Can I Quote You?

I don’t think people or agencies should quote notable advertising people—like Bernbach or Ogilvy—if they don’t at least take a stab at abiding by their standards of work, or how people are treated or the ethics of business those two men believed in.

You shouldn’t cite someone’s words but ignore their intent. 

I recoil when I see Ogilvy, the entity, co-opting the words of their founder when there’s nothing of David’s ethos and beliefs at all remaining. To my eyes it’s like false patriots who wrap themselves in the flag and then trumpet patently unconstitutional and anti-amerikan beliefs. Or bible-thumpers who cherry-pick phrases from the book while abnegating its essential truths. As rabbi Hillel is said to have said regarding the Jewish Torah, “That which is hateful to you do not do to others. All the rest is commentary. Now go and learn.” 

But most of these people are hateful to anyone who isn’t like them and willing to broadcast their hate.

You can’t hide behind a cross one minute and then next hate and call people illegal because they look different.

To my eyes, perhaps the wisest of the Ogilvy-isms I’ve remembered and inculcated through the decades is this one (which I’ve rewritten slightly to un-genderize it.) 

“The consumer isn’t a moron. The consumer is your partner.”

(Not as good as the original. But this is a family blog.)

Maybe it’s a function of my advancing years, but today—in dozens and dozens of daily interactions—I contend that most marketers treat people as if they’re stupid. As if it’s ok to lie or hyperbolize. As if it’s ok to bait and switch.

One near constant instance of that is the evidence that most advertising is Smilist. It bludgeons us over the head with ridiculous grins telling us how happy we’ll be if we’d only use their product like their plasticene models do.

Never in my life have I grinned like an idiot while working with a friend/lover/co-worker/stranger at my non-branded computer. Have you ever smiled like this?

Likewise have you ever smiled like this while talking to a cable company? Especially one named SpeculumOne.

Unreality like this is the equivalent of treating people like they’re idiots. It’s like the kids coming home from school happy as cultists and screaming “Hot Pockets!!!"

These are three stills from horrible commercials with pretty smiling people gushing over drugs that can be deadly. The top one is about toe fungus. The middle for a weigh-loss drug. And the bottom for severe rheumatoid arthritis.

Smile!

SMILE!!! YOU HAVE CLAY-COLORED STOOLS!!!

We are also besieged with lies like these. Yes, ExxonMobil has transformed thousands of communities. Usually into uninhabitable toxic dumps.

We see ads like this every day.

We don’t throw bricks.

We also get hogwash like these examples. At almost every turn.

Over the weekend I was at an expensive Boston hotel. Their $700 nightly room rate included a “free breakfast buffet.” The free breakfast buffet included an 18% service  charge. Though we served ourselves.

Later on I paid for another meal, for my daughter and her family. I can only imagine how many discussions were had over adding the word “valued” next to the word “customer” on the line I have to sign. Is that how you show people they’re valued?

I’m stupid enough and old enough to hold onto the belief that for a communication to be effective it must be based on some sort of truth.

Today from casting on down, every ad, every commercial, every emotion portrayed feels as false and focused-grouped as a Maine senatorial candidate. Everything is packaged purportedly for maximum marketability but everything is a lie.

The people behind the counter at the QSR aren’t smiling.

The world won’t end because there are no more Doritos.

There are no un-trafficked roads in amerikkka built, it seems expressly for Buick commercials.

There are no phone companies that make things simple and charge the price they advertise.

Every knows these are all lies.

But the truth sucks.

So we tell lies.

Lies no one believes.

But they test well.

Apologies.

I’ve only been to Berlin, Germany once, and that was for an IBM shoot, not a tourist visit. Still I woke up around four in the morning every morning to try to get lost as well as I could.

The hotel we were staying in had been a bank. It was on a plaza across from Humboldt University and not far from the location of the nazi’s notorious book burnings, the first of which flamed in May, 1933, just a few months after Hitler named himself führer. (The nazis capitalized it. I won’t.)

That book burning was carried out by university students agog over hitler, as so many in amerikkka (including major media outlets and those who advertise on them) are today. The current memorial glows a copper green at night-- a reminder of the spooky glow of the fires interacting with the minerals in the inks of the books they burned.

--

Just as I was leaving Ogilvy, Shelly Lazarus, their CEO Emeritus asked me to assume the toughest assignment of my already-long career. That is, to work with Boeing and help them recover and rehabilitate their reputation after two fatal crashes killing more than 300 people flying on their new 737Max jet.

I spent some time thinking about the terrible mistakes I’ve make in my life. What were the “human rules” of mistakes. I came up with this scenario.

