The Low-Bid Economy, Continued.

Way back in August--when the temperature was higher but the globe was some degrees cooler--I wrote about a phenomenon called "The Low-Bid Economy." http://adaged.blogspot.com/search?q=low+bid+economy
This weekend, I've been forced to attend a Bat Mitzvah in Ann Arbor, Michigan (that is not the start of a joke) and I've run head-long into another facet of the low-bid economy--the complete and utter lack of service.

I flew Northwest. Surly flight attendants. No service or accountability whatsoever. Seats literally crooked on their runners as low-bid workers try to jam in another couple of rows. A dirty plane. No food except $2 trail-mix, which really sounds like something a gerbil would eat.

Then the Hertz counter in the Detroit airport. A line of six customers. And one fat Hertz rep behind the counter unable to make the contract printer work. Three Hertz people milling about, complaining in loud voices about the cold. Or looking at USA Today on their computers. No sense in serving customers--they pay us to pass hours not help people.

Then the Marriott Courtyard Inn. One pimple behind the counter. She can't spell my name. Can't even bother to listen to it when I repeat it again. And I'm an "Elite" customer. Ha! A filthy hotel. Because why pay people a decent wage to clean? It is dirty. You are dirty after a shower. And if you are over 5'5" you have to bend to get your head under the showerhead. Low-bid, everybody down.

Then, an attempt to replace a broken cell-phone still on warranty at the T-Mobile store. "T" as in terrible service. Terrible attitude. Terrible. Terminal. Tacky. Tsurly. Trafe. The phone they sold you breaks, and you are inconvenienced. You get charged for shipping. You get no apology.

Dell has just awarded some billions in advertising to a new WPP group. If Dell does not become the "Nordstrom's" of the PC world, their market-share will continue to shrink.

The Low-bid world is a dirty, dumb and dispiriting place. A place where no one cares. We need an alternative.

The "low bid" economy.

All over America things are being built. Highways, levees, bridges, houses, housing projects, mine-shafts. Even ad campaigns.

In our current MBAelstrom of thought, when those projects are put out for RFP, if they don't go to a crony, they go to the lowest bid. According to Alan Weisman's new book, which will soon be a classic, "The World Without Us," the results of low-bidding are crashing around us everyday. (Even in Iraq--the war that was supposed to cost us nothing, remember.)

In advertising, which this blog is nominally about, Clients wind up with low-bid creative (Hot pockets!), low-bid innovation, low-bid client service and worst, low-bid results. And those CMOs that buy into the low-bid adconomy? Their average tenure is down to a new low...23 months. Let's low-bid them adieu.

The "No money down" economy.

Last year, starting around this time I wrote a few posts--with my usual de Toquevillian perspicacity--about something I was calling the "low-bid economy." You can read them here if your time-sheets permit any non-billable time whatsoever: http://adaged.blogspot.com/search?q=low+bid+economy

This morning, amid the housing crisis, the oil crisis, the credit crisis and news that the nation's foremost stock exchange has lost 20% of its value over the last 12 months, I am visiting the low-bid notion again but with a slight twist.

We are still living in a low-bid nation. Even worse, however, we are living in a no-money-down world. The world of $150 take-out, $1200 handbags, and $15,000/month summer rentals. Of course as agency people this affects us, perhaps most overtly in online marketing.

Here's what I mean. Clients routinely build expensive websites, develop ornate applications, capture compelling content (capture that content! it's getting away!) only to leave these marketing elements unpromoted and floating around cyber-space--never telling consumers where these things are or even that they exist.

As they used to intone on the old TV show Dragnet, dum de dum dum.

This is because clients don't want to pay for real marketing. They bought their marketing with no money down, no money to propagate what they've produced. Ah! Another example of marketers believing that consumers are waiting and waiting eagerly for yet another message.

Pursuant to my last post.

The deleterious effects of our low-bid economy are everywhere and they make my blood boil. So today we end up with cheap products that wind up more expensive, growth-hormones in our farm-grown Chinese fish and lead in our brand-name children's toys. And crappy one-off advertising that does nothing.

But here's the thing that really rubs my goat the wrong way. Where are our industry leaders? (I won't for a second say, where are our national leaders? They're at a focus-group facility some place reading poll results and back-pedaling.) You see, low-bid is in many cases synonymous with low-risk. And if we had industry leaders they would be speaking out about this.

Instead, Chief Creative Officers are wanking on about minutia, agency presidents are blathering about new media modalities, Bob Greenberg is incomprehensible, and no one, no one is saying advertising takes time, money, intimacy and intelligence for it to be effective. Advertising is not a cost-center--it is a profit center. It should not be low-bid, low-risk.

Is there an agency person out there willing to make a speech entitled "Why an "Expensive" agency winds up being cheaper." Naw. I'm off to the Hamptons.

Dry wall from China.

I heard a report on National Public Radio on toxic dry wall that over the past few years we've been importing from China. This dry wall is making many who come into contact with it ill. It turns homes, literally, into toxic assets.

It seems to me that dry wall has always been a "substitute good." That is, a material that takes the place of a more expensive alternative. In any event, builders looked for ways to do their jobs more cheaply, either to compete more successfully with other builders or to offer their products at lower prices.

We in the agency business are doing our utmost to proffer the advertising equivalent of Chinese dry wall. We lower our prices, we find cheaper alternatives. Holding companies pit one of their agencies against another, may the lowest price win. According to a BBC report, "Residents of houses containing Chinese drywall say it smells like rotten eggs and has given them breathing problems."

I don't know about you but 99% of all ads smell like rotten eggs too.

--
BTW, over two years ago I wrote a post called "The Low-Bid Economy." http://adaged.blogspot.com/2007/08/low-bid-economy.html Sometimes I wish I weren't so damned prescient.

