Meanwhile, back at the Holding Company...

I've spent my life in the advertising industry. It's paid for my two homes, my kids' college and grad school educations, my dog's extensive wardrobe and my 1966 Simca 1500 with a broken heater and loose muffler.

In an effort to save Holding Companies the time and money involved in firing people, I've created the "Fiero. The World's First Firing Bot."

... Welcome to the Fiero... 

The World's First Firing Bot

Fiero:          

Hi, how are you today. I'm Fiero,

the world's first automatic Firing Bot.

How can I help you today?

Victim:        

What's this about? 

Fiero? 

You just popped up on my screen.

Fiero:          

... THINKING THINKING THINKING

Victim:        

Fiero, are you there?

Fiero:          

Hi, how are you today. I'm Fiero,
the world's first automatic Firing Bot.

How can I help you today?

Victim:        
You contacted me.

Fiero:          

....Yes.

Fiero:          
... THINKING THINKING THINKING

Fiero:           
You are being fired today.

Fiero:           

Your last full day of employment will be

three weeks ago yesterday.

Victim:         
What do you mean I'm being fired?

I'm scheduled to shoot a spot next week.

Fiero:          

... THINKING THINKING THINKING

Fiero:          
Hi, how are you today. I'm Fiero,
the world's first automatic Firing Bot.

How can I help you today?

Victim:        

You just said I was fired.

Fiero:          

Your last full day of employment will be

three weeks ago yesterday.

Press 1, if you've been made redundant based on    

a reevaluation of the changing client needs.

Press 2, if you hearken back to the '80s.

Press 3, if your agency is undergoing strategic
reassessment based on the shifting media landscape.

Press 4, if your Holding Company is hemorrhaging money

due to severe mismanagement bordering on thievery.

Press 5, if you'd like to repeat these options.

Victim:        
What kind of severance do I get?

I've worked 40 weekends this year

and worked here for 12 years.

Fiero:          

Hi, how are you today. I'm Fiero,
the world's first automatic Firing Bot.

How can I help you today?

Fiero:          

Your last full day of employment will be

three weeks ago yesterday.

Victim:

What is going on?

Fiero:      

Press 1, if you'd like a box to put your things in.

Press 2, if you'd like to settle Aeron-chair rental fees.

Press 3, if you'd like an envelope to put your things in.

Press 4, if you'd like to be switched to our

Empathy and Consolation bot.

Press 5, to repeat these options.

Victim:        

This is crazy. I just ran into Liz the CEO!

She told me what a great job I was doing.

I had dinner with the client last night.

Fiero:          
Hi, how are you today. I'm Fiero,
the world's first automatic Firing Bot.

How can I help you today?

Victim:        

I've put in 12 years here. Nights, weekends,

canceled vacations. I'm winning awards.

My account is making money. Is there no one

to talk to?

Fiero:         
... THINKING THINKING THINKING

Victim:        
What about my severance?

Fiero:         
While the Sever-O-Matic is preparing your package,

Press 1, if you'd like easy-listening music.

Press 2, if you'd like the contemporary sounds of smooth jazz.

Press 3, if you'd like to hear the latest CEO investor call.

Victim:       
Sever-O-Matic?

Isn't there anyone I can talk to?

Fiero:          
Hi, how are you today. I'm Fiero,
the world's first automatic Firing Bot.

How can I help you today?

         

                 

A tale of three magic markers.

Back when I was a puppy in the business, almost forty years ago, I worked for two Hall-of-Famers who were among the brightest stars in the Doyle Dane Bernbach constellation. Go through a 1960s era award book, and you'll see literally hundreds of ads attributed to Ron Rosenfeld, at the time the youngest writer inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame, and Len Sirowitz, the art director of many of my favorite ads.

Ron and Len were not much interested, by the time I worked for them, in great advertising. But they were interested in making money. In fact, they were one of the first agencies to abandon the high-rents of midtown Manhattan and move their offices to the then no-man's land of lower Fifth Avenue.

Their offices occupied an entire floor of the old Arnold Constable department store building. It ran from 18th to 19th Street and from Fifth Avenue to Broadway. More than thirty years later, they are still the most-beautiful offices I ever had the displeasure of sitting in. With 13-foot ceilings, old cast-iron Corinthian columns and light streaming in from the windows and skylights.

