Explain Yourself.

I'm going to guess that over the last ten years, ten trillion dollars has been spent on advertising and public relations selling things life crypto, NFTs, big data, various legal drugs, electric vehicles, quantum computing and, mostly AI.

A quick read from Google Ngram (which plots the prevalence of a given word or phrase from a body of publications) indicates that I'm not "smoking something." It seems today every third word is AI-adjacent. (The data reflected above stops at 2022.

The graph's curves are probably, in fact, steeper.)

In any event, though trillions have been spent promoting the latest and greatest, and billions of people seem to be enjoying the techno-Kool-Aid, I'd guess that the worm will turn for many of these so-called advances because no one has taken the time or made the effort to show normal people how they work.

The investment in AI in the US may reach 2-percent of GDP this year--up from 1/10th of a percent in 2022. That's a 1900-percent increase. Before I sink an economy, I'd like to know why. If only because:

The term "railway bust" in England around 1880 is most closely associated with the aftermath of the Railway Mania, a speculative frenzy that peaked in the mid-1840s and collapsed shortly thereafter. The mania led to the authorization of numerous railway projects, resulting in the construction of approximately 6,220 miles of track between 1844 and 1846. However, the speculative bubble burst causing investment to stop almost overnight. This collapse left many companies without funding and investors, including many middle-class families who had invested their life savings, with no return on their investments.

In all my decades working for technology companies, I've never been told or have been able to find any information about the efficacy and efficiency of virtually any modern-day technology.

This IBM ad from 58 years ago tells me the following:

"In 1953 it cost $1.17 to get a business letter from one businessman's head to another businessman's hands. 

Today it costs $2.49. 112.8% more. Per letter. 

In 1955 a secretary to handle those communications cost $4,539 in salary and overhead. Today it's $6,396... 

Between 1960 and 1965, the number of professional, technical and managerial people creating paperwork increased 22% over the number of people to do it... 

...Used systematically throughout an office, these two pieces of IBM equipment alone have increased people's productivity by 50%. 

Today, as I said above, literally trillions are spent telling us adjectivally about the splendors of this, that or the other thing. I've yet to see anyone anywhere (at a time when we get hundreds of always-on, always-cloying, always-annoying messages a day) or any AI say, "In a recent survey of one-thousand office workers, a staggering 82% said they were able to research problems more thoroughly and arrive at the right answer 41% more often and over 36% faster.) 

Or even using sports as an example, I've never read, "During the 2025 season, the Sandusky Dodgers used AI exclusively to call pitches. Their team ERA decreased from 3.44 to 3.17, wins increased by 22% and overall ticket and concession sales increased by 66%."

Is information of this ilk not obtainable? Do we not ask the questions? Or is all of this tech a sham with no measurable results other than FOMO?

 

If I were selling EZ-Pass or even, by application RFID technology, I could use the photos above and write, "RFID saved the average commuter 200 minutes of commuting time a week--that translates to 166 fewer hours of commuting a year. The reduction in emissions was equivalent to taking 1853 cars completely off the road."

Back when I was coming of age, Esquire magazine, ran an occasional feature called 'actual size.' I suppose the column was based on this 1966 ad by DDB written by an ex-boss, Ron Rosenfeld. It was interactive 30 years before the word was invented.

There wasn't a reader on earth that didn't compare themselves accordingly.

 

Likewise, I would think these ads would still be effective today. Letting you show yourself why something works better.

I can't believe humanity has changed so much that we think seeing is no longer believing.

I think what's changed is an industry enamored with stunts and trends and self-congratulation more than evidence, argument, empathy and conviction.

St. Augustine and Me.

There's a lot about running your own agency that's really hard. But the hardest thing about it is the thing that is most ever-present. And actually the thing that is most important in real life, too.

Big Daddy says it to Brick in Tennessee Williams' "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof." We'd all do well to read it over once in a while.

