I'm scared.

After a week of Cannes-hell-Culture, I'm scared.

Sure I'm sickened, too, by the mendacity. By the fakeness of the work. Sickened by the scam. Sickened by the blatant self-promotion. Sickened by the lack integrity.

But something else is going on here.

As our industry reflects culture, I think we are reflecting the United Kingdom from 170 years ago.

And that is scary. Let me explain.

(What follows will be a little heady and a little rough. Much of it has been influenced by an article I read from the Atlantic Monthly almost 25 years ago by the brilliant Peter Drucker, called "Beyond the Information Revolution." Drop me an email and I'll send you a copy. It explains a lot.)

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Drucker covers a lot of ground in his piece, which is mainly about the pace and peculiarities of technology adaptation. But he touches on another element, too. 

Why did the UK's economy fall so far behind the US's and Germany's, starting around 1850?

What Drucker contends is that as industrialization and modern production became more widespread, in the UK the notion of being a "business person" was considered by the elite classes to be a social inferior.

He says, "By the 1850s England was losing its predominance and beginning to be overtaken as an industrial economy, first by the United States and then by Germany. It is generally accepted that neither economics nor technology was the major reason. The main cause was social...."

"... England did not accept the technologist socially. He never became a "gentleman..."

Drucker continues:

"Nor did England develop the venture capitalist, who has the means and the mentality to finance the unexpected and unproved... England, although it invented and developed the commercial bank to finance trade, had no institution to finance industry...

So England looked down upon people who rolled up their sleeves and worked with machines. Grease under your fingernails and you would never get to be a Lord or a Lady.

I'm scared that the same sort of social sclerotic thinking is happening in advertising.

Part 1. Think of how many people in our industry when we all go around the room and introduce themselves, utter a title that has virtually no connection to actual work. 

They're "Content Impresarios" or "Working at the confluence of culture and commerce." But...WHAT DO YOU DO?

We reject honorable titles like copywriter (how I introduce myself) and art director. We say ECD or something equally obtuse. It's as if we're ashamed to show the aforementioned grease beneath our fingernails. (BTW, one of the reasons I write with a proper fountain pen is that they leak. A copywriter should always have ink on her hands. Don't trust one who doesn't. They're too clean for their trade.)

Part 2. Judging by what I've seen from Cannes this week, we are embarrassed to be seen as "selling." Somehow selling is dirty, crass, declasse. No. 

Today, we influence culture. We become companions. We're authentic guides on a customer journey.

Fuck me.

We need to sell shit.

Or clients will continue to do what they're already doing. Disregarding our industry and refusing to pay for us. And why should they? 

It seems most agencies are more concerned with their own brands and their own self-aggrandizement than their clients'. It's pretty simple really, if we don't take the time and the effort and do the math that shows we make money for them, they don't give money to us. How's that for a metric?

Admittedly, my eyes might be jaded. I've been around the industry my whole life and it seems that today we are more concerned about everything other than selling soap or cereal or software. How does it work? Why do I need it? What makes it different? We consider such objectives beneath the loftiness of our dying industry. 

No. 

We don't act as brands' agents anymore. We're not looking out of them. We don't, in the words of David Ogilvy, sell or else. 

We say we're going to make you part of culture.

And to be honest, I don't even know what that even means. Or why it's a good thing.

I'm not looking to Tide for anything other than clean laundry. Or Doritos for anything other than a snack. Or Gillette blades for anything other than a clean shave.

I don't need a brand to tell me how to be a man, or raise my children or eschew plastic bottles. 

When you're on a baseball team there's always a perfectly reliable glove man who can fill in anywhere. He usually weighs south of 160 and tops out at about 5'9". He's there to spell your second baseman, or shortstop or even third-baseman. He's a utility infielder. A fill-in.

A few of these guys get too big for their spikes. They start dreaming of hitting the long ball and grabbing the big contracts. 

Those are usually the guys tending bar at age 27. Their baseball careers long ended.

They forgot what they were good at. And tried to do things they shouldn't do.

