Ontology.

My sense when I watch an event like the Superbowel, or even the presidential election and the purported speeches and debates leading up to giant events, is that something is dramatically wrong with much of our nation.

The "dramatically wrong-ness" isn't our politics, or our climate-denial, or some ingrained-unfairness in the system, or inequitable distribution of wealth, the wrong-ness is more fundamental and ontological that those things. The wrong-ness emanates from our very core.

 

As a nation, we are no longer reality-based.

We have a president who thinks the Gaza, which has been battled over for 6,000 years, can become the Cote d Azur. He redraws weather maps to change the course of hurricanes. He fabricates and lies.

The list is nearly endless--and empirical--not political.

The same can be said for our industry.

Advertising is no longer reality-based.

By that I mean the messages in our work, and the people we show in our work, are not real. They worry about running out of chipped and formed potato products. We act as if stentorian affirmations about yessing will compensate for the closure of american freedom. We pretend celebrities live lives like ours, wear funny clothing and care about coffee so much they actually immerse themselves in a slurry of coffee sludge.

 

The driving goal of our political discourse and our advertising discourse is no longer to communicate what we do or how we can serve people--how we can make a problem better--it's to create a spectacle, most often ridiculous (like immigrants are eating our pets) so that we dominate the news-cycle.

We no longer inform.

We entertain.

Don't get me wrong. Entertainment is valuable.

 

But in politics and advertising entertainment should serve a purpose. To promote or make more palatable something--an idea or a product--you want to sell.

 

Most of the spots played on the superbowel, told me nothing. Or their high-octane glib-grab overwhelmed any definitional sense of a brand or product's reason for being. I believe the impact of most of what I saw will disappear like your fist when you open up your hand.

 

I'm not picking on the pringles work but the pringles work is a good example. First, pringles are gross. An ersatz potato product in a can--the words chopped, processed, reformed and shaped come to mind. Does anyone since the beginning of time think anyone since the beginning of time will be so bent out of shape because there are no pringles left that they'll a) care, b) say something, c) yell into a can.

Not only was the spot devoid of any truth--people care more about pringles than everything else in the world--flying mustaches is about as unappetizing an association you can make with a finger-food. I can only picture little hairs on my artificial chips.

 

The spectacle was there.
A party nicer than one I've ever been to.
Better looking people than I've ever seen (and not a single heavy person though amerika is the world's fattest nation.)

Flying mustaches.

Celebrity a-go-go.

And a re-scored and re-recorded pop-tune from 1967.

 

A spectacle.

 

I might be unqualified to judge advertising these days.

99.89-percent of my clients come to me not knowing how to define what they do or how it's different from anyone else.

 

They've not done the work, nor have their previous marketing partners, of marking out like a dog a playground, its territory. They've not done the work of un-parity-izing their offering.

 

In politics, too.

 

If you're the same as everyone else by definition it means you have nothing to say.

 

So stand on a chair and scream it.

I am perfectly bland and I stand for nothing, pick me!

 

In other words, make a spectacle of yourself.

 

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is doing the opposite. And entering our sixth year in business, we are earning more revenue by defining and differentiating clients than 186 of Ogilvy's 144 offices.

 

I don't want to choose a beer, or a vacation, or a car, or an anything based on spectacle. I might remember your name for a bit. But there's a good chance I'll associate you with excess, profligacy and waste.

 

I like a good joke.

I like a nice production.

I even like celebrities.

But if those things aren't linked to an idea and a message, you're pissing money away.

 

I don't like that.

Fifty-nine Spots.

Someone, not me, counted how many commercials were on the Super Bowl broadcast emanating from the racist, sexist, fact-denying auspices of the Murdoch-owned Fox empire. 

They said there were 59.

For professional reasons, I had to watch them all. 

But now we're about one-hundred hours post-game and I scarcely remember a single one. The ones I do remember, pringles' mustache and little caesar's eyebrows, I remember only because they sickened me.

Unappetizing. I don't like hair in my ultra-processed food. I'm funny that way.

It's hard to be an old person and not look at the $560,000,000 of media time (an estimated 70 :30-second slots multiplied by $8,000,000) and not feel that the work could have been better. 

