Dig?

I got a small assignment a few days ago, writing a website for a small therapeutic group that helps adolescents and young adults deal with substance abuse problems. My guess going into the assignment is that most people this side of Ozzie and Harriet have had, or know someone who's had, run-ins with some kind of addiction--whether it's alcohol, drugs, a combination of things or even digital devices.

If you're going to accept an assignment on such a serious topic, you can't phone it in. We hear a lot about "craft," these days, though in my first 35 years of working, I never heard it at all. Craft begins with dedication. Caring. Not phoning it in. 

If you're working on a treatment center, you have to assume that the people who go to such centers and the people who work in them are saving lives. And that there are plenty of lives that need saving. That's important work. Craft is rising to that occasion in all you do.

As you might guess, I looked at the sites of half a dozen "competitive" places. I found exactly what you'd expect. Stale language devoid of credibility. "We are patient-centered and are dedicated to putting the needs of our clients first."

There's nothing innately wrong with those words. Except they're meaningless and everyone uses them. 

Such nondescript locutions are everywhere in marketing communications today. 

Every steakhouse offers "exquisite cuts of prime beef, impeccable service, and an unforgettable dining experience that transcends expectations." Every cruise line says "Cruise to unforgettable destinations and start your dream vacation with a cruise you'll never forget." Every automaker promises to let you "own the ride," with an "electrifying experience." Every ad agency promises to "harness the power of technology putting you at the intersection of creativity and culture."

In fact, bad writing as above is actually built into our industry.

When you have an hour or two to work on a brand, you don't know the brand. You default to clichés. You practically have no choice. And face it, you're more likely to be fired for going out-of-scope than you are for producing drivel.

When I work with clients, I usually take a few hours to interview people who work at the client or actual customers. I create a list of questions to try to look under the hood of how and where they work. I try to interview little people with metaphorical ink on their hands, all the way up to the big bosses. Often I ask them to send me a picture of a talisman, or something they carry with them in their jobs. It helps get to who they are. The same way you look at the bookshelves in someone's apartment, it tells you something about them.

This is an attempt to be forensic about writing. Incisive. To get away from what's expected and get to something realer and truer. I explain to the people involved that my job isn't to write beautiful-sounding words, it's to find truth.

I interviewed about seven people at this center. I don't like interviewing people. It rubs against my misanthropic grain.

However, one man, someone even older than I, told me a story.

When he meets a group of people suffering from substance abuse, he reaches into a suitcase he carries with him. He pulls out of his suitcase a bear-trap with a mannikin's leg trapped in its razor-sharp metal teeth.

This is you, he says to the users.

You're trapped, he says to the users.

We're going to get you out of this, he says to the users.

That's good writing.

In effect, the man wrote my copy for me.

All I did was clean things up a bit.

But not too much.

The Play's The Thing.

More than 25 years ago, my brilliant elder daughter, Sarah asked me to take she and her best friend, Elizabeth, to the second Austin Powers movie, "The Spy Who Shagged Me."

Such movies, I thought snobbily, are below my laughter-pay-grade and as much as I knew I'd have a good time hearing two tweens laugh, I was somewhat dreading leaving work early to go to something dumb. I had forgotten that the things that have brought the most laughter to our benighted planet are not sophisticated comedy but a pie in the face or a pratfall. 

On my way up to the sticky-floored theaters on East Eighty-Six Street I was reading a "plannery" article on the disintegration of "play" in amerika. The author wrote that when she was a girl kids would gather after school, throw baseballs, kick cans, fly kites, chase each other and generally cavort. Now, they go to a field, there are parents on either side of the field, referees and two teams playing an organized game of football. 

Play has gone from "free-form" to regimented.

No wonder our nation and our world is falling apart.

The things I learned playing reckless ball with friends, besting bullies, arguing, fighting, looking one way and running the other and a thousand other ruses are no longer learned. We get 1, 2, 3 instructions. And have thereby eliminated "figuring it out."

About four years ago, I received a gift in the mail from a company I ordered some stuff from in England. The person running their online business had miscalculated the postage they were supposed to charge me. He wrote me a note asking for more money to cover his costs. I sent it to him. As a thank you, he sent me a "MYRIORAMA" by the great artist Tom Gauld.

A what?

