Be Kind. And Mean.

It seems to me about 37 times a day someone on some social platform, or wearing a t-shirt with a message on it, tries to show how profound they are by telling the world to "Be Kind."

I can barely think of anything dumber or more platitudinous. 

Because if you have to be told, and if you're taking life advice from strangers on corrupt and polluted social platforms, you never will be kind. You will instead be kind of a dimwit.

Toward the middle of last week a young person reached out to me. She asked for career advice. I wrote back to her and offered her an hour on Friday morning at 9AM her time. We spoke for a full hour.

I work pretty hard on these calls. I've been in the business a long time and I see a lot. I think I offer a lot to these people.

As Steve Hayden once said to me, "free advice is worth what you paid for it." I take that as a challenge and try to make it punch above its weight.

Usually, toward the end of our call, I say something I think is pretty good. And then I add, "that's it. That's your assignment. Do that work. Talk to the people I've told you to talk to and you'll be closer to getting a job."

I always add one more thing.

"Be mean to yourself. It's Friday now. Be done with the work I've told you to do by Monday. Be mean to yourself. Get it done. It's a pain in the ass, and hard, and introspective and maybe you have things to do this weekend, but be mean to yourself and get it done. It's how you'll get what you want from your career."

I wrapped up this particular talk with a nice turn of a phrase. "Being mean to yourself is the best way to be nice to yourself."

I'm not sure everybody gets that. But that's ok.

When my younger daughter was ten, she was determined to pass her open-water scuba diving test. Ten was the youngest age at which you could become certified.

We were all on vacation in Hawaii, and rather than hang out on the beach or play in the pool, my daughter sat at the poolside and studied her scuba text book. She looked grim, furrowed and slightly miserable. Studying when she wanted to be playing.

I didn't make her. I didn't tell her to. But she understood.

She did that also when she became a rescue diver at 15 and a open-water dive-instructor at age 18. Today, at 32, she helps run the world's premier Marine Science Master's program.

She got there by being mean to herself. Denying and trying.

When Friday rolls around, I do the same to myself. Virtually every Friday for the last 247 years, I say to myself, "It's been a helluva week." Because work, even as much as I love it, is hard. You put your whole brain, your whole heart and all your sinew--every-slow and every-fast twitch into it. 

When my work-week ends, even if I have no pressing client deliverables upcoming, I open--not shut--my computer. I do what I'm doing right now, I dope out a blog post or two for the upcoming week. I've done that for seventeen straight years without missing a day.

A lot of making it in our business or any other business is finding something that makes you stand out from the myriad people who can do roughly the same things you can. I mean, what we do is pretty easy. When you get down to it, writing a commercial is writing about 60 words about peanut butter or baked beans. It's really not that hard.

What's hard is showing the people who want those commercials why they should pick you to type them. What's hard is showing people what makes you different.

I realized early on in advertising that I had a lot going for me. But even with that I was never going to be one of the cool kids. There would always be people who won more awards or were smarter about hopping on the latest trends. Or their ass-kissing skills surpassed mine, which are not inconsiderable.

I realized my many shortcomings.

But I still had the same ambition.

To be picked. To be chosen. To get the job. To get the money.

How could I get there?

About 99.9% of what I do now--the blogging, the ads, the general sagacious-izing--is because I want to win. I want the money.

I know to get the money I have to be mean to myself. I have to drive myself. I have to metaphorically sit by the side of the pool and study while everyone else is drinking blue drinks and slipping into or out of various bikinis.

So, I recoil when I see platitudes like "Be Kind."

You're better off being mean. Denying yourself and trying harder.

Mean, I know.

 

Used.

That ugly rectangle with the hideous photograph of an ancient man wearing ancient clothing sitting in an ancient chair is what us old-timers in the ad business used to call an "ad." This ad, and ads like it ran in things we used to call magazines.

A magazine was made of paper, often glossy, and stapled together. It had a variety of words and pictures put into a form we called "articles," or "news items," or "stories," or "reporting." It also had dozens of ads in dozens of different sizes. If you wanted more impact, you bought more ads and bigger ones.

