A Journey.

Ruggero Vann/Corbis, via Getty Images

I'm stealing this, fairly wholesale, from a subscriber-only newsletter by Frank Bruni of The New York Times. In the newsletter, Bruni quotes an Australian reader, Michael Hogan, who writes, “It feels like every damn thing I do is labeled a journey. I don’t buy a drill. I’m on a home improvement journey. I don’t see my doctor. I’m on a wellness journey. I don’t deposit money into my bank account. I’m on a wealth journey. Make it stop.” 

Bruni comments on this linguistic-tic this way:

"Maybe it’s a byproduct of the era’s narcissism, a companion to all the selfies and Instagram stories and a social media landscape in which people are always positioning themselves in the foreground, where they pose just so. It’s semantic self-aggrandizement, turning an errand into an adventure, a routine into a religion...And so humdrum activities become heroic acts."

If you use words for a living, and almost everyone does, don't use words you're used to seeing. Don't just repeat things. Don't play into the dominant complacency. Which is a obfuscator's way of saying don't be boring. 

Don't be a "story-teller." Don't promise "robust," or "agile," or "nimble." Don't look like everyone else. As Orwell told us in "Politics and the English Lanuage," "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

To my ancient eyes, Bruni's critique of "journey" is fine, but it doesn't go far enough. He misses at least two points.

1. When you use clichés, you're giving the viewer or the reader permission to ignore you. Like you ignore safety instructions when you're on a plane or the 29,000 emails you get that toggle between a total of about fourteen or eleven subject lines. And so it goes until, your brain stem is frozen like a wart and cracks right off.
   
   
   
   Winter: "These savings will warm your heart."
   January: "New year, new deals."
   February: "I ❤️ these deals."
   March: "Spring into savings."
   May: "The savings are blooming."
   June: "Our deals are hot hot hot."
   July: "The deals are bursting in air!"
   August: "Like Summer, our savings are ending soon."
   September: "Back to School savings."
   October: "Savings so good they're spooky."
   November: "You'll be thankful for these savings."
   December: "'Tis the season for savings."
   
   
2. Part two is even more pernicious. And way more cowardly.
   
   I saw a creative lead on the IBM account at Ogilvy do it once. And he did it with such dumb pomposity that I almost snapped my fountain pen in half in anger.
   
   About fifteen creatives, strategists and account people had been working for days putting together a presentation for the client. The deck probably had twenty commercials, as many print and banner ads and all the accoutrements in the back of the deck that take twice as long to create as commercials and ads that are never bought but you have to show, lest you're accused of just doing print, banners and TV.
   
   The creative puff started the meeting--he had a page that said, "We are on a journey." 
   
   As another ex-Ogilvy friend once said, "fuck me with an iron rod." At a decent agency, they would have shot him like a broken horse.
   
   Calling hundreds of thousands of dollars or work and thousands of hours of labor a journey is merely a circumlocution. A way of saying to the client, "you don't have to buy anything. This is a work in progress."
   
   That sentiment is about as heinous as bullshit gets.
   
   As I type this I'm an hour away from a client meeting where I'm presenting a Nifty Fifty. 
   
   Those 50 ads ain't a journey. They're work. They're carved. They're what the client has paid for and what they have to buy if they want to progress.
   
   When a plumber comes to my house to install a sump pump, I'd show him the door in about in about 2.9 seconds if he told me we were embarking on a "dry-basement journey," or a "black mold-abeyance odyssey."

I don't care about all the New Age bushwa that tinkles around and says the journey is as important as the destination. I am not Lawrence of Arabia or even Lawrence of Oregano. I'm fine with Mao's Long March beginning with a single-step. I get long-haul-isms.

But when we need food in the house, or I need a $69 cable for some peripheral that barely cost $69 in the first place, I don't want a journey, I want the job done. I'm sure my clients feel the same way. 

In fact, below is the second page of the client presentation I'm about to give. I called it an Agender not an Agenda because I'm from Yonkers and that's how I speak. And I've allocated the time as below.

The client doesn't want a journey. Or blah blah blah.

He wants some ads.

The Creep (and Creeps) of Fascism.

I don't think fascism, or authoritarianism, of fick-the-little-guy-ism, when it fully descends with its soul-crushing weight will come wearing jackboots and carrying a riding crop.

I think when the last bits of humanity on earth are finally buried under a trillion tons of micro-plastic and press releases, it all will have happened like going bankrupt. Slowly, then all at once.

