Or Die.

Let's start with a time-worn truism.

Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.

We've all heard that.

We've probably all said that.

My experience tells me something. Nearly every product being sold today sucks. Nearly every product being sold today is bad.

Every airplane seat is too cramped. The flights are late. The personnel are nasty. I'd say you're treated like cattle, but cattle is probably treated better.

Every telco is unreliable. And loads up your bill with hidden charges. And makes bills impossible to decipher. And drops about three calls in five. Beyonce my ass.

Same with every ISP.

Every hotel room is pubic-haired. And full of hidden charges. And filthy. And near the noisy elevator. And the rattling ice-machine. Even expensive hotels. Some MBA sold them on the idea of cheaping-out on every courtesy.

Every automaker has crappy service departments. If you can get an appointment, you can't get a loaner.

Every fast-food place strews its trash everywhere. And service is slow and surly.

Every soda spot shows thin people while causing a nation of diabetics.

I can't be the only one who feels mistreated at every "customer interaction experience."

Customer service is more aptly customer disservice.

Or disrespect.

None of this is advertising's fault.

But what happened to our higher Bernbachian order? 
What happened to guiding clients, not just being their vendors?

What happened to being agents?

To saying, 

fix your problems rather than sweeping them under the rug.

What happened to substantially helping a brand, not just polishing is turdiness?

What happened to Love thy Neighbor?

And believing the consumer isn't a moron.

I've been in the advertising business literally my whole life. 

I was born into it.

I never saw myself as a flack. A whore. A liar. A mouthpiece.

I saw myself as someone who was meant to improve a client's business. Not just from ads. From actions. From candor.

The ad below is more than half-a-century-old.

It might be half-a-century since anyone read it.

That's a mistake.

It should start every meeting, every presentation, every new business pitch. 

The commercials I say during the Super Bowl didn't reflect the reality of the world I live in. Everyone of them--no matter how entertaining and pyrotechnically adroit--struck me as dishonest. 

We seem to be a Potemkin industry.

All facade. No foundation.

How was your blogpost experience today?

😃        😐        😠

Do this or die.

Is this ad some kind of a trick?

No. But it could have been.

And at exactly that point rests a do or die decision for American business.

We in advertising, together with our clients, have all the power and skill to trick people. Or so we think.
But we're wrong. We can't fool any of the people any of the time.

There is indeed a twelve-year-old mentality in this country; every six-year-old has one.
We are a nation of smart people.

And most smart people ignore most advertising because most advertising ignores smart people.

Instead we talk to each other.

We debate endlessly about the medium and the message. Nonsense. In advertising, the message itself is the message.

A blank page and a blank television screen are one and the same.

And above all, the messages we put on those pages on those television screens must be the truth. For if we play tricks with the truth, we die.

Now. The other side of the coin.

Telling the truth about a product demands a product that's worth telling the truth about.

Sadly, so many products aren't.

So many products don't do anything better. Or anything different. So many don't work quite right. Or don't last. Or simply don't matter.

If we play this trick, we also die. Because advertising only helps a bad product fail faster.

No donkey chases the carrot forever. He catches on. And quits.

That's the lesson to remember.

Unless we do, we die.

Unless we change, the tidal wave of consumer indifference will wallop into the mountain of advertising and manufacturing drivel.

That day we die.
We'll die in our marketplace. On our shelves. In our gleaming packages of empty promises.

Not with a bang. Not with a whimper.

But by our own skilled hands.

 

Six Things the Internet (and Holding Companies) Don't Understand.

About two times a year, the great publisher, Taschen has a sale that's really a sale.

So many sales today start with artificially high-prices and knock them down to meh. Or, they trumpet products that are always on sale. Either way, they're phony. Their ginning up some excitement to get you to act.

Taschen, to me, seems different.

When I get their emails announcing a sale I am fairly agog. I don't know what Balboa looked like when he first saw the Pacific. Or Ada Lovelace when she unraveled the mysteries of computer science. But when I get notice of a Taschen sale, I jump onto my phone and look to tell every friend who might care that "it's here."

It's an event, the Taschen Sale.

Unfortunately, I know virtually no one who cares about it as much as I do. As my therapist of 40 years or one-million-dollars says, "I need to widen my circles."

