Think Too Small.

If you pay attention to ads on LinkedIn and sites like it, you'll see a lot of ads for creative people at either agencies or on the client-side. Reading these ads, I wonder if people any long know what advertising can do for them. The ads read like the example below. They're 98-percent gorp, 99.9-percent from a planet that no longer resembles the one I was born on.

An ad for a creative person should say, "create ads that stop people and change their minds about a product and help them buy it." That's all.

I wonder if like many inventions before it, advertising has, quickly, gone from something that in the right hands is miraculous. To something that is dull, boring and prosaic.

What started as a breakthrough and a business advantage has turned into a public utility.

Advertising, it might be argued, has created more wealth for more people in more places than any other form of communication in the history of the earth. But instead of using the incredible power even someone working in the basement of his seaside cottage has at his Mac-tips, we inundate the digital airwaves with clichés, dopiness and clipart.

You might think of advertising like you might have thought about electricity 150 years ago, or air-conditioning 75 years ago, or automatic transmission, or color TV 50 years ago, all those "take-for-granted-todays" were once considered amazing. 

Once advertising was, in the hands of agencies that cared and clients who believed in it, responsible for great fortunes and huge percentage gains in marketshare. I'm thinking of Apple, Nike, IBM, FedEx, Absolut and half-a-dozen or two-dozen Unilever, P&G, Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other brands that made hay with impactful and ubiquitous advertising.

In the modern world of marketing we've made a choice.

We ignore impact.

We choose inundation. 

We don't cook a good meal.

We serve crap by the bucket.

And we think it's good for the clients we work for.

We make a ton of small things that eventually get through because we've made forty-two million of them. We don't worry if we piss people off. Fuck 'em. We're a monopoly.

We do crap because we don't believe in power. We default to tsunami.

Nothing actually gets through to people. No one cares. Everyone just turns off. And as for agencies themselves, such practices have devalued them, their people and our entire industry.

Let's win an award!

That's all that matters.

 

Toil, Tame and Burnt Ass.

There have been a spate of articles of late about a general disillusionment, especially among people under 40, with the way work works, or more accurately, doesn't work.

On Monday, Labor Day in amerika, The Wall Street Journal reported on the breakdown in the relationship between hard work and career and financial success.

This is bad. It has a why-bother-ness to it. A merely going-through-the-motions. When people no longer find a linkage between effort and success, who cares enters the picture. Who cares is the enemy of progress.

When I was the head of a major ad agency, much of my bonus was based on keeping our attrition rate below 16-percent. That means, btw, that one out of six people leaves your agency every year. 

Today in an industry that says they believe in "transparency," you can't find data on such matters. When I was a boy, the advertising trade press often reported such details. Like the number of employees an agency had, agency revenue and their revenue per person. Today, the trade press merely reprints agency press-releases and calls that news.

On Thursday, I got a copy of apress-release via WPP from their new CEO, Cindy Rose. The release included this paragraph nominally about putting people first.

As a copywriter who made a good living for many years because I was able to write convincing copy (because it often included facts) I find this statement as shallow as a noon-day puddle in Dubai.

There are some simple realities to consider, that I believe, and I'm not being negative just honest, go against the platitude of putting people first. (No company in the entire history of the world has ever issued a press release by the way where they said, "We're putting Knoll furniture first. Carpet tiles second. People third."

The central problem with how agencies run is simple to reveal. Agencies expect you to be committed to them as if you are a valued employee with security, timely raises and bonuses and a genuine stake in the success of the business. 

When it's convenient for agencies, they expect people to work roughly thirty-percent of their time without being paid for it. That is, you get paid for forty hours, even when you work fifty-five. You can't bill and get paid for all the hours you work, but your agency can. You're working for free.

That arrangement worked when you were truly an executive. Because with your dedication came benefits. A presumption of a secure job, an assistant, an occasion perk, and an annual wage increase. Also, and perhaps I'm being naive, when the industry was healthy, the C-suite made about 20x the wage of a median-salaried worker. Today, the CEOs of IPG and Omnicom (the only holding companies I could find data on) make something like 200-300 times what their median-paid employee makes.

