Expansion. Collapse.

Many decades ago I worked on an occasional assignment or two with an art director who was not my usual partner. We were better friends than we were partners. My feeling was she never worked that hard, and got by by being charming and counting on her copy partners to carry the day. However, despite S's shortcomings as an ad person (some years ago, she left the business to become a therapist) she was someone with whom you could run an errand or grab lunch of even just go for a short walk, when that sort of thing was permissable.

One day S and I went for a walk in midtown. This was the early 90s and it seemed like half the retail storefronts in mid-town Manhattan had been taken over by the Italian clothing chain Benetton. 

I never much cottoned (or polyestered) to the brand and said something disparaging about its proliferation. 

S gave me a withering look. And then said something I've remembered for all these many years.

"Don't you know, George," S said, "Companies expand to the point of absolute collapse."

It's funny how sometimes something obvious, but well-expressed can capture a larger mania in a way that has you applying it to nearly everything.

At the time in advertising, most agencies were still independent. Sure, there was Interpublic. But as a student of the ad business, their consolidations made sense. When McCann had the Buick business, they could grown no bigger in the auto category. So essentially they bought Campbell-Ewald who had the Chevrolet business. That let them dominate their markets and still find a way to grow. That sort of holding company chazarai made sense to me.

Down the street, the Needham Harper Steers combination with Doyle Dane Bernbach made less sense. Unless, Needham's strength in Chicago would complement Doyle Dane's strength in New York. Nonetheless, there seemed to be a legitimate reason for being.

And then the floodgates, a la Benetton opened. WPP started buying agencies like a sailor spending money while on shore-leave. They wanted to own every retail facing they could, the better to dominate share of wallet.

I remember once interviewing with some executives at Omnicom's Diversified Agency Services group. These were the men who ran the hundreds of agencies that weren't the big pillar agencies of Omnicom. I naively asked, "what's your digital strategy? Why so you have Tribal DDB, Atmosphere, Proximity and a dozen other dopey names I can no longer remember." They no longer liked the cut of my jib and the interview was over.

About ten years ago, I realized Omnicom, Publicis, IPG, WPP was Coke versus Pepsi. Like Coke and Pepsi (and now Keurig Dr. Pepper) seek to dominate the grocery story, the big holding companies wanted every ad dollar they could get. Small players are pushed into the worst position, potential customers can't find them, they are beaten on price and muscled out of the way.

Now, of course, all these years later the final chapter of S's analysis is coming painfully true.

"The point of collapse" part.

WPP has fired 104,000 employees in just eight years. More than 52% of all employees.
That's collapse.

The holding companies, for so long stealing market share by offering lower prices (or selling their services at an actual loss) provide no value add to clients. As hard as it is to stop an inflationary spiral, most economists will tell you an de-flationary spiral is even harder to arrest. It's hard not to offer lower and lower prices when you've trained the market to demand them.

Of course, advertising will continue to exists.

As Dr. Johnson said so many centuries ago, "Promise, large promise is the soul of advertising." By that I mean companies and brands need to make promises to induce consumer interest. Someone needs to make these promises dance and sing. It's often people like me.

When all the rafters and beams of the current advertising hegemony have finally fallen and burnt, when the money-people have finally extracted the last of their nine-figure payouts and pillaged the shells of the companies they strip-mined, including any and all pension funds, when they're paid off (and they're always paid off first) and vendors never are, brands large, small and in between will still have needs.

They'll need to make a promise.
They'll need to make it interesting.
They'll need to make it memorable.

My 3M schema is one of my many ways of coalescing what I do.

Someone will need to make you:

1. Meaningful. ie explain what you do and why it matters.
2. Modern. ie so you look relevant and timely.
3. Mnemonic. ie memorable, so one ad stings for a long time.

Collapse is here.

Rebuilding ain't far off.

Alive.

 

Of all the many reasons I have never been "one of the guys," maybe the most pressing is that I imbibe in absolutely no popular culture, sports or the currency of modern amerkin, gossip. I couldn't care less about the latest series on this streaming platform or that. In fact, until three months ago I didn't even have a tv, nor did I miss it. As for sports, which eats up so much time and energy for so many people, I simply do not understand. Every game now seems a money game. The team with the most buys the best players and they win. Even college sports, is populated by multi-millionaires. I would like someone to tell me how many of these "student-athletes" ever do any student-ing.

  

As impenetrable as I am to the lures of popular culture, my few remaining friend are similarly impenetrable to my reading suggestions. I often recommend books and get nothing back other than a polite sort of funereal nod.

All that said, and know that, in the words of my father, I'm just pissing up a rope, I wish every one--yes, I mean every one--would read Ian Buruma's new book, "Stay Alive." First let me start by explaining the title, which is not an ode to the BeeGees. 

