Boney Tenant.

 

Every once in a while, you read something or stumble across a story that is so profound that you feel obliged to check if it were written by Sophocles or Plutarch. This story here from Wednesday’s “Wall Street Journal” is an example of what I mean. You can read it here.

I was never much of a Tony Bennett fan until 2001 when my father died. Around that time there was New York’s last jazz station broadcasting out of Newark, New Jersey, WBGO. They played an old “V-Disc” recording of Tony Bennett singing one of the saddest songs ever, “St. James Infirmary.” V-Discs were made during World War II or directly after. They were made to be sent to soldiers overseas. Bennett was born in 1926. The war ended in 1945, so he was a young man when he cut the wax. 

When my father died I called the station and they played it for me. Here’s a link to a version. I can't seem to download it. Life today means every time something is improved, it gets worse.

Hearing this was really when I fell in love with Bennett. 

I told a friend of mine about it and she sent me a ten-CD set, that though it had a lot of great music on it, it didn’t have the V-Disc recording. 

The article linked to above on Bennett is one I wish everyone would read. I especially wish the award-jockeys, financiers and accountants that have taken over the ad business would read it.

Not because of Bennett. But because it’s about integrity. Because Bennett is about “To thine own self be true.”

By the early 1970s, to quote the Journal “reinvention seemed to signify relevance….With several No. 1 hits and a Carnegie Hall triumph under his belt…Bennett was already a major star.”

Clive Davis—the legendary executive at Columbia Records said to Bennett, "adapt to contemporary tastes or the label will move on without him."

Davis handed Bennett a list of contemporary rock songs to cover, including Eleanor Rigby and MacArthur Park. Bennett went into the studio and "vomited from the strain of artistic compromise. The resulting album—“Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today!”—remains a musical and commercial debacle."

Why this in a blog on advertising?

Because  who hasn’t been told essentially, "adapt to contemporary tastes or the label will move on without him."

Who hasn’t been told to be digital first, or social first, or :06 first, or Tik-Tok first. Who hasn’t been told it’s not the message, it’s the medium? 

When Ogilvy was still in business and I was still there, I was told by the president and the CCO that Ogilvy was “no longer in the platform business. Clients are no longer buying platforms.”

Oh. 

I’ve been told rational thought is dead.

Information is dead.

Product differentiation is dead.

I’ve been told no one cares about benefits and features.

I’ve been told every tool in the persuasion and selling toolbox is dead.

I’ve been told today’s consumer is so radically different that everything I know and believe in is dead. 

Heaven forfend, if my dog ran away, I’d put up signs with her picture that says “Lost Dog.” The same way people would have in 1926, 1826, 1726 and plain-old 26. 

I wouldn’t plot an influential strategy or do something brand-y that obscured the message. I’d say “Lost Dog,” and have a picture, her name and my phone number.

Has the world really changed that much?

When I’m pitching a piece of business, it feels like I’m hoping to get picked by some baseball team. You have to stand-out to get in.

Here’s where Bennett might have served as an example to an industry still engaged in Ponzi-inflected Seppuku.

The Journal continues:

Bennett’s son Danny became his manager. He felt “The product was fine; only the distribution needed fixing.” Soon Bennet was on late-night television, alternative rock clubs, and eventually on MTV. His album 'MTV Unplugged' won the Grammy album of the year and went platinum. 

Bennett’s story is also a study in brand discipline, though he would never have used the phrase. Instead of gravitating to rock or its offshoots, he preserved the product and trusted that quality would eventually become a competitive advantage….

In a marketplace saturated with manufactured novelty, that made him rare.

Bennett spent seven decades betting that a superb song, sung with conviction, would outlast every fashion built to bury it…. 

His real innovation was patience—an asset that never depreciates.

I like the line above, a superb song, sung with conviction, would outlast every fashion built to bury it.

You can cross out the word song and substitute “headline,” or “joke,” or “essay,” or “drawing,” or “blueberry cobbler.” There’s a lot of money to be made in riding to FOMO Ferrari, in convincing clients and customers and everyone else within spitting distance that the world has changed irrevocably, and we better get with the latest trend.

In fact, I’d suggest that’s why everyone and his sister are accepting the sloppiness of AI. Forget its dearth of verve and originality, it’s cheap and everywhere.

I’d suggest that “superb” work is not based on trends. And conviction—by definition—can’t be faked. Real feelings and real emotions expressed with integrity is what the industry should once again be about. That’s why, almost seven years since being kicked to the curb by Ogilvy/WPP, they’ve lost 80% of their value and I’ve gained 80% more wherewithal.