As mindless an an Executive speaking at Cannes.

It seems like everyone and his sister has won a Serengeti's worth of Lions at Cannes this week. I think the US Census Bureau was contracted to count them all. But once they got past the number of grains of sand on the beach, they simply gave up.

About 20 years ago when I was working on IBM Thinkpad, I got a list of "support points," reasons why people should pay more for a Thinkpad than a Dell or an HP. Among those reasons was "winner of over 700 awards."

The account people insisted. 

The client insisted.

I refused.

Nothing should ever win 700 awards because there shouldn't be 700 awards. In all of world history there shouldn't be 700 awards. But today, Cannes and shows like Cannes seem to give out that many "Best of Shows" or "Grands Prix." I was under the foolish and dated impression that there can be only one best. But apparently, the entirety of the ad industry is awards polygamous.

You can have 91 best friends. 88 best cups of coffee in town. And 66 19-star hotels. Because? Because everything is a lie and the people playing the game are the only ones profiting from the lies.

The only thing more prolific than the number of asinine awards for work that has never really run, is the mind-boggling stupid statements by various senior-level executives bent on stating the obvious--tautologies or solipsisms--that add up to nothing more than nothing.

I'm not sure what motivates agencies or executives to issue these sorts of statements. To paraphrase Shakespeare, they seem like tales of sound and fury, told by idiots, signifying nothing--for profit. Does anyone look at something like this and say to themselves, "Break me off a hunk of that agency. I need them to make my brand a companion."

Or does anyone hearken back to a time before brands were expected to be coherent? "Do you remember the old days, honey, when brands were incoherent?" 

And I'm waiting for my bag of Doritos to lead me to self-actualization, as indicated here:

All this pre-amble--or, better, pre-ramble, leads to my introduction of a new feature of this humble blog, and with apologies to Jerzy Kozinski:

No one knows the sound of one hand clapping--but we all know the effect of one hand on the remote. 

You can see much further when the radio is turned off and the podcast is playing on a big screen.

As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.

We welcome the inevitable seasons of nature, but we're upset by the seasons of our economy.
And we use too much seasoning in general.

The era of proclaiming this era over is over.

Everything is dead. But declaring things dead is very much alive.

Consumers have the power to be referred to as people. 

Before you target people, make sure they want to be aimed at.

We have buckets of consumers. But kegs of beer. Someone will be thirsty.

To speed your digital transformation data must be hybrid, high-bridge and high-britches.

It's time advertisers get with the programmable.

People may want to have sex with anonymous brands but they only marry brands they love.

We are a creative transformation company that transformed our company to be 40 percent smaller year over year.

We are a global brand and customer experience agency that harnesses creativity, technology, and culture to create connected brands. But we're not sure what they're connected to.

We are a global leader in marketing, communication, and business transformation. Though we don't market, communicate or transform.

The power of purposeful purpose.™

Purpose can't just be a pose. Or a pur.

We have won more awards than have even been awarded. Again.

Four things I learned from Zoom.

I'm back in New York City for a couple weeks. Once again, only two-hours from the sterile air of Connecticut's Gingham Coast, I am able to soak in the life and the energy of the City that Never Sweeps.™

New York during these Spring-like-days of high cerulean skies and perfect t-shirt weather is like Ted Williams. He returned to baseball after being a soldier twice--once from WWII and once from Korea. Each time, after a long layoff, he came back and resumed walloping the cover off the old horsehide.

My city seems as energized and ebullient as ever. Moving 20 percent too fast, 20 percent too rude, and 20 percent too impulsive. Which is just how I love it.

Soon, I think, we will start coming into various offices. Having in-person meetings. Having coffee with friends in the morning and drinks after work. Soon, that most abnormal of states, normalcy, will return.

I wonder if our 18-months of Solitary Zoom-finement will have taught us anything.

Here's what I've learned about communications during our virtual confinement and some lessons I think all of us in advertising can learn.

