it. No one got into advertising to make banner ads or Facebook posts.

 

Then there’s clients. I think they, too, have a sense that we’re spinning our wheels. As Michael Farmer recently pointed out on LinkedIn, "since 2009, forty of the top sixty advertisers have seen brand growth rates fall below nominal GDP growth rates." Ouch.

 

Finally, there’s the audience. They keep telling pollsters they don’t like ads, they find a lot of digital ads creepy, and they pay a premium to avoid it. I’d argue that it’s not actually true they don’t like ads, generally, it’s that they don’t like crappy ads. But if most people are paying to avoid your product, you’ve got a problem.

 

Now, I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I do know that “make even more slop faster and more cheaply and continue to bombard people with it” isn’t going to work. At the heart of Zombie Brands is a simple proposition: how about we move away from pestering and get back to persuasion? If I can convince even a handful of people that’s worth a try, the book will have done its job.

I've bought it. 
Have you?

 

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Hunting. And Gathering. Wisdom.

 

I really don't want to hear from anyone, no one, not a soul, how the passage from Mark Twain below. I don't want to hear that the passage that today's post is about, is antiquated, mean-spirited or heaven-forfend, gendered. 

Twain wrote the passage more than 150 years ago, and things were different then. Smart people can take things from the past and move beyond "judgment." They can use old books not as a bygone norm, but as a "time machine" to see how life was lived.

It wouldn't do me any good to castigate, disparage and otherwise dismiss the brilliance of, say, Edith Wharton because her Jewish characters were often portrayed with antisemitic stereotypes. They were greedy, socially ambitious, and racially "other." This reflected early 20th-century prejudices--and Wharton's haughty New York class. But to throw her on the ash-heap of history? That means throwing out almost everything. And we can't learn from things we flat out reject.

Anyway, back to Twain.
A good person to go back to.

I ran across this quotation last night during my typical Mexican jumping bean of reading, where I jump from topic and author to topic and author. 

Last night I was betwixt and betwain.

"There comes a time in every rightly-constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure. This desire suddenly came upon Tom one day."

I don't want to hear about "boy." Or "rightly-constructed." I want don't to want to hear about Twain's misuse of "boy." Or the heinous nature of his "judgey" "rightly-constructed."

I want to talk instead about hunting for hidden treasure. And how it's essentially disallowed in a modern task-focused, 100-ads-a-day ad agency.

So much of life is hunting for treasure.

In fact, Desmond Morris in his great book, "The Nature of Happiness," (ignore the Cialis overtones of the cover) pointed out that from an evolutionary point of view, more human happiness comes from the pursuit of a goal than the accomplishment of that goal.

The chasing is better than the getting.

Early humans were most fulfilled when the hunted together. Forming a group, sharing cohesion and a goal, dividing labor and pursuing that goal. Early humans were happier hunting aurochs, a breed of 1500-3000 pound prehistoric cattle, than when they actually killed one. 

I think most people are like that.

I love searching for rare books, or fountain pens, or 1950s era skee-ball machines, or a good, fatty corned beef sandwich--even though searching in pre-internet days was time-consuming and, at times, exasperating, it was fun, exciting. You never knew when, if ever, you'd hit paydirt. The internet's ruined those searches. 

My wife and I spent five years searching for a rare book by my favorite author, Joseph Mitchell, "My Ears Are Bent." At the time (around 1990) it was out of print. And Mitchell disowned it because of some language which would today be regarded as racist. I finally read it in one-sitting on microfiche, at the New York Public library. Some years after that, my wife found me a first-edition and returned enough soda bottles to cover the not-inconsiderable asking price. 

I have the copy with a dozen or two other first-editions hermetically sealed in acid-free ziploc bags in my Manhattan apartment.

Today, you can find anything (except who's in the epstein files) in under 17-seconds.

What occurs to no one is what is so plain to me. 

That efficiency in creativity, in love, in treasure hunting is missing the point of the endeavor.

The point of the endeavor is to chase.

To hunt.

To search.

To trip and fall.

To find things we didn't even know existed and which might be more valuable than what we had set out looking for when we began our quest.

Back literally almost 50 years ago, I was working as a copywriter for the in-house ad agency at a department store called Bloomingdale's. I had a great and wise boss, Chris, who was like a great New York City handball player. He could cover the entire court and he knew all the angles, though he hardly ever wasted a motion.

I was working on a very high-profile ad that was important to Bloomingdale's and it was getting more scrutiny that blood and filaments at a crime scene from the seven-digit salaries that ran the store. The copy had gone through a dickens-worth of revisions and now was in the final stages through the platter of my red IBM Selectric II.