People paid for these things we used to call magazines. They either signed up for a subscription, in which case the magazine would be sent to them whenever it was published (printed) or they walked to a store or a kiosk we used to call a "newsstand." On that newsstand, there were dozens of magazines and newspapers. You could put money on the counter and buy them. More newspapers and magazines came in every day, and many things we used to call people (not users) would visit often and buy them.

People would keep magazines for a while. Sometimes a week or longer. Once-in-a-while, they'd read an article they liked and they'd clip it out, or Xerox it, or give the magazine to a friend and say, "you might want to read the story by Ray Bradbury on page 71."

As I said above all that is quaint and outdated now.

We have no more magazines, we have sites. We have no more articles. We have content. We have no more ads. We have banners. We have no more time because there are so many sites and so much content and such an onslaught of banners, that we ignore virtually all of it.

As Neal Postman wrote in 1985 (before you were born) in "Amusing Ourselves to Death,"

All that brings me back to the top of this post and to the copy in the aforementioned ugly rectangle:

I don’t know who you are.

I don’t know your company.

I don’t know your company’s product.

I don’t know what your company stands for.

I don’t know your company’s customers.

I don’t know your company’s record.

I don’t know company’s reputation.

Now—what was it you wanted to sell me?

When I was a boy in the ad business, until the time the ad business deemed me obsolete for making it too much money, most of the ads I worked on tried to answer the "I don't knows" above.

Most of us didn't go to ad schools back then. I didn't know anyone who did post-graduate work in advertising. And I'm not even sure if I knew one account person in all my years who had an MBA. Also, decks were usually typewritten, not 144-page powerpoints. 

Today, though I make more money than ever before in my life, have more disposable income and am statistically in the top one-percent of American income-earners, there's scarcely a brand or a product that tells me anything I feel I need to know about themselves. 

I love cars and I'd be damned if I could tell you a material difference between a Nissan, Toyota, Mazda, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes, Audi, BMW, VW, Ford, Chrysler, GM product other than people seem to have orgasms when they hear about Apple Car Play and hands-free parking. The same holds true for just about everything in every store. Oh, and there's never any traffic, people buy cars because of balloons in showrooms, and the apotheosis of life is driving your kids to soccer.

No one answers the "I don't knows." They don't even realize they exist. (That would be harkening back.)

As a consequence, I no longer buy anything. I don't know what I'm buying anymore or why it's better or why I should care.

That's progress!

When advertising stopped caring about me

I stopped caring about it.

When advertising stopped saying what I needed to hear, 

I stopped listening to what it was saying.

The end.

Spinning.

The other day in this space, I wrote a smidgen about Long History. That is, looking at the world not just with a view of the last two, five, seven or eleven cataclysms, wars and disasters, but through looking at the last few thousand.

Long history tries to make sense of the present by looking at centuries, even millennia past. It tries to discern trends that you might miss when you view things through a narrow aperture. For instance, if you watch the sensation nightly news--at least in amerika--you're likely to hear a cacophony of murders, abductions, sexual assaults and more. It takes a step away from our quotidian mayhem to discern if life is getting more or less violent, more or less stable, more or less chaotic. Even comparing decades of data doesn't really do the trick.

The goal in a lot of in-the-moment reflection on current events is to bolster one particular agenda over another. It was very easy to paint a picture of inflation being out of control at the onset of the Covid pandemic. The data looks different if you can look at it through a different lens. 

A lot of people my age, for instance, will wank on about gas being fifty-cents a gallon in 1975. They use that data point as proof of some global serenity. Ignoring that fifty cents in 1975 is equal to roughly $3.40 today. So all the apoplexy about out of control gas prices was really just politicking, not science.

Same with eggs for that matter. Adjusted for inflation, they're about the same price--give or take a yolk--that they were 50 years ago. 

The figure that's really grown disproportionately is the one no one talks about: CEO pay.