It's hard to feel a fealty toward a place that demands, essentially Corvée, that gives one-percent increases every thirty-six months, and fires people the moment there's downtime. In other words, there's little relationship--and this is enforced by corporate behavior--between how hard you work and how well you are treated.

Who cares.

The second objectionable bit of Rose's statement contains the words "help you grow as professionals." I have no data to back this up, only anecdotal accounts, but most agencies have eviscerated their learning and development programs. They offer little or no training. And many of the older people who used to help bring younger talent along have been kicked to the curb.

How do you learn if there's no one left to teach?

There are a host of other structural exigencies that make agencies unwelcome places to work. There's more stuff to make in less time and often for lower client fees. Much of the work that appears before people, ostensible to induce them to buy something, reeks of bad mass-production and clip-art taste. It's hard to have pride in producing shoddy merchandise that annoys rather than enlightens people.

As for being the home of the "world's most exceptional talent" that's hard to fathom without a proper sense of what sent the place into a down-spin in the first place and the economic drivers that have turned advertising into a low wage, low security, low future industry. What's more the reliance of so many agencies on freelance crushes the morale of staff. And freelance is how agencies function today. Not a single agency entity understands that downtime is the recharging people need after a giant push. 

There are substantive, and yes, costly, steps a holding company or an agency can embark upon to make the industry good again and to make an agency a place people want to work, sweat, and toil.

But none of that will happen without some sense of and commitment to fairness. Fairness in wages. Fairness in security. And a relationship between hard work and more money.

Who cares?

-Inder.

Some years ago I read something, I think about Microsoft (which is somehow valued at over $4,000,000,000,000 -- four trillion dollars.) I read that they sorted out their employees into one of three categories.

1. Grinder. The person who sits in the office and churns out work.

2. Minder. The person who keeps things moving, keeps clients happy and takes care of relationships.

3. Finder. The person who goes out and gets new business.

Forbes magazine describes those roles this way:

While no one ever talked to me about these personnel classifications, the categories made a lot of sense to me. In my travels through the world, I'd look at people and organizations to see if this Grinder, Minder, Finder delineation made sense.

I also bring the designations up a lot when I talk to my grown-up and-successful daughters. They've seem to have understood and latched onto them, too.

I bring Grinder, Minder, Finder up because I'm busy right now with GeorgeCo., as busy as I've ever been, in six busy years. When you're busy, if you're doing work right, you often have to toggle through Grinder, Minder, Finder with no delay between the strata. That's what I've been dealing with lately.

I might start my day with a new business call. Where I'm closing in on getting a proposal signed. From there I might get an email from a client asking for three video scripts and 108 LinkedIn ads all due tomorrow by five. Moments later I might have a teary phone call with a client asking for my advice on something.

Sometimes I feel like a ping-pong ball in a Cuisinart. 

It's hard to switch tiers. Tears.

And frankly, when it comes to the aforementioned 108 LinkedIn ads, like Bartleby, I would prefer not to.

Here's the point, though. 

Crappy companies look at Grinder, Minder, Finder in terms of hierarchy. You graduate from grinding, to minding, to finding. There was a point in my career, more than two decades ago, where it seemed like the thing to do was to distance myself from rolling up my sleeves and grinding. 

You get too big to do shit.

I was supposed to have moved beyond typing ads for a living. I was supposed to have moved beyond hand-holding clients. I was supposed to be out beating the bushes, speaking at events, judging award shows, etc.

I never got too big to grunt.

I tried effete-ing myself and I lasted about nine-minutes as a do-nothing paper-pusher. The beauty of work is all the work. The good and the bad. In Churchill's words, the blood, sweat, toil and tears. Not just the fancy, the schmancy and the perks.

What keeps you honest with work is knowing how the work gets made. Knowing what the process looks like and feels like. Having to fight through bad briefs, worse timing and sometimes unreasonable demands. 

That's what work is. Taking the worst assignments and making them the best.

You're better at it overall if you understand the component parts that make up work.

I think it's sad that we have people running at agencies or running marketing at clients who have never created an ad, or even read one. They're good at golf, or the schmooze.