Even back then, I was an ornery son-of-a-gun, and most places I worked would find a room for me far away from the rest of the inmates. They didn't want whatever diseases and toxins I was harboring to spill-over the walls and seep into other offices. In other words, I had an office at the very end of the hallway, back by the freight elevator and a storage room dusty with old veloxes.

There was only one office back where I was and it was kept empty as an act of grace by Ron and Len. If one of their less-successful old friends from the old days needed a place to work, or a place to hang out, or a place to take a meeting, or to decamp for a few days, this space, next to mine would be made available. 

In that way, I would occasionally spend a week or a month sitting next to a 55-year-old ad legend, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip, shirt untucked, bursting with stories about the way life used to be. Late at night when the rest of the agency had gone home or had gone to the city's seamier sides, I would sit with these guys and say things like, "What was Bill Taubin really like?" Or "Tell me about Phyllis Robinson."

One night, it was very late, the office was dark except for the Tensor lamp I had shining on my Smith-Corona word-processor. I heard a noise coming from the next office--the one that housed temporarily the legends from the past.

I walked over to say hi. To shoot the shit.

"George," sit down, the old art-director rasped.

I found a chair that was not a cheap knock-off of a Marcel Breuer.

He stared off through the louvered blinds and began.

"One night, a night late like this, I was sitting in my office alone. Through the haze of cigarette smoke, I saw a phantom standing in the doorway. I brushed the smoke from the day's thousand Chesterfield's away, hoping the apparition would dissipate with the tobacco fog, but it did not. In fact, it intensified into focus."

"An apparition," I said dumbly.

"OK, a spirit, a haunt, a spook."

"Today we call them account people."

That evinced no laughter and my neighbor continued. 

"The spook came over to me. He held up his hand--a bony, Ichabod Crane paw. It was holding three identical Magic Markers."

"Choose one," the spook said.

"They are all the same," I answered, "how do I choose?"

The ghost was hovering now. Its form was pulsating as if it were breathing.

"They are not the same. He held one up. This is the Magic Marker of Beauty."

"Beauty?"

"With it, to your side will come the most beautiful woman in all the world. She will be taken in by your talent and will love you with a love that has never been loved."

At once, he told me, the apparition changed from an amorphous, ghostly figure to living, pulsing flesh. It became the very image of godly beauty. Botticelli's Venus crossed with Rider Haggard's Ayesha with a soupcon of Marilyn thrown in.

"She beckoned me closer. But then as I was about to embrace her she vaporized. The apparition returned and offered me the second marker. 

"Now the shape changed to look stern and austere--roughly like a ghostly Helmut Krone, if that's not redundant. 'The second marker,' the apparition said, 'is the power of art direction. With it you will win one-hundred awards, one-thousand. Ads like Think Small, will be consigned to the classified pages.

"Then that shape disappeared and a third showed up. A bearded, distracted old man. He handed me the third marker. 

"He said, 'This is the marker of wisdom. When you hold it you will think strategically. You will know how to out-fox your clients' competitors. You will know how to communicate with clarity and impact. You will know how to have the strength, not to win riches for yourself or acclaim for your work, but how to achieve things for your clients and your agency. How to make them powerful and important to consumers. You will see all that, with the marker of wisdom.'"

The old man reached into a lower drawer and poured himself in a small dusty glass a shot of Chivas. He filled another dusty glass for me.

"The apparition returned now in its original form. 'Which do you choose?' I was 25, George, a young man in the business. I was sweating and afraid. I thought of the woman, of the beauty, of the pleasure she would bring me, of eternal love and bliss and more. I chose the first marker."

"The marker of beauty."

"Yes," he said solemnly.

"And what happened."

"The woman of beauty, of pleasure, of desire, perfection and lust was a Creative Director's wife. She left him for me. She came to me. She transported me.

"But I was hated. I became a pariah in the industry. I had some years with her. But..."

"Like all things, beauty fades."

"Awards turn too to dust."

"Yes," I agreed. 

"But...the third marker," he said. "The third marker."

"Wisdom."

"That one ran dry years ago."

Like an apparition, he disappeared. 

And I did too. 

Down the freight elevator and into the night.

An ode to light. Told by darkness.

I stumbled upon a line by Oscar Wilde the other day that for no apparent reason made me think of advertising as it is practiced in our current advertising "Dark Ages."