A lot of book mania has been superseded by the wonders of the Internet. And the Internet, for all its cockeyed, sold-to-the-highest-bidder search mechanisms is wonderful. Like, here's a site that lets you page through and zoom into a Shakespeare first folio. That's downright amazing. And brings to mind this, also from Shakespeare: 

But back to Taschen and the six things no longer understood by nearly anyone.

For under $200, these six books just arrived at my Connecticut cottage. A 1,500 sq. foot shack girded with eight statute miles of bookshelves.

You can find all this stuff on the internet, I suppose. But not so large. Not so touchable. Not so vivid. Not so organized. Not so mine.

I'd say about 99.7-percent of all people in the advertising industry are more "creative" than I am. But 0-percent are more curious. And (high-end refrigerator joke) sub-zero read and remember more than I do. Finally, maybe 0-percent work so
sedulously. 

I might never reference a single of these books in an ad, or a meeting, or even having a drink with a client. But they help me, nevertheless, think different. They're synapses made legible. 

When ad people get together--I get together with some doyens of the old school once every few weeks for a casual cholesterol infarction--the conversation often turns to the dearth (and death) of creativity left in the business.

I betcha it's directly correlated to the dearth (and death) of agency libraries.

If you don't learn, you can't lead.

Super. Stupor.

As I get farther and farther away from the standard utterances and issuances and masturbatory mania of what used to be the advertising industry--as Jerry Della Femina called it, 'the most fun you can have with your clothes on,'--the more clearly I can see it.

Sorry, Jerry.

Maybe this is jealousy on my part because I don't, again, have a spot running on the Super Bowl. In fact, I never did.

Even when I was at the pinnacle of my career, my commercials never ran toward the mainstream. And I was more about expressing an idea--heaven forfend, a reason to believe--than I was about constructing a spectacle with celebrities, too-loud rock 'n roll, or some faux touching story of a love regained.

Not that ideas and spectacle can't be blended. Carol Reed was no slouch. Though I think he'd be a second-tier creative these days. Restraint. Subtlety. Intelligence. No high-decibel dancing.

But more of my view of the industry is colored by the incessance of our chatter around the spots that will air and our hubris in promoting these things clients spend millions on and people care little about.

Soon, someone smart in the industry will have an idea. They won't merely have teasers for ads next year. They'll create teasers for the teasers for the ads. And the year after that, teasers for the teasers for the teasers for the ads. And so it goes, as Billy Pilgrim dirged.

The industry is like a CVS drugstore. The Halloween candy will come out right after Memorial Day. And it will all be stale by July 4th. Like the rest of our trumpian wet dream.

The Super Bowl is the only time the industry feels vital to the business community. We'll look at it like a new born baby set loose in a topless bar. It's the good ol' days.

But as I see ad after ad--before the game--and teaser after teaser, before the ads before the game--it all feels like a high school production of Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues." 

Our fanfare about what we do and the noise we make about it is solipsism not with just a capital S, but a 144-point capital S. In other words, the importance and influence of our work is minimal.

Sure, we've created an analytic industry to prove the creative industry is still viable. But I'm not sure who all that data convinces except for people whose jobs depend on believing all that data.

I saw the homage to bygone America from VW. I saw the paean to mayonnaise. I saw a repellent 90-foot dorito in Las Vegas, and can barely imagine another thing more likely tp produce vomit enhanced by artificial coloring.

I saw the Christopher Walken spot for BMW. And this might be part of the problem.

BMW dealers--BMW is a hot brand now, they're selling more cars than ever--so their dealers suck worse than ever. I can't  find anyone to repair my car and give me a loaner--which they're obliged to do.

I think part of the issue with advertising--and the world--is there's a giant and ever-widening gap, a subject-object split--between the world portrayed in ads and the world we live in.

You see this in politics too. A divergence between truth and the party line. 

In Norman Lear's New York Times obituary, I remember this bit:

Believing in advertising today, or politicians, is a bit like believing in the salutary effects of crack cocaine. It's not smart to focus on only the highs without the inevitable lows. Look at TV spots and it's "which Tina do I want to be," not the world is burning, my kids are on tranq and my neighbors are neo-fascist wannabees.

"The message that was sending out was that we didn't have any problems."

I dunno.

We're living in a post-trust world. A world riven neatly in two where one-half cannot even fathom what the other half says, believes or how they live.

We have no agreed upon truths. 

Fair is foul and foul is fair. The battle is lost and won. 