It's as bad as a president or senator or congress-person who has no idea of what a quart of milk costs, a bottle of aspirin or how hard it is to pay your Con Ed bill during a heatwave. Or what it's like to commute by subway when the A/C is out, which is always. Robert Moses, the autocrat who built New York's highway system, never learned to drive. He was chaufferred to work in a 12-cylinder air-conditioned Packard, he dictated to secretaries who shared the back-seat with him. He didn't really care what people went through. He lived in a different world.

There are a lot of ways people absent themselves from the dirty work of work. (But work, to be clear, is all dirty work.) It's getting ink on your hands and a printer that won't print at midnight and help you can't seem to find when you need it so you have to do it yourself.

Work is those 108 LinkedIn ads that I don't want to do and while I can pay someone else to do them, they're mine to do, because the assignment, the job, the client is mine and my name is on the work.

All this has been lost in a world where the only way to really make money is to make it off the sweat of others work. But I don't want to work that way.

I want to take something shitty. And make it good.

That's work. 

And as much as I hate it, I love it.

Belief.

Over five years ago, my friend Eitan Chitiyat, interviewed me for his blog. In that post, I said, "I believe in factory tours." That was my way of saying you have to know a product or a company before you try to create something for that company.

Imagine for a minute, if you were to write a dating profile, a college application essay, or even give a eulogy for someone you don't really know. You might get some details that personalize the effort. But you probably don't have the closeness you need to write something that's actually personal.

There's a big difference (that most of the marketing industry fails to recognize) between "personalized" and "personal." As Mark Twain once said, it's like the difference between lightning and lightning bug. Same essential spelling. Entirely different meaning. 

On Friday, my good friend Rob Schwartz and I were talking on the telephone. We talked about the death of our mutual colleague, Steve Hayden, a little about the sump that is fast-dying liberal democracy and then about how we're each doing during this chapter in our lives. 

Rob's had about four careers as far as I can tell. He started many years ago as a copywriter, rose to CCO, became CEO (is that a rise or a fall?) and is now enjoying, yes, enjoying life as a career coach. 

The last few years for Rob and I, have witnessed probably more changes than we anticipated having to live through. Rob is now doing more and more coaching, and I was booted out of a crumbling House-of-Usher of an ad agency, and forced to start my own place. These are big transitions at any time. Maybe bigger when they happen when you're on the wrong side of 60.

When I started GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I wrote a line in ink with one of my many Pelikan fountain pens, "Don't start a new agency just to act like an old agency." That was more shorthand to myself to do things my way. The way I regard as the right way.

I was telling Rob about my practice of doing extensive interviews with different levels of clients and customers when I begin to work on a brand. In my gee-whiz, naive way I said something like, "I can't believe real agencies don't do this. Not even planners anymore. That's why, everything looks and feels the same. That's why so few brands are differentiated. And everyone seems to speak (or shout) in the same voice and say the same things.” 

Lack of knowledge leads to a surfeit of generic.

Rob, as an excellent listener, said "You don't visit their factories anymore. But of course there are no factories. But you're doing the factory tour."

Just now, I ran across this article in The Wall Street Journal. In it Wharton marketing professor Shiri Melumad says working with Large Language Models “... is like the Google Effect on steroids. We’re shifting even further away from active learning.”

Daniel Oppenheimer, a professor of psychology and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, corroborates, saying he sees in something similar in his lab: "Students who use AI tools to complete assignments tend to do better on homework—but worse on tests.They’re getting the right answers, but they’re not learning."

In today's Times, there's an essay by Gary Marcus, an author a AI-skeptic. (Remember skepticism? Questioning authority? Real facts?) Marcus writes, and doubts.

Tools, from the paleolithic clovis points, to rope, to the wheel, to the shovel, to the typewriter, to the internal combustion engine, to the Mac, have always, by definition, lightened the labor-load of humankind.

But our new so-called tools no longer lighten our load. They do our load for us. This makes AI no longer a tool, in fact, but a usurpation.

My point in all this is very simple.

In the roughly 4.5 million years since our ancestors came down from trees and started walking on two feet, progress has always been made as a result of two things: work, and risk.

In the modren computer age we have sought to eliminate both. The algorithm will, it is claimed, not only give us the right answer, it will create that right answer for us. If you think about all the "best-practices" know-it-alls you've heard via white papers, agency meetings, powerpoints, pontifications, ted talks, and presidential podia claiming they know the one true path, you know what I mean. The are people and machines who believe they are gods or they can read the will of god because they can see things no one else can.

