Listening.

Steamfitter, by Lewis Hine.

For about twenty years, I was an avid long-distance runner. 

Having had a father who had his first heart-attack at just 39, and a second at 44, I started running so I wouldn't follow in his stolid infarcted footsteps. 

Soon, I started speeding up my footsteps. And wearing cheap canvas Converse sneakers, I'd course a mile in needle-strewn Riverside Park, then two miles and longer. 

Slowly I began to enjoy running. I liked the alone time, the concentration and the mind-wanderingness. I liked that I lost weight. And I liked, that I could set goals for myself, train appropriately and meet those goals.

Before too many months of running, I started running marathons. There are longer races, of course, but 26.2 miles, 42 kilometers is maniac enough for me, and I never raced any further.

Thinking about running and my life today, which is as an old man who makes his living at a keyboard, what I most learned from running was a way to listen to my aches and pains.

What I most learned was Nick Adams'-esque. That there would be good days and bad days and in-between days. But that you would always be in the day you were in, until that day was yesterday, and then tomorrow, it would be that day again.

I learned from running that on the good days you temper your enthusiasms by reminding yourself that tomorrow might feel like a steep incline. And that on bad days, well, they're inevitably  counter-balanced by a good day.

When you run marathons, that good/bad battle can take place amid all sorts of increments. You can have good/bad days. Good/bad races. Good/bad miles. Even, and no, I'm not exaggerating, good/bad yards. Every section of every moment or distance can be parsed and analyzed. Your wind can feel deep and strong while your right hip hurts, as mine aches all-day and all-night now.

What happens when you train for something is you acquire--beyond all else--listening skills. You hear what's going on with your self. You have an understanding, an awareness and a depth of knowledge as to how to handle a million-and-fourteen different situations. Mostly because you have handled them before.

Last week, I was well-paid to rewrite a couple thousand words of website copy for a startup with all the foundational solidity of an amoeba. To make matters worse, those thousand words were all in a google document and I like working in google docs as much as I like losing a filling in a molar.

H, the woman who manages GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, was blithe and oblivious about all this. Like a spectator at a six-day bike race, like the kind they used to have around European velodromes in the 1920s, H observes the action, not the pain. She sees me going around and around without hearing the crunch of bone on bone or the snap of a tired sinew.

That, in a nutshell, is why the best choreographers used to be dancers themselves. Or the best race car drivers know how to fix their machines. They have an understanding of the mechanics of the movements they're demanding. That's why most project-managers and administrators suck. They want things fast but they never actually have to find those things themselves, or physically chisel letter-forms in marble. 

They want the dance move without knowing the strain. Or the tremolo without knowing the tremors.

But that's where if you've trained a lot, your listening comes in. I had those thousands of words to clarify, euphony-ise and otherwise improve. I dreaded doing all that, but I knew that each word I faced was just another footfall in a race that's 20,000 or 10,000 or 30,000 footfalls long.

That's what most people--certainly most agencies, where the average age of creatives is just 31--don't understand. 

Let's finish these footfalls with Nick and Ernest.

“He had already learned there was only one day at a time and
 that is was always the day you were in. It would be today until it was tonight and tomorrow would be today again. This was the main thing he had learned so far.”

That's not an easy lesson.

Nick Adams learned it in the north woods as a teenager. 

I learned it in a beige cubicle in front of a Selectric.

It's listening and observing the needs. Listening and observing the pains. Listening and observing the self. And knowing how to handle the yesterday, the today, and just maybe, the tomorrow.

New Business Books I've Recently Read.

The biggest, and I suppose the most lamentable change in the business that's happenened between the time I worked for  giant holding company agencies and the time I worked for myself, is that these days, there is seldom an "Agency-of-Record."

Sure, I have long-standing accounts--I had a call earlier today with the client I opened my doors with over five years ago, and another long-time client has just sent me a text with photographs of billboards I wrote. She took in a Las Vegas airport. Her company is holding their annual user conference in Las Vegas and I thank them for the work and for not inviting me.

Regardless of those accounts which I've had for five plus annums, and two or three others, I am constantly pitching new business.

I suppose I'm a little like Vasco DeGama or something. Always looking for new trade routes and spices.

Every once-in-a-while a friend or acquaintance will ring me up and chin-wag with me. Almost invariably they'll ask (many of these calls, while solicitous, are exchanges of business information) "are you working on anything interesting?"

I usually brush that one off like a seasoned comedian handles a heckler, but other times I handle it like this. "When I grew up in advertising, say in the 80s and 90s, the two great advertising success stories were an overnight delivery service and the Nynex yellow pages. You could barely ask for more prosaic accounts than that."

Though my inquisitors are silent, I can hear their eye rolling. So, I'll continue, so as to avoid dead air. "My job is to make things interesting. To find what's interesting in them. To find what makes them special. Important to people."