Amid massive Allied bombings, state murder and abductions, and god-knows what else, "[A ]common way for Berliners to say goodbye was no longer auf Wiedersehen, or Heil Hitler, but bleiben Sie übrig, stay alive.”

BTW, you can read reviews of Stay Alive here: From the Wall Street Journal. And from the New York Times.

No one knows right now, we might not know for years or decades what kind of horrors amerika's horror of a president has propagated in the Middle East and when that horror will strike us in amerika. I don't know if the Iranis, masters of swarm/drone warfare will attack the US with 100,000 drones. I don't know if they'll jerry-rig a way to kill with their nearly 700 kilos of bomb-grade plutonium. I don't know what comes next. I don't know what supremacist hatred all this will evoke and where it will all end, if it ever does.

But what I do know is this. And I am saddened and deeply upset by it. 

When you live (as you and I do) under a criminal regime, you become complicit, you become a criminal. We can wear our sarcastic anti-trump t-shirts, and go to every no-kings protest from here to eternity, but we are complicit. 

The criminal regime takes about 70-cents out of every dollar you earn and spends that dollar on criminal pursuits. Fake wars, kidnappings and disappearances of emigres, killing protestors and calling them domestic terrorists. There's no way out of this. He is us. He is our man.

In Buruma's book, even at the peak of the Gestapo surveillance state, there were protestors. Before too long they were usually hung on meat hooks to die. Women were decapitated--that was deemed more humane.

Of course, some people remained decent. They helped feed the Jews who were given no rations, even hide the hunted. But more and more, as the noose around every neck inexorably tightened, decency became suicide. If you spoke, you died. If you found news not propagandized by the state you died, if you mourned the death of a loved one, you died.

That stuff isn't happening here yet. But it seems ever closer. The noose--that is the consequences of living in a state where foul is fair and fair is foul, where war is not war, where illegal is legal will grow ever more severe. 

If an when amerika is struck, anything less than goose-stepping revenge will be regarded as disloyalty. Doubters will be called traitors. Questions are dissent.

A madman, bound by no morals, following no rules, beholden and checked by no one has spun the world off its axis. 

WH Auden, in his great poem, September 1, 1939--called out the "low dishonest decade." I cannot think of a more brutal an accurate punch in the nose way to sum up the trumphorror. 

Low dishonest...killing.

September 1, 1939

• 
• 
• 
• 

W. H. Auden

1907 –

1973

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire 
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

All we can do is hope to bleiben Sie übrig, stay alive.

Traveling in Place.

Not too many weeks ago, I wrote a piece in this space about the myopia, or the bubble, or the solipsistic cocoon we so often find ourselves in.

In modern advertising, we look at the same commercials, covet the same agencies and awards and seldom get out of our closed-looped world to see how others imbibe. That and the elimination of visiting factories, talking to customers, doing road trips, etc. contributes to making the work we do very in-bred. I don't know if, like the Romanov's in Tsarist Russia is there is a creative equivalency of hemophilia, but that ain't a bad metaphor. In-breeding in real life or in advertising, is bad for the gene pool.

Or as Slim Pickens, playing Major Kong in Stanley Kubrick's all-too-real Dr. Strangelove, said "Stay on the bomb run, boys! I’m gonna get them doors open even if it harelips ever’body on Bear Creek!”

Today, we have a lot of creative harelipping.

My point today, as it is almost every day, is about broadening our horizons--or doing something different and turning things upside down. 

Sameness doesn't deliver stopping power. And stopping power is Part One of any successful advertising work. If no one sees it, I don't care how the fuck well-crafted it is, or that the director used the lenses used at David Lean's nephew's Bar Mitzvah.I don’t even care if it’s dead solid perfect strategically, if no one sees it, it’s plastic sushi. 

The other day, I stumbled upon this item in the New York Times, about "the last living number painter in Naples." You can read the article here. I suppose Mr. De Stefano is being replaced by computer generated comic sans, and the world suffers yet another unkind cut as another breath of life expires.

In the article, they mention that Mr. De Stefano has an Instagram site. Given that Meta (which owns facebook and instagram) are two of the three biggest child-trafficking sites in the world, I closed my accounts about three years ago. I can't. We have to start unaccepting the horrible acceptingness we are forced to accept. We have to be rigid and binary. We have to be "This will not stand." 

I know I have an Old Testament mien, and I don't even have a beard. But I ain’t supporting child rape. I’m funny that way.

My wife, however--no child-trafficker, mind you--is still on both. She sent me much of Mr. De Stefano's art below, so I could post this.