I suppose it’s weird to flit from Tony Bennett to William Faulkner—but they’re both people who stuck to their knitting. You wouldn’t find Faulkner partnering with James Patterson or co-writing the Yoknapatawpha cookbook with Martha Stewart or some other atrocity. 

Faulkner concluded his Nobel Prize Acceptance speech with these words. I don’t expect you to read them as often as I do. But try to read them once in a while.

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. 

The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. 

The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Trends are fine. You can make haste quickly with them. But to build something that lasts, you don’t merely chase after trends.

You endure. You consistent. You do you. You prevail. 

 

Worms Matter.

Words matter, about 2,000 pundits a day pompousicate on LinkedIn.

Words matter, says every client in every meeting.

Words matter, say hack-assed creative directors, without every bothering to read the words.

Words matter, as another billboard goes up that hasn’t a soupçon of stopping power, charm or wit.

Or even coherence.

Words matter.

And then we bring on legions of machines that don’t understand words, but merely select them based on a set-of-pattern-matching probabilities that are most likely to give you a set of words that look just like a set of words you saw not long ago.

Words matter.

But not enough so that we select them carefully.

Most of what we read and hear and say has the originality of an in-flight ad for a credit card offering points. You can’t walk out on a plane. But no one can bear to listen.

In fact machines don’t understand words—they don’t think after all—they just predict which one should come next. It’s like looking at Muybridge stills to learn how a horse gallops. 

There’s a lot you can, or a machine can, infer from the above. But as Angus Fletcher points out in his book “Primal Intelligence,” (I’m quoting from the Wall Street Journal review you can read here)

AI can steal datasets from stories and recycle them into plots but, Mr. Fletcher is keen to remind us, the computer is still not reading the story. We are.

We are the ones taking the word scrambles and lacing meaning into them. Mr. Fletcher uses moving pictures to drive the point home: If you ask AI to generate an image of a running horse, it will do so with bits and bytes of data, still images that it pushes together for us to view. 

It’s our brain that sees the horse run; we write action and story over bald data. 

 

The subhead of the WSJ review of Primal Intelligence is something the propagators of trillionaire-backed AIs are hopeful that we’ll ignore or forget. 

In other words, while AI can spit out words, it takes human understanding to select the right ones. Man’s search for meaning is not algorithmically based.

Here’s an example from “1929,” Andrew Ross Sorkin’s great book on “the greatest crash in Wall Street History,” at least until the trump dump, which is (my guess) coming soon.

Until Herbert Hoover, the periodic collapses experienced by the amerikan economy were typically called “panics.” We had:

The Panic of 1837.

The Panic of 1857.

The Panic of 1873.

The Panic of 1893.

The Panic of 1907.

The Panic of 1920.

Hoover was scared that using the word “Panic” would create a panic.

So, though while the NY Stock Market lost 25% of its value in just one day, though unemployment rose to one-person-in-four out of work and industrial output fell by half, Hoover didn’t want people to panic.

Hoover chose to use the word Depression.

Depression.

Here’s Sorkin:

And that didn’t quite work out.

Words matter.

Even more, so does thinking. Which machines cannot do. sam altman’s purported singularity or “super-intelligence” are just marketing hype. 

We’re 30 years into the cellphone era, and about 70% of calls drop and about 2% of people understand their bills. We’re five years into the bot era and we can’t get a problem solved. And merry-izing the tone of voice and employing human-like interjections don’t fool anyone but the bought and paid for.

It’s the South Sea bubble.

The Tulip bubble.

The Credit Mobilier bubble.

It’s the 1929 Market.

Ponzi-flated for the benefit of a dozen men. 

A dozen men constantly raising more money.

Marketing-hype designed to separate the gullible from their money.

It’s all as real as the word Intelligence in Artificial Intelligence.

Going back to the Journal’s review of Primal Intelligence:

Having defined intelligence as “logic,” we’ve inadvertently turned education into endless data mining. 

Logic, reduced to its basics, is math—it’s a formula that operates only when there is data to plug in. That’s the whole mechanism behind algorithms and computer science. 

We’ve become so accustomed to thinking of logic as the primary good that we miss the obvious problem: Data, by its definition, is information that is known. It already exists. 

You can mix and recycle to make new tweaks, but it cannot lead to innovation—and it can’t tell you what to do when the future is unknown.

We’re using the wrong tools for the wrong job, getting the wrong results, and concluding there’s a 2.0 that will ameliorate that. 

There’s a word for that kind of thinking.

But this is a family blog.

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.