We won't even notice it's here. Though we're being assaulted by it every day.

Not just the trmpian evil.

Little insidious actions that everyone is in on.

A friend of mine worked for a holding company until April 1. Then he was let go. Then they offered to hire him back on April 15. He had to once again fill out 71-pages of forms and undergo once again, a background check.

They make you submit.

If I want to watch a clip of the Knicks' surprising comeback win over the Celtics, the Times' site, which I pay for, sends me to a twitter link. So I have to support elon mursk and his child-trafficking, anti-semitic, hate-filled bile to watch a three-point shot.

They make you complicit.

All of my clients pay me electronically. Usually after 60 days. When did making someone wait 16-percent of a year for work they've done become ok? When did it become ok for someone to be paid in May for work they did in January? 

One client, the world's 67th largest, tried to pay me only after making me wait 25-percent of a year. Though I could pay them 1.5-percent of my gross to get my money, my money, 30-days faster.

One holding company, the third-largest or maybe the most-recently disappeared, made me wait more the 33-percent of a year to be paid for work I was charged with doing (a pitch) over-night.

They make you squirm.

Getting paid electronically is easier for those paying you. It's not easier for the person (me) who did the work. The person who did the work has to wait longer for their money.

As your payment nears, you usually get an email that looks like this. 

The "system" has made it ok to try to get you to pay $90, in this case, to get my money. This is after I've already waited 60 days. You want to "mafioso me" to not delay payment any further.

They make you pay.

This is how a person--even a well-off person like me--gets creamed by the system. Every plutocrat is taking, taxing and schtupping. Every little guy is fikked.

125 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt, for all his hypocrisy, introduced the "Square Deal."

90 years ago, Franklin Roosevelt presented "The New Deal."

Back in 1950, Harry Truman presented something called "The Fair Deal."

Today from our politicians, busy profiting from their offices and the beneficences they grant themselves which include free healthcare and legal insider-trading, not to mention payment for "speaking," we get nothing but a "Raw Deal."

Everyone of us--from "self-check-out" to myriad dysfunctional government departments (that we pay for) to the pillaging of social security--which I've paid into since 1963--to the inadequacies of what's fantastically called "health care," (there's neither health nor care) everyone of us is being beaten.

Again, it ain't the jack-booted armies that will destroy us. It's companies like Mars--the fourth largest privately held company in the United States--who spend $2-million on lobbying--and who have the balls to sell individually-petro-chemical-wrapped Lifesavers. 

Or the giant cable companies who charge you monopoly rates to watch TV, then charge you again by dedicating 25-minutes/hour to commercials and promos.

Or every company in creation that makes you download an app just so you can pay your bill, only you can't find what the bill was for, since they hid it on the app.

Or all the times every day you have to click a box to tell some robot that you're not a robot.

Look at this from 2:10. Is this where we are.

We haven't just met the enemy.

We voted them in.

And we pay them to screw us.

American Amnesia.

Marty Puris, one of the greatest ad-people ever, has a new mission that goes beyond selling BMWs, UPS, Club Med and the other vital brands he built as co-head of his eponymous agency, Ammirati & Puris. 

Puris, who when I was a cub I would have given my left penis to work for, has founded an organization called "America, the Possible."

As much as I've rewritten Shakespeare, Marx (Karl, not Groucho) and Orwell, I haven't the temerity to re-write Puris. So, I'll let him tell you what he's up to. And then I'll get to the point of today's post.

I bring up Puris' work in this humble blog on advertising, because I believe in metaphor. Metaphors allow us to understand something we don't know about by comparing it to something we do know about, or something we can imagine. Metaphors also help us make our language vivid and memorable. 

For instance, Holden Caulfield in Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," didn't say it was cold standing on a hill at Pencey watching a football game. He said it this way:

Likewise, for more than a quarter of a century, Johnny Carson would say, "It was hot out today." His audience would respond, "how hot was it?" And Carson would oblige with metaphor, and usually a laugh line.

I wonder, if Puris' point about so many millions of Americans forgetting what it means to be American can be extrapolated to advertising. I wonder if, in Puris' words, we've become the marketing equivalent of "civically illiterate and chronically disengaged." Or worse--afflicted with know-it-all hubris.

That's the metaphor I see.

I wonder if in our societal lust for guaranteed solutions, our infatuation with the (over)-promise of technology, and our placing of pseudo-scientific marketing up on a pedestal, we have, as an industry and as individual practitioners of advertising forgotten the basics of what makes advertising work. What made it an important, attractive industry. What made it one of the great forces of the greatest economy that ever was.

