Crashes.

I finished late last night during another losing battle with Dame Insomnia, Andrew Ross Sorkin's great book you-should-drop-everything and read, "1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation." You can order it here for $12.52, with free shipping.

If you order this book, or any book for that matter, you'll likely have it delivered in plastic packaging. The packaging will be packaged with ads. It's not enough for people to sell you a book and leave it at that. They have to maximize your life-time value and throw ads at you.

Now, you might wonder, what does Andrew Ross Sorkin's "1929" have to do with any of this? One is a book about the speculative ginning up and money grab of the stock-market nearly a century ago. The other is about used books I buy from abebooks.com because I like a bargain and don't mind buying used.

That's easy.

Last night, I read this bit, which confirmed a story about the depression I had always assumed was apocryphal. 

After a week "in the world," back in my New York City apartment, I returned Saturday to our Gingham Coast house made of straw. Waiting for me were about seven small bundles of incidental books I had ordered that had arrived during my absence. Each of these books was wrapped in plastic and each plastic envelope was stuffed with ads of the "penny-saver" ilk. Truly junk.

The burial insurance ad above is representative of them. It was 'art-directed' to look like a quasi-official document like a state-issued license or deed. You can get great used books cheaply--and that's a blessing. But like everything today, you'll also be inundated immediately with garbage. Dumb, gross, insensitive and aggressive. Also, about 98% of these ads treat you like you're an idiot--that you'll be fooled by the faux "check" they're mailing you.

Go to a website once. Spam for life ensues. And of course my "free" gmail box gets into the act, with more and more lies that are masquerading as email from brands that, you'd think would do their best to protect themselves from these obvious scams that are trading on their "good" names.

I do no business with CapitalOne, which seems to me a bank only slightly less upstanding than the neighborhood loan shark. They're slightly to the unethical side in a Wells-Fargo-ing way. 

And the likelihood of Tiffany giving me a "complimentary" something-or-other "crafted for this moment" (whatever that means) is about the same as tump presenting a fair, affordable, color-blind and helpful healthcare-for-all plan.

Even my Kindle, which cost me nearly $200 after I paid for the protective cover--and who charge through the nose for access to badly laid-out books that aren't really "optimized" for digital reading, gives me an ad every time I "wake" it up. Even though amazon's trillionaire owner pays a smaller percentage in taxes than I do, he feels its within his rights to inundate me with more stupid ads I don't want, ostensibly so he can make more income he pays no tax on.

The point in all this is that like stock market tips and speculation almost a century ago, or the AI-market today, advertising inundation is out of control. The plethora of ads diminishes the value of each one until they are as plentiful and useful as flies around a dead carcass in the Sahara. They annoy. They make you hate. Not want.

The inundation reminds me of Joseph Kennedy's stock tips. There's too much. Coming from everywhere. With no buffer. No respect. No restraint.

The great money grab--where advertising went from six-minutes of commercials per hour to 25 per hour (not counting logos on uniforms, on playing fields, on the referees, on the chyron) has chased people away. The paying to watch three times is even worse.

Once your monthly access fee.
Once with your time.
Once for a streaming service
is all a form of abuse.

It's no wonder more and more consumers are post consumer, ie. they ignore all.

It reminds me of clients who ask for bits of the copy to be bold. Then another bit. Then another. Then another.

Before long the whole thing is bold. So nothing is.

This is the state of advertising today.

As Spencer Tracy says to Ernest Borgnine at about 2:40 in the above clip, "You're not only wrong, you're wrong at the top of your voice."

That's us. Wrong and wrong at the top of our voice.

Bob Levenson wrote in DDB's famous "Do This or Die" ad sixty years ago: "No donkey chases the carrot forever. He catches on. And quits."

The world has quit advertising. Advertising has quit serving.

And the holding companies are bigger asses than asses.