America. According to commercials.

I don't watch a lot of television. But when I do, I see a world that resembles not at all the world I actually live in. I understand advertising has always knocked out the dents of life and rubbed in a coat of wax--but the lack of reality and humanity in modern advertising is, to me, startling. 

People, I suppose, are personas or archetypes, or most often, targets. Their needs are no longer Maslowian. Madisonavenuian. Wholly false and artificial. I worry about such things. And estrangement from and false depiction of what life is really like and what really matters to people.

                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.

I talk to my
friends about
my colorectal
exam.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I regularly 
hi-five people
while watching
TV.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree
I often break
into spontaneous
dance.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I smile broadly
when I eat
breakfast cereal.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I tell people how
reliable my
phone network is.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I mention brand
names in every day
conversations.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
Every time I buy
fast food, the workers
are merry.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I carve duck
decoys
while an
announcer
reads disclaimer 
copy.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I jump when I take
a selfie.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I have never
driven
in traffic.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.               I I hold up my
hands like I'm 
being robbed
while my car 
parks itself.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I'm easily
persuaded
by balloons in
car showrooms.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I lay on the floor
while using my
logo-less laptop
computer.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I put mustard on
hotdogs in a 
zig-zag pattern.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I always get the
last can of beer.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I'm ready to
switch to
Chevy.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I drop tons of
steel ingots
in the back
of my pickup.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I ride my bike 
with my feet out.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
A candy bar
puts me in a 
good mood.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I'm 27 years old
and live in a 
$19 million
home with an 
ocean view.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.           Waitresses at
chain restaurants
are always
beautiful.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.           Food at chain 
restaurants
is always
beautiful.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
Every Christmas
I surprise my
spouse with his 
and hers SUVs.
                                                    disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
I think cars look
best with giant
bows on top.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
My friends laugh
uncontrollably--
so much so
that they steal
my fries.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
My financial advisor
smiles knowingly
then points to his
computer.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
Depressed people
put their face
against the wall.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
There are no lines.
There is no waiting.
                                                     disagree.                  neutral.                strongly agree.
Everything is clean.

Rules. Versus standards.

I read something the other day, an innocuous statement from an Advertising Hall-of-Famer not known for his innocuous statements.

Somehow four months or so ago, the fearsome Ed McCabe and I became friends on Facebook. The word "friend" today has about as much value as a corset at a nudist colony. We're not really friends--we're connected and I get to see what Ed's having for dinner most nights or the color of what he's drinking or one of the spectacular cars he's driving.

Scali, McCabe, Sloves was the pinnacle of New York advertising for the 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s. I never got the chance to work there. I presumed I wasn't good enough. But I poured over their work like as a young student I poured over the Canterbury Tales. In both cases, I read and read and read, and learned and learned and learned in the hopes of committing to memory everything I could.

Scali, McCabe, Sloves had a punch-in-the-face intelligence that stopped the reader in her tracks. If, as Carl Ally said (McCabe had worked there) "Advertising should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," McCabe's work was surely in the afflict the comfortable camp. 

Anyway, I read something from Ed's feed some time ago. It's something I haven't stopped thinking about. And something more people and more agencies would do well to consider

"We didn't have rules," Ed said. "We had standards."

What follows will be inflammatory and will likely earn be a good level of rebuke. Today, we seem to hold a lot of different agenda in greater esteem than we hold our standards. 

Of course equality, equity and fairness are vital. And as an industry we should be doing everything we can to achieve those crucial objectives. But fairness cannot--we cannot let it--supersede our standards or cause us to forget what we are in business to do.

What I've seen from all precincts of our industry is a complete deterioration of standards. Worse, I've seen an industry that seems to have forgotten what good is.

Good is a relative term. It might mean something different to you than it does to me. But as humans, we've always had some fairly universal, agreed-upon values. 

For instance, if I were hoping to play in a pick-up basketball game, I'm 100% sure LeBron James would get chosen by one of the team captains before I would. No one would say, "I'm picking George because we need an old, fat, slow Jew on our team--it's only fair. Besides, he has stone-hands and can't shoot."

It's not unusual today to see "help wanted ads" that are both jaw-dropping and blatant. They will flat-out say they're seeking a certain demographic. This is not only illegal, it is the triumph of rules over standards. Of agenda over quality.

What strikes me is that advertising has fallen for one of the most pernicious rules of our era. That rule silently states that every accomplishment, because it's been accomplished, is worthy of note.