Earlier this morning I was looking through my hard-drive for an idea for a blog post.

It's Sunday as I write this, and I had written already two posts for the week ahead and I wanted a third to take myself from behind the week's blogging 8-ball. (I've written already 7,100 posts, but I still have to work to find 7,101 and 7,102 and so on.)

I went looking for an old VW brochure I had saved somewhere. I thought it might make a nice topic for a post. 

I couldn't find it. But somehow I tripped into this fairly amazing rabbit hole.

As a person who loves cars, and who wants a new one, I spend a decent amount of time looking at the websites of automotive brands. Or should I say "blands." Here are screen shots of what I would consider six of the "sexiest" auto-brands in the US.

Here are a dozen or so pages from automotive brochures that are older than you are. 

To Puris' point about the wasting away of America's democratic glue, it's hard to know why we left what we were doing for what we're now doing. Hard to know why we left what worked and embraced the insipid.

Just as Puris asks if we've forgotten what America is about, I'm asking if we've forgotten what advertising is about. If we've forgotten the importance of advertising. The power of advertising. The love of advertising for the product we are charged with selling.

Have we forgotten, or ignored, or been MBA'd and AI'd away from doing the things advertising used to do--had to do: create desire. Differentiate. Make sexy. Define. Demonstrate. Detail. Design.

Have we as advertising professionals forgotten, as Puris believes America has forgotten? 

I believe so.

I believe if we don't do anything about it, we die.

This Will Cost Millions.

There's an old Jewish joke that goes something like this:

Miriam, 77, has invited Sylvie, 78, up to see her new apartment on the Upper West Side.

"It's easy to get here," Miriam says. "You get off the Broadway local at 86th Street and push through the turnstile with your left elbow."

"Umhm," Sylvie agrees.

"The building is right there. Pound on the door with your right elbow and the doorman will let you in. Then walk down the hall and press the elevator up button with your left elbow. When the car comes, press floor fourteen with your right elbow. Then turn left off the elevator and bang the doorbell to 14G with your left elbow."

"I get it," Sylvie says, "but what's with all the elbows."

"Well," says Miriam, "I assume you're not coming empty-handed."

Greeting people with kindness, making them feel welcome has been a human-norm since the Zeus-fearing ancient Greeks. You could literally be punished by the gods if you didn't welcome someone into your home. If you didn't offer them fruit, wine, olives and a bed.

The same holds true in many middle-eastern cultures today. If you visit a Bedouin's home, you barely talk until you've shared a cup of tea. When you try to buy something at Khan el-Khalili, Cairo's great bazaar, you eat and drink and talk and friend. Before you dicker.

When I was a boy in graduate school I traveled the girth of New York interviewing a skein of once-famous now almost-unknown Black poets. Even at nine in the morning, if you were offered a glass of wine, you took drank it, and gladly. If someone comes into your office, you come out from behind your desk. If your grandson visits, you sit down on the floor with him.

Now, against 300,000 years of human behavior on earth, the Silly-con Valley non-humans are suggesting, as they have, that you abnegate what remains of your human-ness.

If you ever wonder what the real motive is behind technology-ization, I suggest you consider that it's the destruction or at least abeyance of human norms that go back to early bi-pedal times. 

Norms cut into profit. Manners cut into profit. As does kindness. As does respect. As does leaving a place better than you found it.

In our Mammon-ocracy, ruled by the whore-of-Babblin'-idiots, anything that cuts into profit is bad.

Last week, my long-time friend and producer Joe Maire, sent a note to my client with final 16:9 and 1:1 high-res cuts conformed in h264 and pro-res. 

Quickly, though it might have cost legions of Sam Altman acolytes money, we all got back a flurry of those costly bits of humanness. 

Though I've been making a living in advertising for forty years and am considered pretty good at it, I can't say I understand the recent trends. We fire people who have experience. We push laughter and creativity to the fringes and we applaud efficiency and cheapness and inundation and surveillance. There's an algorithm somewhere that proves every bit of illogic--that is, believing you'll be successful if you make work people hate, block or ignore--makes sense.

I even worked once at a Bain-led consultancy run by more Harvard MBAs than there are bacteria in a goat's gut.

All that I know about client service and advertising can be summed up in a sentence or two. Clients and advertising that are kind, that say please and thank you, that show faith and trust and believe in their creatives get the best work and have the best careers.