Truth.

The re-establishment thereof is all we should be examining. Not the effects of gamma rays on man in the moon corn chips and piss-water beer.

Commitment.

Serius est quam cogitas.
It's later than you think.

As I've written before in this space, I have a near photographic memory. I don't remember everything. But I remember much of what I read and hear. Forever.

It's a blessing, having a memory. And a curse. It's why, for instance, I want a handwritten apology from everyone who's ever wronged me. I remember.

About five years ago, the phrase 'photographic memory' fell out of vogue. The correct term was now eidetic. Though in all my years I never heard the word eidetic from anyone but me, and only since I learned that it's replaced photographic memory as the preferred term.

I don't know who put forward this change in language. If it was the American Psychological Association or the Funk and Wagnalls Institute of the Obtuse. I just know I'm not supposed to say I have a photographic memory. I still say it, however, because if I started this post by saying "I have an eidetic memory," half my readers would likely drop off before they got to the end of the sentence.

Having a good memory posing some challenges in today's modern world. 

Pre-cell phones and caller ID,  I never wrote down a single  phone number. There aren't that many people who call me and when people would they'd say, "Hi George, it's Jill. Can you talk?" Or I'd simply remember.

I'd be ok. I'd know who I'm talking to and no skin off anyone's ass.

Now that I run a business, I get a lot of calls from people I don't know. When I get those calls, I have to make a decision. Do I add the number to my contacts, or do I rely on my memory to "store" it.

There's a lot to consider before you clog either your brain or your phone's contacts with a number. First, will this be a person you're likely to speak to with some regularity? If not, why bother saving the number. If they're likely to be a transitory acquaintance, I usually decide to just let things go and not store the number anywhere.

That's fine until you get a text message from a number you don't recognize. "George! Will I see you next week after work?" 

Shit. I have no idea who wants to see me. I never marked down who belonged to that number.

I'll try to be cagey about things. But cagey has never been my strong suit. "It would be great," I lie. "Who else will be there?" I hope through that sort of slight subterfuge to at least figure out what sphere of my life I know the unknown number from. Many times, I let a couple hours go by before responding. I hope they'll get annoyed and say "George, it's Patrick. Are you there?"

More often than not, I have to lie.

"I transferred my data to a new phone and my contacts got wiped. Who is this?"

That clears things up, with a minimum of embarrassment and just a soupçon of prevarication.

It's hard for an old person to live in this world. Things like writing down a number say 'commitment' to me. And I'm loathe to commit to anyone I know for fewer than 41 years. Storing a brand's email? Not sending it to spam? Whaddaya nutz?

It's a generational thing, I suppose.

Forget about trying to change me. 

Systems Collapse.

Reading my Linked In feed and talking to friends who are also in the industry, I can't help but think about the concept in historiography of "Systems Collapse."

This ain't the kind of thing to talk about on a first date. Unless you're a freshman at Columbia in 1977 and everyone you meet is a budding anarchist looking around the city for discount Molotov cocktails. BOTO. (Buy one, throw one.)

It also ain't a perfect topic for a post. Usually, I try for a little lightheartedness, in general. But somedays I can't grin and bear it.

Between seeing Mark Read spend $319 million on AI systems (surely more than WPP has spent on people since the first wire fucked the first bits of paper and plastic). He's spending that $319 million so he can shit-can $320 million of salaries. Add to that new that private equity has concocted ways to award stock to CEOs and then offer it to them at deflated prices before it hits the markets, and you'll see why I am feeling pretty blue. Add to that the $300+ million fine to be paid by Publicis for promoting opioid use.

That's not a bad week. That's a normal week.

The barbarians aren't at the gate, they're at your dining room table and they're eating all the good bits and farting into the upholstery.

Just in the past 72 hours, I've seen quips like these.

"Recruiters: Everyone is available."

"You make over $250K. You don't have a target on your back. You have a target on your front, your sides, your ass and everywhere else there's you."

And then seeing a temp job at Saatchi NY for major P&G brands where the pay they're offering is $680/day. No benefits.

Back around 270 years ago, after literally centuries of wars, the British Empire was a bit shaky. Rich people in the American colonies realize this and sensed it was time to start a rebellion. People in Iran, Russia, North Korea and god knows where else are probably sensing this sort of thing today about amerika.

