Hurley Burly.

If you have any sense of history at all, any sense that giant institutions have always tried to impose their world-view on the population they seek to control and, therefore, profit from, you should be very sensitive to the current dogma being propagated by nearly every giant company and thousands more smaller companies who are those giant company's willing executioners.

AI is almighty, god-like and great. Any mistake is your fault and acceptable. And any deviation from today's current technology orthodoxy subjects the deviator to excommunication modern-style. 

This morning, I came across an ad from Oracle--a malign company if ever there was one. By the way, like the drug dealer/child-killer driving a giant SUV and flaunting his wealth and power, Oracle of late is doing the same. Consider this.

This sort of growth doesn't happen to a half-a-trillion dollar company if some sort of manipulation and prestidigitation isn't happening. Something is going on that is about as kosher as a church basement potluck dinner in Pork Belly, Iowa.

Growth this precipitous is simply not tenable. It's the human contact equivalent of Elizabeth Hurley deciding I am Mr. Wonderful. If that somehow happens, something is amiss. 

Back to the 19-page ad I saw for Oracle this morning. Here are just some of the dogma masquerading as truth statements I pulled from their downloadable brochure.

What I find striking in all this is how Oracle's claims are so distant from any reality I've ever encountered. Much like church dogma in the age of Galileo or RFK-anti-science dogma coming from much of amerika today. Much like the arrogant dogma of statements like these from WPP, my ex-employer.

HINT: When your market cap has dropped from $32B to $6B in ten years, and you've shed 70% of your employees, calling yourself a creative transformation company ain't cool. It's like a rapidly metastasizing cancer hiring a PR-firm and calling itself a "rapid cell-growth organism."

As it pertains to Oracle and their long ad, I found this footnote. All of the data in their slides above comes with this as their source.

2019! 

Really, they're citing "scientific" data from a study that's almost seven years old? That's a bit like taking a photograph of an acorn and calling it a future 300-foot-tall giant sequoia. 

The best thing that came from being born during the era of LBJ and Richard Nixon, of Vietnam and Watergate, of long-hair and middle-fingering norms is that we learned to question. Everything.

Something is rotten in the world when trillions are spent telling you how great AI is and you've yet to see any evidence of it other than you can make a video of your dog talking from a still photograph. 

Despite trying to force it down my throat, I'm not sure AI is winning anymore hearts and minds in the workplace than amerika did in Vietnam fifty years ago. Compliance is not acceptance.

Something stinks here.

In a time of universal dogma, questioning is a revolutionary act.

Up Above in My Basement.

Sometimes the finest thing that can happen is the thing that happens least often, or has happened never before. One of those happenings happened to me late last week.

A passel of books had arrived at the doorstep of my small Connecticut crib. Before too long, or more accurately, before my bookish clutter annoyed too much my wife, I lugged them down the steep steps to my basement office.

It took me until I was about 65 to have a room of my own, and it's almost exactly as I wanted it. Would I like a view of the sea? Sure. Would I like a small sofa to recline on in-between meetings? Who wouldn't. But even without those accommodations my office is fairly perfect. I get good natural light. I have two comfortable upholstered chairs. I have an elegant Herman Miller stand-up desk. I have a 15-pound dumbbell to lift to keep my biceps from looking like Walter Brennan's neck.

Most of all, of course, I have my books. 

Books and books and books and books and books and books and books. And more books.

It's those books, the ones that already line my shelves and the new arrivals that made this post happen. 

The new books meant I had to rearrange my old books. I had to do what I seldom do. Straighten things up. And under some of those books and under some papers and some old notes I had taken I found this leaflet, 16 pages or so from an event about 19 years ago during The New Yorker Festival down at the South Street Seaport.

A bunch of old New Yorker-ites and Joseph Mitchell's daughter, Nora Mitchell Sanborn, had gathered together to talk about the old man, my favorite writer of all time. For all these years, I have saved this catalog from that talk. The back is splattered like a pointillist canvas with the spray of some of my wife's viscous black coffee. It looks like the remains of a spit-take.

I hadn't really opened the brochure since my early 50s, if I opened it at all. But I opened it on Monday and was struck my how wonderful it is and how Mitchell's writing moves me like little else.

Here's what Nora Mitchell Sanborn, Joseph's daughter wrote. It's the wrap-up of her two page preface. I'm sorry about my inability to take proper iPhone photos from a printed page. Somehow I think their lopsidedness is a genuine case of form following function.

I've written a lot since I began this organ back in 2007 about Mitchell. But I'd guess very few people who read what I write have bothered to spend the time it takes to know someone like Mitchell. 

Why should they? He's old. He's dead. He's that most heinous of all contemporary sins. He's not contemporary. 