That is the triumph of doing over the triumph of doing well. That is the finisher's trophy, the participation ribbon, the "you-go-____-ization" of accomplishment. That predilection for reward might be fine for third-graders, or I-just-need-to-finish-marathoners, but it's not fine if your business is to move-forward someone else's business with communications that are supposed to cut through, communicate and motivate.

Going back to the LeBron example above, ours is not a friendly-neighborhood game where everyone plays and we all have a beer afterward and kibbitz around. Back two decades ago, I worked for a client that sold billions of dollars of servers. I was called to a meeting led by one of the senior clients--a sales-person--not a marketing person.

"This is _______'s share of the UNIX market," the sales-person said. "I want to take that share and kill them."

I know that's horrid--but if I'm Nissan, I want to kill Mazda. If I'm Dannon, I want to kill Chobani. If I'm Agency X, I want to kill agency Y. We do this not via cheating, skullduggery and shivs, we do it by doing better work smarter and faster.

We also do it by not applauding every drip from every agency sphincter. It's not just that the commercial below sucks. Most commercials do. It's that the agency that created it is lauding it as a "slam dunk."

Obviously, taste is subjective. And Leo Burnett could tell me 29 focus groups of "Buick potentials," saw this and loved it and sales in B and C counties where Buick makes most of its hay are up 11%. They could tell me that I'm narrow and elitist and don't get the female skew and insights contained herein.

To that I say, fine.

But it's boring. It's trite. The acting is horrible. The script is not in English and the whole thing is a cliched mess.

Back when I was young in the business and people were treated respectfully, and even young creatives had their own space so they could think, about half the creative department had a Nerf basket over their garbage pail.

A lot of times, someone would crumple up a bad comp and throw it in the basket--never to be seen again outside of a landfill in Staten Island.

A lot of those "shots," were slam dunks. 

But they were made on a three-foot basket.

You need standards. Not just rules.

Dear Aunt Crabby.

 

Crabbigail Van Buren. Photo credit: Mark Denton. https://www.coy-com.com/

A periodic advice column of life in…and out of advertising. From advertising’s oldest-living copywriter, Aunt Crabby.

-

Dear Crabby,

My agency keeps on telling staff in Town Halls how much we're about "creativity." Yet every time I turn around, four more senior creative people are fired and the Holding Company has spent another $200 million acquiring a data company that consists of an old Gateway computer shared by two Estonian guys who used to work at Radio Shack. What's going on here?  

--Perplexed on Eleventh 

Dear Perplexed,

Haven't you heard? It's been "opposite day" in Holding Company agencies since Martin Sorrell stopped breast-feeding, back in 1999.

-

Dear Crabby,

After three years of working nights and weekends--and coming through on every assignment ever given to me, I've finally been promoted from junior copywriter to copywriter. Yet it feels like nothing's changed. --No-motion promotion

Dear No-motion,

On occasion, a junior mint gets promoted to a full-sized York Peppermint patty. No one cares.

-

Dear Crabby,

My agency is losing big account after big account. We've won a few pieces of business lately--but they're tiny. The kind of accounts people used to run out of the backseat of a 1974 Buick LeSabre. How can an account with revenue of $20K/year make up for an account that had revenue of $20 million/year? 

-- At Sea PA

Dear At Sea,

Easy. Your agency's c-level people can tell the Holding Company that they're winning business. That's good enough. "Look," they'll grovel, "our decline is slowing down." It's like the Credit Mobilier scandal of 1872. The general rule followed by fraudsters from Boesky to Caligula is that by the time the fraud is discovered, the fraudsters are out of the country.

-

Dear Crabby,

I've been hearing a lot about "hot desks." I have to say, having a crappy piece of formica'd-plywood and a second-hand Aeron with a view of an airshaft and pigeon shit that you have to fight for every morning is hardly what I'd call "hot."--Temperature's rising

Dear Temperature,

These days, in the agency world, jobs, bosses, accounts, desks are all temporary. You should be happy you have a floor. Those are next to go.

-

Dear Crabby,

I just read about a giant phone network that's reached a deal to bring individual shopper card data into programmatic digital ad buys for packaged-goods marketers, giving it the first demand-side platform powered by offline and online sales data from millions of shopper cards. The network claims they have a cookie identity solution that delivers first-party consent so they can connect to identifiers other than cookies. How come I never get any cookies? --Sweetless in Seattle

Dear Sweetless,

You're on the wrong customer journey.