1. A lot of people are on mute. In Zoom, mute is a button. In real-life, it's a metaphor. 

99 percent of everything that's said isn't heard. 99 percent of everything that's said is self-referential lip-flapping. People talking to hear themselves talk, not because they have something to say. 

I think if we approach every bit of contact the way we should be approaching advertising--that NO ONE CARES--and we worked hard to make our sentences important, empathic and informative, we'd all be better off.That's one of the reasons meetings are so long. 

2. A lot of people will have their video off. Again, a button on Zoom. A metaphor in real-life. 

Most people in meetings, on the phone, wherever you run into them are doing other things. They're playing solitaire. Putting the finishing touches on an email. Reading a news item. Texting with a friend who chirps okey-dokey all too often. 

The truth is, in advertising and every day "intercourse," we have to earn attention. 

Susan Sarandon said in "Bull Durham," "A man will listen to anything if he thinks it's foreplay." Sure that's funny. But it's profound too. No matter how you communicate, no matter what you're saying, you have to make and keep a promise to the listener.

3. There are too many meetings and every one of them is too long. Approvals take the amount of time you have. Maybe this stems more from working as an independent--outside of the giant self-fulfilling prophecy known as a holding company agency. But If you have 21 days to review work, the organization will almost always take 22 days.

One of the great luxuries of having my own agency is I deal primarily with C-level clients. They see work. They say "what about?" We discuss. It's approved. The agency-standard of 17-rounds to approve a tweet isn't about improving work. It's about billing hours. And puffing out chests.

Bernbach said it best (no surprise, there) when he advised Robert Townsend, CEO of Avis. "Approve, disapprove but don't try to improve."

That ain't a bad way to live. And to be profitable. 

4. Don't say or do anything anyone else is saying and doing. Really. And don't use the word unprecedented. Try to be noticeable and memorable and different.

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We're coming back from a huge upset to our system--to the way we live, the way we work and the way we fill our days.

We'd all be better off being a bit more mindful of the world we're coming back to. Thinking a little more clearly. Breathing a little deeper. Being a little more respectful of our time and others'

I can say all this shit.

I'm 109 years old and have almost enough money to not work with people I don't like, on brands I don't respect. I wish I learned all this 40 years ago.

Hello, Darkness, my old enemy.

As a Jew, even a Jew who grew up in New York (in which one in four people are Jewish) you are no stranger to anti-semites and anti-semitism.

I was born in 1957, and it wasn't until 1965, after all, that the Vatican conceded that today's Jews could not be held responsible for the death of Jesus. That's right, I grew up during a time when the largest religion in the world accused one of the smallest of killing their god. 

More recently, in late 2009, Pope Pius XII, "Hitler's Pope," a man who did little or nothing to protest Nazi genocide, was beatified as a saint by the church. This man was no angel. He killed, indirectly, tens of thousands of Jews and separated thousands of others from their families. His priests helped dozens of Nazi murderers escape through "Ratlines" to South America, after they were done killing Jews in Europe and Africa and Asia, too.

Beatified. A saint.

There were times, as a well-muscled and large youth, I took umbrage at some Jew-baiting slight, and took the bait. I found myself rolling in the dust with some racist who had called me something I didn't like. My knuckles ache still from abrasions from various goyishce schnozzes. I trust their schnozzes ache even moreso.

When I lived in San Francisco and there were Christmas decorations in public spaces--and in my agency--with no accommodation for those of other beliefs--in violation of the laws separating church and state, I looked the other way.

Recently, however, up here on Connecticut's Gingham Coast, the ugliness of anti-semitism has again raised its long and bony finger.

My wife decided we have to sink nearly half-a-million-dollars into our crappy house. To do so we had to get a variance from the cloistered little town our house sits in. And that involved a public hearing. And anti-semitic neighbors. 

Anti-semitic neighbors who said, publicly, that "The Tannenbaums are very nice people. But we've been living here for 67 years and they are newcomers. Plus, they're noisy. And they're nosy. Their addition will allow them to look into our home--they'll see into our living room and our dining room. 

Go on, call me an Internationalist and a rootless cosmopolitan.