It's no wonder a ragtag group of yeoman with 17th century muskets and no arms industry of its own was able to defeat the British.

It's all a little inconceivable that a mouse can kill a lion in hand-to-hand combat. Or whatever it is mice have.

It's always puzzled me.

Then I stumbled upon a fact.

In roughly 1800, the last pay rise given to British sailors had occurred in 1650. Their pay stayed the same for a century and a half. No wonder they had to "impress" troops--forcibly abduct them to serve. No wonder they (sorry for the period racism) had to Shanghai people. Drunk them, clunk them, and abduct them.

In the ad industry, I'd imagine in real dollars, people today earn far less than people did when I entered the business. The location of agencies today and their (lack of) decor speaks to this decay. Most agencies today have the aesthetic charm of a Home Depot in a tier three market.

That brings me around to Systems Collapse.

There are scientific definitions of systems collapse but it was explained to me like this.

When cities first started forming on, say, Crete, a group of people would begin to live near each other. Their concentration and breadth of skills and location led them to prosperity. To keep others out and to protect themselves, they built a wall around their conurbation. 

Of course, more people wanted in. The original settlers said, "Fine. More means more. And we'll all get richer and all be safer." So they spend the money to build more walls. The population grew and the walls expanded to encircle more space and more people.

Eventually, however, the city said "enough is enough. I've got mine and don't want to pay taxes to grow more. I don't want to let others in because that costs me. And I'll do all I can to pay for anything now that I'm rich."

Before long, the protective walls begin to crumble. Leaders can't keep people safe and everything seems to decline.

Here's the above in tattoo length: No pay; all decay.

This is essentially what's happened to what was the ad industry. The people who are rich because of it or through it no longer invest back into it. They don't invest in people. They don't invest in clients. They don't invest in ideas. They don't invest in new ways. And they accept the same cheapness from their clients.

The moguls have their $137 million.

If they pay a writer on one of the world's largest advertisers $680/day, rather than what they paid ten years ago, they'll soon get to having $138 million. 

Myopia.

Or Me-me-me-opia.

That's the schema today. The dominant complacency.

When older ad people get together, the topic quickly turns to "whatever happened to creativity?"

Back to my tattoo.

No pay; all decay.

A Blend.

If you've read at all about ancient Greece, you'd discover that intellectual elites argued about competing philosophies like people today argue about sports teams.

There were followers of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates. There were Epicureans. Stoics. Cynics. And Skeptics.

There were more, that I'm forgetting now, but you get the point.

Each of these schools had its adherents. And the arguments and battles between these schools could get pretty heated. Not unlike democrats and republicans today, or death metal and mellow jazz.

You might actually hate someone, forbid your daughter from dating them, or not sit at the Symposium with them because they had a different way of looking at the world. I grew up in a world where airline cabins were divided into "smoking" and "non-smoking." At the Agora, the Hellenes might have had to similarly keep the Stoics from the Cynics.

About 30 years ago, I noticed that the world of advertising was becoming riven in a like fashion. There were those who believed in the primacy of television. There were those who placed print on a pedestal. Others believed in the efficacy and efficiency of direct marketing. Still others believed the nascent medium of digital marketing was the ticket.

These belief systems were rivals.

At a single agency you might have the TV creatives separated from the digital creatives--on different floors, and they might never talk. The people who ran the TV part of the agency would try to sell broadcast. The digital people would sell against them and recommend online advertising. There were rivalries involved and turf wars. The knives were out.

Whole agencies were dedicated to one philosophy or another. And cordiality was seldom to be seen. Everyone believed their philosophy was the "one true path" to marketing deliverance. 

Soon adherents of each philosophy did what philosophical schools do. They created an infrastructure of myth and belief--a religion--that gave ballast to their philosophy's claims to primacy. They had spokespeople. They had data. They had clients. And they had awards and case studies that "proved" this method or that was superior to every other method.

The award shows, smelling increased revenue because they could attract entries from more categories, quickly went along with this. Money transcends philosophy, for the most part. 

Soon, you could win an award for mobile media based on creative that was developed for print or TV. No one called foul. Because money is money and everyone was involved in the grift.

Back to ancient Greece.

After the "creation fervor" around a new school of thought began to dissipate. Platonists grew less adamant the longer Plato was dead, people became less and less orthodox in which philosophy or philosophies they followed. 

