My Morning [_______________.}

The increasing usage of the phrase "Artificial Intelligence."

Even in what used to be called the advertising industry, which is not supposed to be about intelligence, or data, or science, or technology, we all spend too much time talking about talking about those things. 

We'll do everything we can to try to reach people more effectively, except focus on what reaches people, which is things that are interesting, funny, beautiful or, simply, different. The same things that have always reached people. A bonafide interesting story, well told.

It seems that WPP is buying seven new agencies a week and hiring a CEO for every day of the year so they can pretend they still have a viable business. Let me clarify, so they can pretend they still have a viable business after firing all the creative people who at one time made their business viable.

They invest more in data than they do in art. The entire industry does. And then they say, "there's a flaw in the algorithm. That's why people are blocking our ads." Or they say, "Generation G abjures advertising." They never say, "our ads suck, that's why no one pays attention." Or "our ads are as flat as a plate of piss."

More creative people, more agencies, more clients, more brands are talking about artificial intelligence than about laughter or a good joke they heard or even a rainbow they saw one afternoon. 

I don't understand why we're not talking about the amazing, stirring, 'holy-shit-did-you-see-that' things that are all around us.

As Joyce Kilmer never wrote:

"I think that I shall never see,

An ad made interesting algorithmically.
Unless, in fact, we use our head,
The industry is wholly dead. "

On Monday, September 9th, I read about this book below, "1001 Movie Posters." On Monday, September 9th, I ordered this book below, "1001 Movie Posters." On Friday, September 13th, I received this book below, "1001 Movie Posters."

I suppose for some it might be considered prohibitively expensive. It cost me about $70. Roughly, in my estimate, what the average hipster pays per week for chain-store coffee. Or what they pay for two drinks at an expense-account private-banker bar in New York.

I throw nickels around like manhole covers but I couldn't see any good reason for not buying "1001 Movie Posters." If it extends my useful career for ten minutes, it's paid for itself.

Three points here today.

One. Human intelligence trumps the artificial sort. Laughter trumps almost everything. 

Two. Books, which organize and make tactile information, trump digital renditions. You can hold beauty in your hands, not see it through a veil of pixels. And

Three. From a communications point of view, 99-percent of advertising and marketing practitioners have forgotten what is evident in the 1001 posters, some of which I've pasted below. Effective communications generally are made with:

a) Stunning design--you haven't seen before.
b) Memorable type/copy.
c) Design hierarchy.

About 99-percent of the websites and ads I see online have none of the a,b,c I've written above. They're just a hodgepodge of A.I. spin-art that made a committee of degree-holders happy. They're a tale told by a committee-iot, full of compromise and bad taste, signifying an abuse of  the viewer.

Why is every online ad--and every TV commercial--so devoid of the a,b,c above. Oh. It's gone through seventeen rounds of approval and it's enhanced by research, data, best practices and AI. Even ads by ad agencies advertising for creative people look like they were designed by a short-bus bot. See above.

If you want to do good work look at good work. Not just what won purported awards from a purported award show. Work that lit fires and stirred souls.

Usually if I have a call early in the morning, someone on the call says, "I haven't had my caffeine yet." 

I wish I heard people say, "I haven't heard any Brückner, yet."

Or "I haven't looked at a Klimt, yet." Or "I haven't read any John O'Hara, yet."

Those things can wake you up, too.

And should.

 

The End Slide.

I think it started with the rise of PowerPoint.

Another reason to dislike PowerPoint--as if we needed more.

But along the time agencies started presenting creative via PowerPoint, or PDF or Figma or whatever--along the time we started presenting electronically, someone decided to add at the end of creative presentations a concluding slide that read, "Thank You."

I can't imagine doing that when we used to present in person on foam-core. But today, every presentation seems to end with a page that looks like this.

I suppose life could be worse. We could, and many agencies do, end even more treacle-ly--with something like this:

Some agencies make matters even worse. They're so thankful, they're so exclamatory, they're obsequiously gushy. If you're kowtowing that much after a presentation, you're really bending over backwards too far.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that we aren't thankful for our clients and their business. But when you're showing them work, 

I'm not sure we should have to thank them for their attention and time. That's not "thanks-worthy." It's the nature of the relationship. It's part of the value exchange. 

I dunno. 

Any of these end-slides make more sense to me. Even if they would get me fired.

Everyone Gets a Trophic.

I realize that though Ad Aged is ostensibly a blog on the ad industry, I very often deviate and start writing about topics somewhat meatier and more important.

A lot of my "depth" comes from a simple practice of mine. I don't read books on business to learn about business. I read books on life--a much deeper topic--and apply what I've read to advertising.

My Account Director, H (whom I call the smartest person in advertising) about a month ago recommended this book to me. It seemed very much up my alley. I only started it last week and I'm just about 160-pages in, but I've already used it to win a piece of new business. That's not a bad ROI from a $19.99 Amazon Kindle purchase.

I'll start here, with a quotation from the great Dutch naturalist and geologist Geerat J. Vermeij. He said, "'the ability to create a future has been intrinsic to living things for billions of years.' Humans, however, were more adept at creating futures than any other species." 

Hmmmm, I underlined, "create a future," that's what good advertising people do for brands. They don't just create a sale, they create a future--a long-term viability.

(That the holding companies have abandoned that is evinced by the way over the last ten years or so they've shed on the order of forty percent of their employees.) They're not trying to create a future, rather a quarterly vig so they can gin up their bonuses.