Somehow, and for whatever reason, it seems that the entire industry--which includes client-side marketing people--have convinced themselves that the viewing/reading/clicking public has the collective intelligence of a barn-swallow. One that was recently dealt a severe blow to the cranium and has been rendered essentially senseless.

We have basically convinced ourselves that nothing is important except (maybe) a moderately-attractive-looking piece of film, a callow folk singer singing a song writ three-decades before she was born, sinuous twenty-somethings dancing, and some sort of grandiose declaiming. We have forgotten the verities of advertising that existed since advertising began--way back in Sumer, Mesopotamia, some 6,000 years ago.

If you have a camel to sell, write "Can go four days without water." Or "Extra eyelid to keep out sand." 

People want to know things about what they're buying.
They want to know why what they're buying is better.
They want to know what they're buying actually does.

They also want to feel those things that humans have always cherished in interpersonal relationships. 

People want to feel they're special.
People want to feel they're cared for.
People want to feel they've made a smart decision.
They want to feel heard and respected.
Not shouted at or lied to.

Advertising, at its best, used to convey all that. We didn't go into every assignment saying:

People don't care.
People don't read.
Every product is the same.
No one believes anything.
The only thing they care about is being cool.

In fact, to be obdurate, I'd argue, 

It's our job to make people care.
It's our job to create things people want to read/watch.
It's our job to find product differences.
It's our job to find and propagate and communicate truth.

The Oscar Wilde line I found was this: "I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement."

Today's prevailing and all-too-frequently used advertising equivalent is this: "I must decline to do something good owing to the fact that no one cares."

Just now I came upon this spot by the German agency Jung Von Matt. "Agency Spy," usually so snarky, was fulsome in their praise of Jung Von Matt's commercial drivel.

"Hyundai is utilizing some slick camera work and editing to highlight its new Tuscon SUV. Its latest ad, created by German agency Jung Von Matt Neckar, showcases the SUV in various driving conditions—on picturesque desert roads, modern cityscapes, nighttime vistas—in vivid color and jaw-dropping cinematography. Sure, the car might be secondary in the film, but it’s a minute well spent for your eyes."

This is advertising criticism 2021 style. There wasn't a single unique shot or idea in the minute. And frankly, a disquisition on "light" is hardly the means to sell anyone a car, except maybe a photon. 

Besides, I'm pretty sure no brand can make a case for being the brand that "owns" light. And copy that says things like, "Light can turn a shadow bright," well, that's copy on the order of this: "Air. It's what we breathe. Through our mouths. And our nostrils. It sustains us. It gives us life. And it's what surrounds, embraces and holds the new Hyundai Snotrag. Air. Three letters that mean so much."

I look at that expensive monstrosity and it makes me hate Hyundai, the actors, the agency and additionally the industry. The spot is so chock full of cliches, it actually sullies everything around it. It is a blight of light brains and unthinking creativity. It told me nothing I didn't know and certainly nothing relevant to me.

And I can hear all the praise and back-slapping and corks-popping and self-congratulations echoing through Jung Von Welcome Mat.

I've always looked to the VW ad below--not an especially famous one--as an example of great advertising. It made me like the brand. It made me want to know the brand. And it makes me want to be one of the people who drove the brand's product.

There's not an ounce of bs, pretense of cliche. Solid and useful information. With warmth and wit.

And I'm not going to discuss this any longer, even if you want me to. I have a subsequent engagement.

More philosophical reckonings.

If you want to scare the shit out of yourself, and there's no better way to improve or maintain your cardio-vascular health than a good bout of apoplexy, you'd be well-served reading Nicole Perlroth's new book, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race. You can read the review in "The New York Times" here.

Through the years, especially those years when I was working on one-time tech behemoth, IBM, I've read quite a bit on security. All of it's been frightening. 

You get the sense that you're on a hyper-loop roller-coaster through hell, run by a coked-up eric trump and rudy guiliani's cut the brakes because william barr and the federalist society agreed that was the originalist interpretation of safety as aborted by amy coney barret in a see-through apron. That said, Ms. Perlroth's book was by far the most-detailed, most-comprehensive, most-damning of the trump-putin cabal and the most-frightening.

There's not much you as a person can do to escape the peril we all live in. Virtually everything we come into contact with is connected to the web and the web has more viruses and infections than donald trump's paid-girl-friends and mar-a-lago's unpaid-staff.