In 1975 CEO wages averaged twenty times median employee wages. So, if a median worker made $15,000, the CEO made $300,000. Today, the average CEO makes three-hundred times their median worker. So if the median worker makes $75,000, the average CEO makes just under $23,000,000.

Then there's this, which should be self-explanatory.  Workers are making more, and getting less. The profits from productivity gains are going to the C-suite, not the you-and-me-suite.

Now, to the aforementioned Long History portion of today's post.

If you go back to the Black Death, either it's 14th century or 15th century occurrence, when about half of Europe's population was killed, something else happened in Europe. Workers--there had been a glut of them before the plague--gained power. They could break their indentures. They could leave their Lords. They could strike for higher wages. 

In short, the balance between capital and labor was altered by the cataclysm. You heard a lot of fretting about this during Covid. The great resignation. $15 minimum wage. No workers.

Taking a Long History view of our era, I'd suggest that with the Great Depression (roughly 1929-1941), World War II, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society, labor--that's you and me--gained an upper hand. The highest marginal tax rate was over 90-percent, and as stated above, workers wages were in line with those of management. Plus, at least theoretically, taxes were somewhat redistributive. The wealthier helped the less fortunate.

My view is that that arrangement--since the Reagan years--has come under attack. I believe Project 2025 is evidence of that. As is the evisceration of employee benefits and generally lower wages. What's more, something like 45-percent of workers in amerika are "contingent," gig workers. They're permalance. With no security, no benefits, no real investment in amerika or its economy.

What we have today is Reverse Robin Hood capitalism. Steal from the poor to feed the rich.

There's bonafide smart people--not advertising bloggers--who write about this stuff. One is Walter Schiedel, a Stanford University historian who's book "The Great Leveller," is tough-going, but a must read. 

You can read a short interview with Schiedel from "The Economist" here.

At the least, you might want to read these few sentences:

My usual enemies will read this and screed at me that I'm living in some liberal fantasy world. That's fine.

I think if you look at long history from serfdom to union busting to today, you'll see there's been a constant battle between capital and labor. When I grew up, labor was still ascendant. The legacy of the New Deal, the collapse of world capitalism and, I suppose, luck. 

Today, the tables have turned.

The little guy--and we're all little guys--is being rotisseried. Project 2025 is evidence of that. And I can't believe that the four or five agency holding companies don't have their own version of Project 2025, call it Private Jetting, that they're slowly enacting. 

I've seen it.

It sucks.

Kerplunk.

Of all the banalities I've heard during my 66.7 years, the most banal of all might be the one that was repeated roughly every 12 seconds when I was at R/GA back 15 or so years ago before we realized that the internet was to cesspits what donald trump is to ethics.

Back then, those under the narcotic effects of technology would sing the praises of the splendors of technology, refusing to recognize or acknowledge the corrupt and corrupting influence of great power under no governor or editorial restraint or, even, the smallest dram of fact-checking.

Back then every planner in creation was extolling the power of Sheryl Sandburg leaning in and told us on auto-repeat that "the consumer was in control." 

Somehow, the un-thinking went, the consumer could make content, could comment on a brand, could be heard and that would check the unchecked power of soon-to-be trillion dollar brands that are too big to fail and too evil to give a shit.

Yesterday, I got a text from xfinity which is owned by comcast telling me that my service will be interrupted for an unspecified length of time because they are maintaining the fiber optic cables that my fees paid for

As I do, I texted back. "I pay for 24/7 service. Will I be refunded for this outage?"

The bot of course told me that outages caused by maintenance are ineligible for credit.

Life's great when you bill what you want and make the rules you want and are so powerful that no one can do anything to protest your power.

But the consumer is in control.

Today, just about everything amerikans buy is controlled by just two or three companies. What's more, and most pernicious, is the schtupholm syndrome that afflicts most people today. What I've found is that many people actually root for oligopolies versus the people fighting them. We have been trained as a "society," to disdain people who speak out. They're regarded as trouble-makers and loudmouths. Seeing, say, Coca-Cola as the world's largest distributer of plastic pollution and diabetes makes you a pariah. "But they sponsored the concert I paid $400 to attend, and they spend $1,000,000,000 telling me how kind they are."