Some time at sea.

About 100 years ago, I was working on the account of a very large local bank. This was in the early 90s, before the banking industry, and every other industry, was allowed to consolidate--concentrating enormous power in the hands of just a few companies.

There were probably two-dozen fairly large banks in New York--all competing against each other. 

The Bank of New York, Irving Trust, Chemical Bank, Chase-Manhattan, Citibank, Bankers Trust, Manufacturers Hanover, Marine Midland, Anchor Bank, Banco Popular and more.

Today, pretty much, there's Chase and Citi. Maybe Bank of America and Wells Fargo. 

But all the local banks have been subsumed by a large, multi-national. All you have to do to witness this is drive down a main street in the suburbs. You see beautiful old granite buildings with engraved porticos that say, "Clinton National Bank." Then beneath that or above that, a garish aluminum sign that says Chase.

This has happened with newspapers and gasoline companies. And of course advertising agencies. In most categories, we're down to two or four major companies that dominate (if they don't monopolize) their industry.

The thing I learned when there were dozens of brands competing for your attention was the importance of branding and the importance of standing out.

Today, too many people in our industry conflate branding with logos, colors and typefaces. A brand is much more complex than a mere look. It is the total amalgam of behaviors and actions that guide a company. To focus on a logo and a font is like juggling with one ball.

Back to the 90s. Imagine you're walking through Manhattan. Or driving through a suburb.

You come to an intersection and there's a bank or a gas station at every corner.

How do you choose?

That's what brand value--and building a brand does for you. It helps the consumer form (consciously and unconsciously) preferences.

My personal belief is that what passes for the advertising industry today has forgotten about preference-making. This is partly because digital media was supposed to be so targeted that advertisers could reach their "targets" when they wanted with a precise selling point tailored to the viewer. We'd be welcomed in. We wouldn't have to earn attention.

That charade or false promise or lie about precision has allowed two generations in our industry to forget about the need to create an impact and differentiate. We forgot about earning attention. 

We forgot our jobs.

We forgot about likability. 

We forgot that we're interrupters. 

We forgot that we've been invited into no one's living-room, inner-ear or scrotal region. 

We are interlopers in those places. Intruders and if we don't do something kind, funny, entertaining, useful and worthwhile, we will be hated.

In any event back to what I learned about the importance of branding. 

When you're walking through the city and there's a bank on every corner and you have no account with any of them, how do you choose one?

You choose based on their brand. You don't go through a rational checklist of attributes, ATM-access, and other things. Through the ether--in a limbic way--an impression has been formed in your head. You might like the green of one bank's signage more than the ubiquitblue of another. You might like the candor of a headline on a poster. You might simply like its architecture or that they have swinging doors, not revolving doors.

These are the complexities of our business. 

This is why we as practitioners have to expend every muscle, brain-cell and sinew finding something true, real and relevant to talk about.

Lexus used to advertise gold-plated contacts.

Dunkin' Donuts used to make its coffee fresh every eighteen minutes.

Apple let you put 10,000 songs in your pocket.

These are the things that implant in brains. If you can find them and you're smart enough to be relentless in talking about them. We used to call them permissions to believe. We pretend they no longer matter. But they do.

Not long ago I did some work for the launch of a cruise line. Like every other cruise line in the world, they wanted to "redefine modern luxury." 

I said I didn't know what that meant. I said, give me something tangible.

They said, we spend more time at sea and go to unusual ports.

I said, more time at sea.

I wrote, "we travel one-knot slower than other cruise ships. We take a little more time. Give you a little more space. Help you find a moment or two to breathe. That's what one-knot slower allows."

Of course, they didn't buy it.

Too memorable.

Being avid.

Not too long ago, I read something somewhere about the man who edited Robert Caro's books. 

That might mean nothing to you. But I think Robert Caro can teach a writer more about writing than a dozen or two MFA degrees. I've worked with and for some of the best writers in our industry, I have a Master's degree in English and Comparative Literature from a little school up the Hudson in the Manhattan highlands and I read about one-book-a-week. As far as I'm concerned, if you put digital pen to digital paper for a living, you owe it to yourself to read Caro.

And Robert Caro praised his editor, Robert Gottlieb. So when this book review appeared in the Times, of Gottlieb's memoir, "Avid Reader," I bought it as quickly as you can say Jack Robinson. 