Author David Miles says, "It is worth emphasizing that hunter-gatherer populations are generally small – the ecologist Paul A. Colinvaux made this clear with the book title: 'Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare.'  Big-game hunters like Neanderthals and modern humans living on the mammoth steppe had small populations for the same reason as polar bears, tigers and great white sharks...."

"To put it simply, plants form the broad base of the pyramid at trophic level 1, with herbivores at level 2, predators at level 3 and carnivores or apex predators forming the peak. 

"...the basic rule is that the consumers at one trophic level convert only about 10% of the energy of the level below into their own organic tissue, so apex predators are relatively inefficient consumers and must be rarer than the species below them. This is inevitable for tigers and great white sharks..."

When you're big, you don't have a lot to feed on. Or eventually your food supply disappears. Then you perish.

When I started GeorgeCo., off the bat I started making more money than I ever dreamed of. My wife and I decided to buy a small cottage along the sea on the Gingham Coast about two-hours northeast of the teeming fleshpots of Madison Avenue. Interest rates were low at the time and we went the local bank to get a mortgage. Naturally the bankers asked for my employment history and saw that I didn't have a steady paycheck from one gigantic source. That's usually grounds for denying your mortgage application.

I said to the banker, "I used to have one source of income. Now I have six. It's much better to have multiple streams rather than just one." Apparently that worked and we got the loan we needed. 

Essentially, I explained that I can feed, as above, at many trophic levels. I can earn my financial calories, so to speak, from meat, fish, plants, birds, beans, legumes, leaves, algae and more.

I used this etiology in pitching a client this morning. I said to them, "you don't have one off-the-shelf-solution. You make things that work for your customers. An apex predator, only has one way to amass calories. It had to go for a mammoth. You can get sustenance from a dozen sources. That's the way I work, too.

"It's exactly why humankind transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming. When we became farmers we found many different sources of sustenance. Grains. Beans. Fruits. Not to mention the animals they could hunt, fish they could catch, birds they could kill. That's the methodology that successful businesses build to succeed."

You take nourishment from many sources. It's the opposite of "if all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail." If you have a brain and you have elbow grease and you give a shit, you'll find a way. It's TWTW. The will to win, too.

I'm not sure they understood much after I said trophic.

I'm not sure I understand much either.

But I got the business.

Survival.

Sound, Fury, Signifying & Nothing, LLC.

Usually when I read something I like online, I make a pdf of it and file it away. Especially when that something teeters on the brink of being profound and intelligent. I must have thousands of articles saved this way. 

Last week I read something. However, I failed to save it and now I can't seem to find it again. That's lamentable. Because it was good.

Fortunately, I remember the principle in the article that appealed to me.

The central gist was simple.

As a "culture," we no longer make art.

We only do "entertainment."

I haven't been to the movies for about twenty years partly because I have no interest in seeing a movie about comic book characters, ie. the Marvel universe, or a sequel on a sequel on a sequel.

I used to read Marvel comics when I was a boy. They cost 12-cents back in 1968 and they were a pretty good deal. I enjoyed things like Spiderman when I was a ten or eleven. Probably up to the time I turned thirteen. Then I started being more interested in girls than in fictional superheroes, my reading changed. I moved onto other things. I outgrew the Incredible Hulk, etc. 

The point is simple.

As a culture, entertainment has overwhelmed art.

We care more about how much revenue something generates, how much it's earning from licensing and spin-offs than we care about what it's trying to say.

There's no more Carol Read's "The Third Man." We're more today about "The Fantastic Four." The math hasn't helped us.

I wonder if there's an industry parallel as well.

We no longer do messaging. That's hard work. Intellectually demanding. Serious. A value exchange. You give us attention, we help you make a wise purchase decision. 

That's too much for today.

I'm told repeatedly no one wants that.

They want Gefilte Fish flavored ice cream.

So, we do "entertainment."

We no longer do meaning.

We do stunts.

I think it all comes down to an axe I've been grinding for quite a while. We no longer have the patience or the belief in what we make as ad agencies or clients. We don't believe there's anything important or interesting about what we do. We so don't believe in what we do, we replace the art of advertising with au courant "entertainment."

I saw a Porsche monstrosity with Dua Lipa not too long ago.

Dua Lipa is a long way from righting the ship-a.

So, we spend scarce marketing dollars and do shit like this. Which I would imagine actually depresses sales, and people. It's notorious, yes. And nauseating.

Like so much today.

...it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

I know fuck-all about QSRs, but I know Burger King is a poster-child for failed attempts at relevance. Right now, despite a successful $5 meal promotion, same-store sales are still down. And have been for three or four decades and thirty or forty agencies.

Yet, rather than redouble their efforts and try to sell food people want and are willing to pay for, 

they waste their time doing crap like this. 

Back in ancient times until, I suppose about 40 years ago, people used to call behaviors like this "fiddling while Rome burned."

Like the ad industry entering awards shows, hiring a CEO for every month of the year, and banging on about being network of the year when they have 80-percent fewer employees than they had in the year 2000.

Many years ago, and by way of conclusion, back in 1999 when dot-coms were all the rage--pre dot-com bust--I worked with a brainy account guy who summed up our client's business model this way: "They lose money on everything they sell, but they make it up in volume."

That seems to be our way today.

Most of what we make contributes to our destruction and the destruction of the people paying us.

A couple thousand years ago, Cicero exclaimed, "O tempore! O mores!" Oh the times, oh the customs.

I prefer, "O tempore! O morons."