You can begin trying your own here.

Play.

It seems to me that the same lack of play I was reading about on the Six train to the movies a quarter of a century ago, has further infected our world today. It has certainly infected the remaining shards of the ad industry where the number of deliverables due every day has sky-rocketed and the use of imagination has accordingly plummeted.

This might be just a coincidence that I am rounding up to a conclusion. But while the quintillionaires and their willing executioners are cramming the use of electron-induced pattern-matching down our throats, imagination has become sere. Laughter is barren. Joy is a dishwashing detergent.

Last week, I've noticed what might be (or it might be a stretch on my part) two new books that have just been released bemoaning our societal loss of productivity. 

That might be related to our societal loss of play.

We might be so busy optimizing that we have instead pessimized. 

That's what I think about.

Why We Write.

It's been busy at GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company with two or three new business calls happening every two or three days. 

It doesn't much matter if the clients calling are selling a complex technology or a fast-moving consumer good or a vacation destination where it never rains except when I visit. 

Clients have a damn-hard time saying what they do and how they're different. Alex Murrell wrote about this a couple years ago in his excellent essay "The Age of Average." The age hasn't gotten any-less-average now that half of the benighted world is using the same pattern-matching AI technology to blanderize and cheapify their creative.

If you doubt that businesses know how to tell prospects what they do, take ten minutes and read some ad agency about sections. You can find them all at the intersection of pablum, blather, bushwa and pretense.

Say hi for me.

For the past few nights I've been reading Moudhy Al-Rashid's new book, "Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History." You can, and should, order it here. And read it.
Assuming you can still read.

​

Al-Rashid's book starts, really, at the beginning of history, as opposed to pre-history. That is to the beginning of writing.

 

Talking to so many prospective clients who don't know what they sell--why it exists, what makes it different, what it does--and seeing the same shortcomings in nearly every commercial I see and everything I run across, it seems to me we, as a society and an industry, might have lost the "writing plot." By that I mean, we've lost the original purpose of what writing was for.

Cuneiform, shown above, is humankind's earliest writing. It's about 6000 years old--predating the pyramids, the bible, the Iliad and the Odyssey and my 271 missing time-sheets from my decades at Ogilvy.

 

There's a sign in the desert in what is today Iraq, outside of a city that was called Uruk. The sign is blue and sits near an ancient Ziggurat. It reads "The first written words started here."

 

Those first written words were not poetry, or love songs, or beautiful dramas and flowery language. They were who grew how much barley. Who needs how much beer. Who owes what to whom. As Al-Rashid writes:

The first writing was hard-working muscular "let-me-explain-it-to-you-writing." It's the writing we've forgotten how to do and use.

​

​

Robert Caro, my favorite living writer, winner of two-Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards said in his great book "Working,"  “One of the reasons I believed I had become a reporter in the first place was to find out how things really worked and to explain those workings."

I've rewritten Caro, as I re-write everyone. My job, the job of a copywriter is to "Find out how things work and explain them to people."

Somewhere along the way, as a business, advertising has gotten waylaid by art. We no longer want to do the explaining. We want to be rockstars, directors, artists, singers and poets.

Those are all legitimate pursuits.
But they're not the job of those of us in advertising.

In advertising, we're supposed to help people by helping them understand why they need or want something. Why this particular something is better than a competing particular something. 

Yes, as above, that should be done with artistry, skill, wit, humor and intelligence. But we have to remember, people won't pay for something--they certainly won't pay extra for something--if they don't understand what it does, why it's special and why they can't live without it.

Before the current president was reputedly elected, I wrote a note to her opponent's campaign, urging her opponent to run ads like these. Ads that would say what she was going to do. Not ads, as she was running, that alleged to tell you how she might make you feel.

I believe ads like this work. 

Fired.

Last night I had a call with a prospective client. I won't, yet, go into specifics here. But one of the people on the phone was a big deal celebrity whose name will be associated with the product they're asking me to work on.

The big deal celebrity wanted to know how I work.

This is a question every one of the couple of hundreds of clients I've entertained has asked.

I've gotten good at answering it.

Mainly because I spent a good amount of time figuring out how to answer it.

I'm always as blunt as a punch in the nose. 

I like to think, "if Joe Louis could type."