"They work all the time and take phone calls outside that are very noisy. They're very noisy. Also, they put in an air-conditioning unit that's noisy. They're noisy and they're nosy."

I suppose you could say I'm being paranoid about this. But there is in language, coded words that communicate things without saying them directly. Noisy. Nosy. Words at home in 1950s America. Words I was warned against all my life. 

"Be quiet. Keep to yourself. Or...the Goyim will..."

"Elitist" is one of those words. "East coast." "Not real Americans." And so forth. 

You hear these things all the time. You hear them publicly from so-called leaders. They're, today, acceptable to say aloud.

Also, though Jews make up merely .002 of the world's population and .018 of the US population, we have been quota'd at universities, excluded from golf clubs and kept out of rarefied neighborhoods. 

But we are not classified as a minority. Though we are one of the world's smallest minorities.

This post will probably get me a lot of rebuke. 

I'm sure there will be Palestinian bricks hurled my way. And Israel as apartheid state, too. I'll also be told I'm being overly sensitive. That Jews are well-represented in board rooms and ad agencies and on TV and so forth.

Representation does not mean hatred is absent.

I'm tired of this shit.

And the hateful neighbors?

Since I'm a Jew I have some alleged malign intent. A plan of world-wide domination where my octopus of evil envelopes the world.

I am looking to try to train Seagulls, a Jewish bird if there ever was one, to drop dead fish, preferably Gefilte down their chimney.

The terrorists are among us.

Sometimes they're in Congress.

Sometimes they live next door.

Are the stars out tonight?

 We're living in an era of self-proclamation, self-promotion, and self-gratification. Everyone, the saying goes, gets a trophy. Every crappy kids' drawing has a place of honor on the $9000 Sub-Zero.

At major universities, for instance, everyone gets an "A."

Here's a look at grade inflation through the decades. From C to shining A.

The same sort of thing is happening over at the world's largest monopoly: Amazon. Witness this small sampling of headlines about "reviews for sale" on Amazon.

I believe it pays for every organization--no matter what it is they do or sell--to have a historian on staff. Someone who looks at things with some "distance." That distance allows them to be less reactive.

People, generally, look at topical events or happenings within an industry, business, locality or country and think those occurrences are unique. Historians look at things that happen and work to find where they fit within a long skein of time that could include centuries or within trends that span conventional boundaries.

That's called, in a word, perspective.

About two decades ago I remember reading that the average product sold on Amazon received a rating of 4.3 stars out of 5. That corresponds, according to my math, to an 86 percent out of 100. 

I don't think the average thing we buy can, technically, be above average. But according to Amazon's calculus, it can. Likewise, around the same time, Zagat's surveys were superseding in importance the written reviews from legitimate food journalists from "Gourmet Magazine," and "The New York Times." Despite all the many biases inherent in a system that uses public voting as an assessment tool, Zagat's was easy. And we went with it. We started eating--and overpaying for restaurants that got 27s. Maybe they were 17s. But the people have spoken.

Now, we're at a point I believe, whether you're looking for a restaurant, a hotel, a kayak or a vacation destination where ratings mean nothing at all.  

Everything has become "pay to play." You enter, you pay, you win.

In some cosmic version of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, the same has happened to our industry. Awards are meaningless as we spend more on them and imbue them with more import. It's the trophy-ization of emperor's-new-clothes-itis.

There are so many awards--so much blather and emphasis put on awards and so little scrutiny of the processes and rules around work that can be entered for awards, that the whole system, to more and more people, is essentially little more than self-promotion.

Some award shows, I believe the Webby's, have awards where nominees solicit votes from their friends. I think they call it "The People's Choice Awards."

It's a sham.

And a shame.

I'm constantly amazed that no one finds it amazing that many shows hand out multiple Grands Prix and multiple bests of show. I thought inherent in Grand was singular and best. 

It reminds me, somehow, of the old Henny Youngman joke, "I'm frank and earnest with women. In Cleveland, I'm Frank. In Pittsburgh, I'm Ernest."

