Bad News. Worse News.

BAD NEWS: You've gotten Covid again.

WORSE NEWS: It's Covid 19--as in your 19th time.

BAD NEWS: You've gotten hired by a WPP agency.

WORSE NEWS: You harken back to the 2000s.

BAD NEWS: Bagels in the break room.

WORSE NEWS: Stale.

BAD NEWS: The client loves your copy.

WORSE NEWS: She loves it in seven colors of contradictory direction.

BAD NEWS: Verizon is offering a free phone.

WORSE NEWS: You had to watch an entire Verizon commercial to find out about it.

BAD NEWS: You work for the industry's second most-awarded agency network.

WORSE NEWS: Every other agency network is tied for first.

BAD NEWS: You worked for months and won a giant piece of new business.

WORSE NEWS: You worked for months and won a giant piece of new business.

BAD NEWS: Your new CCO has a really crappy creative reputation and a terrible reel.

WORSE NEWS: She didn't do any of the work attributed to her.

BAD NEWS: Your new CCO has a really crappy creative reputation and a terrible reel.

WORSE NEWS: Her replacement will arrive soon and will be even less qualified.

BAD NEWS: Upper management has decreed you have to be in the office three days a week.

WORSE NEWS: Unfortunately they're the same three days upper management is in the office.

BAD NEWS: Upper management has decreed you have to be in the office three days a week.

WORSE NEWS: There's no place to sit.

BAD NEWS: The holding company expense system is so complicated at takes three weeks to do your expenses.

WORSE NEWS: They'll be approved just three weeks after you get charged a credit card late fee.

BAD NEWS: The client is on Net 120.

WORSE NEWS: After taxes, your net is gross.

BAD NEWS: The agency has a new podcast.

WORSE NEWS: You're expected to listen to it.

BAD NEWS: The global holding company town hall discusses nothing but data.

WORSE NEWS: For a moment it seemed like you understood what they were saying.

BAD NEWS: Five years until you retire.

WORSE NEWS: You're only 27.

Malefactors of Great Meh.

A friend of mine works for a new business consultancy. They recently published the Agency Family Tree which I've pasted above with a GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company headline attached. I removed the name of the new business company. They had nothing to do with my repurposing.

I realize my art direction and design skills are minimal and, really, without merit. I couldn't, though I tried, make the listings of all the individual agencies above that have been subsumed into the giant holding companies large enough to be legible. 

But you should, just based on the mass of grey lines underneath holding company headings, OMNICOM, WPP, PUBLICIS, INTERPUBLIC, DENTSU, HAKUHUDO, CHIEL, HAVAS, STAGWELL, get the idea that the malefactors of great wealth and bland advertising have bought up just about every agency of any considerable size. 

They've kept their paws off of Wieden & Kennedy, who somehow remain independent, and they haven't yet acquired or been folded into the giant accounting consultancies like Accenture or Deloitte. My guess is, that's coming.

Leave no cash-flow unpillaged, right?

I realized something a few years ago when I was in the local supermarket. Where there used to be Coke, Pepsi, 7-Up and then a considerable number of local brands in the soda section, now there are no more local brands. 

The oligarchs, by introducing Coke Diet Zero Low-Caffeine Cherry Vanilla Lemon-Lime light, have bought a shelf-facing. They ain't selling a lot of that SKU (stock-keeping unit) but they're keeping that shelf-space out of the hands of any still surviving smaller competitors. Ask Russia. Ask Ukraine. In a war, you grab territory. Er, it comes with the territory.

The same strategy has removed competition in the hotel industry, the automobile industry, the handheld-device industry, the airline industry, the hamburger industry, and the political-industry. When giant companies own everything and limit choices, quality usually plummets and prices usually rise. There's little question that dynamic--paying more for less--has happened in what remains of the advertising industry.

The "Internet Service Provider or ISP Industry" in the US is a metaphor for so many of the extortionate business practices we no longer question. First, there's no Service-ness or Provider-ness anywhere near their names. Second, if you ever wondered why so many terrible sports teams are owned by cable and internet companies, think of how much money you could make, and what you could do with it, if you owned a toll-booth. These companies have a government-ordained unregulated utility. Billionaireitude usually follows. They make money by strip mining. They never re-invest.

I'm not one-hundred percent sure why there's no anti-trust sentiment arising against this agglomeration of capital. There's a verbal fudge in the law that's on Federal books, it's called "the rule of reason." Corporate lawyers maintain that some restraint of trade is "positive or beneficial for consumers or society." And, I'd allege for reasons of graft, the Sherman Anti Trust Act is about as effective as abstinence videos aimed at horny teens, a tautology if there ever was one.

