Say One Thing. Do Another.

Depictions of the Roman god Janus.
He had a complex view of the world.

One of the major aspects of the world that's sure to get me upset is dichotomies.

When people say one thing and do another.

You know, lie.

Like moving people in agencies to open-plan. 

We were told it would ease collaboration.
It really spread sickness.
Led to people wearing noise-canceling headphones.
The death of people working together.
And it never had anything to do with collaboration.
It have everything to do with saving money on rent.
And putting more people in less space.

Here's another topical for-instance.

Someone says, "we need to tax billionaires." 

(Tesla has reported $5,700,000,000 in income in 2025 and paid $0 in taxes.)

Quickly, the people talking about taxing (not axing) billionaires are accused of waging "class warfare." Class warfare isn't someone amassing an un-spendable amount of money, it's saying that that money should be taxed.

A trillion, btw, is a thousand billions.
And a billion is a thousand millions.

So, a trillion could be redistributed to create

one million millionaires.

Or, as reported in last Thursday's Wall Street Journal:

At five-percent interest, Musk's trillion earns him $50,000,000,000 a year in interest. Or $137,000,000/day. Or about $1,600/second.

But someone saying make people like Musk must pay taxes are accused of waging "class warfare."

A dichotomy in advertising is glaring. We know what we as humans like to watch. It usually looks nothing like what we produce for clients. In short there's a distance between what we as human beings like to watch, and what we're forced to watch.

We like watch sports. Or jokes. Or things that make us laugh or think. We're forced to watch 42-seconds of legal copy per 60-seconds of spot. Or listen to some recurrent drivel about network reliability or look at pictures of happy fast-food workers.

What we in the industry like, is nothing like we as industry practitioners produce. 

The dichotomies go on and on.

There are thousands of ad industry "spokespeople" extolling the virtues of AI, cost-cutting, efficiencies, scaling.

Most people want kindness, consideration, a laugh. 

No one speaks for people--not in what was once, broadly speaking, a people-focused industry.

Can you imagine an holding company leader at Cannes, or in his limousine saying as Carl Ally said 50 years ago, 

"Advertising must comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." 

"Or we have to do commercials that make people feel something. Laugh. Cry. Think. Feel." Like this. Something that shows its creators had actually lived in the world. Not merely in an excel spreadsheet.

Today, the doyens of the ad industry are more likely to say, 

"Advertising must reduce our operating costs to offset the pricing pressures from client procurement departments, so we can maintain our margin without further reductions in force and return shareholder value to our investors."

One of my strengths and weaknesses as a human is that even at the ancient age of 68.527 years old, I have held onto my naiveté. 

I refuse to give in.

I believe our job is to help companies sell stuff by providing relevant information that's fun to read or watch, so it stops you. So you feel rewarded. So you learn. So you like the people it's from. Something like this.

That's about as outdated as this statement from Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25 and Luke 18:25. "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of god."

Another dichotomy:

We love gold.

We ignore the golden rule.

One-Liners.

How to write headlines.

A lot of people on the periphery of the business world like those of us in advertising, or what used to be advertising, criticize the tendency of business to think quarter-to-quarter.

I'm guilty of it myself. Essentially railing against clients and businesses and investors for thinking of short-term gains, as opposed to slow, steady, roll-up-your-sleeves growth. In short, a lot of the world operates on a "get-rich-quick" basis whereas, about 99 times out of 100, making money is the result of a get-rich-slow methodology.

Of course, get-rich-slow isn't much of a promise to clients, investors or ordinary people. That's why we're so susceptible to 
"in by 9 out by 5" promises. 

• Drink this beer, get the girl.
  
• Take this pill, play with your grandkids.
• Drive this car, become successful.
• Hire this agency, and see sales skyrocket.

There is such a thing in the world as long history. People who engage in it look at the world through thousand-year lenses. They realize things unfold not over the course of weeks, not even over the course of years or decades, but sometimes over the course of millennia. 

amerikka's current president thinks wars and their consequences can be wrapped up like sitcoms. We will be paying for the effects of the illegal US invasions of Venezuela and Iran for many years to come. Not to mention their multi-trillion dollar price tags. 

Unlike an episode of "Eight is Enough," it won't be over in 22 minutes. 

But this is a blog about advertising. So I need to make a transition.

When I was a kid in the business, if I was about to shoot a spot or a campaign, I'd have the future carefully charted out. I'd say to myself, 'this will be the lead spot on my reel and will surely get me a great job at either Chiat\Day or Chiat/Day, whichever way the virgule leans.' Things seldom happen that way. Seldom as in never.