Gottlieb is like the publishing industry's version of George Lois. A person who became famous making others famous. A person present at the creation of great things. A person who did great work at great places, like Knopf, Simon & Schuster and the "New Yorker."

He's edited, in addition to Caro, Joseph Heller's "Catch-22," works by Toni Morrison, Barbara Tuchman, Salman Rushdie, Bill Clinton and Don Delillo. 

All that's impressive, but what impressed me most about Gottlieb was a habit he had. 

He said, "I can almost always read a new manuscript overnight." He almost always responded to a writer--because he knows the pain of waiting for criticism, within 24-hours. Because, simply, he cared about the people who made him rich.

Admittedly, Gottlieb has legendary powers. He claims to have read Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in one-sitting. But he was no pushover. A fellow editor once scribbled in the margin of a page, "this is the single most boring page I have ever read." Gottlieb read the manuscript next. Under that notation he wrote, "No, Page 511 is more boring."

Caustic commentary aside, Gottlieb once said, "Editing is about making your enthusiasm public."

When I think about big names in the industry, whom I know and work with, quick response and public enthusiasm are characteristics they generally share. They're not too "busy" to look at things--that excuse is a powerplay--or too threatened to praise them.

When I think about big names in the industry, whom I know and work with, they're NOW-ISTS.

A NOW-IST does things now.

Not in a minute.

Not after chit-chatting.

Not after hours of perseveration.

Now.

When a NOW-IST is asked to write something, they don't say "it'll take a week or three-days." They say "ok." And they buckle-down and do it.

NOW-ISM isn't an innate ability. It's something people teach themselves. Some of the best freelancers I know know how to never miss an assignment and never miss a deadline and never miss satisfying a client. They've trained themselves to seize their opportunities. So they get a lot of opportunities. 

It's math.

When I played ball, there was always one guy who could be ready to go into the game with just three warm-up tosses. Or another guy who could ride the pine for four straight games then get called in to pinch-hit and lash a double while he still had splinters in his ass.

A NOW-IST seizes opportunities. And gets more opportunities because of their seizing ability.

I introduced a friend to a famous NOW-IST the other day. One of those email introductions you sometimes feel bad about making. A little gushy, sometimes.

My friend wrote to me shortly after I made the introduction. 
"[She] took a whole 28 minutes to answer my email..." 

That's a NOW-IST in action.

NOW, here's a little secret. 

If you get in the habit of doing things the moment they're given to you--if you deliver work on-time, or ahead of time, your career will go better.

I actually think you're work will be better, too.

Because you won't be over-thinking. You'll be dealing with self-imposed pressure and solving problems. 

That's usually good.

NOW, back to work.

A wordless inhumanity.

Of all the great advances brought on by the rise of the internet, perhaps most-seminal is that it's easier than ever to buy expensive socks, teeth-whitening gels and blue-light-filtering reading glasses.

At my advanced age of 19-years-older-and-going-away from Rich Siegel's 44, I no longer have many consumer wants. When we bought our new old house up here on the Connecticut coast, we bought the new furniture we needed and we replaced the washer-dryer that broke and we got some exercise equipment we keep in the basement. But besides those things, I don't crave little accouterments or bric-a-brac that clutter up a home and a life. 

Though we're slowly re-doing things up here. I was told that five-panel doors will complete the cottage look. But I can't make myself care about door opening solutions. And it appears I'll need a separate, and presumably equal, door closing solution.

As for clothing, Covid has meant about a year about evenly divided between baggy shorts and elastic-waisted sweatpants and old t-shirts often with more moth-holes than shirt. 

The fact is, outside of a new electric car and maybe an expensive  Celestron NexStar 5SE programmable telescope, there's really nothing I want. The telescope is to help me start overcoming my complete lack of astronomical knowledge. Outside of being to identify the Big Dipper, the North Star, Orion's Belt, Venus and in the fall, Mars, I'd like to know something of the galaxy. At least 1/10th as much about the stars as an ancient Greek from 4000 years ago, or a Portuguese fisherman from the 15th Century. 

Nevertheless, I live--no matter how I try to avoid it--in a culture where shopping closes in on us like the timesheet police at a money-losing agency. So I find myself, more often than I'd like to admit looking at things I have no intention of ever spending a plugged digital-nickel on.