Harvey 'Big Daddy' Pollitt: You didn't kill Skipper. He killed himself. You and Skipper and millions like you are living in a kids' world. Playing games, touchdowns, no worries, no responsibilities. Life ain't no damn football game. Life ain't just a buncha high spots.




You're a thirty-year-old kid. Soon you'll be a fifty-year-old kid. Pretendin' you're hearin' cheers when there ain't any. Dreamin' and drinkin' your life away. Heroes in the real world live twenty-four hours a day, not just two hours in a game.

Showing up every day, working, hustling, putting pen to paper, taking the call you didn't feel like taking, making the bone-stupid copy change you shouldn't have to make, working through a brief, or a scope or a one-thousand word-long single-spaced email with thoughts on your latest presentation--they're not exactly welcoming. They're not a chaise lounge by the pool, a cool drink or even a plate of ice cream slathered with molten fudge. They're hot drudge, not hot fudge, but they're the moving machinery of your career. The must-dos you must do.

Somehow, as in the quotations above we've got a scad of social media sites that people exploit to show a "buncha high spots." 

Half of LinkedIn seems to be on some sort of unshaven jury or extolling work that's barely worth the pixels they sullied, or flogging fakery in some fashion. Fake platitudes, fake gratitudes, fake attitudes, fake trophy-strewed, fake Blahnik-shoed, fake tattooed, tabooed, unglued and renewed. Even if you're screwed.

Somehow, we've turned the world into a giant refrigerator and we're all showing our art on it. 

Honestly, your splotches ain't Pollocks. Your schmears ain't Rothkos. Your so-called wisdom ain't Bernbach. You're not even trying. You're just posting and relying on people being too drunk on their own self-satisfaction to call out that 99-percent of everything everywhere ain't exactly St. Augustine.

The truth of the matter is, I have nothing to boast about. I'm hustling like a one-legged hooker and it's hard to close a deal. I'm working through half-a-dozen client digestive tracts with ads, and revisions and, worst of all, scopes scopes and more scopes. If past is prologue, three-out-of-four of those scopes will lay in an email inbox somewhere and net me nothing but more heartburn.

My life is not the rhinestone glitter of whatever social network is least-engaged in fascism and our socially-acceptable child-trafficking. My life now is the glacial movement of trying to win, trying to write, trying to get paid, and most of all trying to do it all over again tomorrow.

That's what Thoreau meant, maybe, about most of us living lives of quiet desperation and dying with our songs still unsung inside us. Most of us live that life, because that is most of life, the 99.999999-percent of it that don't make its way to the 'gram.

Thank god.

Lockstep.

Though I am well-educated and what we call today a "life-long learner" (we used to just call people 'smart') I think most of the knowledge I've amassed through my long life I acquired when I was supposed to be doing something else.

Two of those learnings I learned in Hebrew school, though today I hardly know an aleph from an olive from an Olav from an Oyl.

The last thing I wanted after a day of elementary school was to spend more time in school. Especially where I knew none of the other kids and the glorious days of what we used to call Indian Summer were sparkling on the other side of the plate glass. In fact, the whole time I was in Hebrew school, I don't think I made one friend, or had one teacher whose name I knew. 

But I learned.

Because while I sat in the back hoping not to be called on, I opened one of the prayer books that were strewn about the classroom. There I found pages and pages of memorials, stories, poems, essays and literature about the seminal event in Jewish history. Not Abraham almost killing Isaac, but the Nazis and their millions of accomplices (99-percent of whom were never punished and never owned up) who killed six million Jews. Persilschein.

Had there been one class--one measly lecture--titled 'why we should believe even though god was absent when we needed god most,' I might have paid attention or even given some small dram of respect for a religion that in many ways chased me and millions of others a way. 

But, trying to understand, trying to find an answer I could reckon with helped me learn and learn and learn some more. I've read maybe thousands of books on the holocaust. As a friend once said about me, "George has two kinds of books in his library. Books about the holocaust. And the other one."

The other thing I learned was about social dynamics and the invidious power of groups that divide the world into "us and them." (Which is the very definition of what groups do.)