I pieced together all the changes like I was going through a three-dimensional periodic table. I took words from here and there, listening to everyone and dotting all the eyes and crossing all the oolong.

Chris came into my 6'x8' office with a door and took the copy paper from my machine. He read the first sentence and without pause or ceremony, tore the copy I had pieced together with such forensic acuity into little pieces.

"Start over," he said, leaving my room. "You're not writing anymore. You're not trying to make it good, anymore, just correct. That's no way to be."

I was pissed at the moment.

My five-carbon-deep copypaper represented a week of work.

But Chris was right.

You don't ever find treasure trodding over well-tread ground. 

You have to hunt.

Better without a map.

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Of course, the opposite of digging for hidden treasure is the destruction of treasure, wealth, good fortune and riches over time and overtime.

I am constantly amazed by the corporate treasure destruction that I see in the world today. Once storied brands have, over the last 20 years or so, while convincing themselves that they can stop doing "real" advertising and rely on small, impact-free digital ad units that give viewers no differentiating information about their products--flushed figuratively trillions of dollars of brand equity down the toilet (which they've MBA'd into "the funnel.")

From a CPG POV, why would anyone spend $7 on Listerine when they can spend $4 on CVS brand. I grew up in an era where advertising provided the reasons why to buy a product as opposed to a cheaper alternative or a no-brand alternative. Advertising no longer supplies those magical drops of retsin or eight tomatoes in every can. So, people buy only on price. Which has, back to my point, destroyed the treasures built up over decades or even centuries.

The latest case of treasure-destroying has been effected by WPP. Apparently there's no more "Ogilvy." A brand that no longer has any distinguishing place in the marketing universe.

To be an Ogilvy writer--regardless of what you think of Ogilvy--was to be stamped with integrity, intelligence, logic and a soupçon of David's with and hauteur. 

No longer.

Now you are a part of WPP Creative.

A vomitous name with no standards, meaning or added value. As meaningless as clear soup. 

Which is what they sell.

Or what they've buried.

The downward slope of the WPP logo reminds me of a torpedo'd ship.

Lots of Laughs.

There was a fairly esoteric article in last week's New York Times that might very-well be the most important article you'll ever (not) read. The article is by Dr. Gina Mireault, a developmental psychologist at Vermont State University and you can read it here.

If you save important articles as I do (though I have no filing system more adroit than my prodigious memory) the pdf gets saved automatically with a different title, one I like even more than the one the Times went with in order to goose their readership numbers. 

That secondary title is simpler, and more interesting to my baby blues. "What a Baby's Laugh Actually Tells Us."

What does a laugh--baby's or otherwise say to us?

We spend so much time, and burn through so much data, and solicit so many opinions when we create advertising work. We forget that before we try to tell people something, we first have to get their attention. We first have to excite some dopamine. We first have to make them feel something. 

We've rationalized all that out of 99.999% of all advertising. We assess work on whether or not it has provided all the requisite copy points and mandatories and disclaimers. In our race to get all the eyes dotted and tees crossed, in our race to regress to the mean and make sure nothing is colored in anything but a hospital beige, we've de-laughed, de-cried, de-discomforted, de-provoked about all the work you're likely to see or just saw on the stupor bowel. We compensate for our lack of humanity by using the ultimate non-humans--either celebrities or AI--whichever comes worst. Those same non-humans do most of the measuring and commenting, as well.

We suppress, we cover our faces, we stony ourselves. All not to feel or show actual limbic feelings.

But back to babies and giggling and Dr. Mireault's article.

Let's start here:

If babies "learn about and participate in the world" via laughter and humor, why would anyone--regardless of the haughtiness of their education and the social science books they've read and the Seth Godin books they've bought--think that the people we try to reach--i.e. you and I--are any different?

Why wouldn't we as advertisers--regardless of our role in the ad business--not try to create, as Darwin observed 150 or so years ago "social bonds" that go beyond the need for language? An attachment to the work that goes beyond logic, that, in fact is based on illogic?

Now, here's the bit that really struck me. 

The importance of upside-down and backwardness in communication. To be blunt: The importance of being different. 

A look that makes you re-look.

The importance of showing people something they've never seen before--like Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Or André Kertesz's fork. Or the importance of twisting a familiar phrase so it's "queer to the ear," and therefore striking and memorable. 

I've said about 62,000 times over the past few decades, Adidas' old tagline "Impossible is Nothing," stood out. "Nothing is Impossible" would have stunk to high-hell.

The article I'm citing talks about giggling and laughter--but the root of all laughter is something even 8-month-old children recognize--and you and I do too, no matter what our age or particular predilections. 

That root of all connection, according to Dr. Mireault is something she calls "benign incongruity." A "kindly disruption." A weird "not-adding-up." A "non-closing of the circle."