If the prospective client wants circumlocution and bs, we shouldn't be working together. That's not what I do in either my work or in how I deal with people. 

I'm not much good at "the ol' soft shoe." 

I am good at WYSIWYG: What you see is what you get.

So, when a client says to me "How do you work?" my answer is well-rehearsed, and well-thought-out.

I say:

When I was at Ogilvy, many clients would say to me, 'we love working with you. But hate working with Ogilvy.' 

I continue:

When Ogilvy fired me I said to myself, 'how can I make myself easy-to-buy? So I came up with an offerings list that's simple for you and simple for me. I can get you a scope in 20 minutes without wasting my day working on it and wasting your time waiting for it.

I always put an extra fillip on the word "fired."

That word almost always gets a reaction. People, especially in business, don't say 'fired,' because it's too honest. No one admits to being fired. They say things like "when I left Ogilvy." "When I moved on from _____."

We used to say shell-shock. Then battle-fatigue. Now we say post-traumatic stress disorder. 

I say I was fired. 
I was.
Not laid off.
Downsized.
Right-sized.

I was shit-canned.

Sugar-coating is for cereal and Hallmark.

It's off-brand for me.

Last night when I said the word "fired" the big deal celebrity I said it to got nervous. He laughed like he had been caught cheating on a test. I watched his reaction like a good police interrogator would watch a perp. The word "fired" made him sweat.

But I'm glad I didn't namby-pamby about.

Using the word "fired" might cost me the business. By the same token then, it might have saved me a giant celebrity-sized headache.

Because if you don't like plain-speaking, you don't like GeorgeCo.

And you'd probably fire me.

That Didn't Work Out.

Just Monday, I read a book review in the alumni magazine of Columbia University of a book bluntly called "Why Nothing Works." It didn't take me but a few sentences to start applying some of the thinking in the book to the nearly comatose ad industry. Somehow (BTW) the ad industry brings this clip from "The Princess Bride" to mind.

You can read the review here, assuming there's no pay wall--though everything in higher education is behind a pay wall.

BTW, the most important "thing" my father gave me was a piece of advice. He said to me probably 55 years ago, "The smartest people at The New York Times write book reviews. If you want to be smart, read them." 

I've taken that counsel to heart and probably read a dozen book reviews a week, from the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Mad Magazine. You can get a lot of information in a thousand words or so. And often that information, somehow, informs how I approach a problem my clients might be facing. 

You get, in short, a world view. Not a trend view. Or a fad view. Or what won an award-view. You get, from book reviews, perspective. You get even more if you actually read some of the books.

Take this passage of the review as a metaphor not just for amerika's "mostly-deadness" but our industry's. Substitute agency language for amerikan governmental language:

In examining how we got here, Dunkelman ’01CC, a political historian, takes us back to a United States that once moved fast and didn’t break but built things — big things, like public works (dams, reservoirs, and electrification projects that, in the case of the New Deal–era Tennessee Valley Authority, brought electric power to an undeveloped forty-thousand-square-mile swath of the rural South in just over a decade), public spaces (parks, forests, nature trails), and public transportation (tunnels, bridges, railroads, and highways that spanned a continent). How did a public sector capable of such accomplishments devolve into one that, to invoke a widely publicized recent boondoggle, was prepared to spend $1.7 million and ten years to install a single public toilet in San Francisco?

The parallel to the ad business is all-too obvious. How did we go from Absolut, FedEd, VW, BMW, Avis, Apple to tweets about Sydney Sweeney--and literally millions more ads of even less consequence and impact?

How did we go from sitting along-side CEOs (not CMOs) and shaping brands to becoming chosen on criteria selected by bean-counters in procurement? How did we cede our stature as the creators of more wealth than any other industry in the history of the world to, like WPP, losing 75% of its market cap in just a dozen years?

Dunkleman, the author, attributes amerika's declining ability to "get things done" to an era of "guardrails." What he calls, "important checks on power that were designed to curtail such abuses and restore accountability to the citizens whom government was supposed to serve. The downside? Limitations on power generate so much fine print and so many hoops for planners to jump through that even the worthiest projects often fail to come to fruition."

This, too, can be translated so it relates to our industry, for instance: 

guardrails were important checks on power that were designed to curtail agency excesses and restore accountability to the clients agencies were supposed to serve. The downside? Limitations on power generate so much fine print and so many hoops for planners to jump through that even the worthiest projects often fail to come to fruition.