In the five years since I opened the doors of GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I've probably won 50-75 new assignments. Roughly one a month or so. 

I've only been asked to show sample-creative once--and I pulled out of that pitch. Because at this point in my life, if a client doesn't know who I am and what GeorgeCo. does, there's a pretty good chance they're not right for me and I'm not right for them.

After all, I show my thinking and my work every day. In this space (which reaches thousands of the top people in our industry) and in those dopey ads I do in an effort to keep my agency top-of-mind.

Also, I speak to people.

As myself. Not some bespoke new-business-atron. As myself. Nuttiness and all.

I don't talk to potential clients about the latest sebum-filled pustule of popular culture or the latest ugly crassness that's sweeping social media. I talk to them about what's going on in the world. I talk to them about how people think. I talk to them about historical precedent and the world we're living in. You know, those things Bernbach called "simple, timeless human truths." Not the latest craze or spasm.

This has always worked for me. I remember talking to the great Chris Wall when I was new to the IBM account and telling him about a book I had read called "The Victorian Internet." I showed him that not only did I understand the idea behind e-commerce and e-business, I understood the historical importance of speed and the competitive advantage it brings. Especially if you can make the saliency of the technology as sexy as a teeny-weeny blini.

Below are some of the books I've read over the last six months. I can't say "this one got me a $70,000 assignment," or "this helped me impress so-and-so." But I can say, that these are the things that make me me. 

And it's me I bring to these phone calls when I try to answer a prospective clients' question: "How can you help me? Why should I choose you?"

I get that a lot. 

And yes, H, my business manager, L, my wife, if she's within hearing, and even Sparkle, my thirteen-month-old golden retriever might sigh and despair when they hear me start my answer by talking about neolithic axes and trophic food supplies. But more often than not I'm able to bring things around and find a relevance and even, if I'm lucky, a universality in what I'm reading to the world we're living in.

In any event, I win a lot more than I lose. At least so far.

What's more, I like reading. And that should count for something.

Knews. And Un-Known.

For many years, my wife and I had the news feed from National Public Radio on in our apartment. In fact, I was an early adopter and before every radio station streamed its broadcasts, I had a receiver that looked like this, with a remote control.

I would follow NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered across the country. From New York's public radio station, to Chicago's to Los Angeles's public radio stations. I like news, and though I listened for hours a day, I felt like I was getting a constant flow of updated news.

I continued this listening habit until about six months in to the Covid pandemic. It was then I realized the news was repeating the same set of stories. 

There was one tranche of news that talked about the spread of the disease, over-loaded hospitals, deaths, and how the world was coping with the pandemic. There was another tranche of news that said it was all fake, that it would all blow over, and that maskers and people taking the disease seriously were over-reacting.

The point here isn't to take sides. The point is that the news stopped telling me news.

The "sides" (and news isn't supposed to have sides) were so entrenched, that newness no longer mattered, repetition did--in hopes of getting through to people who would never change their minds. 

You experience this today in almost all sorts of what used to be news. If there's a war, we hear reports on the intractable sides of the war--why we should or should not support this side or that. If there's a horrific hurricane, we get some reportage about the havoc the storm caused, but we get much more discussion about climate change and whether or not it's actually happening. Even this political season, we hear little about actual issues and more about the antipodal-ness of the candidates and their beliefs. 

In short, we are so polarized in so many ways, battles about polarization have supplanted actual news on the news. When I do listen to the news, there's little new information presented to me. I rarely learn anything new. Usually, I merely get information that reinforces my "pre-existing" thinking.

For as long as there have been humans on our pale blue dot, the best advertising has always been news.

If you can tell me something I don't know that's valuable to me, there's a good chance you can convince me to try something. If you can tell me something new, if you can give me some news, there's a good chance I'll pay attention.

Most of the ads I see have no news value. 

I see McDonald's ads, for instance, that have a picture of french fries, as if I didn't know McDonald's sells french fries. Even the Tesco ads that are sweeping through the internet this week and seem to be widely praised tell me nothing about Tesco that I don't already know. 

I'm just not sure why I should care. Where's the news? What's your promise? What do you do for me?

About 99-percent of the ads I see--wherever I see them, and about 99.999-percent of the messages I see in social, are devoid of anything I might care about.

They contain nothing new.

They contain no news.

They say, or show nothing in a new and arresting way.

I know there are legions of marketers and agencies and even politicians who believe brands need to be "always on." I'm sure that's wrong.

Because always on is always annoying if you're not always interesting.

"On" isn't the starting point of light. Light is.

No one needs always on. 

We need always illumination.

--

This isn't new.
And it isn't news.

But.

Yikes!

Not too long ago, working alongside Steve Hayden, I got paid to write a manifesto for a venture capital company.