I went through some of the hundreds of spots I store on my hard-drive, and picked roughly 59--the same number aired on the Super Bowl. (I probably pasted more below. Some of them are parts of longer reels.)

Never-the-less, you decide.

Did things used to be better?

Or am I just an angry old man?

Or both?

Probably both.

OmniInterLieCom.

 

I've just read a regurgitated press-release in Ad Age. Ad Age, like Adweek, used to do legitimate reporting. When I was starting out in the business, you could read the trade-press and know who was growing, who was shrinking, who was hiring and who was firing. You can no longer get that information. Nor do you get any perspective.

When I started at Ogilvy my second tour in 2014, I believe they employed between 1000 and 2000 people in the New York office. I'd be shocked if they have more than 300 today. You'd expect changes of such muskian-magnitude would be reported upon. Instead, we get a whole lot of nothing, stories about "best places to work," or "articles" by a "publishing partner" i.e. an ad or a press release masquerading as content.

To my tired blue eyes the worst effect of all this is the effect it has on our language and on our relationship with the truth.

Somehow, CEOs who have eight-or-nine-figure compensation packages are using the Language of Plutocracy and they're getting away with firing thousands of people and closing dozens of agencies.

Here's the lede from the Ad Age/IPG press-release cited above:

Linguistically, the oligopoly holding companies have replaced the word "firing" with the word "restructuring." In an industry where about 75-percent of your costs are salaries, there's no way to save $250,000,000 without firing people. A lot of people.

Last week, the CEO of omnicom projected cost savings of $750,000,000 via a slightly more honest admission of, "post-merger job cuts and consolidation of back-office and operations." Wren's prevarication was much less subtle than Krakowsky's. Wren said, "cost savings will arise from streamlining holding company, middle office and regional positions, as well as from eliminating duplicative overhead, back-office, and third-party expenses across our larger combined global footprint.”

CUT TO A CROWDED CITY APARTMENT. KIDS SCREAMING IN BACKGROUND. THE WHOLE THING LOOKS LIKE THE CRATCHIT'S HOME UPDATED TO 21ST-CENTURY BROOKLYN.

PERSON 1:  No, honey. I wasn't fired after eight-years of seventy hour weeks. 

PERSON 2: Thank goodness, the kids...

PERSON 1: I was duplicative overhead, a back-office, and third-party expense, and was let-go across a larger combined global footprint.

PERSON 2: Oh, honey. I'm so proud of you.

Then there's this as re-press-released by Ad Age: When asked if the restructuring would lead to job cuts, the company provided a statement. 

“The goal is to design and implement the right organizational and operating structure to ensure we remain innovative and competitive. This work will change the composition of some teams as we look to invest in talent and technology capabilities in areas such as AI, identity resolution, content management platforms, commerce and data.”

Wren and Krakowsky have been in their jobs for a long time. If they were minding their stores in a manner worthy of their compensation, how could the companies they're ostensibly running have a combined $1,000,000,000 in duplicative and unnecessary costs?

This use of language--from two of the largest so-called "communications companies" in the world is jaw-dropping. It makes Orwell's Newspeak look genuine and truthful.

Firing thousands of people and calling it restructuring is like throwing out the garbage and saying "I'm restructuring egg shells, coffee grinds and banana peels."

Here are two more twisted statements from Krakowsky, a man set to pocket $49,000,000 if the purger/merger goes through.

Krakowksy attributed the fourth-quarter and full-year results [a large drop in revenue] to the “impact of account activity”

throughout the year.  ie "We lost accounts, revenue fell." Just like, "We poked a balloon with a pin, it popped."

And this Stalinist-coded lie, “We were on the wrong side of the outcome in defending a number of very significant media accounts.”  We were on the wrong-side aka "there were two sides, winners and losers. We lost."

CUT TO A BADLY-DESIGNED CONFERENCE ROOM IN AN NEARLY EMPTY OFFICE SPACE

ACCT PERSON 1:  How did the pitch go? Did we win?

ACCT PERSON 2 :  Yes, but we were on the wrong side of the outcome.