In short, we eliminated risk taking and replaced risk taking with mandatories, best-practices and focus-group consensus.

In a similar book, "Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation," by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber, the authors suggest that the way to break the stranglehold of stagnation is to do what's most counter-intuitive to the cost-accountants and public-opinion pollsters who currently run our business and the world.

Though I shouldn't sum up an almost 400-page heavy-duty book with one sentence, I will.

We have to over-index on risk and taking chances.

Or we have so-focused on Minimal Viable Products that we have become a minimally viable species. 

Current course and speed, playing it safe, will deliver us even deeper into the slough of despond that the world seems mired in.

Having fun, taking chances, being dumb, mad, special, opinionated is the only way out.

Finish This Quickly.

I read this essay by Ben Rhodes just moments ago in The New York Times. Here's the bit that tilted my internal pinball machine: "In the disquieting new film “Eddington,” the director, Ari Aster, captures the American tendency to live obsessively in the present. As a Covid-era New Mexico town tears itself apart over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter and conspiracy theories, a faceless conglomerate constructs a data center nearby — a physical manifestation of our tech-dominated future. It’s an unsubtle message: Short-term compulsions blind us to the forces remaking our lives." [The underlining is mine--not the original essay's.]

Though it's probably stupid and myopic on my part, many things I read--even big items like the essay above--I bring down to my world and the industry I work in: advertising.

Let's start with the title of the essay, rewriting a word or two so I can make my point. Let's change it to "How Short-Term Thinking Is Destroying Advertising."

Today it seems like short-term advertising, aka "performance marketing" is destroying brands that took decades to build. Sure, we can use promotions to gin up short-term sales, but while we do that, we often see long-term value deteriorate. 

While we're putzing around with fads and technologies and bowing to the great god data, we're forgetting basic stuff like saying what brands do, why they matter and what makes them different. We're chasing after ephemera and ignoring fundamental.

So, there are whole categories of goods and services that people won't buy unless they're 40%-70% off. If 90% of the time a $10 product can be bought for $7--eventually that product will never be sold ever again for full price. It will only be bought when it's on sale. If you planned to sell 100 units at $10 and you have to lower the price to $7, what you've done is marked down your company 30%.

Worse, your brand, no matter what you say it is becomes nothing more than "30% Off."

Here's a dopey for instance. When I was a kid, Listerine used to spend millions advertising. I probably haven't seen an ad for Listerine for 25 years. If I go to one of the two remaining drug stores in America, CVS or Walgreens, they have a store brand that looks identical in every way to Listerine, yet it costs probably 40% less. All those millions Listerine used to spend justified spending more for Listerine. Now, I have no reason to. So I buy whatever's cheapest. Lack of advertising, short-term thinking, took Listerine (and hundreds of other brands) from a leader to a too-expensive parity.

Short-term thinking, like performance marketing,
stopped telling people why one brand cost more than another and why it
was worth that extra dollar. That costs $Billions in brand equity.

The agency business has short-termed its own brands to-death, too. Look at what WPP has done to Y&R, JWT and dozens of others. 

As bad, I've heard of holding companies that win a giant account and staff it with nothing but freelance. They save money that way, and they can expand and contract with client needs. Others hire people for a maximum of one-thousand hours per annum, so they can avoid paying for benefits. In the short-term money is saved. In the long-term, the quality of work, relationship and the agency's brand itself decay.

Someone will likely say that the pressures today for sales and profit are greater than ever. As if there were a time when the pressure to succeed in business wasn't greater than ever.

Growing up in the business, I remember a small agency, I think Earle Palmer Brown, that specialized in retail advertising. They had a mantra, "build sales over-night, build brands over-time."

In other words, it ain't one or the other. It ain't either or. It ain't performance or brand. It ain't people or profit.

It's both.

It's tough love.

The best kind of love there is.

An Annual Check-Up.

I read an article not too many minutes ago in the Economist. 

Like many articles in that august weekly, this one was written with both wit and a different perspective. 

The Economist also edits its articles with a time-sensitive machete. They're never more than one-magazine page long
--1,000 words--perfect for a TL/DR universe. They're also good training for today's generation of writers who never learned to write-to-fit, because in the digital world, there's no bottom on the page, or respect for the reader.