I noticed that just about every year during the High Holy Days a dozen or so pronunciations changed. One year we would be told to put on our yarmulke. The next year, yarmulke were called keepaaaah, the next year kip-ah. 

All this finagling I realized was a way of separating people. Some were "in." Most were "out."

Fred my old brother tells a joke about a Jewish man who after 30 years alone on a desert island is finally rescued. Before he leaves the island, he decides to show his rescuer around. The marooned Jew shows his rescuer the synagogue he built. A moment later he shows his rescuer another synagogue. The rescuer says, "you were alone on the island, why are there two synagogues." The Jewish man said, "well, there's my synagogue. And then there's the one I wouldn't be caught dead in."

You see this bifurcating mechanism at work all over the world today. Having a different belief, or a different standard, or a different perspective on anything makes you an enemy to about half the people who at any given time think about the same topic in a different way. Worse, so many people are so bent on not being different that they lurch like a ship at sea and start parroting the latest dogma so as not to be left out of a trend--and most trends are almost wholly made up. 

For the life of me I can't think of a single ad that's influenced culture for more than twelve seconds. I've seen some ads generate a catch phrase, or impel people to do something silly, but influence culture? Frankly, I don't even know what that means. 

AT&T is using characters from The Office, which went off the air in 2013.
Somehow it is "of culture." Even though the writing sucks.

As for AI, though every third item on social seems to be about its "taking-over-ness" I can't articulate one way AI has made my life better. Customer service is worse. Search is not as good as it was when we had the yellow pages. And getting an accurate answer is harder today than yesterday, and much less good than when we had encyclopedias nearby or could call a researcher at the New York Public Library.

Yet,

I'd rather they spent $1,800 per person on a good rye bread.

Omelettes for everyone!

But, we live in a "you're either with us or against us world." And more often than not, you're persona non grata if you have your own opinion.

And it's worse if you work for an agency.

If you can find one.

What th' What.

I did something on Friday that I've never done before.

A sign of weakness? Aging? Or learning?

I reached out to a wiser friend, a guy who's run a big agency for advice on a scope I had to write.

H, my Account Director, usually helps me with scopes. But this was due in a trice. And was stupidly complicated. 

It was for a major client and involved GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company creating literally thousands of ads. This is not the sort of thing I've ever had to do the math on before. 

When I worked at big agency, those assignments would bat about, but I never had to price them. They were usually, in a sense, an adjunct of an AOR relationship, and there were usually people about whose job it was was to grind out tonnage. I might have been asked to over-see the work, or set the tone, but I seldom had to do what we seem nowadays to call "buckets" of work.

[BTW, I hate the word bucket when it comes to work. Fish come in buckets, often fish on their way to dying. Work doesn't. I use the word "tranches." Which was born ugly and financial, and seems to me more-purpose-built. These semantics matter to me. Even if they matter to no one else.]

I sent my friend, I'll call him R, my notes. How much I'd get paid compared with someone I've hired. The number of days I estimated the work would take. And then I created two scenarios. One for a stupidly large tranche of work. One for a slightly-less stupidly large tranche of work. 

R wrote back, "I liked what you came up with. I just put it through the AI filter:"

And, in fact, the 'AI filter' helped me with some "coalescence."

But slowly I realized the reasons behind my AI resistance. Which has been consistent, vocal, and logical. It grows stronger, my resistance, now that LLMs are revealed to be hallucinogenic, and AI slop as entered into the discussion. Small language models on more adroit data sets might make more sense.

But the phrase that pays is: AI resistance.

At its core, creativity is resistance. 
At its core, creativity is rule breaking.
It's tearing up the paper.
It's standing up when others say sit down.
It's doing something wrong, unexpected, different, broken in an effort to make noise and get noticed.
At its core, creativity is a mis-direct.
It introduces confusion to make clearer the eventual clarity.
It's taking something you've seen one-hundred and nineteen million times and it's forcing you to look at it again.