It also reminds me that every year I see dozens of agencies showing their award-winning spreads for Lego blocks. I've never seen a lego ad in real life. I've never seen a lego poster in a toy store. Yet lego has probably won more awards than Nike and Apple computer and Perdue chickens, whose advertising you could argue, built entire markets.

I can't find out how many pencils the once-vaunted One Show awards. But look at how many categories they judge in.

If they got only ten entries per "discipline," at an average of $500/entry, the One Show would gross $130,000. That ain't a bad profit on handing out (following my math) 78 colored metal pencils--three per category. Of course, $130K is chicken feed. There are likely hundreds of entries per category. 

I just don't know what all this is about anymore. 

Or why any client would believe any agency that sells themselves and their efficacy based on the awards they won for work that may or may not have even run. I wish there were an actual trade press to investigate the money-making motivation behind the awards industry and their enablers. But that won't happen. It's a captive press--with low-paid practitioners who do little reporting, investigative or otherwise. Besides, they like the free drinks in Cannes.

That's all for today.

If you liked this post, please leave a review. 

You can join the 588 other people who have already, as of 5:15 this morning, given me a 5-star rating and have awarded me  coveted "Blogger of the Year" honors.

An open letter to new agency employees.

Dear New Employee,

Welcome. 

No matter what your job title is at GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, you have--from this point forward--an additional job.

You are a detective. 

You know, like Columbo, Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple or Sam Spade. 

You are a detective.

You are here to find out clues and facts and salient information that make the products and services we advertise more interesting to more people. So we can sell more effectively for our clients.

There's no such thing as "The Big Book of Surprising Details." Or "Insights from A to Z." 

You won't find these things, necessarily in a 700-word single-spaced brief. Or a 48-page powerpoint deck adorned with jocular gifs. They won't be on the first couple of pages of a Google search.

No. While most agencies and clients and theorists use the word "insight" like they're floating around like pollen spores in May--real insights that clarify, inform and persuade are extremely rare. We don't use the word at GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company.

The only way to find the clues and facts and information is to dig. It's to read annual reports. It's to read twenty-year-old annual reports. It's to read competitors' ads. And trade magazines and talk to people who use our clients' products--and people who don't. We must talk to engineers. Product people. We must go on factory tours.

That's how we'll get to compelling facts that differentiate and persuade.

We'll dig. We'll listen. We'll think.

We won't do "category" commercials that are funny and memorable, but which could be for any brand including our competitors. 

It's been a trend for quite some time for advertising agencies to recommend and produce beautiful commercials that say little if anything because somehow we've persuaded ourselves that commercials or ads with copy are a lesser form of creative. 

I've spent 40 years hearing that. And I fundamentally reject it. You can find something important to say. And you can find an artful way to say it. And you can sell a shitload of stuff for our clients. And make our clients happy. You can do all that. AND win awards. 

Fundamental to any effective communication is getting attention. And nothing gets attention better than giving people information they need--that they can't get anywhere else--in an unusual, funny or charming way.

You are a detective.

Find information about how much lead is in a mechanical pencil. And we can do ads like this.

You are a detective.

Find information about how we inspect our cars. And we can do ads like this.

You are a detective.

Find information so you can do ads like this.

Dilettantes can't do work like this.

This is work.

Not just a pangloss of style. Or trend-aping.

Timesheet worriers can't. Cool-chasers. Scope-jockeys. Parity-parodies. It-wasn't-on-the-brief-ers.

You can.

You are a detective.

Find information.

Think.

Work.

Thank you.

My annual Father's Day post.

As of this moment and forward into perpetuity, or next year anyway, this will be my annual Father's Day post. It might be shit. But it means something, somehow to me.

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On Father’s Day, in this age of social media, it seems that everybody who’s ever had a father dutifully posts some sepia-tinged photo of their old man, smiling wistfully at the camera. If you’re around my age, those old daguerreotypes (they seem that ancient to me) are usually accompanied by a line or two of writing. Something like, “I miss you, Pop.” Or “I think of you every day.”