All work comes down to work and risk.

Not, as we are being told everyday, work-delegation and risk-avoidance.

The simple fact is, the new breed of small independent agencies, GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, are still willing to take the risks and do the work. The be-tar-pitted behemoths of the industry believe some magical binary alchemy will lead they and their clients to the promised land.

I do at least ten hours of interviews.
Read at least one-thousand pages of powerpoints.

Write ten manifestos and one-hundred print ads.

Work and risk.

They're hard.

They're what I believe in.

Welcome to Metaphor-Land.

Drones are among the newest and most-advanced weapons on battlefields and besieged amerikan cities today. According to M. Gessen, writing in The New York Times, "Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city is just 20 miles from the front line. In the center of town, one cannot walk a block without seeing boarded-up windows where glass was blown out by bomb blasts. In the bedroom suburbs to the east, entire blocks of Soviet-era high-rise apartment buildings lie in ruins."

Much of this damage, and countless casualties have been caused by drones. 

Ukraine has some of the world's most-advanced weaponry to battle Russian drones, including the Patriot missile system and F-16 fighter jets. A single patriot missile costs $4,000,000. And F-16, about $70,000,000. (About what the trump family takes in every week from crypto "sales.")

The Ukrainians also have theYakovlev Yak-52. A propeller plane was originally built as a training plane by the Soviets. It has a top speed of just 177 mph and a ceiling of just 13,000 feet. People drive faster on the FDR than the Yak 52 can fly.

But in the skies above Ukraine, between ten-percent and twelve-percent of all Russian drones are being shot down by amateur soldiers in drones.

The pilot is usually an amateur. The kind of guy who flies from New York to the Hamptons to beat the investment bankers. The gunner is a guy with an automatic weapon or a shotgun. He's usually shooting rabbits. The pilot gets as close to a drone as he can. The gunner leans out and shoots it. Sometimes the pilot will tip a drone off course with the brush of a wing. 

The Wall Street Journal wrote about this phenomenon in the paper on Monday. One of the gunners they profiled had never even been in a plane before.

It made me wonder what if we in advertising tried going back to the low-tech way we used to fight our wars for consumer attention and product preference. Sure, we'll use every high-tech tool we can. We'll use so much AI, our algorithmic sphincters will begin to hemorrhage. 

But what if we used the advertising equivalent of a prop plane and pop gun?

What if we gave some old people some magic markers and tissue paper and had them scribble out a storyboard. The copywriter could type it two-fingered on an old selectric. We could find some celluloid somewhere and an old Arriflex in someone's closet and we could shoot the thing. We could find real musicians to play real instruments and record a track. And a whisky-throated stentor to do the VO, recording originally on tape. I'm sure we could dig up a moviola and find someone to cut the thing. We could send out for opticals.

Old school.

I bet, just doing this a few times, we could shoot a lot of sophisticated tech right out of the sky.

And we might, also, teach the world a thing or two.

Be-Labor Day.

To my readers outside of the be-nighted states of amerika, today is Labor Day in amerika. We celebrate Labor Day in September in this nation to remove from a day celebrating workers any possible association with May 1st, or May Day, or International Workers Day, which to the recidivists in the be-nighted states has an association with Communism or Socialism, or equally rancid in the eyes of so many powerful amerikans, any semblance of workers' rights.

Over the last fifteen years or so as the giant advertising agencies and holding companies have massively consolidated and, along the way, shed tens of billions of dollars in market value, many in our industry and its periphery have assigned blame for the industry's collapse to a variety of forces, as if those forces, and not their behavior is responsible for that sucking sound.

Divestiture of media is blamed, as is media's fragmentation. AI is blamed, as are FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) and lately, MANGO (Meta, Apple, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI.) Or even MANGOT (all of the above, plus tesler.)

Others cite silly ideas like "the big idea is dead," or today "people are post-consumer."

The point no one seems to bring up is the pillaging of the advertising industry by the very people who are meant to be running the advertising industry, nominally protecting and promoting the industry.