Today, we readily admit things I would be embarrassed to admit. My mother would have swatted me like ballplayers high-fiving each other's callouses during a home-run trot. We look at "Common Sense," by Thomas Paine, or "The Sound and the Fury," by Faulkner or even "The Seven Stages of Man," from "As You Like It," by Bill Shakespeare and we say,

we say TL/DR.

I find that sad. 

To my world-view, Phil Dusenberry of BBDO advanced his agency and his career by proposing that in order to be welcomed into people's living-rooms, TV spots should be better than the programming they interrupt. I've always tried to uphold that thesis with my copy. I've always tried to make it human, interesting, educational, funny. I've always tried to Joseph-Mitchell-the-shit-out-of-anything-I-was-working-on.

Of course I've failed at least 99.79-percent of the time. 

But I tried.

I hope this wasn't TL/DR.

BTW, I found one page from the brochure online. It's archived at Seton Hall University and Princeton University. I also found a photo of an historical marker commemorating Mitchell. 

 

Starvation.

With the Jewish Holidays, Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur (Jewish rush week) fast approaching once again, as they have every year for most of the last 6,000 years--including the darkest days of the Hitlerite state--preparations in our little Connecticut sea-side shambles are beginning to form up. 

The preparations remind me a little bit of a ragtag baseball team getting ready for a series of games somewhere. Slowly duffles get packed with uniforms, spikes, bats and balls. Rolls of tape and batting gloves and tubs of atomic balm for sore wings find their place amid the canvas. 

Before long, a few dozen boys have packed their change of clothes, their chewing gum, an old paperback or two and an ancient plastic transistor radio, maybe from Korvette's, to break the monotony of the transoceanic peregrinations.

Accordingly, for the Jewish Holidays, my wife is writing little shopping lists on small sheets of paper, menus are being planned, daughters and others are being consulted. The long unfurl of preparation is easing into the wind.

Not too many hours ago, my wife sent me a receipt via email of some holiday-adjacent-Eastern-European-Jewish-adjacent food she's dispatched to our younger daughter out in San Diego. There's not an eatery in all of that urban agglomeration not decorated somehow with a surfboard. It is as distinctly un-Eastern European as the world gets.

When I got the receipt I thought, lovingly, of my wife. She is, and has been since her late 20s--more than forty years now--the matriarch of our small, slightly-larger-than-nuclear family. As I have been for forty years now, the patriarch.

It's not that we're the oldest, it's that both my wife, L, and I were "born old." We grew up with parents who were missing, drunk or otherwise irresponsible. In turn, our responsibility muscles got an early and frequent work out. At early ages we were making sure the work of running a family, meals, getting to school, picking people up at airports, etc, got done. We suffered from a lack of parenting, and in accommodation for that lack, compensated.

As I do, however, I started thinking about matriarchs and patriarchs. The mat and pat part is easy to get. It's "ma" and "pa," without being all disgustingly Latinate about it. The -arch part is a little less clear to those not in the habit of looking words up.

The -arch part brings us to the advertising point of today's post.

It occurred to me as I was on this etymological gallop that the agencies I grew up in had -archs roaming the halls. Older people--even people with their names on the door--who set the tone and tenor of the joint. 

They were the resident "fathers and mothers" of the agency. They could mete out reward and punishment. They established standards. They could glare at you. You were, from an evolutionary point of view, somewhat bred to please them and to meet their demands. You certainly knew your ass was in a sling if you disappointed.

Last week I was asked to write an endorsement in support of an ad luminary's nomination to the One Club Hall of Fame. My friend Rob Schwartz was asked to do so for a different luminary. He sent me what he wrote. His nominating letter quickly leapt to this passage.

That passage illuminates one of the important aspects of the
--arch job. A toughness. A sticking to values. A standard that is unambiguous and not subject to discussion.

As defined above, --arch: "to rule, lead the way, govern, rule over, be leader of."

I wonder if today, in agencies, and in the larger world in general, we are suffering from a lack of --arch-ness. The muckety-mucks in corporate, at the holding company, the matriarchs and patriarchs now make 200 to 300 times what those who work for them make. They usually sit apart from them. They don't walk to halls and kibbitz with their children. 

They have rarefied, ivoried, in and from a distant planet where different rules, even a different sense of humanity apply.

Culture, often, is a masthead or an email or some inauthentic representation from the long-ago days of --archs. To be blunt, quoting a dead founder is not the same as someone who has taken over for that founder and assumed their --arch-ness. Someone who will feel personally disappointed if the work and the performance and the comportment of the place is slovenly.

Maybe decay due to lack of --archness is inevitable. Rust never sleeps, after all. Everything that rises must recede. 