Not only is the consumer not in control, today's consumer is too lazy to be anything but ill-informed and so has no idea how shitty the oligopolies make life.

That includes, of course, our advertising oligopolies in which five white men control 85% of all advertising jobs and if you protest, you're black-balled out of the business. 

The diminishment of the importance of advertising, the very destruction of the industry, the self-hagiography in the industry's obsession with pay-for-play awardingness, and the constant reductions in force are identical to the modus operandi of all the monopolized industrial sectors mentioned above.

When every industry acts like an extractive industry--taking the wealth and leaving slag and detritus behind, we have a world in systems collapse.

Of course, we have political oligopolies, too, where the dimmycrats and the repugnants in a country of 330,000,000 can't find anyone more palatable than a serial thug, liar, fascist and abuser or a old-man who no longer has all his faculties intact.

They're also a monopoly.

The consumer is in control. 

Yup. Just like sand is in control of the sea

.

The Long and Winding Rude.

One of the great privileges of being as old as the reptiles, and working for yourself, not directly for a corporate behemoth, is that you have something of a chance--if you take it--of looking at the world from a distance, not from up-close.

If the good graces of the world had given me the patience and the scholarship money and I had somehow become an academic instead of an advertising man, I probably would have toggled back and forth between teaching English and teaching history. The two were always tangled in my mind and like my daughters' long, thick hair. I was never able separate one strand from another. They were interwoven like mammon and cruelty.

How can you read "The Goophered Grapevine," for instance by Charles W. Chestnut with no historical understanding of American history from 1619 to the early 20th century when the book was written? How could you read "The Grapes of Wrath," by Steinbeck, or "Heaven's My Destination, by Thornton Wilder devoid of the elucidation that comes from knowing something of the times in which they were written? 

That goes for just about any piece of literature that I can think of. Columbia professor James S. Shapiro probably agrees with me. He's written dozens of books about literature, historical context and why those book are important today. If you think things are rough in amerika in 2024, you might want to read Shapiro's "The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606." Order here.

All this is to assert, I've managed to enter my dotage with my faculties intact, a decent book of business and more clients than I can shake a pay-stub at. That allows me the privilege of trying to piece together something people above my pay-grade call "long history." That is, not an historical account of the Franco-Prussian war, which lasted little less than a year, but instead at the tectonic movements of people, empires, technologies and ideas that shape history, not over the course of a human life-span, but across centuries or even millennia.

It's easy with our quotidian "we're about to be wiped out for all time" mindset to think we're about to be wiped out once and for all. At the height or the depth of the cold war I remember reading a small item about some experimental anthrax that escaped from a Soviet laboratory and killed everything in a swath as broad as trump's cranial merkin. 

After reading that article, I spent years looking over my shoulders for an anthrax attack, from russia from our own government from walmart from verizon from wpp or from some other malign force beyond my control. I still have unnatural worries about anthrax, it must be said, or half-a-dozen other things that you can read about in the paper or hear on the news about as often as you encounter a sequin on Taylor Swift's pupik.

Long history encourages, as the name indicates, a long view. A view that is positively Faulknerian in outlook. That mankind will not only endure, we will prevail. Sure, I can counterpoint the fuck out of that, and so can my myriad readers. But as Hank Williams sang, and you should sing now and again, "I've been down that road before."

Mankind, for what it's worth, have survived everything we've thrown at ourselves and has been thrown at us by cosmic and pathological forces. Damn, we survived the Antonine plague, the Justinian plague, two bouts of the Black Death, the scourge of smallpox, AIDs, Covid and Gilligan's Island re-runs. We've survived more wars than you have hair on your arms and more advanced weaponry too. We've survived leaders who would make Vladimir Putin look like Florence Henderson and I suppose we'll have to do so again before too long. Things might really suck for a while--there might be no chunk light tuna in the grocery store, but somehow we'll get through.

