Boiling Frogs.

Watch the promo, here.

One of the things that never fails to shock me about the advertising business is how its esoteric-ness has skyrocketed in the forty years since I entered the business. 

When I was young, we used to talk to companies about how they did business, how they treated customers, the way their stores looked, how they answered the phone. We wrote ads for them, of course, and Christmas cards. But many of us realized (and acted on) a larger idea that we were here to improve the public's perception of a company not just its ads. 

Public perception happens in a trillion ways every day. Ads are seen by fewer and fewer people and seem to matter less and less. Ads, in fact, are a small part today of the complex amalgam that makes up how people feel toward a brand. What's more, so many ads are created with the care given the 107th of 108 Xerox copies, that most of them have a life expectancy about 1/10th the longevity of the common mayfly.

Even so, more and more, ad agencies do ads that don't even run where real people (not awards' juries) can see them. And they're about smaller and smaller topics and further and further removed from 'the reality-based community.'

I remember when I was at Ally & Gargano my boss Ed Butler when told of an offer or offering from the bank we worked on, would often cite a segment that appeared on the news of the local affiliate of CBS. It was called "Shame on You." It would featured companies that engaged in heinous mistreatment or said one thing and did another. Ed would often say, "You're going to show up on 'Shame on You.'" Often the client would heed Ed's advice. 

Even things that seem temporarily good for business and turn out to be catastrophic for business if they're based on lies or deceit.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've seen what to my eyes seem like important articles in The Wall Street Journal. If you're in the business of helping clients business (once the sine qua non of advertising) you'd think such articles would be noticed. You'd think they'd be talked about. You'd think agencies might be advising clients on how to improve their customer relationships and their overall perception.

Alas, CMOs are as far removed from how customers are treated as lofty politicians are from the needs and concerns of their electorate.

So, people--you and I--hate brands more and more. Yet the commercials and ads we make pretend such disdain just doesn't exist. Cue the happy family eating bottomless breadsticks or the happy family luxuriating on a plane that's spotlessly clean, well-lit and accoutered with flight-attendants that make Heidi Klum look like some old bag.

The subject-object split in advertising has never been more of an abyss. What's shown has never been farther removed from what's real. (I think the same is true of agencies themselves. They're "network of the year," but they dropped from 1000 employees four years ago to 100 today.)

Or people don't like/trust advertising, yet we tack on 20 seconds of disclaimers to a 30 second spot read at a rate that screams "we're speaking fast because we're pulling a fast one," or "you need this drug even though it gives you projectile vomiting and can cause death."

At its very core, marketing and capitalism are about trust. Trust. As in if you don't trust us you won't buy from us.

That's why our industry ignoring trust (and the current administration destroying trust) is so terribly dangerous and threatening.

Sixty-one years ago, an agency Omnicom just shut down ran this ad for Avis.

It's an ad based on caring. 
It's an ad made-better by empathy.
It's an ad that speaks human.
It's an ad that understands the woes of consumers and how hard it is to get helped.
It's an ad that defined a brand as different, better.

I've talked to clients about running ads like this. The best reaction I got to such a suggestion was to be shunted aside as "naive."

When you look at present day data like this, it would seem to me what's naive is doing nothing at all and pretending customer disdain doesn't exist or will go away because you want it to.

• More that 3/4 customers had a product or service problem in the last twelve months.
• More than 7/10 customers think companies need to improve their customer experience.
• A University of Michigan study shows consumer sentiment dropping by roughly 33-percent since the beginning of the year.

Our industry claims to want to keep abreast of culture. Dissatisfaction with current course and speed is a huge part of our lives--and culture. We ignore anything that doesn't show people smiling.

As Scott Broetzmann, the president and chief executive of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting, which conducts the National Customer Rage Survey with the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, recently said “I can order dental floss and it’ll be at my doorstep in 30 minutes, but when it comes to problem-handling, it’s still an effortful, frustrating, emotionally stressful.” 

Forrester principal analyst Pete Jacques sums it up well. “Like the proverbial frog that doesn’t feel the water becoming increasingly hotter, many North American brands are inching into more treacherous positions with their customers’ loyalty."

As Rich Siegel over at Round Seventeen might conclude, "Mmmmmm, boiled frog."

Aweirds.