One of the long-history-ish things that stuns me about advertising is how little the things we elect to watch and read and hear look like the things we're forced to watch and read and hear.

That's because we're trained to believe in a fundamentally unrealistic causality. We say, if we run this commercial that features two chalupa-grandes in a nacho-crusted shell for just $6.99, the fortunes of Taco Timpani will soar like a space-x rocket. Most often, as James Nance Garner once said about the office of the vice-presidency, what we do ain't worth a bucket of warm spit.

When I was a boy, I remember reading something about Woody Allen when he was just 16 years old. As someone with fervent creative energy, Allen would write 50 jokes a day and sell as many of them as he could--to the likes of Sid Caesar--for about $2/joke. 

I wonder if there's a strategy in that.

I wonder if instead of creating "films" for the ostensible reason of loading masses of people with copy points to get them to buy NOW, I wonder if we stopped trying to sell so much, and instead just tried to be an entertaining friend.

In other words, and I say this in part because, like Woody Allen 75 years ago, I can do it, I wonder if brands would be better served if they had their creative people just write 50 jokes a week.

A joke's job is to be friendly. To get noticed. And remind people you're there and you're ok.

Maybe that's what advertising should be.

Fun.
Funny.
Fast.
Fertile.

Rather than bludgeoning people, building synapses in their heads so when you see their logo, their colors, their typography, something clicks, a smile or some warmth ensue.

For pretty much my whole life, Tiffany's ran an index card-sized ad on page three of The New York Times. Back when things made sense, a "broadsheet" newspaper was 2700 lines. And standard advertising units were measured in lineage. 

I learned all this when I was a beginning copywriter at Bloomingdale's writing 20 ads a week, 50 weeks a year.

A full page ad was 2700 lines. A large ad with a column missing was 2100 lines. A 10"x14" ad was a 1680. And so on. 

Tiffany's ran a 300 line ad, pretty much every day. One-ninth of a page. 

These weren't great ads.
Really they were just reminders.
Like a store-sign might be before everything was taken over by global brands.

An impression.
An inducement.
A promise.

Here's my favorite New York store sign of all time. (Sorry for the 'gender'-ness.)
We need to remember the efficacy of drumbeat impressions.
The sustain. Not just the pulse.

Tiffany's in their 300-line ads weren't selling off the page. 

They were reminding people they were there and showing them they were relevant.

We forgot the "service" portion of communication--are you there for me? We over-index on the shrill, the buy now, the fomo.

Re think.

Jingles Jangled.

When I was a boy growing up in a treeless suburb just about twenty minutes from my father's agency's offices at 247 Park Avenue in Manhattan, my world fairly crackled with commercials for various local beers. Everyone's world did. 

No one in my parents' small home drank much beer. My mother used a bottle now and again to put "body" into her hair, prior to setting it with rollers. And she might have kept a few bottles in the fridge for a workman doing some sweaty summer job that my father wouldn't do and my brother and I were too young to manage. But beer was a blue-collar drink and my parents had six-martini-lunch aspirations.

Still, baseball was the sound track of the era (we lived less than a dozen miles from Yankee Stadium, the house that Ruth built--and years later--Steinbrenner desecrated.) In those days, and it seems almost crazy today, baseball was played during the daytime, under the sun, when it was meant to be played and the game was on on every radio.

In fact, like an Einsteinian exercise in time, light and motion, you could run down your block and not miss a moment of the game. The pitch might have been thrown in front of the Pearson's at 102, the call "ball" might have been heard thirty feet south in front of the Robinson's at 106, and the ball might finally have been hit at 112, in front of the Evans'. By the time Ellie Howard was dusting off his flannels and standing up from a slide into second, you might find yourself at 120, in front of the Fried's.

Accompanying the soundtrack of the game, of Red Barber and Mel Allen, were myriad beer commercials. 

Commercials when I was growing up didn't aspire to be "cinemagraphic." Or even high-falutin'. They aspired to sell stuff.

They understood the audience they were addressing. These weren't PhD-candidates from the Ivy League. They were Ralph and Ed. They were guys punching a clock. They were shower after work guys not shower in the morning guys.

What's more, copywriters and art directors creating commercials for this audience, weren't talking about "lensing." In fact for the first 30 years of my career, I never had to pretend to care about what DP we were using and his award winning cinematography from his obscure classic that no one saw and everyone admired.

So, worried instead about getting ear worms and their client's products lodged in bona-fide customers' head (not award's juries) they used ancient story-telling devices like jingles and repetition that have been working since your ancestors and mine made the move to bi-pedalism.