But I can't help but think this decay has been sped along by the cheapness-impelled firing of people who would be matri-and-patri-archs had they not be shit-canned because they harkened back, and more broadly, the general dismantling of another --arch, hier--archy.

Years ago, you had to live up to the people in big-windowed offices, who made big salaries, and who got the big assignments. Today, everyone sits in the same crappy tables and you can't tell who's got a forty-year track-record of building brands and who's just graduated from ad school.

The holding companies saw fit to destroy all that --archiness. Matriarchs. Patriarchs. Hierarchs.

With that destruction, they destroyed so much more.

Hold It.

As you know if you are a regular reader of Ad Aged, of if you're unlucky enough to know me in real life, I toss nickels around like manhole covers. I'm not cheap. I just like to think before I spend. I want to make sure I'm getting something special before I shell out the ducats.

I bought a new Pelikan Classic M200 Apricot Achat Special Edition Fountain pen about two months ago. (Pelikan comes out with a cool color and matching ink about every year. That leads me to buy a new pen accordingly. Writing with a fountain pen is important to me. It's my semiotic way of saying 'words matter.' So I have an array of Pelikans, even though I do 98.7659-percent of my writing in a keyboard first-manner.)

Buying the pen took me two months of perseveration. That's what I mean about thinking before I spend. I'm not impecunious, just careful.

However, twice a year or so I spend like a drunken sailor on shore leave.

That is whenever the great publisher Taschen has their twice-annual book sale. As you can see from the order above and a stray receipt from a year ago, Taschen's books are interesting and their sale-prices teeter on the incredible. The truth is, I barely have time to even flip through the thousands of pages and pictures and volumes I buy. But that isn't the point. I read somewhere that the great writer Umberto Eco had a personal library of 30,000 books. Reading one book a day, it would have taken him 82 years to go through them all.

What we've forgotten in our everything-at-our-fingertips overly-pixelized age, is the value of things that are built to endure. We ignore things made with thousands of hours of painstakingness, erasures and perseveration. We have defaulted to the quick and the dead. Things that have the intended longevity of a fart in a windstorm.

The care and tactility you can get from a book versus a digital representation is the difference between corporeal passion and online porn.

This Taschen volume, which is heavier than my three-year-old grandson sits near me now. It is oversized like the old Manhattan yellow-pages and is therefore hard to read and unwieldy. It's the book equivalent of a crowded Lexington line man-spreader.

But.

The feel of the paper. The expanse of the perfect photographs. The transportative power of large imagery, not something silently flickering on your phone is all-too-seldom experienced these days.

It occurs to me as I write this that there is a larger, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny thought here.

We gave up something when we gave up physicality. When we made messages for media that had weight and dimension, not merely domesticated electrons. We don't, and here's my point, treat our work or our viewers with as much respect as in times past because our work is transitory--even illusory--from the get-go.

We're not, as people or an industry, going to return to paper and ink or celluloid of course. In fact, we are moving past any sort of corporealness of images, production or message as we further and further embrace AI.

But, at the very end of the day (or our days) the pith of our work isn't a new software, or fragrance, or mayonnaise or SUV, it's a human touch, a sense of contact, maybe a caress.

Things that are growing rarer all-over.

Things that are too precious to lose without lament. 

Or a fight.

 

Stop in the Name of Tripe.

The thing that pushed me over-the-edge, finally, was the apples you buy in the grocery store. 

It doesn't matter, Macintosh, Macoun, Northern Spy, golden delicious, red delicious, Granny Smith, Gala, Fuji or whatever. Each one has a small sticker attached to it so the cashier can type in the code of the apple, the system can keep track of inventory, and the store knows how much of what to buy.

This, like most things today is convenient for the seller and a pain in the ass for both the consumer and our planet which is already over-flowing with more garbage than you can shake a foam-peanut at.

Of course, you the consumer are left to deal with the disgusting idea of a sticker on each apple. A sticker made of plastic, stuck on with a chemical adhesive, that you can't peel off, you have to cut off.

Not to mention if you buy fruit or vegetables at the grocery store you stick them in plastic bags that take centuries to degrade in the environment. If you get a take out chicken, it's in more plastic. If you get a tube of toothpaste, there's enough packaging to package four or five more tubes.

And everything is packed in plastic.

Which is choking us.

Which is cheap, and therefore good for the seller, but impossible to clean up, which is bad for everyone.

Buying a box of raspberries should not lead to an environmental disaster.

But there's no escaping the control giant companies exert over us. 

They make a mess. 

We clean it up.

And pay for the privilege.

Last week I saw something on LinkedIn about some technocrat trillionaire (the non-tax-paying sort) suggesting applicants for jobs should have to pay $25 to have their application looked at.