What I've noticed as I faux-shop my way through the internet is how absolutely divorced writing today is from the cares, woes, joys and concerns of humans. I always think of this ad below as the apotheosis of empathy. Some art director and copywriter and account person and client actually understood what it meant to be on the road, selling, traveling from city-to-city and cheap hotel-after-cheap-hotel night-after-night.

Just last week, I noticed a company called Caddis that makes expensive off-the-rack reading glasses for people with an off-the-rack need to try to purchase coolness off-the-rack.

I hear a lot of talk from the ad community about the poor representation of BIPOC, Asian+, LatinX, Women and LGBTQ people and cultures in advertising. 

I was on a podcast recently discussing it. I said something that was regarded as inflammatory, insensitive and wrong-headed. I said, a bigger issue in advertising is our complete lack of humanity. I'm not denying biases against the aforementioned groups, but there's a bigger bias against treating all people with honesty, intelligence and humanity. We under-represent kindness, understanding and humanness as well.

I pointed to writing like this from the Caddis site. It's not just bad. It's wrong. Pompous. Insensitive. 

It is un-human.

It's written more to convey pretense than meaning.

There's no promise, no truth, not even any words I understand.

Eye appliances.

99.9999999999999% of Americans call them glasses. But you've decided they're eye appliances and that that's a good thing.

Wipe my ass with a feces appliance.

Maybe even worse, I looked at a website selling expensive condos in an expensive suburb outside of New York City. It's built in the middle of nowhere yet, we're perfectly bi-racial and bi-generational. And we caress equines.

After roughly 200,000 years of humans on earth our five senses are coming together in unexpected ways.

Then, there's something they call signature butler service. I suppose that means your butler will sign checks for you.

Though this particular agglomeration of Chinese sheetrock and veneered particleboard is about a mile from the sea, apparently that's close enough to reflect the splendor and allure of the shoreline. Absolutely nothing about red-tide, Coney Island whitefish or beach-syringes, "glimmering off the water."

I'm sorry. This is anti-everything, including anti-corpuscle, anti-DNA, anti-breathing and anti-living. It is not in the least human. It has no relation to realness or empathy.

I have rarely seen the sun lingering on a balcony outside. The sun doesn't linger. The earth rotates around it, and so it moves inexorably. What's more, I've never seen a balcony inside. That's the thing with balconies. In two words: they're outsiders.

Here's the copy from the Hertz ad. I retyped it from the ad I posted above. It's good practice to retype ads you like. It helps your fingers learn.

Notice the honesty. Right down to the candor of the tagline. We can help a little. Not a lot. There's no over-promise here. No transformationalismism. No bombast, hyperbole, bullshit.

If you ever feel the need to read of a piece of copy that really speaks to people, read this. If the male pronoun offends you, change it to something that doesn't. Then read this again. 

If the old references from pre-GPS, pre-ATM times affect your head, find new things that make service matter and mentally include them. If you think there's nothing any advertiser can do to make their brand real and human--you'd be better off not reading this blog anymore.

A business trip is often one minor calamity after another. 

 

Add them together and they produce a traveler who mostly wants to travel home.

 

But long before he seems home, he's likely to see a Hertz counter. And, as fellow humans, that gives us some 

obli­gation to do what we can for him.

And we can do more than rent a car.

For instance, if you don't know how to get where you're going, we'll give you a map and diagram the route.

 

If you run short of money, we'll lend you $10 cash. (Just show us your Hertz charge card and we'll tack the loan onto your rental.)

 

If you get caught in the rain without a raincoat, we'll give you a raincoat.

If you're a stranger in any of 33 cities, we'll give you a survival manual that tells where to find anything else you may need--from a decent hotel room to dental work at 2 a.m.

If you're in a hurry to return one of our cars, we won't make you stand in line. If you're charging your car, our express check-in lets you toss the rental agreement on our counter and run.

And if none of these solutions solves your problem, we'll work on one that does. Or at least give you a shoulder to cry on. 

Of course, we haven't forgotten the most obvious reason why people come to Hertz.

So we constantly check our Fords and other cars to make sure that what ever else may undermine your travels--they won't.

 

Hertz.
We can help a little.

--

Then there's this. 

From Papa, who wrote great novels shorter than decks on social media.

 

My first therapist.

About 41 years ago,  I met a woman who changed my life. I suppose I could start a story a day with those seven or twelve words and never fully run out of fodder. But this particular woman, did change my life.

I'll call her Jill and leave it at that.