CEO pay in all of industry is out of whack in relation to that of typical workers. The ratio was about 20:1 when I was a teenager. If a worker made $10,000, his boss made $200,000. Now it's almost 350:1. If a worker makes $100,000, his boss makes $35,000,000.

No one points out, for instance, that Mark Read's compensation has increase as the holding company he used as his personal ATM decreased in value from roughly $31Billion to $5.5Billion, an almost 84-percent decrease in value in just a decade.

What Read and his ilk have done is increase their pay vis a vis their workers while decimating the number of workers (the people actually doing the work clients nominally pay for) and therefore the market cap of the companies they're supposed to be running. They're selling the milk from the cow while they're selling off the meat.

In sports, if the owners sold all the best players, saw the team get worse season after season, and saw attendance and broadcast revenues plummet accordingly, sooner or later, people would blame the greed of ownership for destroying that which yesterday was strong.

Somehow in advertising, we blame exogenous conditions and excuse the malfeasance and bad faith of management. I'd betcha, for instance, Read will be paid by WPP for the next 25 years. Martin Sorrell, Read disgraced predecessor after all, is still being paid by that company.

And as anyone who's watching knows, Mark Read is no Bobby Bonilla.

He's worse.

Or as Eugene O'Neill wrote in "The Emperor Jones," “They's two kind's of stealing. They's the small kind, like what you does, and the big kind, like I does. Fo' de small stealing dey put you in jail soon or late. But fo' de big stealin' dey puts your picture in de paper and yo' statue in de Hall of Fame when you croak."

My Shed.

I've written before about Dwight Garner and his practice of continual reading and alongside that collecting really superior quotations from the books he reads. 

Garner keeps a note book of words and phrases he likes. Every-so-often, he'll publish one. People like me buy them and have it never more than an axe-length away from their typing fingers. Garner, because he is idiosyncratic, is infinitely more fun, if not as compendious as Bartlett. And as to online quotation hunting, he is the Louvre compared to an airport newsstand.

Here are three randomly selected pages from the book above. If you are a kindlenista, you can download Garner's book for less change than you'll find hiding in your sofa cushions.

Up here on the Gingham Coast, many people do something I've never really seen before, and will never understand. Their houses, garages, lives and backyard sheds are filled with so much stuff, a lot of people park their cars on their front lawns, or beside their one-third-too-large homes. 

They either love their SUVs so much that they're showing them off, or more likely, they have too much stuff and since the neighborhood our house is in doesn't allow street parking, there's no place else for their Grendel-size vehicles.

Grendel was large enough to have been an offensive lineman at D3 college.

Even with the cute-little one-room-school-house-looking sheds everyone has "out back," they have no room in their garages for their cars. (I joke, I'll someday get fined for stowing my 1966 Simca 1500 in its proper place after it's done with it's transportation ministrations.)

But, to be honest, I also keep a shed.

I think most writers do. 

At least writers of my generation. Who have cultivated the skill of memory. (Memory gets stronger with practice. Many people have allowed google to atrophy their power of recollection. That is a mistake and representative of self-harm. It's cutting of a different ilk.)

We keep shards of lines, like Dwight Garner, above. We keep phrases we like. We store information despite the bullshit that we have access to all the world's information at our finger-tips at all time. (The problem we face isn't one of access to information, btw, it's actually finding that information when we need it. Locating what you need is near impossible. Because the organization of all that information has been sold to the highest bidder who's not interested in what you need but in what they have to sell.)

I got an email from a client last night.

I thought for a moment about how I got the client. She's way off in Maine.

Oh, now I remember.

She helps run a coastal nature preserve and asked me to write a manifesto for her site. Friend of a friend connection.

I remembered a line written by Heraclitus almost 3000 years ago that I kept, amid the cobwebs, in my upstairs shed. I found it in a book I read and I kept it where I could find it again.

"The Soul wants to be wet," Heraclitus wrote.

Once I sat down to manifesto-ize, I re-found that line. 

I might have had to move a crate of old Archie comic books to get to it, or YouTube videos of Joe Louis knocking opponents down. Or Joe Frazier assaulting Oscar Bonavena, charging ahead like a runaway train crossed with a herd of bison. But I tracked the line down in two-shakes of a tracked-change.