Intuitively or not, it's Signac looking at a scene I see one-hundred times a day from my seaside cottage which over looks sailboats, sunsets and the sound. Signac says, "you've never seen this before." Look again.

It's Oskar Kokoschka realizing that some people are portrayed with more precision even if or especially when they're painted with but four fingers on their left hand.

The language of our age, the MANDATORY language of our age, demands that you accept "terms and conditions" before you can legally blow your nose on a tissue or eat a fast-food pink-slime burger. Apple asks you to accept 24-single-spaced pages of legalese, much of it in all-caps, before you can listen to a song you've paid for on a device you've bought. That's 9,000 words--roughly 2.5x the length of the Magna Carta.

Corporate entities so seek to control us that we have more words governing the usage of things we've paid for than the ancient English had a millennia ago for all of life. 

And in all these documents, their sine qua non is that we have to accept them (like you have to accept cookies) on a webpage or you can't go on.

I realize that's a long-way to go to explain my disdain for algorithmically-based art or answers. But its core is simpler. 

Creative thinkers resist.
They resist standards and best-practices and conventional wisdom.
All progress depends on resistance.
On what-iffing.

Friatribe.

Whenever I see a headline or a quotation or a panel discussion that proclaims "___________ is dead," or "____________ is broken," I feel like running to the hardware store and doing a Lizzie Borden on the speaker, or even, the forum.

Lizzie Borden took an axe

She gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done

She gave her father forty-one.

Much of the industry's issues in my opinion, much of its decline is similar to saying about someone who eats two-dozen donuts a day, washed down by two-dozen beers, topped off by two-dozen scoops of ice cream, and saying "metabolism is broken," or "svelte is dead." 

In short, you can't blame self-inflicted wounds on exogenous events. The industry has been wrist slashing for decades now and while it's convenient to blame any number of circumstances, most of the demise of the ad industry is because the ad industry fails to believe in the power of advertising.

Data was all important.
One to one.
Interactivity.
AI.
Targeting.
Divestiture of media.
Programmatic.
Cable.

The list is as long as the menu at a Greek diner. And not nearly as appetizing.

We have spent literally decades throwing darts at a giant dart-board of excuses on why advertising is no longer a great career or lucrative or influential or whatever. We never say it's because we forgot to water and feed the very industry and the craft responsible for our livelihoods. We treated advertising as a cash-cow milking it dry while pumping it full of chemicals that made parasites rich while destroying the host.

We've forgotten Mr. Bernbach as we have forgotten things like "government of the people, by the people and for the people." And that little thing about all being equal. 

Years ago, I bought the book below for about $8. You'd think DDB (what's left of it) or Omnicom (what's left of it) would keep it always in print. But no, they're too busy selling the advertising equivalent of collateralized debt obligations and ginning up golden parachutes. 

They forgot that one hundred million little things aren't the same and never will be the same as one big thing. With a big budget behind it. So when clients tell them to make a trillion banner ads no one will ever see they don't say, "that's a waste," they say "sure." Ineffectiveness be damned. Actually be praised. (We get paid per piece.)

There's something advertising should say about advertising. 

There's one thing advertising should say about advertising.

Instead, as an industry we bicker about which media microbe is most efficacious so we can grind our own aforementioned ax. We vaynerturbate and sinekerize and godinawful ourselves with pablum and platitudes. We venerate concocted awards for concocted ads. We show fake ads as art. Forgetting that its real ads for real brands that have real media weight behind them that have always worked. 

Instead, we herald illusions. In the parlance of the Bronx, we praise the phonus balonus. 

Not realizing for even a moment, because we're basking in the masturbatory glow of self-aggrandizement, that propagating such undercuts our legitimacy and our very reason for being.

Fake fake fake fake.

Praised. Praised. Praised. Praised.

I'll tell you what set this diatribe in motion. This article below in Wednesday's "Wall Street Journal."

Somehow it's news when a client discovers that advertising their brand makes their brand more popular and therefore valuable. They can raise their prices. 

Imagine.