The article itself is about a new kind of check up. Not your annual trip to the dentist, but a financial evaluation. You can read the short piece here. Just as a trip to the dentist or the doctor might make you healthier, the article suggests, so might a trip to an economist. 

Though GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is having, by far, its best year ever, I wondered what would happen if the clients reading this post gave their brands an annual advertising check up. I wonder how much more business GeorgeCo. might get if more clients were Agency-Introspective.

According to the popular AI-powered search-engine Perplexity, many business leaders do read these pages. Perplexity reports:

With that in mind, as you have your gums, molars, canines and bicuspids checked annually, I suggest clients give their brands and their agency relationship a similar check up. Here are ten aspects you might want to consider when evaluating the healthy of your brand and your agency relationship.

1. Define. Does my advertising tell people what my company does and why it's important?

2. Differentiate. Does my advertising tell people (including internal constituencies) what makes our product or service better? Or has our advertising allowed us to become commoditized and a "me too."

3. Demonstrate. Does our advertising "show," not merely "tell" what makes our brand different and better. In other words, does it provide "reasons to believe." And real proof rather than adjectives and puffery.

4. Disciple-ize. Does our advertising help our brands' most-loyal customers spread the word about why they love our brand? If you believe in the 20/80 rule (the Pareto Principle) that 20% of your customers account for 80% of your sales--there must be some way of willingly putting those loyalists to work for you.

5. Liked. Is your advertising memorable? Is it unique? Is it liked?

6. Yours. Do you own a look/feel and voice? Such ownership makes every ad you run punch above its weight.

7. Dedicated. Do you know the people who work on your brand? The creatives, the planners and the account people? Do they love your brand and have a history on it. Or do they spend two hours on it a month, whenever they have time and when scope permits.

8. Disagree. Will your agency fight with you? Not in with rancor but constructively.

9. Delight. Do you love the work you put out into the world?

10. Impact. Do your ads stop people or inundate them? Do people look forward to your ads, or are you instead "always-on" for "always-on's" sake.

11. Damn fast.  Does your agency take weeks to present work or do they respond with more fervor?

12. Do more. Does your agency over-deliver? Or supply the MVP, minimal viable product?

There might be a few things I've missed in this check-up. There might be a few things you'd add, or a few things you'd cross-out. But I think asking yourself these questions is a good start.

A good next step would be to have a talk with me.

Falling Behind.

A dear friend, an ex-partner, just sent me the Ogilvy-derived drivel above. 

There are a lot of problems with the message.

One: Why would anyone take counsel on business, on falling behind, on "ending," from an agency that's been halving itself in revenue every year for the last five years. That's like posting stock picks from the homeless shelter. Or diet advice from donald trump. Or abstinence advice from elon murk. Failing companies should not be issuing success dicta. They should be fixing the conditions that led to their decades-long free-fall.

Two: Agencies, not too very long ago, issued similar statements about the efficacy of open-plan offices. About 99-percent of people now agree they were an efficiency disaster, not motivated by better "communication and collaboration," but spurred on solely by the chance to cut back on rent. 

You're taking advice from this company?

Three: Agencies, not too very long ago, also told us about the wisdom of divesting themselves of media. That too, has proved to be a disaster. 

Four: Agencies, as we speak, have been selling the flavor of the month for decades. They regard fleeting fads, like Google+, NFTs, interactivity as seminal movements. Agencies always over-trumped such bushwa simply because they're terrified of seeming like they're behind. 

There's no accountability for false predictions. People are fired when a phony trend is missed.

The worst takeaway from the above is that it assumes, with the arrogance of typical corporate leadership, that there's only one manner of doing something, and it is our manner. If you're not doing things our way, you're shit-out-of-luck and therefore stupid.

As for artificial intelligence, it makes a huge and heinous assumption. That all intelligence comes from what's come before and works by using precedent and past examples.

In "Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know," author Angus Fletcher argues against the current "AI is Everything" mania. The book was reviewed in the weekend Wall Street Journal, and the subhead of the review speaks volumes.

 

A not-atypical hierarchy of learning is DIKW. D being the lowest. W being the highest.