If you have $100 million and an unwieldy superego and seven or nine Senators on your payroll, maybe you could start to fight for the spirit of the 1890 Sherman Anti Trust laws to again be upheld. But you'd quickly be called a Red and a Socialist and FoxGnus would revoke your citizenship. Besides, you have $100 million--your raison de crumb-cake is to get your next $100 million. That's the American Way. E Pluribus Unum, that's Latin for stick you hand in someone's pocket.

To be fair, year-over-year GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is growing faster--and maybe even larger--than any of the companies listed in the horrorshow family-tree above. But while my clients range from pre-revenue start-ups to the Fortune 50, I'd really love an auto-maker account, or even a motor-oil, or the electric car division of an automaker or a chain of pool-halls in the midwest or a supplier of fishing gear or a string of training centers that tutor dogs to improve their SAT scores.  

A lot of being a small operation is pushing water uphill. You're shut out of a lot. And you have to compete not only against other creatives but an overwhelming dominant complacency, which includes a depressed fee schedule based on the commodification on creativity perpetrated by the holding companies. Half your work is de-commodification--and that ain't easy.

But they ad game--the ad game that <er> harkens back to the 80s was always an underdog's playground. The little guys always took on the big guys. Like Apple versus IBM or VW versus Detroit. 

I wish it were easier being The Alternative.

At least it's fun.

Be Bop Shee Boop.

You can't go on any social media site, read any feed, or even go on a news site without 75 or 50 otherwise intelligent people gushing over the latest advent in some sort of AI-enabled film technique, word-to-image technology, weapon-system, satellite rapine or whatnot.

Different in every way. But hyperbole.

The system is rigged.

Jed Clampett, a dramatization.

Humankind seems to be gushing more over our collective binary destruction than Texas oilmen did over gushers at Spindletop a century and a quarter ago.

The wealth bubbling up was going to change everything and all would be right with the world. We refused to see the unintended consequences of all this gushing. The corrupting wealth. The environmental destruction. The forcing people off ancestral lands. The climactic cataclysm. 

Today, people post absolute AI garbage. Worse than crap. Awful disgusting ugly dumb insulting. Seriously, the above is the technological second coming? I've sat through thousands of meetings in my day. I'm 66 years old. I've been to Disney Land and through "It's a Small World." I've never seen anything worser.

Yet.

The gush continues.

And for whatever reason, on Twitter, I'm in a small coterie of ancient ad people. And non-ancient ad people like to share these things with us. Like an early neanderthal might have shown an early sapiens his latest cave drawing. We're supposed to be awed, I suppose. Lascaux-a-go-go.

Seriously. AI can't even top Neanderthals.

It's all so empty. 

You learn more looking at the fractals of a puddle in a Bronx parking lot. No aurochs need apply.

Yet.

The gush continues.

While it doesn't take a lot to anger me, it takes a lot to anger me enough to write about it on Twitter. But finally, I cracked. And I wrote this:

Words that make you different make a difference.™

@georget20

·

Feb 15

every time we show some advance of technology, we should show something amazing that's human-made. I think we're forgetting that our brains have six trillion synapses and are way more advanced than the most-complex computers ever built.

youtube.com

Palm Beach Story (1942) - The Weenie King plays Fairy Godfather.

Claudette Colbert and Robert Dudley in Preston Sturges's classic comedy, The Palm Beach Story.Check

And that's how I feel. That's what I believe. STFU about the splendors of science if you ain't willing to what a piece of work is man, how Noble in reason, how infinite in Faculty, in apprehension how like a god.

Every time I see some butterfly with a clown face playing pickelball on Mars, marvelously rendered by a billion-dollar machine programmed by people who have never visited a proper museum, we should look at a Caravaggio or Artemisia Gentileschi. Or go to the Egyptian wing at the Met or see an old Roman mosaic of fish or gods.

AI. Cain't.

Or read Ozymandias, whose giant trunkless legs are today built on binary bullshit and their description has a 140-character limit. Or go outside one dark and moonless night at look at the blackness of black and see the flicker of a billions years' past and wonder like the ancients did as they tried to derive our place in the universe.

A place made by humans and brains, of awe and fear and wonder.

Not pixellized spin art.

Sorry, Alan.

It's worse today.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

Or, Babs. Even better.

Stakanovite.

For most of the seventeen years I lived under my father's roof and under my mother's borderline personality (or whatever the latest DSM calls 'a nasty old hag') my older brother, younger sister and I had to tiptoe around their tilted little house.

First, any noise might set my mother's hair-trigger to 'extra-hairy,' and two, my father almost died of a heart-attack in 1967 and again in 1974, and we, as children were told it was the noise we made which was largely responsible.