Phil Knight is a billionaire not because he made a better sneaker. But because he treated good agency people as they deserve to be treated. He challenged them. Then let them answer the bell.

The same, I'm sure, is true of Steve Jobs. Yes, he made a better PC. But no one would have known if he didn't say please and thank you to a few people at Chiat\Day.

It's funny how the prevailing wisdom of the world puts a cost on human-decency but is myopically blind to its incalculable benefits--the profit it brings you. Oscar Wilde once defined a cynic this way: as "someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

Think doge, think trump, think of the holding companies constant lay-offs and impecunious cost-slashing and you'll get it.

Those client comments I've pasted above, show a client who gets it. I've known her since the early 2000s and she's been a GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company client since 2020, when I opened my metaphorical doors.

I could keep a tally I suppose of all the times she's driven me crazy, or asked for a lot for a little in no time.

Somehow that's all ok.

She pays on time.

She says please and thank you.

She hires me again.

It's really that simple.

Thank you.

It's Easy!

Back in my old baseball playing days, I spent my 10,000 hours sitting on a rickety bench in the dugout or across the aisle of a 32-year-old American bus from my wise manager. We climbed up through the top-less mountains--like the topless towers of Ilium, or we'd find ourselves in the happy, well-lit kitchen talking to my real father in life, the Mexican Double-Hall-of-Famer (for playing and managing) Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla, aka Hector Quesadilla.

I learned more sitting alongside Hector and just listening than you could learn from a thousand years of MBA school, or graduate school in English and Comparative Literature. In grad school some intellect had read Moby Dick so intently he decided it was no longer about whales and whaling at all and god and rage, but about how Queequeg and Ishmael were closeted homosexuals. Somehow this wise-fool knew how to read into something writ a century earlier with Nantucket brack in the writer's veins.

I learned that most things in life are easy until they're not. Most things in life can be done by anyone, until they can't. Most things in life fix themselves until they don't.

"Managing a baseball team is easy," Hector would say, "when your pitchers are throwing aspirin pills, not grapefruit, when your power is on and you're up 11-3 in the ninth."

"Yes," I silented.

"Managing a baseball team is easy," Hector would say, "when you can keep the ten guys who hate you away from the fifteen who are undecided."

Again.

"Everything is easy," Hector would recite, "until it is hard. Being in love with a dark-eyed woman is easy, until it is not. Paying your bills is easy until two are due at once or three. Even being a child is easy when your father isn't drunk and working on his aim."

I have lost three or eleven major people in my life. Three or eleven major people who are no longer with me but who are with me every day. 

Hector might be five of them.

I think about those words, "everything is easy, until it is hard," almost every day.

Most people stop at the comma.

Their Unsinkable Molly Brown-ness stops before reality sets in. 

In the rush to replace humans with technology, the doyens of Selfish-con Valley believe AI can do it. You can see this in every airport in amerika when it snows. Eight days out of ten, apps can handle people who need to rebook flights in a hurry. When in snows, it is hard, and they can't.

I saw this in the operating room when I was having my cataracts removed by a skilled doctor with a laser beam. There was another doctor there, an anesthesiologist, who did nothing. She smiled and stood next to me as I was being en-surgeoned. 

"That has to be the easiest job in the world," I thought while in that anesthesia haze. And it is. Until, heaven forfend, something goes wrong. A heart-rate drops or blood pressure rises or something doesn't behave as you wish it would, or predictably.

H, who helps me run my business and whom I've loved since the 1990s, is beginning to understand.

She sees my phone ringing. She sees people calling to buy my services. She sees clients applauding after I present.

That's all very easy.

Until the phone doesn't ring. Until my prices are too high. Until the applause withers away.

Everything is easy, until it is hard.

When it is hard is when you have to get smart. 

When it is hard is when you have double-down.

When it is hard is when you have do things you'd rather not.

When it is hard is when you have is when you have to do what is hardest of all--fend off doubt, fear, self-rebuke if not self-hate.

The marzipan-complected men who run the advertising business thought it was easy. They made easy, expedient decisions and skimmed millions off the top of once-steady cash-flows. 

It was easy.

Now it's hard.

The cash-flow has stopped flowing.

Their three-piece suits are riding up.

When it's hard only a few can do as Hector did. 

Put in Abreu for Bustamante on a hunch. Start Efren Medrano, not his craftier brother, Leo. Rest Issy Buentello though he's lashing the ball and put in the 43-year-old Sisto. 