I'm 94%-positive people aren't named Jill anymore. Just as they're not named Betty or Donna or if they're boys, Frank or Walter. Names come and go like the tides. And in this generation, I seem to know more women named Alex and Charlie and Sam and even Georgie than I know men named Alex and Charlie and Sam and even Georgie.

Jill was my first therapist and a woman wise-beyond-her-years. I say that because I was probably 21 at the time and she, likely was just half-a-decade or so older. And she was way wiser than I ever was.

Playwright, Eugene O'Neill. Not a laugh-a-minute.

At the time there was some pretty Eugene O'Neill shit going on with my parents, involving things. An etiology, if you want to get hoity-toity about it, that was more Hillbilly elegy than upper-middle-class Jew, though those two cultures probably have more in common than you'd think from watching Jed Clampett, Jethro and Ellie-Mae.

It was enough stress for me, also living in a dorm-room in New York's most roach-filled building, Johnson Hall up on 116th and Morningside Drive, that I knew I couldn't handle it all on my own. Though I grew up with Samuel Goldwyn's one-liner rattling through my head that "anyone who sees a psychiatrist ought of have his head examined," I put aside my mid-century non-modern biases and walked down to a pre-war building on 91st and Central Park West where Columbia had an affiliation with a dispenser of mental acuity.

It was there, for eight-dollars a session, that I met Jill. And continued seeing her once-or-twice a week for five years or six.

In all those years, I can remember just two things Jill taught me, and I'm richer for both of them. 

One was the ultimate human advice, though it was expressed in Upper West Side shtetl terms. "George, be a mensch." 

As I enter, every day, deeper into my achy and bruised dotage, the saliency of those four words reverberate all the louder. I have my own business now and, somedays it seems, more clients than I have fingers on both hands. All giving me assignments at seven at night and expecting something as finely-woven as the Unicorn Tapestry back at seven-in-the morning.

A Unicorn. The real kind.

Looking back on my forty years working in giant world-wide agglomerations of regressions to the mean, commonly known as ad agencies, there was hardly one among them that wouldn't, to that seven-to-seven demand, say "sure."

But that ain't being a mensch. That's throwing shit on a dish and calling it dinner.

Being a mensch, between me and my Account Director--a woman who drips out my time as if I'm trapped inside a giant impecunious eye-dropper, is saying, "George is the fastest writer you'll ever meet. But he needs till end-of-day."

That oh-so-gentle pushback buys me a little time to breathe, and I usually, then, deliver mid-to-late afternoon--still apace but with some time to have walked the dog and actually think with a few laps around the cerebellum built-in. 

"George, be a mensch," is delivering for clients the way only you can. With a timeliness, quality and thoughtfulness unusual in today's processed-cheese-food industry. Also, I am not stricken by 91-rounds of internal review that exist to pump up the egos, and the hollow chests of people who sit in judgment of work but never actually do any. That gives me more time--regardless of the timing--working, and less time placating and politicking for someone's ego's sake.

The second bit of wisdom I gleaned from the woman I'm calling Jill, was a cartoon-metaphor that I think about almost every day. 

"George," Jill would wag her finger at me, "you're like a creature. Every time something upsets you, you crawl under your rock and refuse to come out until you feel once again it's safe."

As I've noticed through the decades this hermetic proclivity, I've learned to shorten, if not altogether avoid, my time underneath mossy igneous. I've learned not to crawl completely under rocks--but with a deep breath and a metaphoric hiking up of my pants--to battle back, that is, be a mensch.

A friend and I spoke for 45-minutes the other day, which might be, for me a during-Covid record. I generally run to the laconic, if not the Taconic.

"George," he, she or it said, "the smartest thing you ever did was those ads for yourself in Futura extra-bold condensed that you run on Linked In. It's you versus Goliath."

Wilt hardly ever wilted.

I completed the sentence, "And as Wilt 'The Big Dipper' Chamberlain once pointed out, 'no one roots for Goliath.'"

I heard this while bearing in mind that I seem to gain a large client each week. Meanwhile, my ex-Alma Mater bangs a broken drum and announces the win of a dead or hemorrhaging brand that won't generate enough revenue to pay for one of the six or nine ex-CEOs they'll keep on full-salary plus black-car and dry-cleaning unto death do them part.

"George, be a mensch." In a lot of ways that makes me bigger than other agencies.

"George, be a mensch." In a lot of ways that keeps me smaller

than other agencies."

That's just the way I like it.