I grew up knowing my father could die at any minute and my mother could explode. As I learned about my parents when I left home for good, age 17, no one is entirely useless; they can always serve as a bad example.

Even Joe Louis couldn't take a punch like a time-clock.

One of the examples I learned from was my father's work ethic. Except for his non-stop schtupping of various secretaries, he seldom took a break. There was hardly a moment he didn't have a yellow legal pad and a black Pentel pen.

At an early-age, I vowed I would be more moderate than he. In fact, in an attempt at moderation, I set out for a career in academia. I incorrectly thought the ivied halls of some leafy campus somewhere in say Maine or New Hampshire--somewhere suitably out-of-the-way-and-fray, would be much more benign than my father's martini-fueled Madison Avenue hallways. I quickly learned that the only difference between advertising stiletto knives and professorial stilettos was that at a university the stabbings come fully annotated and with copious footnotes.

So, mostly because I had rent to pay and no visible or invisible means of support and I was tired of getting my furniture from ratty piles on city sidewalks, I went to the School of Visual Arts and after some years of working at it (I think I dropped my portfolio at 41 agencies) I finally started my advertising career. 

I vowed, however, not to cardiac my way to an early death. While I always worked hard, I never got into the practice of staying all hours to show my fervor. I'd get in early, work hard, and go home at a reasonable time. Peer pressure be damned.

When my first ACD (when that was a big title) had a heart-attack virtually right in front of me when he was just 37, I redoubled my efforts not to redouble my efforts. 

In short order, I convinced myself, I was not a hard-worker.

It's now forty years later, and I have two daughters, 36 and 32, who are fast making their ways in their careers. My 36-year-old is a Clinical Psychologist and runs a Harvard-affiliated clinic specializing in helping children and their parents. My 32-year-old is a Marine Biologist and helps run the University of California San Diego's Master's Program in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. It's kind of funny and fascinating to me that in a sense they have the academic careers that I wasn't able to pursue.

The Stakhanovites (стаха́новцы) modeled themselves after Alexei Stakhanov, a coal miner, 

and took pride in their ability to produce more than was required by working harder and more efficiently, thus contributing to the common good and strengthening the socialist state.

My daughters, touch wood, often call me. And, as children do, they excoriate me for having worked so hard. They chastise me for giving them a Stakanovite work ethic.

They tell me about the late nights they work and the 5AM wake-ups. They tell me about the pressures of living in a world where nearly everything that tries to uplift others is under-funded and understaffed and under-pressure. They say, with some anger, "Dad. Why'd you teach us to work so hard?" Their voices are not without rancor in these moments.

I look at them and I have a simple answer.

The same answer Joe Louis, the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time, uttered when assessing his twelve years as champion and holder of a fight-all-comers 66-3 record. The same answer Philip Roth quoted when he evaluated his career and more than thirty novels: "I did the best I could with what I had."

In thirty or so years, lord willing, my kids will say the same to their kids.

Facing Faces.

About three hundred years ago, somewhere in Mittel Europa, what we now call German and Austria, there was a popular sculptor called Franz Xaver Messerschmidt.

He sculpted bronze busts that were very popular for a time, particularly among nobles, people with Vons in their names. Not the skate-boarding cool-kid sneakers.

Consider this, the creepiest thing you'll see all day.

Messerschmidt's busts showed heightened emotions. There's an exaggerated and even grotesque aspect to them. I wouldn't mind seeing them in the Getty Museum in LA, or in various galleries in Vienna. But I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want one in my home. I don't find ventriloquist's dummies scary, or even clowns, but these might keep me up at night. Especially if I saw one move--or convinced my wife that I had.

It's less than a week since the commercial, political, violence and sports phenomena we call the Super Bowl has ended. I'm still thinking about the commercials I saw during the game and which are so ardently debated, critiqued and praised by advertising people in the wake of the event.

All those spots and all the chatter about them has gotten me thinking, as I so often do, about advertising. 

Whatever you think of Messerschmidt's art--and I'm sure nothing I do will come close to lasting 300 days, much less 300 years--his busts capture human reactions.

Do a bit of a Google search and you'll see each one of his heads has a title like, Man Yawning, or The Vexed Man. His depictions match his descriptions pretty well.

I thought of my face. 

On Monday, I had a drink with a friend. She described my visage as "resting cranky face." This is a friend.

I thought about Messerschmidt and advertising and the faces our work contorts.

I'm 99.7-percent sure my face on Sunday during the game could be described as slack-jawed. Sort of like the illustration by Thomas Lea in Life Magazine in 1944 of an unnamed marine at the Battle of Peleliu. The 2000 yard stare. A marine in the wake of the entrenched Japanese enemy during World War II, one of the most horrible of all battles in a horrible war.