Right now, I'm reading Daniel Mendolsohn's new and widely- praised translation of Homer's Odyssey. Unlike advertising which lasts about a week, the Odyssey has lasted about 2800 years. It's still being read, enjoyed and learned from today. At least among those who take the time to read it.

What's more, the Iliad and the Odyssey are the structural basis for about every story you're likely to see on Netflix, in the movies or from the Marvel universe. Hero gets lost. Hero screws up. Hero can't get home. Hero gets home. 

Homer (not Homer Simpson, not Steve Simpson, Ogilvy's former CCO, my boss and friend) understood a thing or two about reaching audiences. Homer wasn't thinking originality. He was thinking "imprinting." Getting ideas and characterizations in his audiences' head. That often happens when you repeat things.

For instance, here are just a few mentions of "Dawn" (not the dish-soap) from Mendelsohn's faithful translation. The description of Dawn, of Odysseus, of Athena hardly varies. It was a repetitive memory device in a era, like ours, when most people can't or don't write things down.

All that leads me back to my youth. A long-time ago. When advertising agencies were more Homeric with their output. Schaefer Beer shared the airwaves with Rheingold Beer, Ballantine Beer and an occasional national brand. 

Everyone in New York knew the Schaefer jingle. My guess is that 97% of New Yorkers who are my age know it now. And probably 94% of New Yorkers who are my age and have early-onset Alzheimers know it still.

Because it was repeated.
Because it was simple.
Because it was liked.

Because they kept it fresh.

It's easy to disparage, no matter their efficacy, no matter how long humans have been using them, old ideas and old techniques. 

It's easy to disparage memory devices.

That kind of stuff is too old.
It's corny.
It's passé.

It ain't cool in Williamsburg.

Disparage things all you like.
Just don't cross Homer.

 

 

What's A Metaphor You?

Sorry about this, but a sports metaphor is coming.

I'm not much of a sports-fan. And I try to avoid using clichés but every once in a long while, like in the case of this long-suffering Knicks fan, 53 years, a sports metaphor is the only thing that can suffice.

The Knicks after more than half a century of dismal, essentially ego-centric basketball, won last night the NBA finals. Before the Knicks beat the Cleveland Cavaliers to advance to the finals, the Cavaliers' coach, the esteemed Kenny Atkinson said, "I think analytically, I think we've won the -- I said three out of three [games in the series], we're two out of three in the expected wins," Atkinson told reporters. "I don't know if you guys follow that -- the expected score. We've won two out of three."

That in a nutshell is the genesis of today's post.

We won. Though we lost. Screw the score, the analytics say so.

For most of the last thirty years, as know-nothings from the accountancy-consultancy-human-resourcery-world devastated the advertising industry, we've looked at analytics and fake-metrics (like specious awards for work that never ran, was never paid for and had no material market success) as a measure of an agency's success or a network's.

We're agency of the year and have a 55% attrition rate and have lost 65% of our revenue. We're network of the year and have lost major client after major client and can't win new ones. We're "the trusted growth partner for the world's leading brands" but we've destroyed half of our own major brands and have been for ten years, while proclaiming ourselves the growth partner, shrinkng.

Updated. And now 100% bushwa free.

As an industry, we've thrown away just about every construction that made any agency ever strong.

You can look at all the numbers and money-ball data you want. Nothing really beats hitting a clutch double.

Instead, we've thrown away long-term partnerships--between art-directors and copywriters. Between creatives and creative directors. Between planners and creatives. Between account and creatives. Between creative and the clients they work with and for.

We've thrown all that out for an analytic-efficiency-just-in-time-staffing approach. And then we PR the shit out of the result and say things like, "I think analytically, I think we've won."

Since leaving WPP in a 'secure financial position' just 12 months ago,

WPP's 'secure' stock has fallen from 39.77 to 18.46.

Since ten years ago, WPP's market cap has plummeted. 

It was $31,000,000,000 a decade ago.

It's about $4,000,000,000 today.

That's like turning eight dollars into one.

Most agencies no longer even have creatives on staff. Much less long-time partners who rely on each other and make each other better. Most agencies no longer have people on brands who even use their clients' products, much less know the customer, know the engineers, know the clients. Instead, agencies "scope" people for an hour here and an hour there--that's efficient, their well-parboiled numbers say. So that's how they sail their ship.

Most agencies hire hot hands. Not thoughtful, adjustable, team-oriented people.

They hire the people who have won awards in last year's shows-- work as above, that never ran, was never paid for, wasn't created under real conditions and had no material market success.

The Knicks ran for more than half-a-century just as holding companies and agencies operate today.

Selflessness and team seldom entered the discussion.