Right now I'm ensconced in some client work and I've written a sentence or two about a company and their ability to hang onto their clients for a long-time. I said something like, "they don't work quarter to quarter, they work quarter of a century to quarter of a century."

In our business we live under the thrall of a belief system that proclaims that the latest is always the greatest. We look for the hottest trends, the hottest technologies, the hottest VO's., directors, colorists and more. We chase trends like priests chase pre-pubescent children during a "friendly" game of tag.

That's the sort of apoplectic history that is all too much with us. So we produce ephemeral thinking following transitory trends because we deal in nothing that isn't of the moment.

In most cases the depiction of life as I see it expressed in television commercials and online advertising is so far from the reality of the life we all lead it would be comical if it weren't so horrifying. The verizon spot above is one of the worst assaults on humanity that humanity has ever contrived. In terms of realism, it makes bad AI look like something painted by George Bellows or another ashcan school artist.

All these so-called "we're here for you" monopolists who rip you off willy-nilly produce crap like the above. Their spots and other bullshit blandishments remind me of Hieronymus Bosch reconfigured by Edward Bernays. 

Maybe our current advertising palette is so well-focused-grouped we interpret it as "show people happy, dancing, slim, and worry-free at all times. Never show anyone with a problem, a need, a care or a bill to pay." 

Our avoid-the-moment, plasticine the smile advertising is based on alternate facts, because we can't bear to even think that the real ones are real. The best thing I ever read about lies is this: "it's terrible to lie to people. But the worst lie is lying to yourself."

We do advertising that avoids humanity, that ignores history, that's cognizant only of pay-for-play awards. 

Etiam si omnes, ego non. Or

h/t harry.

Lights Out.

Way back about 200 years ago I had my first job after graduate school writing advertising copy for the Montgomery Ward catalog. It was a crappy job for a crappy company for crappy pay. I started at just $225/week--which was just over $5/hr, but I learned a lot.

First, you learned to show up every day and do your job. Then you learned if you made a mistake, to take responsibility. Finally you learned that at most jobs there are two types of people. The lifers--the ones with little ambition and drive to get elsewhere. Their opposite were the stepping-stoners. The people using their current job to get to another job. Usually office friendships were established along these lines.

One hot summer day someone had organized a softball game against another office or another department. We were assigned by whatever league we were in to a small ball field on East 14th Street, with the FDR Drive on one side of the field and the towering smokestacks of an old Con Edison powerplant on the other side. The field was about as far away from people as you could be in Manhattan and it could only have been called a ball field by someone who had never before played ball. Or seen a field.

I think the expanse was about a mile east of the Union Square subway stop and as we walked there the heavy stormy skies grew blacker and the clouds looked like wet gym towels saturated in sweat. The whole of the atmosphere seemed ready to burst. Thunder was already booking and sheets of lightning were spreading across the gloom as if the heavens were being gift-wrapped in catastrophe.

But ballplayers are troupers. And if you love playing ball--especially when you're older and a game is hard to come by--you deny the reality of the weather and utter like George M. Cohan, 'the game must go on,' and so it did.

Back 45 years or so ago, I was prodigiously strong, think Paul Bunyan in a factory outlet suit and I was not all that far from my ball playing years. Plus, my temper had yet to be tempered and every swing I swung was swang with the velocity of anger.

I made it up to bat in the first inning. And like Roy Hobbs in Malamud's "The Natural," I hit a towering fly ball that cracked into the clouds and released streaks of lightning like Zeus with a migraine. The fat ball went up and up. Through the troposphere, the stratosphere, well into the mesosphere, heading westward as it descended.

The ball crashed into the barbed-wired shrouded Con Edison substation and sparks set off sparks like the 4th of July. Just at the peak of the explosions, the rain came and the city, ball players included ran for any doorway, broken umbrella or non-pissed-stained newspaper they could find. The lights went out all over New York, except for a thin section of Rockaway out in Queens that was serviced by Long Island Electric, graft and the mafia.