Dad "wearing a spoon as a mustache." A "stuffed toy taking flight from atop her mother's head."

I'd imagine as babies work on "incongruity resolution" in their development with the larger world, that brands who similarly ask viewers in engage in "incongruity resolution" will develop similar bonds with their larger world.

Incongruity resolution, after all, is a fancy-schmancy sciency way of saying asking viewers to make sense of something different.  Incongruity resolution makes viewers think. It makes people piece things together.

Different is the sine non qua of "impact." It really is that simple, as Dave Trott so eloquently and bluntly points out--starting at around 10:30. 

(Different, of course, comes with one caveat. There's good different. And just weird different. We're talking about good--on-topic-different here.)

I thought about starting an agency about a decade before I started GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. About a decade before I had the confidence to recognize my uniqueness and name an agency after what I believed clients would be buying: me.

At that time, I thought about naming my agency "Kanizsa's Triangle," after this seeing this diagram and reading this from Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel. The key phrase below, and in all this and in all advertising and interpersonal communication, is "constructing a reality that is not there."

Again. Another fancy-schmancy sciency way of saying asking viewers to make sense of something different. 

They'll love you for it. (Or in my case, at least not hate you.)

Out, Out Damn Spots.

There were commercials last night. 

A lot of us will be talking about them.

Many in our industry will post online.

They'll assert that just getting a commercial on the Super Bowl is an achievement.  I don't agree with that notion any more than I believe in "participation trophies." 

There's good. And there's crap.

"What a feat. What a monumental moment...Much to be proud of [sic]..." should be tied to the quality of your output. Not just your output.

That might seem mean to some readers. I don't care.

I believe advertising isn't about being part of culture. It's about defining a brand or a product. It's about differentiating it. It's about telling people why they need it. 

In sum, good advertising is about the thing you're advertising. It's what makes that thing desirable. What's important is how you do that job. Not that you made a commercial.

Yes. 

What you made is more important than how you made. 

Humans have essentially believed that since the Lascaux cave paintings or before.

Here are a few commercials I admire. If people can say a commercial is laudable simply because it ran on the Super Bowl, I can say these are better than those because they didn't run on the Super Bowl. Same dumb logic.

(Sorry for the doubles. It's a quirk of the platform. Not me.)

Page One.

It's Friday, and I have a big meeting with a very big client today.  There's an agency between me and the client--and there's a lot of work being presented--a lot of thinking--but I am the only creative in the mix.

That means I had to do what I do best.

Toil.

No, really, toil.

Not just the "exalted" thinking. The kind people fantasize about when the enter what used to be the ad-business. But the grind-it-out things, that in the parlance of sports, "don't show up in the boxscore."

Writing scores of ads, manifestos, blog-posts, TV scripts and more. Filling a giant deck-worth of worth the money. 

Today, if you're on the ball, you don't just have to be better than other writers, you have to be better than AI, too. The AI threat is always looming. Like the steam-drill was always staring down John Henry.

It's unusual in the ad business these days, but my work--the creative bits--were done early. About 48-hours before the client meeting. The head of the agency sent me the deck just about two hours ago. I made a copy nibble here and there, but essentially my work was complete.

Then, I realized something.

Something I didn't like.

We had done exactly what was asked of us.
Exactly as we promised. 
It's all good, artful, sound, strategic and plentiful. 

But something is missing. 

That feeling nagged at me.

We had done everything that was asked of us.
And we did it well.

But that's not enough. 

It never is.

We are launching a new brand for a giant company. We've got all the doodads that do that.

But we didn't have the gasp.

We didn't have the jaw-drop.

We didn't have the awe.

The more-than-they-ever-expected.

The image that sears.

I'm an old-man now. 

I might even be past my expiration date.

I certainly feel that way sometimes, when my aches and pains and heartaches and "lack-of-mattering" overwhelm me like a wave a kid's sand-castle.

But I learned something this afternoon as I tried to beat-back what I saw as a gap in our meeting.

If you're doing work for a client--whether you're an auto-mechanic, a circus act, or an obstreperous copywriter, you should give yourself a brief.

You should hold yourself to a brief. And a standard.

How do I get my work on page one of the deck?

Page 1.

How do I carry the meeting within the first two minutes?

How do I start with a crescendo and build from there?

How can I open like Bellini opened "Norma"?

Then keep going--for two hours after the open.

That's our job.

Meet Chris Miller: the Copywriter With his Own Strapline.

Just a few weeks ago, Dave Trott, as in THE EMINENT DAVE TROTT, highlighted a LinkedIn promotional piece by Chris Miller, "the copywriter with his own strapline."

I'd noticed Chris some years ago--because of that brilliant little fillip of a strapline. He's funny, I said to myself. I'll keep my eye on him. And see what I can learn him or, more candidly, steal from him.