If you have a computer, you're screwed.
If you have an ATM card, you're screwed.
If you use the internet, you're screwed.
If you have online financial accounts, you're screwed.
If you're connected to the electrical grid, you're screwed.
If you're connected to the water supply, you're screwed.
If you travel by car, bus, train or plane, you're screwed.
If you need a hospital, you're screwed.
If you live near a dam or nuclear plant, you're screwed.
If you own stocks, you're screwed.
If you're paid electronically, you're screwed.

That's just for starters.

Part of our screwiness comes from modern technology thinking as encapsulated by the world's most dangerous dweeb, mark zuckerberg.

He famously mouth-farted "move fast and break things."

That absolute anti-human anti-safety anti-earth mentality has been regarded as prevailing wisdom in the world for about the last twenty years. I've even heard it in agency creative meetings and media presentations.

The idea is to get places fast, the devil take the hindmost, and somebody else (usually lowly tax-payers or everyday workers will be left to clean up the toxic detritus.) General Electric, for instance, moved fast and broke things. Like the entire Hudson River, which will be sullied by carcinogens forever and a day. 

It's not hard to think of close-by Holding Company examples who destroyed every great agency they came into contact with from Abbott Mead Vickers and Ally and Ammirati all the way practically to the Zs, with Young and Rubicam, now an unholy mess of initials that resembles mange on the skin of a neglected dog.

Most things, businesses, ideas, relationships even meals aren't about moving fast and breaking things. Sure serendipity happens and old, ossified business practices are good for no one. But woven within "move fast and break things" is Oscar Wilde's definition of a cynic: "a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

zuckerberg's mantra, taken up by others, was all about market- first mover and not at all about security or privacy. The holding company interpretation is about doing something fast, cheap and "always-on" for clients, without delivering long-term value.

By the end of Perlroth's book, she, unfortunately, offers no solution to the security problems created by zuckerbergism. I've read all about lattice-cryptography and quantum-derived passwords. They'll give you a glimmer of optimism like the first taste of cotton candy. They melt away just as quickly. 

In other words, if they stop Putin, or the Iranians, or the Israelis, or anyone else, it will only be a short time before the USA (NSA/CIA and others) use such defenses offensively and our weapons are discovered, decoded and used against us by others. This is what's happened with just about every weapon system ever developed from rocks to trump's space-farce cosmic flatulence.

Perlroth did however note this. Near Facebook's headquarters (where they quarter people's sense of ethics in exchange for mammon) someone had graffitied, "move fast and break things."

Some Molotov-throwing rebel graffitied the graffiti, writing "Move slowly and fix your shit."

For all things large and small, business and advertising, micro and macro, those ain't bad words to live by.

Advice for living. From the dead.

One way of assessing what kind of effect I've had on the universe happens when someone I know--and even love--knocks me in the head, or sends me a text, or mumbles in my direction and says, "Did you read so and so's obituary?"

I was born into an admiration of death-notices--and at the near-constant behest of my sporadically-energetic father--often had one ripped out of the morning Times and insistently placed in front of me.

I was just trying to eat a piece of toast. I often ended up with a life-lesson.

The Times does an amazing job with their obituaries. They cover all creatures great and small. They have their lives condensed and intensified--80 years or so turned into a two-minute read. Their life story is theirs, their successes and set-backs, and more often than not, a joke, a story, a lesson that enriches your life.

The fact is, I have become, over my many years, something of an obituary connoisseur. I've read whole books of them--reading the Economist's obituary on John Maynard Keynes, or The Times of London's account of Winston Churchill, or closer to home and less political, the New York Times' recent obituary of David Mintz, the man who invented Tofutti non-dairy ice-cream.

While there are many who decry my love for obituaries and see it as evidence of my lugubrious and dour mien, all I can say is an old New York-ism: "Don't knock it till you've tried it."

I can also recommend the greatest one-volume collection of quirky obituaries ever compiled, "52 McGs: The Best Obituaries from Legendary New York Times Reporter Robert McG. Thomas." 

If you buy this slim book and don't get handed a laugh or ten, I'll refund your money. Assuming you can find me.

Last week, important in ad circles, The New York Times ran the obituary of legendary headhunter Judy Wald. Wald's selling ability might have led to the rise of the primacy of creatives in the ad industry--at least before the entire industry was subsumed by petty CPAs and cost-cutting Holding Companies. You can read the Times' obituary here. 