I grew up essentially without a father. My old man was away more than he was home, and when he was home, and sentient, that is, not drunk, or hiding from  his termagant of a wife, he was seldom present.

Naturally, I tried to be a better father to my daughters, believing that your job as an elder is essentially to do two things. 1. Give your charges roots. 2. Give your children wings. They should know where they came from, they should understand values, and they should have the confidence to soar.

Of course, being human, I probably fucked up four times for every one time I succeeded. That’s about as human a ratio as any of us get. And while I wish I had had more Ward Cleaver in me and less of myself, all I can say in terms of being a father is that I did the best I could with what I had.

I wish I had a time machine or some cosmic stain-remover and could undo much of what I did, said, didn't do and didn't say that demands undoing. As we age, we flip through life accomplishments and disappointments like a fat man on a toilet looking at the old Sears catalog. We're disgusted and repelled by much of what we see

As I grew up without a father, so did my father. My grandfather, Morris, whom I never met, died when my old man was just 8, and too, he was absent more than he was present.

It’s probably bred in the bone for a lot of men. In the binary world we grew up in, we were trained first to make a living. Everything else, including important aspects of fathering like having a catch or taking your kid to the ballet have, for many of us, come in a distant second.

Many men, myself included, were raised to believe that you take care of your family by giving them a nice place to live, nice clothing, toys, educational opportunities & c. Because of our own liabilities, peccadilloes, genetic-damages and other shortcomings, we might have miscalculated. Yes, we should have been there more. And maybe should have weighed our words with more precision.

My old man’s father, Morris, one of two grand-fathers I never met, came over from the old country, Russia, in 1913. He just beat the immigration shut-down that happened around the time of the first World War.

Morris was 25 or thereabouts when he arrived in Philadelphia. He had no skills, no education, spoke no English, had no money and no family in the New World.

He had escaped mandatory terms of the Tsar's Army: 25-years or death, whichever comes second. And he did it by volunteering, or being volunteered, at the age of ten or so, to work on the greatest infrastructure project of the 19^th Century, the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. 

Life was cheap as the Trans-Siberian Rail-Way was being built.
Thousands died, many more wish they had.

With baggy pants down around their ankles,
the cry of "Hem boy!" would ring out.

Temperatures dropped to -200 (Celsius.) Colder in the shade.

It was a railroad three-times as long as the transnational route across our continent. Through terrain that made the American West look like Frontierland at a Disney theme park by comparison. It was nearly 6,000 miles long and was built through some of the most desolate and forbidding land in the world. What's more, in the summer, temperatures could drop to 200-below (Kelvin) and it got even colder in the winter.

Morris was too young to swing a pick, or to do much else but be sodomized. So he quickly became what was known on the Trans-Siberian as a “hem-boy.”

The workers who laid the tracks were given by the Trans-Siberian railway just one pair of work pants. By the time they had reached Krasnoyarsk, they had generally lost so much weight from eating their meager rations that their pants were down around their ankles. Of course, when you're pounding in spikes all day, having your pants fall down isn't just embarrassing, it's downright dangerous.

So the railroad hired scores of "hem boys" who would run along the railway waiting for a worker to sing out "Hem boy!" Then they hustled over to pin-up and hem the workers' pants.

There's no telling how many hems my grand-father shortened this way. Or how he managed to last the years he did. But somehow he lasted long-enough to save what he needed to land in America and start a new life on our teeming shores.

It’s easy to hate your parents, your father especially. Because like all people, one’s parents are especially flawed. It’s part of being a parent, I think, that you’re usually missing when you’re needed most and you don’t usually find out until years later when you were needed and what for.

There’s not much any of us old people can do about any of that. Maybe there’s some parenting parallel to Newton’s third law of motion. For every action there was an equal and horrible error or inaction. 

It doesn't matter if you're making a billion dollars running a hedge fund, or flipping burgers up at 7 Brothers Deli on 44th and 10th. All of us fathers want the same basic things for our kids. A chance for them to be themselves and find their path.