 
Here's one more take on the holding company whose lead agency used to have "Truth Well Told" as their slogan. I pulled the visual below from the Ad Age press-release I started this post with. Look past the hackiness of the concept and design. Focus on the lies in the words.

Don't get sick on your Mac.
There's no app for that.

Land of the Fee.

There's practically a truism in the ad-business, the steaming remains thereof, that the richer the client, the less they want to pay for services.

This must be a side-effect of the MBA-mania that's ruined amerika for all-but the wealthiest .25-percent of the one-percent: no one deserves any money except the people who least need it. 

On the other hand, most things you buy, from a cable plan, to a phone plan, to a hotel room, to an airline seat, tack on a variety of fees that are wholly un-optional if you have the scent of humanity about you or are completely un-optional in most-circumstances.

While I'm visiting my younger daughter in San Diego, I'm staying at an nominally over-priced but shitty Hyatt Regency. The room rate is bad enough, but then completely un-optionally, they add on a resort fee of $35/day. 

These sorts of fees are everywhere today. I think president Biden tried to make an issue during a speech about "junk fees." Here are just a few examples according to US News and World Report, a magazine I haven't read since Richard Nixon (speaking of junk) was president.

Not too many minutes ago, I text-bitched to an industry friend of mine about a negotiation I started having with a prospective client. Though this client earns literally billions in revenue, somehow my prices were way beyond their willingness to pay. 

My friend wrote something like, "those mofos don't get out of bed for less than $25K. So F them."

But business is business and as I once over-heard the ex-CFO of Ogilvy say, "there's nothing bad you can say about revenue." 

With that in mind, I wonder if it's time to lower GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company's fees, but compensate by adding additional "hidden" charges.

Here are a few I'm thinking about.

• Resort fee. If you've resorted to talking to GeorgeCo., you should surely be charged extra for it.
• Baggage fee. A fee to assure that I leave behind all my emotional baggage.
• Freeces fee. A fee to not have to deal with the usual big agency feces.
• Clarity fee. A fee for not making you pay for 128-page powerpoints that are, in the words of Shakespeare, most often, tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
• You see, fee. A charge for the breadth of GeorgeCo's knowledge, erudition and references.
• Laffee. Why shouldn't I charge extra for that most valuable of reactions: laughter.
• ClichéFree fee. An extra charge because I promise never to use banalities like "circle back," "robust," or "transparent," in either creative or while chatting.
• Fat fee. A fee for assuring that dead-weight never comes to a meeting.
• Celebrifee. A small additional charge for an actual idea and not using a celebrity (or his eyebrows) to overwhelm your product.
• Small-talk fee. GeorgeCo., makes none. You'll gladly pay for the silence.
• Tro-fee. A charge for work that's focused on genuine business results rather than award-trophies.
• C-fee. An additional charge to keep GeorgeCo., LLC, 100-percent CEO-free.
• Coveefee. My largest additional charge. For incoherence.

We'll start with these for now. 

I'm sure more will come to me, that is, if with these fees in place I don't become a ripe takeover target for whatever holding company is willing to pay the fee.

Two Books.

Of all the things that frighten me about the modern world, the worst to my eyes might be this: I think we're forgetting how to be human. We're forgetting what it means to be human. I think we're normalizing that it's ok not to be human, and not to treat others as if they are human.

There are two books I'm thinking of right now. Both were written in the aftermath of World War II, when half the world had decreed that another half of the world was not, in fact, human. 

You know, something like today.

The first was written by the great German philologist Viktor Klemperer. He was captive as a Jew in Germany (he wasn't murdered because he was married to a non-Jew and somehow got dispensation, though his rations were limited and he was sentenced to live in "Jew house".) Klemperer wrote a book called "Lingua Tertii Imperium," in English, "The Language of the Third Reich."

Not too many years from now, someone will write for amerika and for the marketing industry, a book similar to Klemperer's. 

Maybe it will be called "The Language of the Plutocrats," or "The Language of Surveillance Capitalism," or trumplishIn any event, it's there for us to see. People today are targets. Or users. We have to accept terms and conditions--often thousands of words of dense legalese--before we order take-out. We have to accept self-violation (identity-theft and tracking) in order to buy something online. 