I can't be sure that my fly ball caused the power outage. And in those days, we all lived in fear of a replay of the 1977 blackout, riots, looting and mayhem of that 45-hours of terror. I think the power was out for a couple of hours. But we were cowering in our small apartments by then, dripping in sweat and fear of that particular brand of New York violence. 

Some cigarette attached to a union electrician from the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers found an old baseball that clunked a rat that bit into a wire that snapped the copper that caused the dark. He taped the whole conurbation up and the power crackled on not too many hours later.

I think that might be the last time I picked up a bat and swung the ash with intent. It's never easy to hang up your spikes. You can always convince yourself you have a few more games left in you. LeBron seems to be doing so now. Tom Brady did some seasons ago. Mickey Mantle saw his lifetime average drop to .298 because he played one season too many.

The portents told me to quit.

And I listened.

Let Freedom Wring.

For my readers outside of the United States, Ad Aged will be taking July 4th and July 5th off. These are the days in amerika where we proclaim our belief in mattress sales, traffic jams, carcinogenic grilling, and nominally, freedom.

Of course, as Bobby McGee once said, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." And, by the way, we've lost it.

If you're at all interested in amerika and concepts like freedom and even the more hallowed reasons for the July 4th caesura from work, there's a book you might read, "Freedom's Dominion," by Vanderbilt University professor, Jefferson Cowrie. You can order it here from one of amerika's non-tax-paying monopoly booksellers. And you can read the review from "The New York Times" here.

Right now, I am about three-quarters of the way through another book you might want to pick up and actually read. It's called "The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins" by Stefanos Geroulanos.

As the title of the review from "The Economist" indicates (you can read the review here) words like history, humanity, origins, species, freedom, independence and hundreds of other don't have exact definitions so much as they have political interpretations and prejudices.

The amerikan far right and liberal people like me both believe in freedom. But our definitions of what freedom is (you'll know it when we let it ring) are as different as chocolate is from a cinderblock.

In Cowrie's book, and as the title of the Times' review indicates (as well as the photo above of george wallace) freedom means the freedom of the dominant race (so often that means native born, christian white men) to have things their way and not to have to pay tax for that luxury. They want to be free to have their privileges, like to kill little girls while they're attending church. Then call themselves, as bannon and trump are doing, "political prisoners."

Bobby Frank Cherry fought for the freedom to kill little girls.

Many of the 80,000 or so people who read Ad Aged every week are in the communications business. We should probably spend more time thinking conceptually about language. The shades, nuances and layers of its meaning.

There's scarcely a word uttered these days, especially when it's used in political discussion, that isn't laden and loaded with bias and subterfuge. It seems to me a lot of people use the words independence and freedom think they mean, "I should be allowed to do and say what I want and no one can stop me. But other people, people whom I disagree with, don't have those same rights. If they have the right to express themselves it takes away from my right to have things my way."

Essentially, that's the thinking behind those who say government can't take our guns but can take our ovaries.

OK. It's July 4th. It's Independence Day.

The day when all amerika is free to agree with everything I say.

Mainstreaming Lies.

Maybe it was always this way. Maybe I just notice it more now.

Maybe it's that there are no more watching dogs, whistle-blowers, truth-tellers.

Non-short-cut takers.

Millions are calling for a presidential candidate in cognitive decline to step away. Yet we accept a presidential candidate who's a convicted felon, a sexual abuser, and a pathological liar.

We live in a country where the liar is the debate winner. Ergo, the country is the loser.

The scariest part of all this is the part that's hardest to see. We're so used to the lying that we no longer notice it. Lying is like sirens in a city. They're supposed to alarm you. But they're so ubiquitous you no longer pay attention.

On Saturday, Jess Bidgood of The New York Times wrote about these lies in an article worth reading.

Maybe I'm exaggerating. Maybe I'm over-reacting. But similar truth-abnegation-through-repeated-lying-distortion-and-rewriting is happening in our industry as well.

Cannes is a perfect example of this.