Almost by definition, investment companies like the one I was working for, take bets on the future. They look at the world and say, "this technology will make us money." Or, "I don't thing this technology will amount to much."

Then they invest behind their judgment.

While everybody assumes big VC firms are adroit and prescient, my guess is, like most things in life, they have a major league baseball success rate. The best baseball teams win about 60-percent of their games and lose about 40-percent. The worst do the reciprocal. I think most businesses and people--no matter what field they're in--abide by those ratios. Of course, there are always outliers, but for the most part, even when you love someone, you're only hip to their jive about three-times-in-five.

The best teams win about 60-percent of the time.

And lose about 40-percent of the time.

Though there are always out-liers. Or in politics and advertising, out-liars.

I first developed what I call my "60-40 Rule," when I read Andrew Roberts' 1152-page biography of Winston Churchill. The Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph each called it the best single-volume biography of Churchill ever written.

I've always been a Churchill fan. That whole "standing-up-to-the-Nazis-and-saving-Western-Civilization-thing." But if I were from the sub-continent or an Irish trade-unionist (he had troops fire on strikers with live ammunition) I'd likely feel differently. I'd guess 60-percent of what Churchill did was good. 40-percent was invading the Dardanelles or Narvik. Disastrous.

I think Czeslaw Miłosz had it right. And I wish more people would think about this.

Clip and Ignore!

Over the last 20 or 30 years as massive changes in technology and media have arisen, many in the advertising industry drink the kool-aid. I was at R/GA from 2009-2014. For the later half of that time, virtually every conversation inside the walls of the agency was, for some reason, about 3D printing. I could never figure out why. But as Walter Cronkite used to intone, "that's the way it was."

Just a moment ago, I read a book review in the "cheery neo-Fascist Wall Street Journal." I hate enriching the Murdoch family, but the WSJ has a book section that feeds my brain like nothing else. And I'm a sucker for the Whore of Mensa.

The Journal's pay-wall is way more effective in keeping people out than any wall human-kind has ever created for the same task. Even the Theodosian Walls around Constantinople (Istanbul) built in the 5th Century were eventually breached. Though it took invaders a good thousand years to do the job.

In any event, just now I read a review of The Long History of the Future: Why tomorrow's technology still isn't here. It wouldn't entirely shock me if in the entire ad industry, I was the only one who read it. Again, besides the point.

But here's the part I really dug. I'll underline what I think is the best bit.

"Ms. Kobie’s central argument is that many moonshot technologies haven’t yet arrived because they are hard, if not impossible, to build—and that our failure to build them should not be cause for despair. The first driverless car was tested in Nebraska in 1957, for example, but the technology involved embedding circuits under the road, which rendered scaling infeasible. And as Ms. Kobie recounts, a later, more advanced system developed in Germany—a closer ancestor of today’s semi-automated cars—successfully ferried notable guests from Charles de Gaulle Airport but struggled with everything from potholes to computing power. 'We had 95 per cent—that’s nothing,' one of the German researchers tells Ms. Kobie. 'You need 99.999 percent—every decimal takes another five to ten years.'” 

People in advertising don't really understand the nature of change. I'm often asked about the ads I run for my agency, or even the efficacy of this blog.

I answer simply.

They're how I get my business.

But there's no, "run something on Tuesday, get a call on Wednesday causality." The world doesn't work like that, and I don't think it ever will. Even the Chicxulub asteroid impact which happened 66-million years ago last Tuesday, I'd bet it took more than a day or two to wipe out the dinosaurs.

People in advertising--clients and agency side--are looking for magic and they're engaged, most often, in magical thinking. The complexity of decision-making and communication goes way beyond any bs McKinsey or some marketing strategist can concoct. In marketing we often segment consumers in six "buckets" or ten or twelve, when the likelihood that there are six or twelve million.

You can predict, perseverate, prognosticate and analyze the pants off complex data-matrices. Still when push comes to shove, no one knows anything.

And the more you say you do the less you do.

I remember reading something many decades ago by the great historian Barbara Tuchman. She said, "The persistence of the normal is strong."

That's why putting you money on Bernbach's simple, timeless human truths makes sense and trying to anticipate behaviors never will. To sum it up in just two words: Shit happens. To add a couple words to that profundity, Shit happens and always will.

I know this is a lot for a blog on advertising.

I've traveled through advertising history, back to the time of the dinosaurs, through to the Crusades, Churchill and the history of science.

I know that's a long way to go.

And I thank you for your time.

I've been writing in this space for 17 years. 

It's what I do. It helps me breathe and think.

Which proves the persistence of abnormal is also strong.

The Fall. And Branding.