"Marketing Is Helping Carnival Charge More."

That's about as astute as:
"Teenagers Go to Prom to Get Laid."
"Laundry Clean After Washing."
"Heat Causes Warm Weather."
"Water Wet."

We've fallen so far that when our industry functions as it should it's regarded as news.

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company helps brands find out what they do, say it in interesting and memorable ways and then works to create brand-lust around a brand truth.

That ain't dead.

Never was.

We just forgot.

1. 
   

Fight Hell Like Hell.

For about the last twenty years or so something dangerous has become so accepted and commonplace that its actually heightened its danger.

We've been taught relativism.

We've been taught acceptance.

We've been trained in looking at other points of view.

Generally speaking such equanimity is a good thing. 

But in many cases relativism has gone too far. When I worked in an advertising agency, I never believed "everyone is creative." I never believed "a good idea can come from anywhere." I certainly had no respect whatsover for those awards shows that have people asking their LinkedIn feed, or their butcher, for votes. 

I'm Draconian when it comes to things like this. Mostly because I believe that good is different from popular. Most times, never the twain shall meet.

The bigger problem of relativism or "turn-the-other-cheek-ism" or "fair-balance-ism" is that some things are heinous, outrageous, anti-human and just plain wrong. Yes, I am Old Testament when it comes to this, but some things are just wrong and when we allow them as simply another point of view we are, in effect, accepting, normalizing and endorsing something horrible and egregious. 

In our do-goodery-gone-wild world, we've forgotten that stepping in spiritual dog shit and wiping it on the front of your white button down shirt is just disgusting. It's not an acceptable life-style choice.

Some wrongs follow below.
Things we have been taught to accept.
They are clarion calls of fascism, hate and genocide.
And we're willingly calling them points of view.

trump said this the other day during a concocted event designed to scare the shit out of anyone watching.

There are no two ways to interpret a statement like this. There is no way to "excuse" it or call it (as the pussy-grabbing-apologists did) "locker-room talk." They can pangloss is all they want with their powerful networks of hate and lies. But it's fascism, plain and simple. 

"Equal time" be damned. 

This isn't an argument about the Yankees versus the Red Sox. 

There's no two-sides to be accepted.

More. That is just wrong.

Here's the New York Times book review that got this post going. It's of a book by an historian (not the newsreader) Mike Wallace, a noted writer on the history of New York.

It recounts New Yorker's battle against fascism when so many fellow New Yorker's were excusing the Nazis, accepting and supporting them. [Line about past being prologue goes here.]

But, New Yorkers can survive street hotdogs boiled in street hotdog juice. A couple of mofo nazis--yesterday's or today's--will not bludgeon New Yorkers into submission. 

There are a million and nineteen things that happen every day in amerika that are simply wrong. Not a different viewpoint. Not another way of looking at things. Not worthy of equanimity. As wrong as pederasty, cannibalism, white supremacy and recombinating church and state.

It's our job as citizens to throw bricks, to speak out, to buy a shiv and hurl buckets of red paint at institutions of hate. It's our obligation to being human and decent and fair.

As usual, Rick Blaine puts it in perspective, particularly at :35. And as usual, and appropriately, whoever uploaded this on YouTube sullied the aspect ratio. Because they don't care about the sanctity of art. Or anything, or anyone else.

But we do.
We must.
And we'll fight.
Tooth and muthafukkin nail.

Old Style.

I had a call on the weekend from an old partner, current friend. We worked at O together on IBM and over the three or four years we were attached at the hip, we turned out a fair amount of good work, or a good amount of fair work, depending on your mood and current level of cynicism.

S is a Brit, and about a year before I was fired, S transferred back to O in London. He lasted about a year there before they decided to cut him loose. Though S had spent almost 30 years at the place and was one of the essential ingredients of a lot of O's great work, someone who didn't know S, or even what makes O money and what attracted clients to O, looked at an Excel spread sheet.

They said, "Here's where you're trouble is. You're paying S too much money. You can find someone to do the same job for half the price."