Ogilvy won network of the year. They're doing it with fake ads. They fire people each month. They've reneged on their diversity pledges. They're losing (at least in their flagship office) millions of dollars per annum. And so on and so on.

I'd not be surprised if half of the big holding company agencies won some slim prismatic slice of an agency of the year award. And many of them--once the biggest names on what was once Madison Avenue--are teetering on the bring of insolvency or irrelevance.

In 2023, DDB won Cannes network of the year. 

I don't know if they even have 100 employees in New York anymore. And certainly, they seem to lose C-suite people as fast as trees lose leaves in a wind storm.

But like Trump and his legion of enablers, the industry is enabling the propping up of the lies of the industry. That it's doing work of consequence. That it in and of itself is consequential. Worst of all, that the ad industry is vital to clients and a healthy career.

Ogilvy's recycle lies for Coke are a perfect example. Yet. They win praise for an ad that allegedly ran for recycling. Yet.

        

If we say it enough maybe people will believe it. At least the ignorant will.

This is how we mainstream lying. How we blur the distinction between reality and salesmanship. How we obscure everything in service of share-holder value.

It was Orwell who said, “In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." Let me add to that. “In an age of universal deceit, telling lies is a business model."

We work for, vote for, live with, act on, abide by liars. 

The biggest lie is the one we tell ourselves when we don't notice any of this.

A Simple Test.

One of thing things that shocks me about AI is the spread between how great, powerful, all-encompassing, and always improving we're told it is and how bad it is when we actually confront it in the wild.

We're told how great, seminal and life-changing it is. I can't think of one shred of evidence how it's improved anything but corporate profits.

The phonus-balonus Toys R Us commercial is one example, but certainly not the only one.

Try to fix your broken cable bill with a chat bot. It's more Kafkaesque than anything Kafka could imagine. In fact, I'd get more help talking to Kafka next time my xfinity goes out.

Worse, watch something on YouTube. Take the clip above, for example. If an 11th-grader typed the transcription, you'd send him back to 10th-grade. You'd find some way to punish him. At least, detention. 

The typos. The lack of understanding. The way AI completely missed the essential humanity of the moment. Not to mention the humor. Yet the biggest companies in the world and the biggest companies in what was the communications business are willing to put their brand-equity in the hands of inept machines that aren't getting better. What's more, and maybe what's worse, at a time of record profits, they're all too cheap to have an actual sentient human "fact-check" AI's transcription and correct its glaring errors.

It's ok that it's an assault to the senses. Look at the money we're making.

What all this proves is quite simple and is, as AI might auto-generate: "As klay as the nodes on your feces." The corporations and their agents embracing these assaults on humanity care nothing for humanity. Using AI in such as way makes it all so perfectly clear. They don't care about you, or how bad stuff like this sucks. Cheapito, ergo bonus. It's cheap, therefore it's good.

I've noticed for years now, and don't know why brands accept it, how machines interrupt the videos you watch on YouTube with commercials willy-nilly. Not at a natural break, not at the end of a sentence. No, they'll shove one of their asinine messages smack in the middle of a punch-line.

Because, they can. 
Because they don't care about the film itself, the creators' intent.
Because they don't care about art, entertainment, performance.
Because they don't care about the viewer.

Because they only care about doing it cheaply. To mammothize their mammon.

That message is more important than the message they're propagating. The semiotics of interruption and disdain speak louder than the $49.99 triple-play bundle they're lying to you about.

This isn't about preciousness and not interrupting art. It's about a having the merest modicum of courtesy for the people watching. It's deciding where a break should occur with an eye toward the viewer, not only an eye toward doing it as cheaply and machinely-possible.

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is an ad agency now. Much of what ad agencies used to do is protect their clients from bad behavior. Stop them from doing things that hurt their reputation and their standing with people.

When we gave up our role as agents (that's why we were called agencies) and embraced our role as "vendor," and a low-cost commodity vendor at that, we gave up our reason for being.

Counterpoint: A few people at the very top got very rich. And are getting richer,

Our modern AI-derived calculus means it's ok to suck. If you get rich from it.