Once I found it, I knew the manifesto was writ.

I then put the Heraclitus back in its place in my upstairs shed.

I might use it again someday.

He won't mind.

--

BTW, as New York's greatest hailer of cabs, regardless of time of day, gloom of night, weather, or even if there's a leggy model needing one one block ahead of me, anyone who really knows me knows I resemble this remark.

Steve.

I got an email a few hours ago from an ex-big-wig from Ogilvy that I still work with. That's an indication of one of the things that made Ogilvy different. There was something about the place where friendships--even work friendships--went from the usual "transaction-based" sort, to real respect, even, I'd say love.

The email told me and a few dozen others that Steve Hayden had died.

I never wanted to think of that eventuality even though I knew it was coming.

As a boy who grew up essentially without a father, Steve was like a father to me. That means, of course, I loved him. And at times wanted to strangle him, and not in a nice way. Sometimes those feelings were packed as close together as commuters on a rush-hour subway.

I was brand new at Ogilvy, maybe four-weeks in, and really homeless. Somebody, not me, had screwed up the creative on a dot com account that was new to the agency and Steve phoned me up and put it all in my lap.

It was the beginning of November, and we were meant to have spots running by Thanksgiving. I went in that weekend, and not wanting to let Steve down, I wrote maybe 75 scripts. Somehow I summoned up the courage, or stupidity, to hit the send button and send them to him.

The next morning, a Monday, Steve called me in. He liked what I did. He was more than a little amused that in my fervor to be good I had written not just :30s, but :15s, too. I needed to make sure they would work. I couldn't let Steve down.

In less than a week I was in a van with Steve, Susan Westre and Lee Weiss, our producer. We were heading out to location in New Jersey to shoot the first of three spots. Steve was in the front passenger seat. I think I was sitting in a wheel well, feeling completely intimidated and more out-of-place than usual.

Steve's cell rang.

A moment later he turned to me and said, "the client just killed the spot. Write a new one."

Not only did I have to do this in media res, in a pothole-seeking van, Steve worked on an IBM ThinkPad, and I had never worked on a PC before, or with that little red track ball. I was sure Steve was about to find out two things about me.

1. I suck.
2. I don't even know how to type.

But I wrote. We were getting close to the location. And I felt like I imagine someone feels putting his head in the aperture of a guillotine just to try it out. I handed Steve's IBM ThinkPad with my script on it back up to him.

Then I stopped breathing.

Two blocks went by. Steve showed my script to Susan Westre. 

"This is good," he said. 

Steve taught me so much during that van ride. 

That it's ok to be nervous, to feel like a fraud, to even think you suck. That's all normal for creative people. But Steve taught me more. That you can allay, if not conquer your fears, by writing, by trying, by thinking and doing. By typing.

Thank you, Steve.

--

Steve wasn't young when he died.

But I couldn't sleep last night for sadness.

I kept thinking of this from Housman's Shropshire Lad. I'm not sure if Steve was an athlete. And he sure wasn't young.

But certain lines played on repeat in my sad cerebellum:

"And home we brought you shoulder-high."

Steve never wore his honors out.
He never withered quicker than a rose.
The name will live on after the man.

Today we are all "Townsmen of a stiller town."

To An Athlete Dying Young

• 
• 
• 
• 

A. E. Housman

1859 –

1936

The time you won your town the race  
We chaired you through the market-place;  
Man and boy stood cheering by,  
And home we brought you shoulder-high.  

To-day, the road all runners come,    
Shoulder-high we bring you home,  
And set you at your threshold down,  
Townsman of a stiller town.  

Smart lad, to slip betimes away  
From fields where glory does not stay, 
And early though the laurel grows  
It withers quicker than the rose.  

Eyes the shady night has shut  
Cannot see the record cut,  
And silence sounds no worse than cheers 
After earth has stopped the ears:  

Now you will not swell the rout  
Of lads that wore their honours out,  
Runners whom renown outran  
And the name died before the man. 

So set, before its echoes fade,  
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,  
And hold to the low lintel up  
The still-defended challenge-cup.  

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,  
And find unwithered on its curls  
The garland briefer than a girl's.