Here's one anecdote from the Times that might just indicate how comparatively impecunious the agency business has become. [Wald] "loved to tell the tale of how she had once collected a fee for moving an executive from one job to another within the same agency.

“I wasn’t about to give any freebies,” she told New York magazine.

However, what prompted today's post was my wife, Laura. I had read the Times' obit last week when it came out. But she pours over the Weekend Wall Street Journal (arguably the best newspaper in the world if you can ignore the fascist opinion pages) like Champollion de-coding the Rosetta Stone.

"Did you read the Journal's obituary of Judy Wald," she lovingly asked me.

"No, I read the Times'. It was good."

"Read it," she demanded. She was, in that two-word sentence, more Lavrenti Beria than the woman I married, so I complied within about four seconds.

To be honest, I was a little pissed. I had been in the middle of something, and the Journal retread a lot of the same ground the Times had covered. Then I got to the obituary's crescendo, neatly tucked where it belongs, in its last line. 

"In her interview with New York magazine, Ms. Wald summed up her philosophy this way: 'Love many; trust few; always paddle your own canoe.'”

We live today, it seems to me, in an elder-less universe. Wisdom--and the experience of living--is most-often subordinated to the splendor of the photograph of the grilled scallop you've uploaded or a badly shot short-film of a random person dancing or something equally banal.

One of the reasons--perhaps the main one--I read obituaries is that they contain the wisdom of the ages--often from the mouths and minds of those who have had long and illustrious lives and are asked to reflect. 

A good reporter knows how to listen to those reflections and, with skill, can turn them in the epigrams that in some cases would not be out of place among the 147 maxims attributed to the Oracle of Delphi.

I've highlighted two of these pearls above. I'll put them here again. Because I think they're that good. My guess is, if you follow them--as the Ithakans followed their Oracle, you'll probably have not just a better career, but a better life, too.

“I wasn’t about to give any freebies.”

“Love many; trust few; always paddle your own canoe.”

A Friday One-Act play.

WE OPEN ON THE LAVISH EXECUTIVE OFFICES OF A MID-TOWN AD AGENCY. WAGSTAFF, THE CEO IS SITTING BEHIND A MAHOGANY DESK ROUGHLY THE SIZE OF THE LUSITANIA. BAGLEY, A 30-SOMETHING ACCOUNT GUY CREEPS TIMIDLY UP TO WAGSTAFF'S IMPOSING DESK.

Bagley: You wanted to see me, sir?

Wagstaff: [HE BARELY ACKNOWLEDGES BAGLEY'S PRESENCE. AFTER TOO MUCH TIME, WAGSTAFF LOOKS UP.] Buckley! 

Bagley: It's Bagley, sir.

Wagstaff: What kind of ridiculous name is BagleySir, Buckley? We've got a problem.

Bagley: [STAMMERING] A p p problem, sir?

Wagstaff: Yes, Banfield. A big problem.

Bagley: Sir--

Wagstaff: Bixley, I put you in charge of the agency's digital transformation efforts.

Bagley: Yes, you did, sir. And I thank you for that vote of confidence in me. I've been blowing the midnight wind-turbine on digital transformation.

Wagstaff: Blowing the midnight wind-turbine? What in tarnation are you talking about? 

Bagley: Well, sir, we're completely sustainable here. We're reducing our carbon footprint and...

Wagstaff: Confound it, Bushwack, don't keep jabbering till Hoboken freezes over. What is it?

Bagley: It's just that 'burning the midnight oil is so petro-chemical-based' I changed the metaphor to 'blowing the midnight wind-turbine.'

Wagstaff: Well, yes, whatever. But that's not why I called you in here, Billingham. I put you in charge of digital transformation, did I not?

Bagley: Yessir, you did. 

Wagstaff: Then you, Buttbottom, you're the one responsible for leaving the digital transformer on all last night. Do you know what our electricity costs were last month?! 

The boys from the Holding Company are up my keister like deer-tick gnawing on a cocker spaniel's ass.

Don't you know, Barojas, we operate on razor-thin margins here at Wagstaff, Staffwag and Nostaff?

Bagley: Oh Mr. Wagstaff, sir, the Digital Transformatron, McKinsey Model Six Million never shuts down, sir. It's constantly transforming our digitals.

Wagstaff: Transforming? All our digitals?