It stands for Data. Information. Knowledge. Wisdom.

Data, sorry person who said the quotation at the start of this post, is a commodity. Working that data into something that provides wisdom is rare. And the province of a few practitioners of the advertising arts. (Having been fired, such practitioners are usually self-employed.)

As Brandy Shillace's review points out,

"Data, by its definition, is information that is known. It already exists. You can mix and recycle to make new tweaks, but it cannot lead to innovation—and it can’t tell you what to do when the future is unknown.

“To handle the unstable dark of worldly existence,” Mr. Fletcher writes, “our brain had to develop mechanisms for acting smart with little, even no, information.” The brain, we are told, has nonlogical intelligence, four “primal” powers: intuition, for perceiving the world’s hidden rules; imagination, which makes the future; emotion, which aids in personal growth; and common sense, which acts wisely in uncertainty.This list may seem unimpressively simple, but when we look at our modern system of education, we can see that they have been relegated to the fringes—often to humanities programs that are underfunded or cut altogether. In their place, schools drill students to think like computers at the expense of the “practical smarts” that made us human in the first place.

Whenever I see a statement like the Ogildrivel above--on AI or nearly anything else, I go through some steps.

1. What's the predictive track-record of the speaker.
2. Who's making money on the prediction.
3. Do I consider the speaker intelligent and successful.

I have a feeling that about 20 trillionaires are behind the AI onslaught. Thousands more people are acting as their willing-executioners. They're tulip salesmen in 16th Century Holland, they're bridge salesmen in Brooklyn. Crypto salesment in the trumphouse. When the trillionaires get their AI sold, they'll be quadrillionaires, and then they'll work on their next thing after that to become eventually undecilionaires. 

Despite all that money, AI doesn't have:

1. Intuition.
2. Imagination.
3. Emotion. And
4. Common sense.

That's why, we seen "college students doing better at standardized tests while having greater difficulty with real-world tasks.” 

In advertising we'll see brilliant prompt engineers making millions and insipid work costing brands billions.

In the real world, Fletcher says, "there are many paths to a goal, and those who succeed tap into something beyond black-and-white rule-following. They have creativity and flexibility" and a ....“natural cleverness that AI can’t replicate.”

I'll end with this, "AI can steal datasets from stories and recycle them into plots but the computer is still not reading the story. We are. We are the ones taking the word scrambles and lacing meaning into them."

I suppose to the same people who told us how great open plan offices are selling us their next gallon of snake oil, now made with AI-derived serpent juice.

Ask for proof.

99 Things I Never Believe.

1. An agency that says it's "hot" or on a winning-streak. These things and turn in a second. Hot can turn to icy. And a sense of hot can lead to hubris. Which is always bad.

2. People who declare something "dead" or "broken." Everything is broken. Always. And very little ever dies. People have been declaring radio, print, tv, outdoor, the english language, god, humanity, humor, race, history and just about everything else passé since the beginning of time. Like Timex watches, most things take a licking and keep on ticking.

3. Listings of awards. When I worked on IBM ThinkPad, there was a mandatory on the brief that said, "winner of 700 awards." I said then, and I'll say forever, if you've won 700 of something you've won 0 of something. What's more, there's a window-washer in town that claims to be "award-winning." The award thing has gone too far for too long to be at-all believable.

4. Any automated affirmation from anyone from a fortune cookie, to Google Meet, to Zoom, to my Apple watch. Kindness in real life is too rare to attempt to automate. Sincerity has never been automated.

5. Predictions. With the rise of 24/7, always-on messaging, more maybes are being reported than news. Maybes can make you crazy. As an antidote, it's worthwhile taking seven minutes to memorize this poem.

6. Long-lists of credits. Creative credits today are often as extensive as a menu in a Greek coffee shop. This is bullshit. If you change a word, or move a prop on set, you are not instrumental in the creation of a piece. When such minor contributions get equal billing it takes from those who cracked the nut. Creative credits are not, and shouldn't be, a democracy.

7. Initials. Many (bad) creative directors take someone else's script, change three words, add their initials to the top and make it "theirs." Stop it.

8. Calling commercials "movies" or "films." If you do that, you're missing the point. You're selling stuff. But your art must be in the service of selling. Not merely entertaining.