A Rake's Progress. 1, The Heir.

A Rake's Progress. 8, The Madhouse.

The promotional piece Trott liked reminded me of those great 18th Century etchings by William Hogarth. They had a wit, a sensibility and a quirkiness I just loved. 

I was mad at myself for not having gotten there first. Instead of dwelling on my jealousy, I reached out to Chris Miller, "the copywriter with his own strapline," and asked him to write a blogpost for this space. My note to Chris read: "Actually, you exemplify my main advertising thesis. Do something different. From your "strapline" epigram to your 18th century comix." 

Unlike so many people I reach out to, Chris followed through with the piece below.

If you don't know Chris, you should.

You can meet him below.

Why not write him a note and say "hi." 

Like I said above, "he's funny."

--

COPYWRITER, SELL THYSELF.

Like you, dear reader, I'm a George fan. A lover of his humerus-tickling George Co. ads and his mighty blog. Together they offer a glorious drip-feed of Tannenbaumian wit and Georgian

wisdom.

As it happens, I'm also partial to doing a wee bit of self-promo. Although, sadly, the dosage of wit and wisdom is woefully homeopathic by comparison.

George gave me a free hand to write anything. But I believe it was my personal stuff that caught his eye. So I'll talk about that.

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My strapline/tagline/endline

I once wondered why we copywriters don't do unto ourselves as we do unto our clients. Or, more specifically, why we don't tend to write our own straplines. Stuck for an answer, I promptly wrote one for myself.

One of the benefits of now being "the copywriter with his own strapline" is that the line differentiates me from other copywriters called Chris Miller. Because Chris Millers are ten a penny out there, believe me. Check the list of your Facebook friends. You'll find at least three there.

Christopher Charles Miller, Donald Trump's former Defence Secretary, goes several steps further by sharing all three of my names. And the same year of birth. He's also a wearer of

spectacles and, like me, has a frown that can curdle holy water from a distance of 300 metres.

(I'd be inclined to see an attack on the Capitol as something that had to be stopped at all costs, though. So the similarities aren't endless.)

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"I heartily recommend me."    --me

During the Covid lockdown, a fusion of boredom and financial necessity prompted me to create my own little ads for social media. 

I probably should've involved an art director, but I thought the ads' roughness had some sort of charm? Is that the mot juste? Notre Georges would know.

Anti-email mail

Paper was all the rage in my youth. OK, I'm going back a bit, so it might actually have been papyrus. But let's not quibble.

I believed, with the following ink-and-paper mailshots, that fighting for attention in someone's inbox might be a battle I could sidestep altogether by landing on their desk instead. And,

hopefully, to continue sitting there long after an email would've been closed or deleted.

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Hallmark, eat your heart out

Despite being Mr Misnomer 'a non-Christian Christopher' I get as dewy-eyed as the next bauble-hanger at Yuletide. Sentimental sleigh-bell-loving sap that I am, here are a few things I sent out at the most wonderful time of different years.

As you can see, I wrote 1) cards and 2) a label for a wine bottle.

The design work was done by 1) my pal Malcolm Thompson and 2) Rob Taylor, CD at Like A River.

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The would-be Wordsworth wordsmith

I've had a few flurries of activity on LinkedIn that, I hoped, would raise my profile. Naive soul that I am, I mistakenly assumed a few years ago that some advertising-themed limericks were

the way to worm my way into the nation's hearts. (I mean, c'mon, who doesn't love a heartworm?)

I branded them "Limillericks". (Geddit?) But under no circumstances should you attempt to say that word aloud unless you're in the presence of a medical professional capable of

disentangling your tongue from your uvula. I remember one getting a like from George. (The first of those shown here.) That, it's fair to say, made my day.

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Old school

Cut to a few weeks (and centuries) ago. I started posting my comic strip Ye Olde Creative Shoppe on LinkedIn. As before, I was clinging to the ridiculous notion that someone would

see these and conclude that I was precisely the kind of copywriter they were looking for.

It seems to have acquired a (very) small following. So I may persist with it for a while. Or at least until villagers clutching burning torches and pitchforks arrive at my door, demanding I

do something less annoying with my time.

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Going live with a self-promotional project, despite the stakes being spectacularly low, makes me sympathise with nervous clients more than I'd care to admit.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of wide-eyed terror, writing for George's blog isn't for the faint-hearted. Yet here I am.

No, it hasn't been easy typing while biting my nails. But as I've got to the end, I've improved significantly. My ability to dentally self-manicure at 60 wpm is a skill I'll be adding to my CV.

Thank you so much, George. And toodle-pip, you lovely people, you.

Chris

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