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.