On the Knicks, from their vaunted pick of Patrick Ewing in 1985, personnel and personal egoism ruled. Ewing, while still a rookie, refused to play out of position, alongside all-star Bill Cartwright, for the good of the team. Ewing, despite a "hall-of-fame" career and a raft of gaudy numbers, never won a championship. 

The Knicks had Sprewell, a magnificent scorer who played little defense and seldom passed the ball or passed up a shot. The same can be said of "hall-of-famer" Carmelo Anthony, a player who never saw a ball he wouldn't hog, or shot he wouldn't take. 

As Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) said to "the gunsel" (Elijah Cook, Jr.) in John Huston's great version of "The Maltese Falcon," "the cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter."

That's been, it seems to me, the guiding mis-light of the last half-century of advertising and the world.

"The cheaper the agency/network, the gaudier their self-promotion."

"The smaller the ideas, the bigger the trophy case."

"The more spurious the results, the more well-produced the case-study."

If you watch any of the mandatory press interviews with any of the Knicks' players after Saturday night clincher against the San Antonio Spurs, you won't hear the word "I." Instead you hear about help. A belief in the team. A respect for the organization. A trust in each other.

These attributes cannot be gained when you are mercenary and run a mercenary organization--a sports team or a business or a nation. 

The construction of winningness takes time, risk, money, thoughtfulness and a plan more well-formed than the prospect of a short-term triumph.

These are all metaphors.

For human-relationships.
For sports.
For business.
And yes, for amerika.

Nothing good comes merely from money.

It comes from human connection.
It comes from leadership.
It comes from buy-in of a plan.
It comes from respect--for self and for others.
It comes from honesty--doing your job.
It comes from truth. Doing what you say.
And sacrifice of self.

Success isn't derived from $70,000,000 payouts, bs about share prices and bald-men holding hollow anthropomorphic trophies surrounded by store-bought smiles and well-varnished self-aggrandizement.

Success is not found on rented yachts, bottomless rosé, back-slapping and AI-generated press-releases.

Just ask the Knicks.

Radical.

I'm 68 years old.

After 68 years of toeing-the-line,

doing what was expected of me,

working for others,

working for my family,

working to pay my taxes 

and trying to make sure that I'm not destitute
in my dotage,

I'll admit something.

I'm ready to do something radical.

I have a large, wonderful apartment in New York City.
I've lived there since 1998.
It's paid off.

I have a small, seaside cottage in Connecticut.
I can spit into the Long Island Sound from my bedroom.
And it's all-but paid for.

But I'm ready to do something radical.

Not move to a larger house, 
or a smaller house,

or to California, 

where my younger daughter lives,

or closer to Boston,
where my elder daughter, 
my grandsons and my son-in-law lives.

Not to the middle of the country,
closer to my Chicago brother,
and equidistant from my kids.

I'm ready to do something radical.

Not take a day-off from blogging.

Not retire.
Not have the hot-fudge sundae of my dreams.

No.

I keep telling my wife.
I'm ready to do something radical.

When the Times runs pieces like this,

I'm no longer looking for a nice split level,

this time with a mudroom.

Like I said, radical.
At least radical for me.

Of course, it doesn't take long for my thoughts to turn to advertising. What would it mean for a brand to do something radical. 

Radical doesn't mean off-brand, by-the-way.
Maybe radical means more on-brand than you could possibly ever imagine yourself allowing yourself.

Radical might mean,

in this era of universal namby-pamby,
speaking out.
Calling bull-shit.
Not pulling punches.

Radical might mean--in this era of politesse--

actually saying what you feel.

As the Knicks were returning from San Antonio, Texas, up two-games to none against the highly-favored Spurs, I wondered, what would happen if the Knicks did something radical.

I wondered what would happen if instead of holding Game Three in Madison Square Garden, the self-proclaimed "world's most-famous arena," what if the Knicks played a game at Rucker Park in Harlem--the center of gravity for New York street basketball.

Or even the famous W. 4th Street courts?

Or what if they went back to basics. Found an out of the way high school gym in the Bronx, or somewhere in Queens, or somewhere far from the madding crowd and had the game there?

There might be outrage among monied fans who couldn't get to 155th and Eighth Avenue. Or some band-box of a gym in Corona, Queens.

But really about 98% of the NBA's money comes from TV, so the amount of revenue lost would be nominal. Maybe the broadcast--done on a shoe-string without all the built-in big-arena gee-whizery would suffer. But what it might lack in polish it would more than make up with charm and humility.

Then there's this, which I just read in The Economist.

What if Dolan,
the Knicks,
the NBA did something radical.