In this vein, and for whatever reason, I ordered a book from abebooks.com last week that arrived at my fuking bucolic doorstep on the Gingham Coast just last night. Just owning a book of Cuban Revolución art will be enough to get me kicked out of the Gingham Coast Uplift Society, but so be it. Besides, I had pecuniary reasons for getting the book. That is, an idea that could make me some money.

Owing to my particular manual ineptitude, whenever I photograph something from a book it comes out all lopsided. That's ok. There are still many things here, lopsided or not, to marvel over. I particularly like the beisbol umpire poster.

My assertion is simple.

You can if you want find a way to see the world from your favorite chair. 

Just try opening your eyes.

A Tear Down.

Looking back on my long life, I might say that the best job, and the best metaphor, I ever had was one of my early ones. 

Back fifty years ago, summer jobs were not easy to get. You had to comb the want ads just about every night when the local paper arrived if you wanted to snag one. If you couldn't get your local paper at your college, you had to wait until you got home for the summer to get a summer job. Usually by that time, only slim pickings were left.

One summer, I think it was my last summer in New York and living with my parents, I got a job helping two brothers who had a rusty Chevrolet pick-up, a metal-bending brake and some small success doing aluminum siding. Aluminum siding was a relatively new idea back in the 70s, and it hadn't yet gained its subsequent tarnished reputation.

As far as manual skills go, I have none. The only thing I can rightfully do with a hammer is bang my thumb, but I was a big strong boy, and when the brothers Frankie and Olindo Nocito saw me, they hired me on the spot for the then staggering sum of $125/week. Cash.

Because I had no skills, and the brothers had no intention of teaching me any, my tasks were confined within a very narrow range. 

We would arrive at the house to be re-sided and the brothers Nocito would leave me a hammer, a crowbar, a ladder and an assortment of large black garbage bags. My job was to remove all the shingles I could off the house. And keep the shingle droppings off of my head and out of the bushes.

If I could strip a house clean by the time the brothers were ready to pick me up at the end of the day, if I collected all the shingly detritus and had it all swept into large garbage bags, the brothers were happy. More often, if I missed a spot--say something up by an eave too high for me to get to with my ladder, I would hear a torrent of Italian curses like an outtake from some movie by Francis Ford Coppola, and only a bit more threatening.

The metaphor here is simple. 

I was a big dumb unskilled kid doing big dumb unskilled work. Ripping shingles off a split-level.

Anything that required skill, taste, experience or artistry, Frankie and Olindo would do. For the "value-add" part of their business,  wasn't even allowed to bend the aluminum. I would cost them more in misshapen metal than I would save them by doing it myself.

The more I see of the so-called AI revolution, at least as it pertains to advertising, the more I see no one buying, selling or promoting the splendors of AI acknowledges how much of a blunt instrument AI is.

AI is great at producing the 765 different rectangles in 8634 different sizes and swapping in a matrix of offers, calls to action and ethnicity of stock photos so clients and their agencies can produce a broad spectrum of ubiquitously annoying ads that no one will ever notice because they have no oomph of stopping power. AI is great at checking off boxes, at saying we have an 300x250 ad for the site "Mayonnaise Today." We'll be able to test four headline variants, six offers and a dozen calls to action. We'll learn so much we can optimize and improve our results from 12 clicks per 100,000 impressions to 12.375/100,000 clicks.

Doing such work has tremendous value. And AI is made for such tasks.

However, I'd doubt that anyone can tell me the difference between a Nissan or a Toyota or a Hyundai or a Kia or a Ford or a Chrysler or a Mazda or a Mitsubishi. Knowing the difference might do more for a brand than knowing well-qualified buyers can lease a new _______ for a little as $599/month.

That sameness applies to nearly every category from Caribbean islands to car insurance to quick serve restaurants to airlines to political candidates. 

In fact, as skilled as the ad industry has become in creating ads that are indistinguishable from any other ad, on the client side, clients are equally skilled at deriving almost identical offers. 

BTW, just as no brand being advertised today has a unique selling proposition, just as no brand being advertised today stands for something or promises, the same holds true for about 99.79-percent of all agencies. They all seem to work at the intersection of verbal flatulence and acid reflux.

AI is great in a world where it's a given that everything 
looks the same
sounds the same
is priced the same
and has the same legal copy.

AI is not great, as I was not great when I was in aluminum siding, at adding value. At differentiating. At getting noticed.

I don't see anyone on either the client or agency side who's really thinking about "using the right tool for the job." 

There's a place for AI, just as there was a place for me as an aluminum sider.

But what smart brands do--find a voice, find their confidence, and articulate what they believe, it might be worthwhile not having a blunt instrument. Instead, working with someone who can help a brand discover its sense of direction and double-down, not on programmatic legerdemain, but on the courage to stand apart from everyone else.

That's the kind of shit you learn from the aluminum siding business.

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.