I looked at the waste.

The noise.

The incomprehension.

The adjectival gushiness.

The buy-me-now Bacchanal.

I thought about Carl Ally, whose agency I worked at for five years. He said, "advertising should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." The advertising I saw on Sunday neither comforted or afflicted. 

It victimized.
It assaulted.
It was a pipe-organ gone mad at a carousel spinning out of control. Dissonance rampant.

I know everything is tested.
I know we track eye-movements.
And we heat-map pupicks and apply our learnings.

I wonder if we do what Messerschmidt did.

Look at people.
And say, why do they feel like that?

That's Not What I Saw.

Living for so many of my days up on the Gingham Coast, and living up here with a five-month-old golden retriever, I find myself talking to people who live near me. The issue is, they know me but I don't know them.

Though I have a scary-good memory, it's only scary-good about some things. When it comes to names and faces, I have the absorbency of a discount one-ply sheet of paper towel. I can't tell you how many times I have a meeting with Mark and call him Matt one-third of the way through and then hang-up by saying "talk to you soon, Mike."

Around here in Connecticut, my wife knows all the neighbors, their children and grand children, their dogs, favorite recipes, their approximately monthly heating bills and a Stasi-like amount of miscellany. I have conversations with people who know my name and my golden-retreiver Sparkle's name and sundry other things about me, but if you'd ask me, I'd swear I never met them before.

In any event, it often comes out that my real home is not the rocky littoral of "the shoreline," but the rat-paved streets of the naked and teeming city. Every once-in-a-so-often, I'll mention, distractedly, that I'm heading back for a meeting, a laugh, a good bagel or the grit that passes for real urban sinew. None of which anyone up here understands. 

"Oh, be careful," they warn. "I heard the city is gangland. A hellhole, a madhouse."

"Murder!"

Someone else will say, "Didja hear about that thing on the subway? It's out of control."

"And the gangs are rampaging, clearing the shelves in the CVS. It's out of control."

I was about to write that I look at these people like they're from a different planet. But they are from a different planet. They're sifting whatever news they get through a series of screens that confirms their belief in the danger of elsewhere and the absolute genius of living up here.

The biggest crime in this fairly elegant section of the world is someone either not picking up after their dog or putting their dog's waste in your garbage pail. Yet all over the neighborhood their are signs with distended eyes painted on them that say in capital letters, "NEIGHBORHOOD CRIME WATCH." That's like posting a sign in the middle of the Sahara that reads, "Bridge freezes before road surface." Sure, it does. But that matters not a bit.

In our riven era it occurs to me that there's little "truth" anymore. Just opinions shouted at the top of our lungs with utter resolve and conviction.

In the wake of the Super Bowl, according to the self-aggrandizing-ness of the ad industry, you'd think people actually gave a shit about ads. It seems to me, yes, I view things with some critical cynicism, that according to one ad meter or another, virtually every ad won "best ad" recognition from someone--probably some rating entity that collects millions in revenue in return for stellar grades. 

Bey and Verizon. But I'd bet Verizon is still one of the most-hated brands in Amerika.

BTW, I remember launching a campaign for high-end business technology equipment and having the client boast, "In one week we doubled sales." They had gone from two machines sold to four.

It seems to me that the entire ad industry and its accomplices now behave like first-time parents in a Type-A suburb. "Jennifer lost a tooth! She so advanced." "Billy," at age four, "can count to three in Spanish. He's gifted." "Little Jonny farted! Can you believe it!"

Yes. That is our world.

Every thing is an -est.

The best. The funniest. The hardest to have accomplished. The importantest. The influentialest. The est-ti-est, apologies to Werner Erhard.

Every agency has won at least a dozen agency of the year awards or is shortlisted for a shortlist of shortlists.

There are more people on Linked in who describe themselves as award-winning than people who don't.

Here's a tip, if everything you see on TV sucks, yet every creative and every agency has about 3289 awards to their names, something is really wrong.

Subject-object split anyone?

What we're being subsumed by instead of a flat telling-of-the-facts is grandiose posturing, axe-sharpening and agenda-propagating.

Those who proclaim the death of the city have an agenda. Those who give someplace that sells artisanal mac-and-cheese three Michelin stars are being paid. Those who proclaim every thyroid-case with an outside jump shot as the GOAT are trying to sell tickets.

Most of what I saw during the game and afterwards was as noisy as a four-year-old's birthday party during a Ritalin shortage and about as lucid. 

I never once uttered the phrase, "I wish I did that." I say it when I read a book, a poem, see a Billy Wilder movie or even something with Laurel & Hardy. 

And I don't care if any of that stuff won awards.

That's someone else's agenda. 

Not mine.