That’s probably as good an encapsulation of fatherhood as you’ll find anywhere.

And it pretty much sums up this old man's trials and errors as a dad. Like my grandfather, whom I never met, we're all just hem boys, working on a long railroad.

Transforming business transformation.

Today, you can't hardly spit without hearing something about business transformation, or transforming business models, or upsetting the dominant complacency, or the status quo or disrupting the disruptive disrupters. 

We hear about businesses being "Uber'd." or "Peloton'd" or "Apple'd" or "Virgin'd." We hear about it so much, sometimes I think my head is going to fall off. Because, frankly, for all we hear about how much this or that will change everything, to my jaded baby-blues, just about everything universally sucks.

Now that American business and much of our political/liar class is blaming the lack of service whether you're trying to buy a bagel and a cuppa in the morning, a new phone, or just about anything, on the laziness of the American worker. I'd go so far as to say despite all the inflated claims of business transformation, everything sucks worse than ever before.

Everything takes longer (a kayak I bought for my wife's birthday over a month ago isn't expected to arrive for another eight weeks.) Everyone is rude ("you took the wrong cup if you want iced-coffee.) Everyone takes advantage of you. (New York is having elections in a week and every candidate from Mayor to Comptroller feels they have the right to text you.) And everything is spelled wrong (I'll be getting my heir cut later.)

I don't know what, for all the blather about disruption and/or business transformation has actually happened that's good for people, not giant companies.

As I do so often when I get in one of these near-constant moods, I turn to George Orwell and I make a leap.

Orwell wrote this: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

For the purposes of this post, I'm going to equate "business transformation/disruption" with Orwell's locution "revolutionary act."

What are business transformation and disruption if they're not revolutionary?

So, here's my thought about business transformation and disruption. If you want to do them/make them/enact them, here's where to start. Not with data collection, not with greater surveillance capitalism, not with better retargeting, or two-factor authentication. 

Start here.

Start with the absolute basics of being a human. ("Corporations are people, my friends," as neo-Fascist Mitt Romney asserted.)

Start with making a promise to the people you serve and actually serving them. 

Start by telling the truth.

Start by eliminating footnotes, codicils and "terms and conditions."

Start by treating people well.

That probably means training staff, so when somebody says, "where's the filo dough?" you walk them over to the freezer case instead of pointing. That probably means paying people so you can retain them, so they actually stick around long enough to know some answers.

Start by showing up on time. If you run an agency and have a call scheduled with the client at 10, everyone must be in the room and the line must be open by 9:57.

Start by rewarding people for jobs well done. And customers, too, for their business. With real value not bonus miles that are worth nothing and then expire.

Start by not talking about personal empowerment until you stop employing slave labor.

Start by not talking about climate change until you clean up the mess you generate.

Start by not talking about how great you are until you treat your employees great.

Start by fixing your shortcomings not telling the world how your solving the world's.

Start by remembering you're in business to serve--not to reward yourself and fuck others. 

Start by, in sum, telling the truth. 

Simply.

Clearly.

All the time.

Worry about you showing your loyalty to your customers,
not about customer loyalty to you.

And tell the truth.

You want business transformation?

Real transformation, not just bad service under the see-through guise of "efficiency"?

Treat people like people.

--

Of course being human might cut into short-term profit. Some years ago before the knowledge of the horrors of surveillance capitalism were widely noticed, I suggested my client stop collecting data and retargeting people with ads.

I was told, "We get a 7-8% lift through retargeting."

So for an 8% lift on 8 clicks per 10,000 views, we annoyed people. That is to go from 800 clicks per 100,000 views to 864 clicks per 100,000 views, we chased people all over the internet.

My guess is that the damage that nastiness did was greater than 64 clicks per 100,000 views purportedly gained.

Dismal science meet dismal industry.

Someone wrote a comment on one of my posts the other day. Taking me to task, somewhat, for the beating I mete out to Ogilvy in particular and holding companies in general.

I suppose that's fair enough.