If you think I'm being hyperbolic, read a stern timesheet email from your company. Or listen to an inflight announcement. Or think how seven commercials are piped in over a plane's loud-speaker and you have no way of opting out. You've paid for your seat, and a charged once more for your captivity, against any will you have left. Because someone believes selling you another credit card is more important to your right to be left un-sold-to. 

This is inhuman treatment.

And the list is nearly endless.

The second book is called "The Parnas," and it's by the great Italian psychiatrist and one of the world's foremost authorities on schizophrenia, Silvano Arieti.

Arieti was a Jew in Pisa, Italy, about to be murdered by a Nazi lieutenant. Like me, Arieti believes in the ancient idea of "Lycanthropy." That is a delusion or a reality that a human can transform into a wild animal, usually a wolf. 

I'm fine with you thinking I'm crazy. But lycanthropy has been around for almost as long as human history. Arieti saw that Nazi turn into a wolf before his eyes, snarling and feral. I've seen it too. Up-close and lupine.

And not for nothing have we all seen about 22,008 movies called "The Wolf Man."

I think when politicians say people are eating dogs, or are carrying bacilli, or are from shithole countries, or are a somewhat lesser species, it's evidence of real-life lycanthropy. I think when people are fired by fax after working for a company for twenty years, that too is evidence of lycanthropy. I think when 5,000 people are fired so one person can be granted a $49,000,000 pay package, that is also lycanthropy.

I know lycanthropy is weird to believe in. Just as my ersatz-Klemperer-like linguistic mania are also hard to take.

That's ok.

I'm just being human. 

Tells.

If I had to again work at an agency, or freelance for an agency, or somehow be involved in a TV production, I'd enter the assignment looking for certain tells.

Tells: those signs that let you know the stuff someone is made of or what they're thinking before they're even thinking it.

Tells in baseball might be a pitcher who sticks out his tongue as he's preparing to snap off a curve. In cards, it might be someone involuntarily raising an eyebrow as he looks at his hand. In politics, it might be a politician who kicks a kid when he thinks no one is looking.

In the ad industry, there are as many tells as there are smells.

68-page powerpoints are a tell.

Trademarked processes for ideation.

People who use the word ideation.

For me, the most blatant tell is people who call commercials "films."

If you hear someone do so, I'd run from the scene as fast as I'd run from a doctor who says "this won't hurt a bit." Or a stock-broker who's selling a "sure thing." Or a politician who says he's for restoring law and order.

Anyone who calls a commercial a "film" is a pompous twit. Worse, they don't understand the distinction between art and commerce. A distinction fundamental to the very purpose of advertising.

In advertising, we do commercials. 

Commercials are moving images meant to convey information and create a feeling that make you want to buy something or try something. 

Films have a much more elevated purpose. Involving art and beauty, and the kind of truth that is on a plane higher than a mere product truth.

I saw this Volvo commercial the other day and can't brush the taste of pretense out of my mouth. Creating a commercial about a car that fits "all your yous" and expecting it to be regarded as non-generic, that is a commercial that could be for any car ever made, is ludicrous. 

But the sequence that really gets me lasts an interminable amount of time between seconds :15 and :18. The "film" match cuts different circles. The spinning of a car tire, a bike tire, the turning of a knob, pottery on a wheel, the circular Volvo logo.

I can hear the blind Greek chorus of agency people and clients marveling at that spinning symmetry and saying aloud, "that's a beautiful film." 

The problem I have is that I can't see any purpose behind the chosen images. They tell me nothing about the car or the car company except that maybe they don't understand what people want from a car. They also tell me that no one involved in the spot understands how people watch TV. There's nothing in that sequence, or any of the other 720-frames of film, that tells me anything unique, interesting or anything that might make me look up or think.

My sense of most of the world today is that we're too interested in doing cool things or talking about the latest cause célebrè to focus on what's important. 

We're making films. 
Not selling products.

Not searching for that truth that makes something worthwhile. That makes something stand out.

We're trying to out "beauty," or out "poetry," and somewhere along the way "out-real and out-relevant and out-empathize" have gotten lost.