Like some sociologists say about Americans' religious beliefs today, many people chose philosophies like you'd choose your dinner at a giant buffet. A couple of shrimp, a bit of salad, some garbanzo beans, a nice slice of ripe cantaloupe and some brussels sprouts. It doesn't matter that the food, or philosophies you've chosen don't "go together," you like them and that's that.

During my career I've worked in traditional advertising, direct, digital and even events. Along the way, I think I've gained an understanding of the strengths of each medium. Every once in a while a client will come to me with a similar sense of understanding, and therefore philosophical openness. 

We don't go into an assignment with a pre-conceived notion of what we'll make. We'll first figure out what needs to be said, to whom, and then how we'll say it and where.

Though there are financial reasons not to admit it, most successful ways of communicating, most successful religions or philosophies or ways of governing have a certain amount of liberality to them. They blend styles, they borrow tactics from other schools, they find a way to make things work, rather than following a sort of Soviet orthodoxy. 

For instance, if I did something, ahem, when I do something that angers my wife, I don't find one way to apologize. I usually have to find nine or a dozen ways. From saying I'm sorry, to doing the dishes every night, to buying something as a token of my love and contrition. One way is fine. But an arsenal of communication techniques is often more effective.

I hardly drink at all, but I'd imagine what I'm talking about is somewhat like the difference between a single malt, which can be astringent, versus a blended scotch.

The key word here, as the Greeks learned two millennia ago is blended. 

Blending, or poly-ism, is one of the reasons I love New York so much. Sure it has its issues--what conurbation of almost 30-million people doesn't. But thousands of so-called races, religions, languages and more get together under the glow of yon municipal moon and not all that many people kill each other. It's where Jew, Christian and Muslim can get a really good pastrami sandwich hand-sliced by a Puerto Rican and be pretty damned happy about it.

Blending.

Not much of a point today. 

Other than I continue to learn from ancient Greece.

And pastrami.

Deception.

I've been fired a few times in my life and I've always been staunch about how I talk or write about it.

For starters, I hate the pablum-ization around the English language when it comes to being fired. I dislike the phrase "laid off." I dislike "let go." I really hate "downsize," "right-size," or "recalibrated."

The reason I hate those phrases has nothing to do with their sound or their euphony and everything to do with their pro-corporate manipulation.

Being fired is painful. 

It's scary.

It's emotionally wrenching even if you hated where you were working.

If you've ever read anything about depression and loneliness you know that cutting people off from their sense of place and belonging, stripping from them their purpose is more than just financially painful. It sends many people into a real tailspin.

When we adopt language and say we were laid-off, it semantically takes the pain out of what's happened.

It's like saying I was dunked into the water rather than I was keel-hauled. Or spanked rather than whipped.

Using anodyne language--the language of the firer--gives the firer a public relations victory. You didn't have your financial and emotional legs cut out from under you. You were downsized.

As the kids say, fuck that shit.

A few summers ago while so much of the country was in lock-down and a nearly equal quantity was in disease-denial, agencies came up with a new locution to assuage their reputations. They started furloughing people.

That is, they fired them for a period of time hoping they could bring them back at a lower hiring cost than finding new people altogether. They cut salaries. They protected themselves at the expense of their workers.

These people weren't furloughed. They were fired. They were hurt. The company's actions caused pain and they tried to bolster their reputations by using anodyne language to mask that pain.

Now, WPP, which has the PR and semantic sophistication of a brain-damaged toad, has concocted new phrases to protect themselves from backlash over their inhuman behavior and their dire financial performance.

Firing $221-million worth of people is called an "efficiency opportunity." Firing people is called getting rid of redundancies.

My god, "Daddy, how can I be an efficiency opportunity when I grow up?" You want an efficiency opportunity, Mr. Read? Fly coach, walk to work, grab a Sabrett's for lunch.

"I saw an efficiency opportunity and I took it."

Read's language above sounds like that of the Pentagon during Vietnam or Dick Cheney calling waterboarding and other tortures, "enhanced interrogation." It's positively Soviet. Why not just say, as South American dictatorships used to, that "seven creative teams have been disappeared"?

Truth in our modern world, especially during the era of AI and digital fakery is the central problem of advertising. It's possible truth has always been the central problem of advertising.

How can advertisers tell the truth and be believed when so many advertisers engage in puffery, flim-flam and outright deception?