If my wife were out of town and I was playing ball with my dog in the house and I broke an heirloom vase that my wife cherished, how could I recover from my clumsiness or stupidity?

1. Clean up the mess.

2. As nearly as possible replace the old one with a new one.

3. The moment my wife arrived home admit, fully, (no if-pologies) what I did and tell her the new vase will arrive by the end of the week.

4. Admit, again, my boneheadedness and promise I’ll never do it again.

I went over all that with the Boeing client. I said something like “people like brands who act like people they like, and here’s how a person you like would apologize.”

Of course, 300 deaths ain’t a make-believe vase but they got the point. Even though Boeing is essentially a defense contractor with essentially no competition and very “candor-resistant.” Talking to them was like talking to Bob MacNamara during Viet Nam.

Maybe you can judge the decency of a person or a society or a business or a grocery store by how well they admit and make good for their mistakes.

All over Europe you'll find little engraved brass plaques called Stolpersteine. There are over 110,000 of the Stolpersteine installed in over 1800 towns and cities in 31 countries. 

The Stolpersteine are engraved with names of Jews, homosexuals and Romani--but mostly Jews--who were murdered via industrial methods by the nazis. They're brass and about 4-inches square. They're in streets, buildings and walkways. You can't spit in Berlin without hitting one.

Today an opposite sort of behavior is happening right here in the country Lincoln called "The last best hope of earth." A hope we are meanly losing.

tump and his hateful and hating willing executioners are trying to rewrite amerikkkan history. They're denying the evil of slavery, the theft of millions from their homes, the brutality of the Middle Passage. They're denying or trying to deny more than 400 years of human brutality, violence and cruelty. tump is placing revisionist placards in front of american museums denying denying denying. Lying lying lying.

Most people, even educated people, don't know the true extent of the horrors of racism in amerikka. I for one believe reparations are due. If not for slavery, for the cost of having to pay tax yet being denied access to schools, universities, parks, recreation, and more.

Only the indecent would deny what was done. What is being done. Only the cruel would pretend it was small or anomalous.

In fact, here are two plaques tump has placed in the whites house. About his predecessors. This is cartoon-villain pettiness and name calling.

This is not the way healthy societies act. It's that simple.

This is not the way healthy societies act. It's that simple.

This is not the way healthy societies act. It's that simple.

This is the opposite of decency. 

The opposite of our nation's purported christian values.

Meanwhile I was in Boston this weekend for my grandson's fourth birthday party. These markers are all over the city.

Acknowledging a part of the past.

Because history, good, bad, pretty, ugly, proud, embarrassing needs to be true. And needs to be present. Made indelible. 

Of course plaques are not recompense for the past. And no matter how many horrors you can recount, there are probably thousands of more--large and small--you can't even fathom. Plaques don't undo, heal or bring back to life.

But acknowledgement, admission, recognition and public airing of wrong-doing are all steps, necessary steps, toward being decent. They are all necessary steps toward a society of truth and humanity.

We all need myths.

From Superman to Odysseus to Ninja Turtles.

But when the myth overwhelms what happened, when a society is delusional, when a society or a people or an industry can no longer discern the difference between reality and illusion, horrible things--more horrible things--will happen, more often.

This is amerikka today.

An empire of illusion.

Worms.

One of my first big bosses, a recent inductee to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, was John C. Jay, who steered the creative department at Bloomingdale’s in-house agency in the early 1980s. Later, John helped make Wieden & Kennedy great and Nike as hot as they ever were. 

John had an amazing array of talents. But perhaps more than anything, he could spot a trend long before anyone else. I guess in ancient Mesopotamia or Athens or Rome, he would have been reading animal entrails and telling fortunes and serving kings and emperors. In our world today, he served the kings of commerce.

Trend-spotting appears on no list enumerating my protean talents. Sure, I can look at a line of baseball stats and guess someone’s going to be good. I can even look at an annual report, and comment on the viability or “vaporability” of this purported trillion-dollar company or that. But as for seeing things that aren’t even blips on the radar-screen, I’m as blind as a Single A umpire.

That said, I’m sensing something now, that belies the heavy-handed bullying that we’ve been bludgeoned by for so long by various un-accountable tech-bros and their willing executioners in finance, banking, PR and marketing.

In short, I think the AI “solve” everything bludgeon we’re clonked with today is the 2026-equivalent 1880’s “miracle elixer,” medicine show ads that have always been such a part of the world. Who doesn’t want something that will cure everything with no pain, work, cost or side-effects. (That in a nutshell, after all, was the essential promise of the tump kakistocracy.)