We seem, as an industry, to care more about the films we make than the people we serve.

That's the most shocking tell of all.

Inadequacy. Our New Standard.

I'm sorry for this post. For two reasons. 

First, it's going to be fairly-heavy-duty and come Friday in our  late Systems Collapse era, we'd probably all be better-served by a cold foam half cream double-shot dose of hemlock-scented arsenic. Instead of what you're about to get.

It won't go down easy. And yes, I resisted a Stormy Daniels joke.

Second, I don't know if my ability to see the things I see and make the leaps I make is a strength or a weakness. I read about the waning days of Tsar Nicholas II and I see advertising holding companies and, sadly, amerrykaka. I see life lessons and ad lessons wherever I look, from Neolithic Britain to Ancient Greece--and when I'm feeling especially potent, I use them in the almost daily new business calls I seem to have bursting at the seams of my Microsoft Calendar.

I suppose people roll their eyes and lament, "that's George. He's mad as a hatter, but he can write ads like a sumbitch."

Just now I read an article in The Economist. 

Thank you, David Abbott.

I started reading The Economist because of your ads; I stayed because the magazine was smart, well edited, and wittier than anything you'd find within sixteen miles of any ad agency anywhere. 

Their articles are short, to the point. They never have "to continue, turn to page 27." And--because they know the Economist is not your source for daily news--their articles are different. You don't read The Economist for the ebb and flow of topicality. You read it for errant angstroms of insight flaked with humor (or, even, humour.)

If you know me at all, and you look at the clip above, you can probably think of eleventeen reasons why it stopped me. The plight of incessant shorterizing. And then the Orson Welles-ian picture of Churchill in flagrante delicto, like Charles Foster Kane.

But for all the words in the article, it was a single sentence that got me, reminded me of GeorgeCo's Unique Selling Proposition, and where so many of my competitors fail and fail abjectly.

"...[they] can no longer even articulate our inadequacy."

From an advertising point of view--which is what so often matters to me because it's how I earn my daily Milk Bone--most people can no longer make salient what a client does, how they're different and articulate it in such a way as to make our clients' offerings engaging, important, worth noticing and paying attention to.

My sense is that 99.97-percent of all advertising is a mere joke--and a not very adroit one, or a BOGO offer or jargon or, worst of all, a little dance that some masturbatory creative director believes will go viral. 

Very little articulates something important to a viewer. We make commercials with all kinds of musical, sound-design and cinematic doodads that mean fuck-all to people with a problem.

In fact, if amerrykaka is still a country and we have a presidential election at all in four years, I'd suggest to whoever is running the opposition candidate's campaign (if opposition is allowed) that despite the one-billion dollars the democrats spent in 2024 they were unable to articulate the inadequacy of our government and its policies and its people and how we will fix that.

That's why we're in the state we're in.

In advertising, too.

Advertising has always been excoriated by people like Orwell. I get it.

But today our rattling stick is so esoteric it doesn't rattle anymore. No one hears it. It whispers.

Our job is to articulate a scintilla of humanity about a brand, product or service so people see you care and want to make a difference.

Do that. Or inadequate.

And sorry for the Friday post.

As Reliable as a _____________________.

Excuse the continuity issues.

There's a great line from the great Frank Capra movie, "Meet John Doe," written by Robert Riskin, and uttered by a good actor, but a bad human being, Walter Brennan. It's one of those lines I'm not sure shows up in movies nowadays. It's about 82-percent more cynical than people today can bear--that is, 82-percent truer--and it doesn't contain a cuss, a sex act or blood. Therefore, it ain't modern enough for today's audiences.

You'll find it in the first twenty seconds of the clip above and you owe it to yourself to, once a decade or so, acquaint yourself with a world view that involves more than fukking the other guy or avoiding taxes.

Pursuant to shaving and drunken barbers, I realized just now the entire problem with the world. Maybe it was prompted by going to the local supermarket and finding them out of bananas. I'm 67-years-old, I've never before NOT been able to buy bananas.

And then it hit me, in what used to be the "last best hope on earth," what used to be "a government of the people, by the people and for the people," has been taken over by an unreliable narrator.