If I were, heaven forfend, a WPP client, I'd think very long and hard about a corporate entity that so pathologically engages in deception. Rather than take their medicine like a big kid.

What they do to the least of us, they'll do to you.

Liars lie.

It's their business model.

Read What's on the Wall.

My friend, Patti McConnell, the Managing Director and co-founder of the agency Something Different posted a story on Linked In over the weekend. She was doing an email purge and came upon an email from Chris Wall, who for many years was one of the great creative leaders at Ogilvy. 

Chris wasn't the easiest person to work for. Though of course, others will disagree with my assessment. Despite some personal contretemps I had with Chris, I never really found myself questioning his taste, judgment or his passion to do great work. Chris also, always, as far as I can remember, put the needs of clients first, not the needs of awards' juries. 

He wrote these words to me when I was having one of my every eight seconds moments of rage at Ogilvy: 

"Look, you have to have a certain amount of faith in the power of two things:  creative work that is genuinely insightful and well crafted and the willingness to put in the time to do things right.

 

"If you do those things, smart clients love you because their work gets results.  And the others fall by the wayside because hard work trumps a title in the long run.  

 

"It can be a tortuous path, I admit.  You are envied for your portfolio and envied because the people with money and influence look to you for help - and they can't figure it out (because if they did, they'd have the same relationships)."

The note Patti reprinted was touched many of the same themes.

This is from Patti:

"When Chris was departing Ogilvy after 20 years, he sent a much longer email (he was famous for his robust notes), but these nuggets are what stand true today. Or should. Needed this reminder."

This is from Chris:

• "Manage down, not up. Look out for your people. Be unselfish. Help them succeed. Spend time talking to them about their aspirations, try to protect them from stupidity and care about them as human beings. It will come back to you in the form of loyalty, commitment and good karma.
  
  
• Look for the good in every idea. Critics are a dime a dozen. It’s easy to be dismissive of an idea, especially when it isn’t yours. Force yourself to think about how an idea COULD work if it’s not quite working as presented.
  
  
• Ethics is not a training module. It has become fashionable to shovel various on-line “training” modules at people these days. But if you’re smart enough to get a job at Ogilvy & Mather, then you’re smart enough to know the difference between right and wrong. Ethics comes from the heart, not from an email. If somebody who works for you is behaving in an unethical fashion, get rid of them. We owe our clients honesty and integrity above all else. Once you start fudging the truth, you forget what the truth is.
  
  
• People follow leaders, not titles.  It astounds me how many people think a windy title on your business card is the same thing as actually being a leader. But while titles are common, leadership is rare. Leadership brings with it the collective force of faith and partnership. It can move mountains.
  
  
• There aren’t many geniuses in this business. I’ve met perhaps three or four. For the rest of us, hard work is what counts. This is an enormously competitive business and outworking your competition is one of a handful of proven ways to win. The harder you work, the more often you win.
  
  
• Above all, have perspective. I’ve tried to work hard and apply my skills to the best of my ability. But mostly, I’ve benefitted from a culture that attracted people of character and talent who shared their knowledge and made me look good. Lucky me.
  
  
• For a business that depends on the passion and inspiration of people, it is remarkable how willing it is to treat them as a disposable resource.
  
  
• If you embrace it, believe in it and live it - it will continue to flourish

And that, I think, would be a good thing for all of us."

Chris' words seem especially important today, when agencies like Ogilvy have CRL (continuous rolling layoffs) and seem to be less and less concerned with creativity in the service of their clients and more and more concerned with spurious awards, hiding layoffs from the trade-press, the cost-cutting benefits of automation, data and AI, and Holding Company C-Suite bonuses.

This is how agencies talk today. As reported in Ad Age (no relation) last week.

That was then, above. This is now, below.

 

 

Efficiency.

 

I read in Ad Age, the trade press I prefer to call the traitor press, because they suss out no truths about the despoiling of the advertising industry by the Holding Company malefactors of great wealth, yesterday a surprisingly damning article about what's really going on on pothole-pocked Madison Avenue.

You can read it here. 

But warning, it's NSFW. 

But then again, work is NSFW.

The entire ad industry is NSFW.

Back in 2020, when I was fired by WPP-mangled agency Ogilvy & Dontmatter, Mark Read, CEO of WPP defamed me by saying I harkened back to the 80s. The 80s was a time ads mattered, clients valued their agencies, and agencies were profitable. So sue my harkening ass.