Bagley: That's right, sir. The Digital Transformatron, McKinsey Model Six Million, is state-of-the-art best-of-breed thought-leadering digital transformationing.

Wagstaff: Billabong! You're a genius. I'm making you, I'm making you, I'm making you....

Bagley: [EAGERLY] Yes, sir...

Wagstaff: I'm making you a senior unpaid intern!

THE SET GOES DARK. AND THE CURTAIN FALLS.

EXEUNT

I wonder what would happen. If...

About twice a month I run across a site or an article or a something that absolutely slays me.

In the past when this happened, I'd come to work fairly popping out of my skin. I couldn't wait to share what I had found with my work neighbors, friends and colleagues.

Of course, that neighborliness phenomenon is all gone now. First, I no longer work in an office. Second, no one else does, either.

Yet, one of the few things that make life bearable--and even
fun--is sharing. Sharing ideas. Sharing what you've found. Sharing sparks on our collective human kindling.

To compensate for our lack of community, when the Plague began, I started sending to about seventy friends an email I called "Cool Things for Cool People." 

Though we are all atomized today, I wanted something for us all to share, pass-along, enjoy and learn from. I think that was the original idea behind us all sitting out in the open. That we'd talk and exchange ideas and laugh and learn. 

Not that we'd all sit staring at flickering screens with blather-canceling headphones blocking out everything that we're supposed to be able to let in.

Ergo, my list.

But my emails aren't the point today.

As I sent out my note at 6:30 yesterday morning, I realized I had one Agency CEO on my list. 

Only one.

Yes, he happened to come from a creative background.

But only one.

That's Rob Schwartz. CEO of TBWA\\Chiat\Day NY and a friend and some-time colleague. 

I sent Rob a note about the post. I asked him if I could use his name. Self-important people--ie wastes of protoplasm, hide behind their illusions of importance and take days to respond to emails--if they respond at all. It gives them a misplaced and inflated sense of power. 

Good people respond right-away. No one's so busy that they have the right to stop being human and polite. (As an aside, America's most-famous book editor, Robert Gottleib always reads manuscripts the day he gets them. He has enough empathy to know the writer's soul and to know that hearing back matters.)

In any event, Rob wrote back in about 12 minutes. A little slow for him.

His counsel is as good as you're going to get in any day and age. Here's what Rob wrote:

"I have a deep vein of thinking on this. 

"CEOs need to be product-lovers. Like Enzo Ferrari. Quincy Jones. Anita Roddick. 

"We had this in advertising. Look no further than Bernbach. Or Mary Wells. 

"What about at the holding company level? Bruce Crawford of Omnicom was a creative. That was a good start.

"Closer to home for me...the W of TBWA, Uli Weissendanger was a writer. As was Jay Chiat and Guy Day. (Both ran the agency.) Bob Kuperman was an Art Director before he became president of LA and ultimately, North America.

"Product people who love the product. And then orient the enterprise to produce it and produce it well.

"That’s the way it should be." 

I know a lot of CEOs in the business. But I don't include them on my periodic emails because in my stern judgment, passion for creativity (not just "culture" or trends) doesn't extend, generally speaking, to them.

In fact, I'm not sure there are many in that rarefied suite even know any creatives--real doing creatives, not creatificators. I don't think there are that many in the C-suite where creativity is seen as a unique differentiator. I think it was Bernbach who called creativity "the last legal competitive advantage."

I'm not talking Chief Creative Officers here. I send my e to a gaggle or two of them.

I'm talking about CEOs, specifically. 

The people who should be passionate about the business. 

And, sorry lovers of content, analytics, data, technology, finance, programmatic, strategy, optimization and more. This business doesn't just include creativity. In fact, it should be centered on creativity.

If you're a CEO reading this--or, more likely, a CEO having one of your minions reading it to you because 'it's a lot of words,' send me a note. My email isn't hard to find.

Write to me, show me, prove to me you give a shit about creativity. Tell me your favorite VW ad. Your favorite commercial. Your favorite line of copy. Or headline. Or photographer. Or illustrator. Or art.

If there are enough of you who convince me, I'll add you to my list. I'll also write a blog post called "CEOs that believe in Creativity." And I'll include something about you in the post. 

This post will probably never get written. I don't think there are enough CEOs that care. Certainly not enough at the Holding Company stratosphere.