"LIVE FROM RUCKER PARK,
the cornerstone of basketball history,

where the crossover, the slam-dunk and streetball

were invented and honed,
a court graced by 

LIVE FROM RUCKER PARK,
GAME THREE OF THE NBA FINALS."

Or what if the game were played on a court like the one Richard Avedon shot Kareem Abdul Jabbar on (back when he was Lew Alcindor) near the old Power High on W. 65th Street?

Doing so would have been radical.

A tribute to the dreams of kids who breathed the game.
Not the big money people who bought it.

Doing so might have made James Dolan, one of the most-hated team-owners in the world, perhaps a bit human. Maybe even, for a moment, likable.

Also, for all those dreaming kids, 
many of them now old men,

what if the Knicks re-designed their uniforms for one day.

And went with something like this.

A slight uniform revise,
in the universal language of New York

that no one would ever forget.

Radical.

An A-peeling Job.

It makes sense, even if you're happy doing whatever you're doing for a living, to occasionally open a job listing and see what's what. 

It makes sense to see if the grass really is greener on the other side of the barbed wire (I live in a rough neighborhood). 

It makes sense to see if the new pizza place everyone is talking about is really better than the place you've been going since your were in college. (That's V&T's on 1024 Amsterdam between 110th and 111th. And no, the new place isn't nearly as good and is four times the cost.) It even makes sense to try the new Yogel--the yogurt-flavored bagel that will surely be, at some point during our benighted days, the next next thing.

Back in 1979, you could buy a small pie for $3.50.
Man, I wish I had a Rheingold right now.

All that being said, not too many minutes ago, not having a post for Thursday and not having any ideas for a post, I did what so many do when they need an idea in a jiffy, I procrastinated. 

In other words, I went on LinkedIn (which could be called ThinkNot) where I saw this ad:

Oh, says I.

That job listing looks vaguely interesting.

Publicis has somehow gained the reputation as the "well-run" advertising holding company. At a time when agencies are losing money faster than municipal transit systems, Publicis' numbers look glossy.

Still, somehow I remembered a story from 74 years ago about Marilyn Monroe. Back then, Edith Gwynn, a gossip columnist for the Los Angeles Mirror, criticized the gown Monroe war to the "Photoplay Awards." Gwynn wrote: Monroe's gown was “Ill-fitting and too tight in all the WRONG places. It’s black lace over bright red and has a wide, red silk ruffle…Everyone isn’t born with taste. But surely when ‘a star is born’ her studio should see to it that the public doesn’t see her looking cheap and vulgar."

20th Century Fox, Monroe's studio wrote that Monroe would look good in a potato sack. They promptly had Monroe photographed in one. 

By way of metaphor, I wondered if Publicis was the Marilyn in our "potato sack" of an industry. 

And so, I checked out the Publicis job. 

The Publicis job-listing had all the attractiveness, speaking of potatoes, of a tumor on a tuber. And it was written with the uniqueness of a condolence card in Soviet Russia--just after the 1937 purges.

I'm a fairly experienced, well-read and well-educated person. Still, I don't know what half those bullet-points are asking for.

Nevertheless, as someone with the stamina of Tenzing Norgay, I kept reading. 

Norgay led Edmund Hillary to the summit of Everest.

I wondered how many ducats such a job would earn me? 

That's when I came to this portion of the job description.

BTW, and more to the point, as I've said before in this space, so much of what AI generates is bad. Not just slop bad. Stupid bad. 

So much of AI is insulting to readers, viewers, listeners. So much is so widely and thoroughly wrong that you can only conclude that the company using the AI (in this case Publicis) cares hardly a whit for the people they send messages to.

We all make mistakes, of course. Once, a few dozen years ago, a small typo creeped into Ad Aged. But that's human and not unfair. Errors of the sort I've highlighted above are not borne from human frailty--they come from the worst place errors can come from. In this case, corporate Hubris. 

Hubris because there's been a trillion-dollars worth of marketing-spend force-feeding us the idea that AI produces perfection. That AI can do anything you and I can do. Worse, AI can do anything Spielberg can do, or Amy Sedaris or Van Gogh. Trillions are being spent telling us our government, public health, safety and multi-trillion dollar wars can be run by AI. In most cases, it misses--wide--the most salient information, or ignores the most pressing needs of people.

No matter what business you're in, before you go whole-hog and embrace A.I. make sure you also embrace simple, old-fashioned proof-reading and even more-so, respect for your audience.

The reputation you save may be your own.

(In fairness to Publicis, they've corrected their listing. Someone there must be eating potatoes--brain food.)