I suppose that's like colleges charging you $100 to apply for the privilege of paying $90,000/year tuition. Or the giant companies who pay you through third parties and then seek to charge you if you want your money faster than their net 90.

As a friend said, "you have to pay them to get paid."

We are being killed by a thousand of these cuts everyday. Why do I have to turn off Microsoft's AI every time I open a word doc. I don't want it. I didn't ask for it. I want it gone. But you can't get rid of it. Even though I'm a subscriber. I'm a victim.

Same thing with Zoom. I don't need AI notes. I don't need AI to help me write an email. I don't need it when I try to order a hero at a local deli. In fact, I miss talking to someone and telling that person what kind of sandwich I want. AI will algorthmically tell me my sandwich will be ready in 15 minutes. The pimply kid might say (if he were ever trained) "it's crowded now, we'll have your sandwich in about 30 minutes."

Speaking of AI, will you just leave me the f alone, or show me one good thing it's done? Will you stop bludgeoning me with how great it is and actually show me something better--for me, not sam altman of elon murk. Why is my life being destroyed by people who look like shit trying to not look like shit? (I look like shit, but I don't care.)

Likewise, why am I subject to ads for credit cards and airline mileage programs before I'm shown the in-flight safety information on a flight. 

I think this all started with the giant soda companies, of whom I am no fan. (I haven't had a soda for over ten years.) They make the trash their trash is packaged in. They don't clean it up. They leave that to you. And pay you a nickel. 

Slave wages.

Meanwhile they tell us they're environmentally friendly. 

I'm tired of being used and mistreated by everyone bigger than I from a corporate hegemony point of view. I had to pay $85 to the IRS to get a form for a company in India to prove I pay taxes in the United States. The only ones who don't pay tax in amerika are those who can actually afford to.

I'm tired also of press-releases posing as news and no press--or no voices at all--calling out the lies. In ten years, WPP has gone from having 200,000 employees and $30B+ in market cap to having about 70,000 employees and $6B in market cap. Their "sticker on the apple" is:

"These leaders embody the strategic vision and creative excellence that define WPP. Their collective expertise will play a crucial part in helping me drive WPP to our next phase of growth and ensuring our clients continue to win in a rapidly evolving market.”

"___________, incoming chief operating officer at WPP, noted, 'I have been the luckiest person in the world, to have the best job in the world as ________CEO – and I’m immensely proud of what we’ve achieved together as a team."'

As Walter Brennan said in "Meet John Doe," written by Robert Riskin and directed by Frank Capra, "I know the world's been shaved by a drunken barber." 

Take a little off the crotch please, and remove the larynx all-together. 

It makes the excreta go down easier.

War Reporting.

I didn't get two pieces of business this week that I would have liked to have gotten. That I should have gotten. But I didn't.

Maybe it's sour grapes on my part.

Maybe I dodged a fusillade.

The first was a vodka brand that latched itself to a crappy actor who peaked back in 1985 when he co-starred in one of the Rocky movies. Apparently he still has some currency because somehow he has 3.5 million followers on a child-trafficking site owned by a tax-evader. But alarm bells pealed like Falstaff's Chimes at Midnight when I spoke to his wife and creative director. A woman for whom the phrase "better living through silicone" was coined.

H, my Account Director and I had a great call with their assemblage. They asked for our home addresses so they could send us some booze. I said to H, "If we get something tomorrow, they're ok. If they send us one bottle, we get our money up front. If they send us a case, we ask for only half our money up front."

They sent nothing. Not a wee dram.

Then after a week they asked for spec work. 

That was that.

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company does an ad every day very publicly. I've worked for major brands for 40 years. I have self-respect, to boot. 

No spec.

Fusillade one dodged.

The second piece of business was by rights too big for me. It involved media buying which I don't do and production which is a sure way to lose money and be pecked to death by geese.

They found me via the recommendation of a famous friend in the industry. They were told of my "uncanny genius." (His words.) But again, after a few good calls, and good amount of work putting a team together, I got an email yesterday that they went with a holding company agency in New Zealand who did:

Of course, I wanted to say that "little room for concern" is the pitching equivalent of polite applause. Not concerned is not the same as excited. And our job (which most everyone has forgotten) is to excite. Excite ourselves. Excite our clients. Excite viewers.

I liked these people and they liked me. And though I am to burning bridges what John Roebling was to building them, I'll take advice here from Langston Hughes one of my poetical heroes in one of my favorite poems.

Their closed their note to me this way. I'm as good at slamming doors as I am at burning bridges. 

But like Langston said, I play it cool/And dig all jive

This is as front line a report as advertising gets.

My life.

A lot of fusillades.

A little fun.

I wrote:

A lot of trying.

Piss up a rope and your face gets soaked.