So, all at once, S was gone. With about as much severance as a guillotine. (Packages are for holding company executives. Not the people doing the work.)

That happened about 500 times over. 

It happened to me. Probably to you.
It happens thousands of times a day.
It happens so you have no help at the hardware store.
You have to scan your own groceries at the Shop Rite.
You can't find what you're looking for anywhere.
No one picks up a phone.
Words like "please," "thank you," and "can I help you," are as dated and quaint as "23-skidoo."
And no one cares.

The people "running" the agency no longer saw people or talents or odd skills or the ability to add flavor to something dull, they saw this and made their decisions accordingly.

Next month or sooner, they won't even see this. They'll just say, "AI can do it." They change the blade, the axe stays the same.

This sort of management style is rarely blamed for the demise of the modern ad industry. (Or modern amerika.) There's no investigative journalism watching the industry, so there's no one to look at the addition of holding company overhead and how to accommodate that overhead the actual agencies the overhead over-heads must be squozen parasitically.

When Martin Sorrell took home $100,000,000 while he was still at the helm of WPP, no one said, "wait, that's 1000 people making $100,000. That's a lot of copywriters and art directors and planners and account people. What's he doing to be worth all that money?"

When a tick sucks blood we don't ask how he benefits the host. We kill it. In corporatist amerika, we promote it.

They wrote the checks. They piled on bonuses. They made it all in perpetuity. Then they said: "the business model is broken."

Senior Management titles from IPG.
What could these people possibly do for 40 hours/week
to earn their seven-figure grift?

Nobody asks what the C-suite does. How they fill 1875 hours a year. Why they get offices and perks and travel and compensation and black cars and laundry allowances and assistants and more. Nobody asks why there are so many of them. Or if the 20 or so who show up on the leadership pages of holding company websites in reality make more money that the 300 or so people who make up what used to be big agencies and do the work the holding company nominally charges for.

When I was a boy, I worked in a liquor store in a touristy but burly part of Chicago. I worked the night-shift, from 4PM to midnight, and got the job, I suppose because I stood 6'2" in my stocking feet and weighed a solid 210, dripping wet. And I was seldom dripping wet, which made me all the more employable.

At around six most evenings a similarly sized cop in plain clothes would enter the store. He sat in the back at Jalal's desk. Jalal was the manager. The Bragno brother's owned the place, but Jalal made it run. He was a kind and decorous man who could upsell a better wine or vodka or brandy to anyone who came in the joint.

The cop would sit in the back and read the Sun-Times with his feet up on the desk. One of the brothers might gab with him until they walked over to their large apartments over-looking the lake. Lorenzo Jeffries, my best friend at the place and the stock man would sit with the cop and jawbone for an hour, mostly about the Cubs or the ChiSox, or some scandal that inked up the tabloids and came off on your hands.

I sat in the front behind the counter, alongside the cash-register, in front of a thousand miniatures and five-hundred packs of cigarettes. I had a paperback with me, that was allowed, and a buzzer near me to call the fuzz if there was a problem, but there never was. Anyone who was going to be a problem knew there was a cop in the store. At least until about 10:30 when the cop would leave, usually with a case of cold Old Style underneath his arm.

When he left, I was allowed to pull the steel gratings down, at least three-quarters of the way. That was preparatory to closing and warned the whores who plied the Tip-Top Tap across the street that closing time was nigh and it was time to refill whatever their clientele had drained.

I suppose none of this was strictly kosher. 

The cop with his feet up. 

The pay-off.

Even me as cashier--I wasn't even legal drinking age. (I got the job using my brother's social security number. He's two-years older than I.)

But it all worked.

The place ran like a top. The customers got served. I was never robbed. The Bragno's had a nice business--enough so that each brother had a nice Lake Shore Drive apartment.

Of course there was corruption.

There's always corruption.

But there's no corruption like the corruption that manages a people business according to the cells on a spreadsheet. And then blames those very people when the place goes belly-up.