Two kinds of companies.

When you reduce things to their absolute simplest, there are really only two kinds of companies in the world. Those that make things easy for its customers and those that make things hard. Or, put another way, companies look at things one of two ways. Some companies presume that whatever goes wrong is your fault. Others act as if whatever goes wrong is their fault.

Take Toyota for instance. For years, they took responsibility for their products and made things easy for their customers. Now it seems they are sailing a different tack. Unintended acceleration or faulty braking is somehow their customers' problem. Or obfuscated to the point where it's not clear what can be done to fix it and their customers' are shit out of luck.

Likewise the telcos. Just think of how easy they make it to read their bills. There, I've made my case.

Likewise the airlines. $50 just to re-book a flight?

Or any of the thousands of companies that charge a "re-stocking fee" if you wish to return something you don't want.

I'd like to be naive enough to think that good companies will prevail and bad companies will flounder. Unfortunately the low-bid economy we live in has driven most good companies out of business. And most companies (including ad agencies) act like little more than shysters. And not in a good way.

Meandering.

I was up early this morning, prelude to an 8AM meeting with my client down on Wall Street. My wife is, once again, in LA on business, so it's just me attending to the needs of Whiskey, my eight-month-old golden retriever. On mornings such as this when the press of business and puppies coincide, things can get hectic, but, I think, I've handled things in stride.

Actually, I'm at my client half an hour early, partly because I'm neurotic about being late, partly because you can never anticipate the vagaries of New York City taxi service and partly because very little bad can be said for showing up places early.

Wall Street at this hour isn't sharpies in expensive suits. Instead it's burly men in heavy coats and hardhats going to work building the giant towers that are springing up everywhere down here. For all the woes of America, for all our political quagmires, for all our income disparities and millions living in poverty, down on Wall Street, buildings are rising ever shinier and ever higher.

It's been busy at work of late, extremely busy. Last month I "celebrated" three years at my agency (there was no note from anyone, no cheaply symbolic bottle of wine, no American Express gift card, no acknowledgement at all. In the low-bid economy of agencies today, such graces are long extinct.) After three years at my agency, I have finally been "discovered." People who have known me a long time say "I'm finally coming into my own at the agency." No, I reply. The agency has finally (and, I'm sure, temporarily) woken up and noticed what I can do and so few others can.

The prevailing ethos in agencies is that your meant to feel blessed that you have a job, especially someone like me, who is not only "old," (in fact about 20-years-older than most everyone else) but also in possession of an old-time advertising salary. A salary calculated on the ideas you have that build clients' businesses, not your proficiency with Flash. I'm meant to praise the lord that my job hasn't been outsourced to Belarus or Sao Paolo, or to some 26-year-old hipster who, frankly, has never done it before.

I've always cut against the grain. I remember a CEO cornering me once in the lunchroom at a venerable agency in which I was working. "If only you were easier," he said to me. "If only you weren't so gloomy or mean all the time." What you're saying, I told him, is "if only I weren't me." Well, sorry, this is what you get.

HR does this shit too. They're more concerned with your corporate compliance, your timesheet adherence than anything else. It's like judging a boxer based on how neat his locker is.

That's all for now. No point, I know.

But I'm allowed.

It's me and me is what you get.

Vs. Sameness.

One of the many things that upsets me about the state of the world to day is the utter lack of creativity. Maybe I've just seen too many commercials (1) for Disney's new "A Christmas Carol," with Jim Carrey. Or maybe I've seen too many web ads (1,000,000) where the animation looks almost exactly the same.

I guess it looks the same because it's done on the cheap or someone says, I like what so-and-so did, let's do something like that. Not thinking that that same conversation is happening at about 200 hundred agencies at exactly the same time.

I've written in the past about the dangers of what I call "the low-bid economy." You don't have to be an Albert Schweitzer to know you get what you pay for. All the rationalizations that you will beat the system are just that, rationalizations.

This morning I ran across a short movie by an animator called Gary Leib. It flies in the face of sameness and is worth taking a gander at.

The Old Man and the turkey burger.

I had dinner last night with my cousin, Howard. I don't know exactly how Howard and I are related, it's some complex arrangement on my father's side, but we've known each other since we were in diapers, and through the years have grown closer and closer. Blood, as they say, is thicker than water.

The bar was too crowded and too noisy, but somehow, I guess the privilege of age, we got a small table in the back. We each got a beer, the special of the night. Howard ordered a grilled chicken sandwich with extra crispy bacon and fries. I opted for a lighter repast, a turkey burger with a side salad.

Both Howard and I followed in our father's footsteps. Howard is an executive for a luggage company as was his dad and I am a copywriter, as was mine. We each have been married a long time, Howard 31 years, me, nearing 30 and we each have two kids. Howard has boys. Me, girls.

We talked, mostly, about the kids, of course. Their emergent independence and their struggles with pursuing their callings and finding a mate. All four of our kids are doing quite well (with periodic upsets of course) thank you very much.

Then, as you might expect, our conversation turned to our careers.

We talked of the increasing lack of civility at work, how it's almost a badge of honor to treat people like crap. We are expected to do more, for less money, no appreciation and with fewer amenities. I told Howard I call this era "the low-bid economy." Everyone tries to do everything as cheaply as possible, then we all bark when it turns out like shit.

We stared into our sandwiches. We traded war stories. We laughed the laughter of two men who had seen a lot.

Howard summed it up best:

I tell my kids, "Save your money."

"Don't buy $129 sneakers, $49 knit caps, and $200 sunglasses," I added.

"Save your money," he repeated. "You know what job security is? It's having money in the bank so you know you can go in in the morning and say 'fuck you and your fucking job.'" He flipped his imaginary boss the double bird.

"That's right," I agreed.

"You might never do it," he continued. "But it's nice to think you could."