When it's hard, you think, you take chances, you try something never tried before. You try. You don't try the tried.

When it's easy, anyone can do it.

When it's hard, 646-823-7165.

Dead. Line.

After almost 50 years of being on copywriter deadline, I've learned something about myself.

There are times when you must hunker down and get the copy done before you call it quits for the night.

Maybe even more often, there are times when you have to close-up the Mac and save the writing you have to do for the morning.

Morning, like Spring, is the awakest time for me.

I rise and shine.

Morning--even 6AM--is my favorite time to play the over-achieving squirrel and cracking the toughest nut.

The problem many people have with getting things done is simple.

Almost everyone fucks themselves up with this. 

Myself included.

I have a copy meeting this afternoon (it's Thursday as I write this.) 

And two ads to re-write.

The ones I was too tired to re-write last night.

I have a busy day leading up to the copy meeting. 

I really didn't know how much I had to do on the copy and how much time it would take.

Not knowing what you have to do and how much is when work enters a dangerous territory.

For mneumonic purposes let's name this conundrum the Doom Loom.

When you don't know exactly what it is you have to do.

So it looms over you like an angry god.

That leads to avoiding the work you have to do.

So it gets loomier and doomier.

It soon becomes easier to perseverate over, worry about and thus avoid.

That's what I did when I finally sat down this morning to re-write that copy.

I changed, as instructed 150,000 to over 160,000.

I remembered a fact that I thought would strengthen the copy.

I broke one long sentence into two better sentences.

I made an end-line pithier.

And I made a nice, clean, well-organized deck.

Then I sent it all to my Account Director.

It's her problem now.

It took me twenty minutes.

As most things do.

Even Doom Looms.

Ask For The Sale.

There's an old, and possibly anti-Semitic joke that despite its fraughtness, I think about.

It goes like this: 

Q: "How do you say 'fuck you' in Yiddish?" 
A. "Trust me."

As I get older, which I'm told beats the alternative, the more I feel like I no longer live on a planet ruled by immutable Newtonian laws or common-sense.

A lot of people are trusting the congenitally untrustworthy. In politics, at work, in relationships.

I'm hearing a lot lately by people in what used to be the ad industry giving away their brain-power for free and asserting that they'll make it up in 'production.'

That behavior has a lot of my aforementioned Yiddish joke in it.

If you're so desperate for business that you'll give away what you do for free in the hopes of subsequent compensation, you're in the wrong business. 

Not only that, I'll say this: I think you have self-respect issues. 

You're behaving toward clients like people behave toward abusive partners. Maybe they won't punch me this time, because I did everything they asked for.

Guess what?

Anything you'll give away you wind up paying for.

The trouble with the agency business isn't anything inherent in its efficacy or even efficiency. The trouble isn't related to data or AI, or pay scales, or understanding culture.

The trouble with the agency business is that the four or five men who control 75% of the business no longer believe in the value of our industry. They're no longer willing to say to a recalcitrant cheapskate of a client as my mother said to a pants salesman on the Lower East Side 55 years ago. 

"It's still my money and they're still you're pants."

"It's still my know-how and it's still your 'no one knows you.'" I can get people to know you, like you, want you. But that costs.

In other words, if you won't get me unless you give me what I need. And you--the person who does the actual work--have to have the courage, conviction and confidence to walk away from people who want something for nothing.

You can't lose money on everything you do and make it up in volume.

Giving up your integrity as never gained anyone anything. But its currently the diseased currency of our business.

We'll do it for nothing and make it up next time, or in exposure, or you'll somehow feed our egos.

Damn.

If a plumber won't do it, why would you?

This ain't the easiest course to follow.

It's easier when playing a game with a kid to always let that kid win. If you don't, they might cry. They might say some harsh words. Their ego might appear bruised.

A lot of parents always let their little kids win.

That results in nothing but spoiled brats.

I see the same thing in advertising today.

If you don't give it to us cheaper, we'll cry (or go elsewhere.) So work gets cheaper and cheaper and less and less effective. We proffer puerile panacea in the place of working hard and sticking to our guns. We'll do it cheaper! We've got juniors, and data, and AI! 

Then we go to China for cheap trophies meant to assuage our cowardice.

What we've created is devalued, commoditized jun .

I've off the last K for "what are you 'krazy?'

Since the beginning of humans on earth something for nothing-ism has never worked.

A handshake is nice.

So is trust.

But as Samuel Goldwyn once said, and my brother reminded me, "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on."