I don't like Mark Read.

I don't like unprincipled rich people destroying literally thousands of livelihoods. I don't like a holding company that's fired 45% of its workforce since 2017. They've gone from 200,000 employees to 105,000 employees while granting themselves private-jets and multi-million dollar bonuses and compensation.

I don't like that.

Most of all, I don't like lies. And Orwellian Newspeak. As a person who grew up during the lies of the Vietnam war and Nixonian autocracy, I hate lies like these. And I hate lying liars.

And I hate people who have the inhumanity to call firing masses of people "efficiency opportunities." Or saying things like "there will unfortunately be some redundancies."

"Mark Read. Making Snidely Whiplash sound like Mr. Rogers since 2018.™"

I thought about sending this to 50 efficiency opportunities I know and collecting their statements. 

Mine is:

Mr. Read, 

I am not an 'efficiency opportunity.'
I am a brain that for 40 years made clients, shareholders and you, rich.

I wanted to get dozens of actual humans to tell Mr. Read that they're people, humans, not cells on a spreadsheet to be eliminated so you can despoil an industry and deposit your mammon.

But I don't have time to send out notes to people. And people are generally afraid to poke billionaire-bears. So, I did it alone.

In other words,

I took the opportunity to be efficient.

It's gonna take a lot of bagel Wednesdays to wash that phrase out of my gullet.

Marking Time. And Progress.

A lot of people ask me about my blog. 

My famous blog.

How I've managed to write a post every working day since June 4, 2007. 6241 posts in all, including my 20 or so so far this year.

A lot of people ask me how.

And a lot of people ask me why.

If I say, I do it because writing is a discipline like exercise or, even, brushing your teeth, or if I say writing a lot makes me a better writer, they look at me funny. They act as if they still don't understand or as if I'm trying to be inscrutable in some way.

Going into October, 2023, my phone started ringing fairly off the hook. GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company had had an ok year up to that point, but each of my final three months of the year was like like three months of work in an of themselves. In a sense, each one made my year.

That pace hasn't slackened in 2024. I don't want to jinx things but my guess is that GeorgeCo., LLC, is bigger than a lot of "big" agencies. They're better at boasting and announcing they've won 77 Gold Titanium Harpsichords in the Latvian International Advertising Festival. They're great at announcing they've won for the eighth consecutive year "Fast Company's" "Best Places to Get Downsized From." 

They're proud to trumpet that their nineteen CCOs, each of whom are desperately looking for new jobs, have once again won "Creative Director and Lemon Zester of the Year in the Borderless Creativity Awards," but they're not so good at actually helping brands. 

Wow. Helping brands. Talk about passé.

Man, do I harken back or what?

Going into last Sunday, January 28, I had no posts written for next week. Given that I have meeting in New York on Monday and three different client presentations on Tuesday, I was feeling the pressure. 

The pressure of having nothing written and no ideas. And very little time.

And there, my friends (and if you've read this far, you're my friend) is exactly what I've gained from writing this blog and the discipline that writing this blog has demanded.

The pressure of having nothing written and no ideas. And very little time.

That's just about every day.

That's just about every brief.

That's just about every aspect of your life and your career.

Who doesn't feel that way half a dozen times a day?

That feeling of being neck-deep in shit and someone starts throwing baseballs at your head.

You can't duck. 

You've got to figure a way out.

That's what I've learned from the ardor and the rigor of writing every day. That the best way to do it is to do it until you do it to your satisfaction. It ain't waiting until the moment's right. Or hoping you can get an extension. Or hoping someone else can do it.

It's doing it.

It's training yourself to do it.

To do it every day.

You never hear of a plumber or a blacksmith or a baker saying "I know I have a thousand horses that need shoeing, a thousand drains that are clogged, and a thousand families that need fresh bread, but I wasn't in the mood."

Just about seven-ninths of the way through nearly every client briefing as we're wrapping things up and the client's talked me through their needs, I say something like, "It's 11 now. If you told me you needed something by 11:30, I could do something pretty good." That's my way of saying "I get it." That's my way of saying "I get it now. And I have enough time to make something special." It's my way of saying, "Relax, I've got this. This is handle-able."

That's what 6241 posts have taught me.

That's what 6241 posts have demonstrated.

I know how to put words on paper that make a difference.