I guess it's a sign of my having been in advertising literally my entire life, since my father was in it before me, and my uncle, his brother was in it before him. The fact is, someone in the Tannenbaum family has been making his slow way through the morass of the industry since the end of World War II. So, it's no wonder that I see advertising lessons nearly everywhere I look.

Of late, I've hit on something. It's an idea I can't shake. If anyone wants to talk about it--I'm all ears. My thinking right now is that nearly every company (and for that matter, person) engaged in branding is missing something fundamental, and is therefore getting things fundamentally wrong..

Brands, without question, in my lifetime, and especially with the emergence of fine design--which seems nearly ubiquitous now--are more sleek, streamlined and nicely designed than ever before. They're kerned and ligatured. They have beautiful color palettes. And somewhat inscrutable but still limbic nearly-cuneiform marks that are somehow supposed to imbue meaning into the brand.

Even airlines, ISPs, telcos and energy companies, who treat everything they touch, from customers to our planet, with disregard, disdain and dip-shititude, look good while they're acting badly.

I'm in an airport in Washington, DC, as I write this. The one I refuse to call by name, because I refuse to honor the president who called ketchup a vegetable and who sold arms to Iran illegally to finance illegal guerrillas in El Salvador. But that's all besides the point.

Right now I'm reading a heralded new history book called "Vertigo", about the Vaterland after World War I and before the rise of Hitler, during the period called the Weimar.

We think of a nation like Germany as an ancient one. After all, Romans were fighting "Germans" two-thousand years ago, but until the mid-19th Century, there was no Germany, there was a confederation of principalities with little national state apparatus. While France, Holland, England, Spain and Portugal were divvying up most of the world for their profit, various Germanic tribes were fighting amongst themselves.

Around the end of the Franco-Prussian war,  say 1871, Germany consolidated and a monarchy was established. A long-mustachio'd monarchy, deeply conservative, restrictive and military in its bearing.

When WWI ended, the monarchy was finally ousted. The first German Republic--the First Reich was formed. An ex-barkeep--Friedrich Ebert, "the burly, affable, melancholic head of the Social Democrats," became Reich Chancellor. 

I don't like facial hair. It makes most people look more ridiculous.

Ebert served in that post--during a time as tumultuous as our time is now in amerika, with warring factions fighting (murderously) for power and control--from 1919 to 1925--a remarkable achievement considering how riven the new nation of Germany was. How wracked by hyper-inflation, the pressures of reparations, the demographic shifts of millions from the countryside to cities and the titanic battles between communists and extreme-right quasi-military, gun-toting freikorps troops looking to assert their will on the nation.

What got me thinking about all this in a blog on advertising, was the sentence below. When Ebert died (of a burst pancreas he was too stubborn to have treated) there was, as you'd expect, a state funeral. But here's the thing. The Reich, just six years old, had none of the accoutrements, semiotics or decorations of a state.

If an american potentate dies, we know what to do. It's happened many times before. We know what to do with flags, what music to play,, what clothing to wear, how to dress and behave. Germany had none of that. Yet, Jähner writes, "The impressive, moving funeral, which added an effective closing touch to the less than brilliant office of the late president, was a quiet triumph for a man who provided the aesthetic accoutrements of the short-lived Weimar Republic from start to finish."

And here's the bit that really hammers home the branding point: 

"Not many people had survived all the confusions and changes of government as intact as Edwin Redslob, Reich Kunstwart and trained art historian. The curious-sounding office of ‘art guardian’ chiefly served the look of the Republic, from the design of the Reich eagle and the stamps via flags and orders to the organisation of the annual celebrations of the constitution and state funerals. We might mock this today, but for the young Republic the aesthetic of the state was not to be underestimated, because it had to provide something that would come even close to gripping the minds of the nation in the way that the pageantry of the German Empire, impelled by Kaiser Wilhelm’s hunger for prestige, had done."

What makes all this interesting to me is how meaningful and purposeful all this branding was. It wasn't just pangloss--like so much branding today--on top of cruddy service, a cruddy product and bland, disconnected performance.

All the pictures below show how the state itself was being built and asserting its place in people's lives.

When you're in an airport, or browsing online, or watching TV, every brand has a neato logo, and looks as friendly as a pap smear. In reality, everything quality and service-wise, sucks. As marketing practitioners, we've once again, conflated branding, with brand. And we've put all our money into decoration and none into how the brand performs.

I say this about 22 times a day.

Branding is a color system, a logo, maybe a tone-of-voice. 

A brand is a million times more. 

It's like I think Mark Twain once said, the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.

A brand is a promise. 

We've forgotten the idea behind promises.

They're meant to be kept. Not just waved like a tired torn tattered flag.

Most branding uses people.

That's why so many of us spend parts of our days unsubscribing, literally and figuratively, to things we never subscribed to in the first place.

Brands are meant to keep promises.