9. Inspiration. As Errol Morris said to me once, "inspiration is for amateurs." You have a job, you get paid, you work hard and do it. I can only imagine if when I was playing ball I said "I'm not inspired today." I would have woken up with a bat up my keister, with pine-tar on it.

10. Case-Studies in Creative Portfolios. Actually case-studies in general. You should show what you make. Not present an essay on what you've made.

11. "I'll do it later." No. Do it now.

12. "I'm multi-tasking." No, you're doing two or more tasks badly rather than one job well. Multi-tasking was invented by the same people and thinking that said when everyone sits out in the open with no space of their own it will be good for communication. It's an "efficiency" rationalization that by any measure simply doesn't add up.

13. We're family. So were the Borgias.

14. "They care about me." I thought that for many years. Then, as I was making my agency money, handling the toughest clients, teaching young people, and putting out various fires I was fired and had to fight for a paltry amount of severance. They care about themselves. Period.

15. "There's no money." For raises. For bonuses. There always is. For the chosen. Just not for you. If there's no money, really, there's no future and you should leave.

16. Talent Acquisition. People are not acquirable. They are not commodities to be bought. The use of such nomenclature betrays a dangerous and mean attitude. And inhumanity.

17. Creatives who introduce themselves by title. You're either an art director or a copywriter. Anything else is bs and showboating.

18. People who cite fake data. Like human attention spans are shorter than gold-fish's.  Or who say, "people don't read." You'll find a lot of back-pedaling if you ask for actual proof.

19. People who post things with people holding up signs.

19. Lists that are numbered incorrectly.

20. Lists that say they go to 99. They usually stop far sooner.

Survival.

Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall (July 18, 1900 – December 17, 1977) was a chief U.S. Army combat historian during World War II and the Korean War.

If you ever look at animals, from the creatures (like rats) you might live nearby, to your family dog, to the birds of prey that swoop down so they can bring a small herring homeward to their high-nests and fledgling families in the marsh, you'll notice that most of them don't enter an area without 360-ing their space, sniffing the air or pawing at the dirt.

They're always, and I mean always, assessing the safety and danger of their world. They can be snuffed out any minute so they've developed a world-weary world-wariness that adds to their survivability.

Back when I was a cub in the advertising business, I remember sniffing out danger in the form of phone calls at 4PM right before the long Memorial Day or July 4th or Labor Day weekends.

There would always be some crisis that needed un-crisising and if you picked up your desk phone you were on the hook for a weekend in un-air-conditioned fluorescence while the rest of your friends were at the beach or watching a ball game on television.

The old hands had learned to sense danger from those calls. They learned how to skirt it. Us young dopes were usually on the hook.

In short, like creatures in the animal kingdom, creatures in the ad kingdom learned to sniff danger in the wind and scurry away in the shadows. I remember one long-legged writer who sat in the office next to mine when I was on my way to becoming a big cheese. 

She wasn't the best writer at avoiding work. But she was the best writer at avoiding writing. She'd leave her Diet Coke on her desk, her IBM Selectric II running and her expensive scarf on her chair. To all appearances Marcia would be right back--it seemed she was out powdering her nose in the Womens' Room. In reality, she was gone for four hours, down at the Subway Inn or the Tip-Top Tap drinking her Diet Coke, but with rum in it.

I've read in more than a few places that most soldiers fighting in WWII, despite all the celluloid you see with grizzled faces unloading machine guns into fields of Krauts, never even fired their guns. According to someone called S.L.A. Marshall, the majority of soldiers in WWII never fired a shot against an enemy. 

I remember working for an advisor-led financial services company back in the "oughts." The CEO said to me, "If I could get my people to work three days and play golf two, rather than play golf three days and work two, everything would be fine."

In short, like the animals I mentioned above, most of our species try to avoid work and the sweaty entanglements it entails. 

I've grown out of that propensity--especially since I started running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. Usually I say, "I'll do it," because doing it takes less time than either finding someone else to do it or hiding. Many mornings I start my day with 17-20 three-minute assignments.

My father never actually said it, but he might have and I quote his unsaid quote nonetheless.

"You don't make any money saying "no" to clients."

Of course I do some times. Dignity. Self-respect. And dumping cut no ice with me. But the way to get work is to do work. And work is the only way I know to make a living.