But consider this:

At the bottom of Rob's emails, there's always some text under his name and title, almost as an afterthought. Something most CEOs would crave, but few actually help earn. 

The type is small but important. It reads:

An AdAge A-List Agency

Back\\2\\Back

2019\\2020

Spinning.

One of the strangenesses of life, especially modern, up-scale, type-A people's lives, is how much can seem decided for you by forces that go beyond your corpuscles.

So many of us seem to have everything plotted out for us. We go to such and such a school. We enter such and such a graduate program. We find jobs with the right firms. And we work toward the raises we're supposed to get. The jobs we're supposed to jump to. Awards we're supposed to win. Asses we're supposed to kiss. And so on.

Many people, as they make their way or lurch their way through life, hit these markers like a well-trained marathoner, ticking off the miles and the water stops, and the landmarks on the course. They're there to let people know they're moving along--hitting their marks.

I don't find it at all unusual when I hear people say, "my calendar didn't synch." However, it almost always strikes my cranium the wrong way. Nothing to do with synchronization. More to do with  someone or something sinking. Like a spiritual Andrea Doria. 

It seems, too often, that there's a certain sense of horrid predestination in our professional lives. That's a round-about way of pointing out how trapped I think so many of us are. It's almost, without sounding sci-fi about, it as if we are subject to forces beyond our control. Forces that tell us what to do and when and we're trapped by some cosmic plan we never even had the chance to opt-out of.

Of course, I was as trapped, or more, than anyone. I'd been working in the agency business for 37 years when I was tossed out on my 'not inconsiderable obliquity.' My well-established course got land-mined, then nuked, then sprayed with small-arms fire, just to make sure no one was left alive.

Or as Dashiel Hammet wrote in the most important part of "The Maltese Falcon,"

And that's what's weird about all this. Life. The agency business. Getting tossed out on your keister at the age of 62. That's essentially having a beam fall from a skyscraper and strike you. 

You've spent your life sensibly ordering your affairs. Only to find out that the ordering of them got you out of step with the randomness of the universe. 

By ordering my life around a predictable paycheck, predictable assignments and predictable predictability, I was pretending that life and the ad industry wasn't as subject to falling beams as it is.

I should have left Ogilvy before they left me. I should have known the beam was falling--god knows, I'd been seeing and hearing it for years. But I said, 'nah. I'll be ok.'

So I was booted out.

Booted out into a chaotic covid universe.

And you know what?

It's fucking great.

I'm working my ass off with the best people I've ever worked with. With the best clients too. Giving me weird things to do, because they recognize the weirdness in me--and my weird set of talents, ambitions, abilities, and humor.

We laugh, my associates and I. 

And there's no one to scowl or wag a stern finger or say, "quiet," because there's some unappreciative, low-margin client in 11A making the 17th-round of changes on a 728x90 banner that will run in a Estonian-language trade-magazine.

There's no petty bureaucrat giving you a 29-digit timecode and telling you you're over or under hours and you're about to be locked out.. 

There's no one--hahahahahahahaha--telling you YOU'RE OWNED. Like the slave you've been made.

My head came off when I was fired and my brains looked like spin-art done by someone with, god forbid, Parkinson's. It still does some days.

But that's fine. And good. And fucking normal.

Spin-art your head.

Spin-art your goals.

Spin-art your career path.

Maybe spinning counteracts the 1100 miles per hour rotation of the earth as we make our way around our dying sun. 

Maybe rather than knocking you off your equilibrium, spinning puts you instead in balance.

Spinning.

It's life. 

My friend, Minnie Minoso, and me.

One of my baseball heroes was "The Cuban Comet," Orestes "Minnie" Minoso.

Part of my affection comes from having met Mr. Minoso. When I was 20, I was a clerk in a downtown Chicago liquor store called Bragnos, right on Rush Street--right across from a bar/brothel. 

Minoso was a sales rep for Old Style beer, which at the time--before everything in American got consolidated, monopolized and blanderized--was the largest-selling beer in Chicagoland.

Minoso walked into the cavernous store, stopped by the counter and shook my hand. Then he generally walked around the store saying hello to everyone. I shook his hand again before he left. And we talked about the diamond-encrusted World Series ring he proudly wore on his giant right-hand.

More than anything, however, Minoso appealed to me because he is the only player in baseball history--maybe the only athlete in the history of top-tier professional sports--to play for parts as five decades.