As a digression—and I’m good at digressions—the Treniers in this clip below sing a song of Hadacol, a popular remedy in the “dry” south, that really just got its users drunk off their keisters. Not a bad metaphor for trillion-dollar valuations of companies that have never come close to turning a profit. 

The Treniers sing Hadacol.

Hadacol was 24-proof magic elixer, popular in “dry” counties in the South.

All that being said, I think the worm might be turning.

On Friday morning, I sent my FFB (friend from blogging) Dave Trott an article from the Times by John McWorther. I know Dave is interested in an ever evolving and mutating language and in New York. This article was about why The Bronx has a The in it, and how many young people are, today, dropping the The, which I would never think to do.

Dave sent back a short clip, nominally in English, from the movie “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The clip, below and well worth watching, contained this line: “He’s cold as a coma.”

It ain’t much of an epiphany, but never in 32 trillion years will an algorithm, a pattern-matching machine come up with language like the above.

It’s still 6AM on Friday morning as all this is happening, and I read this book review in The Wall Street Journal. Containing the line I’ve highlighted below.

If freedom is the essence of music, captivity must be its mortal foe. Yet in “The Midnight Special,” a fresh new take on American music, Colin Asher profiles five artists whose works were shaped by incarceration.

Never in 32 trillion years will an algorithm, a pattern-matching machine come up with language like the above. 

Next, I read an essay by the great Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times.

It contained these adroit sentences.

After about ten years and I’d guess a trillion-dollars of AI is a miracle blitzkrieg, these observations are telling. There’s been scarcely a dissenting voice to the chorus of AI miracle-ness permitted anywhere.

Then there’s this.

On the front page of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

I’m no John C. Jay. 

But maybe, just maybe I’m seeing the drunk-ness is sobering up.

Venereal Advertising.

Not too long ago, there was an opinion piece in The New York Times by the founder of the retailer Patagonia. Assuming you can still read, you can find it here.

Chouinard’s essay starts like this:

Over 50 years ago, my wife, Malinda, and I bought a chef’s knife of carbon steel that we still use. It could be passed down to several generations. Compare that to the junk stainless steel ones that might not rust but that won’t hold an edge to cut a tomato.

Cheap products, made poorly and thrown away quickly, are killing people and the planet.

Not to gild Chouinard’s lily, I’d add that cheap advertising, made poorly and thrown away quickly, are killing brands, brand equity, major corporations and the entire (as if this matters) advertising industry.

(BTW, the calculus behind cheapness—usually filed under the heading of ‘efficiency’—costs brands billions. I heard a story from a client about how AI and the legion of MBAs running their AI, told the fast-food brand Chipoltle to stop topping off their bowls. It was costing the millions. The problem was, customers associated the topping off with generosity. And when they stopped topping off, Chipoltle was regarded as cheap and mean. Today, we see such calculus everywhere. Replace experienced creatives with juniors—and see how our margins will widen. That seldom works out.)

In Chouinard’s piece, he cites the novelist Terry Pratchett. Pratchett's devised something he calls the "boots theory of socioeconomics.” 

Pratchett’s theory goes like this: some time ago, 

"A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in 10 years’ time.  While a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent $100 on boots in the same time--[he'd probably have spent $20/pr. five times on five different pairs] and would still have wet feet.”

Last Friday, unsolicited, a potential client reached out to me. It’s always nice when that happens, though more and more I feel like I should hang around my office those World War II posters warning soldiers about venereal disease. Like VD, bad clients are easy to get but hard to get rid of. In fact, to be New York-dire about this, they can cost you your life. (My wife, as she has so often, rejected this decorating idea.)

The potential client spent an hour with me on the phone. She explained how high the stakes were. That she had a much better capitalized competitor. She explained how large the potential market was. And how important it would be to capture that market.

As a seasoned professional, you listen to these things. I quickly realized to the client, she was in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, two men on and down by two. 

That’s a metaphor for her position.

She needs an advertising-Willie Mays coming next to bat.

As I promised, I sent her a scope.

Reflecting what she needed done, and the stakes involved. Also, the imperative of over-delivering and getting it right. This wasn’t just an execution—she needed a platform to squash her competitor while skyrocketing her own sales.

The scope was, accordingly, large.

In about twenty minutes I got a note back saying I was twice the price as other people she was talking to.

I thought two things reflexively, importantly.

1. Buy cheap; buy twice. And, something that my therapist of 35 years taught me to say and served as my screensaver for half a decade:

2. I’m sure you can find to do it at a price you’re willing to pay.

I could have thought one more thing, but I didn’t.

Anything you have to offer me, ain’t worth getting VD for.

(Unless that means Very Dollary.)