But let me explain. Or, rather, let me try to explain as best I can without going all Keynsian on you.

My generation--the baby boomers--grew up in what was essentially the golden age of Liberalism. Income inequality was lower in this country than it had ever been. Social mobility--at least for white men--was greater. And the government formulated policies that substantially improved the lot of the middle class. They made college more affordable and available. They created the GI-Bill which greatly increased home-ownership rates. And for the first time, the masses had decent wages, retirement plans and health insurance.

My bad, I grew up with a crazy notion that that would continue. Who saw John Birch in the guise of Ronald Reagan coming.  In the words of Abraham Lincoln, I grew up thinking that a government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth.

Over the last 40 years or so, in ways micro and macro (economically speaking) government has shifted away from helping every human to helping the wealthy and the megawealthy. This isn't politics. This is policy.

As reported in the New York Times' "Deal Book" blog on June 9th, 

• Jeff Bezos claimed a $4,000 tax credit for his children in 2011.

• Warren Buffett, who has called for tougher tax rules for the wealthy, paid under $24 million in taxes between 2014 and 2018.

• Carl Icahn and Elon Musk took advantage of rules regarding debt. Icahn deducted interest payments on his companies’ debt, helping him pay no federal income tax in 2016 and 2017. Musk regularly borrows tens of billions against his stock holdings: those loans aren’t taxed, and the interest paid can often be deducted. (He paid no federal income tax in 2018.)

• George Soros paid no federal income tax between 2016 and 2018, after claiming investment losses.

• Mike Bloomberg paid $70.7 million in income tax in 2018, despite reporting $1.9 billion in net income, after claiming deductions, charitable donations and foreign tax offsets.

For your illumination, Bloomberg's $70 million in taxes on his $1.9 billion of net income, is a 3.7% tax rate. That's you making $2000/week and paying just $75/week in taxes. Think about that. Think how well you could live on a normal salary,

So back to my grudge against Ogilvy and the holding companies. 

I single them out because I know them.

What I really hate--and have hated since I was a little beaten child--is bullies. Bullies are liars. And I hate liars.

I hate liars. Part 1. Companies who say they care about diversity and inclusion where fewer than 1 in 50 of their employees is over 60.

I hate liars. Part 2. Companies who say wages and bonuses are frozen while C-level executives routinely get lifetime payouts, giant salary increases and bonuses that could choke a yacht.

I hate liars. Part 3. Companies who claim razor-thin margins, but somehow make enough money to pay their CEOs more than 200-times the wages of a median employee.

I hate liars. Part 4. Companies where it's policy to pay putative executives (that's you and me) a fixed salary while having them work literally thousands of unpaid hours--as the price of holding onto their executive jobs.

As Ezra Klein writes in the June 13th edition of The New York Times, "The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it. Americans like their goods cheap and their services plentiful and the two of them, together, require a sprawling labor force willing to work tough jobs at crummy wages. On the right, the barest glimmer of worker power is treated as a policy emergency, and the whip of poverty, not the lure of higher wages, is the appropriate response."

That's what I'm against.

That's what I'm barking about.

A liar-made economy that exploits workers. That suppresses wages. That tosses people out in a way that makes the treatment of Willy Loman look benevolent.

Or as Thomas Piketty wrote not long-ago in "The Guardian" about the effects of the still-raging pandemic: 

"The right response to this crisis would be to revive the social state in the global north, and to accelerate its development in the global south. 

"This new social state would demand a fair tax system and create an international financial register that would enable it to bring in the largest and richest firms to that system. The present regime of free circulation of capital, set up in the 1980s and 90s under the influence of the richest countries...encourages evasion by millionaires and multinationals."

I agree with Piketty. He's a Ph.D., a best-selling author and perhaps the world's leading economist.

I'm just a copywriter who got A's in Dr. Beck's micro-and macro-classes forty-five years ago. I don't know much but I know what's happening.

We're all living in the world Piketty talks about. 

My edge is I'm unemployed. 

And freedom's just another word for no job left to lose.

So I can write about life without being castrated.