In our current 'o tempore, o mores,'-times, when people are fired and excoriated for "hearkening back to the 80s," I realized that I have, as have many people of my tenure, also survived and prospered in our industry for five decades. In short, I've worked in the 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s and 20s.

I had a misunderstanding the other day with a friend. He was feeling despondent (or I was and I transferred it to him.) 

He said something to me about "not wanting to continue." About having given enough and being a certain age and being tired of fighting. All feelings I can identify with. Fighting your whole life through your career, making a living, saving, raising kids, having a long marriage. I can hear the Yiddish phraseology rattling through what's left of my brain: "What for am I doing this for?"

I said to my friend, "I am modeling myself to be an advertising Minnie Minoso. Minnie made it into five decades. My sport is not as physically demanding, I intend to make it into six decades in advertising."

We laughed at that. Who wouldn't? The idea of making it eight-and-three-quarters more years.

"I don't know, Georgie," my friend said. "You might be a little creaky by then."

"I've been creaky since 1972, and it's never slowed me down."

We laughed again. As we have so often.

I'm lucky, I told my friend. I need the money, but not really --and even though starting my own business has its own challenges (as does living in Connecticut) I am working with the best people in the business and I have a handful of some of the best clients, too. Besides, I innately love the- solving- puzzles-piece of advertising.

Now I don't know if I'll make it into my early 70s, and into my sixth decade. I don't know if anyone will want to work with me, much less hire me to help them in the many ways I can do so.

But I do know, as dumb and meaningless as life can be some times--many times, there's something meaningful and life-affirming about doing what you do as long as you can do it well.

Hemingway's old man did that. So did Alan Ladd and George Stevens' "Shane," as he attacked the impossible stump, "Sometimes ain't nothing will do but your own sweat and muscle," Van Heflin says.

It takes a lot of living to understand that. But I do. 

So did Minnie.

Lies. And the lying liars who lie them.

Recently my advertising Alma Mater, the place where I gave and gave for parts of four decades, ran a self-promotion on LinkedIn. I don't object to advertisements for "myself." Mine routinely get upwards of twenty-thousand views. What I do object to is a place that has turned hateful masquerading as "woke" and benevolent.

Here's the ad Ogilvy shamelessly ran. This is after 12 or 24 months of purging virtually everyone in every office that is over 40 and was making that thing we once described as a "living wage."

If Ogilvy "mirrors" what society is truly like by reflecting society in its people, they are living in a different world than I am. In fact, according to the fairly authoritative 2021 World Almanac (which is a helluva lot easier to navigate and a helluva lot more informative than the web) there are more people over 65 in the United Kingdom--the country of the ad's origin--than under 15. 
18.5% of the UK is 65+. 17.6% is under 15.

Yet according to WPP's most recent annual report, their mirror is not just broken, it's downright delusional. Perhaps, if anyone's reading this, class-action suit delusional.

As for reflecting society in our people, it's hard to mesh the demographic data I provided above with WPP's depiction of itself in its own most-recent annual report.

I suppose given my long-tenure in the advertising business, my relative success, and this blog--which routinely numbers agency CEOs among its 80,000 readers a week, I am something of a leader in what used to be the advertising industry.

If a Rob Reilly or a Mark Read or a John Wren or even a Martin Sorrell were to call me, I'd tell them that the central issue facing the advertising industry in the years ahead is not revitalizing creativity, honing our use of data and analytics, or even conquering purportedly attenuated attention spans.

I'd say that the key thing the industry must do for itself and its clients is to reestablish the very notion of trust. The idea that people can believe things they read. That people can have faith in the truthfulness of the messages they receive from those paying for the messages.

We've seen the horrible and near-civilization-ending results of a world riven by separate realities. The consequences of disbelief will, if not addressed by the ad industry, destroy literally trillions of dollars of brand value. Why believe in anything when no one believes in anything?

However, if our industry itself lies to our industry, if a formerly leading-light of our industry, Ogilvy, blows its trumpet and says "we are good and righteous" when in fact they are callow, craven and flat-out discriminatory, the long-term viability of such storied agencies will crumble more dramatically than it already has in the hands of its current (mis)management.

Part of me doesn't really care. 

I have a handful of significant pieces of business from ex-Ogilvy clients and citizens. So their diaspora is good for me.

However, call me old and old-fashioned, I don't like being lied at.