Someone who spins BS as easily as he breathes. It's convenient, malevolent, evil, and will surely separate you from your freedom, your money, your future and your set of principles, that is, if you have any left.

Our industry too, all industries, are being led by unreliable narrators.

Narrators who tell you they have to downsize. Then take $49,000,000 golden parachutes. Narrators who tell you how they'll save $750,000,000/year and try to hide the fact that it will lead to the end of at least 7,500 jobs (at $100K/job.)

This is your trade-press.
Calling mass firings "cost savings [sic] and structure updates.

A gallery of unreliable narrators.

Narrators who claim to believe in DEI, until they don't.

Narrators who believe in diversity, that doesn't include Jews and people over 50.

Narrators who fire people and hire dumbness-producing AI bot machines and call it "marketing."

The unreliable-narrator-ness is endless.

In fact, if you go to the front page of Ad Age--the nominal advertising journal that stole their name from this blog--look at every story and append to that story the words "unreliable narrator."

Do the same when you turn on the late-term abortion that is television news. Or the slightly earlier-term abortion that are The New Tork Yimes or the Stall Wheat Germinal. 

When you hear anything from our Liar in Chief, or his ruling Kakis, felon muskmelon, the blonde spokesthing: Unreliable Narrator.

Any agency award, any agency press-release, any blather about the effect of man-in-the-moon superbowl marketing: Unreliable Narrator.

I remember as a three or four year-old hearing this lyrics and asking my mother about their incongruity. She babbled something about silliness. Missing, as we all have for too long, the Unreliable Narrator of Life. 

The cosmic Drunken Barber.

It rained all night the day I left
The weather it was dry
The sun so hot, I froze to death
Susannah, don't you cry.

Or maybe this is better, by Yip Harburg, Harold Arlen and Billy Rose.

Say, it's only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me

Yes, it's only a canvas sky
Hanging over a muslin tree
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me

Without your love
It's a honky-tonk parade
Without your love
It's a melody played in a penny arcade

It's a Barnum and Bailey world
Just as phony as it can be
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me

Or, Conrad.

Maintenance.

If you own a co-op in New York City, you're familiar with the term "Maintenance." It's a fee you pay every month to live in your building. It helps the building's management keep things up to snuff. Or it helps them snuff things up.

It covers payments for the underlying mortgage, salaries for doormen and the super and the handyman, keeping the boiler working, keeping bricks from falling, paying insurance and taxes.

No one likes to pay maintenance. But it's a necessary cost of life on earth--or in a New York co-op, whichever comes second.

These days, I'm finding too many parallels between the collapse of amerika and the demise of the ad industry.

In amerika, we no longer want to pay maintenance. So our roads are pocked and poxed and unsafe. Our air-traffic control system is unsafe. Our cops and law-enforcement are missing. It's why our borders are permeable, our medicine is missing, our air is filthy, our schools don't teach, and so on and so on.

If you delve into the notion of "Societal Collapse," which is what amerika is undergoing now, you'll realize it happens when maintenance stops. It happened in Knossos 3,500 years ago. It's happening in your town, today.

Societal Collapse has also afflicted the ad industry. 

Agency brands stopped spending money on their own brands and stopped upholding their own values. They stopped paying for people, paying for training, treating our profession like a profession. AI can do it.

Clients--and their agencies--were even worse. Most products I grew up with spent tens of millions of dollars developing and propagating the ingredients that made them unique. Their advertising told the world about these ingredients. They cost a fortune, but they returned more money to the corporate coffers. 

Today, most consumers cannot tell one car from another, or a generic mouthwash from Listerine. Mostly because agencies and clients no longer tell people why they should pay for better products. They're no longer "maintaining" the differentiators or the vig that the brand spent, in some cases, years or decades establishing.

Compare these two Volvo spots as a for instance. 

This lack of maintaining is a function of lack of spend. But it's also a function of lack of smart. 

For things to maintain their value you have to tell people why they are valuable. 

And that messaging is never "set it and forget it." It must be done with regularity, with consistency, with repetition.

Maintenance.