There's no award like this award. Rowan and Martin's "Flying Fickle Finger of Fate." 
(My birthday gift from my wife yesterday.)

--

With the shuttering of DDB by its owner, Omnicom, last week (a shuttering accompanied by the shuddering of an entire industry) a lot of people have pointed out the purported irony that an agency that won the Cannes Network of the Year both in 2023 and 2025 should be closed so soon after winning such acclaim.

I've yet to see anyone question the value of awards shows. What they award, what they measure, what they mean and if they're an at-all viable way of judging the business value of an ad agency, which is the only criterion on which an ad agency should be assessed.

Anyone who brings the smallest portion of 'show me' to the awards-show-industrial complex would question DDB's victories. Just like would question the viability--even the non-fiction-ness of these items below.

Since 2015, WPP's market cap was decreased by more than 85-percent. They were worth $31B in 2015. They are worth $4B today.

That is not what you would call, in an ordered-universe, 'award-winning.' Nevertheless, the charade persists that these things count for something. 

Again, if you look at the chest-beating around the awards reputedly won, and the performance of the entities in question, you MUST question what we as an industry are doing--how we're evaluating ourselves and our meaning.

Somehow it all brings to my mind this quotation often attributed to Albert Einstein.

In other words, if the measurement is wrong, the results the measurement reveals will be faulty.

Not to long ago, I saw somewhere (I didn't screen shot it) that an Emmy award was given to a dry cleaner or something like that. It made me question the meaning of the Emmy if those in industries extremely tangential to the TV industry can win one.

With five minutes of research I found out that in 1949, the organization behind the Emmy awarded just six awards. Last year, they gave 51-times that number, 306 awards.

I also found out this, which makes me, someone who thinks about 98.92384-percent of awards are absolutely stupid believe that 98.978986-percent of awards are absolutely stupid.

My guess is the advertising networks spend more on winning awards than they do on creative bonuses, training, office decor, retention and diversity efforts, combined. Paying to win is about as craven as a system gets. It reminds me of the old adage I've heard from people who play golf, "You drive for show, you putt for dough." 

Awards are for show, thinking is for dough.  And there ain't any real brand guidance anymore. Just stunts.

I look at the whole thing this way.

Imagine eating the worst hamburger you ever ate. 

Frozen pink slime full of gristle, bone and chopped cow anus. 

Imagine eating that and finding out it won an award for "hamburger served on the sesame-seed bun with the most sesame seeds." The most seeds. And a diamond-award. The CEO accepted the award in France. Meanwhile, the people serving the burger hate their jobs. The restaurants owned by the chain were filthy and the waits were long. The chain itself was bleeding money.

But, award-winning.

You have question what we're doing.

Why we believe it.

Why we keep believing it.

Even when it kills us.

Song Sung Blue.

Art from the Song. It ain't Fortunoff's.

Not too long ago, many of the agencies of the Omnicom group were among the best creative agencies in the world. BBDO. TBWA\Chiat\Day. Goodby, Silverstein. Among others.

Maybe they still are. But, I wonder.

In the early 12th Century, the Song Dynasty, occupying much of what we today call China, was by far the world's most advanced civilization.

They were the BBDO, TBWA\Chiat\Day, Goodby, Silverstein of nation-states.

Their per-capita wealth, for instance, would not be matched by European nations until 500 years later, in the 1700s. And would not be matched by modern China until probably 2000.

Besides a strong economy, China under the Song had the strongest navy in the world. They built ships four times as long as the ships that sailed Columbus to the new world and had trade relationships with much of Asia, India and the Arabian world. About four hundred years before the west, the Song were using the magnetic compass, paper money, movable type and paper.

Then, leadership of the Song turned inward. Exploration was out. Even traveling from your village was punishable by death. Borders were closed. Trade was stopped. Foreigners were banished.

Europe in the 1200s was much the same as the closed off Song dynasty. The "dark ages" weren't the result of a shortage of lightbulbs. They were due to the closed-beliefs of powerful states like the Holy Roman Empire or the Hapsburgs, who as long as things didn't change were good for them. 

However, Europe was politically different from China. There were many small states. It was called Kleinstaateri in German. Small-state-ism. 

If you lived in a state that was anti-trade, you could walk 30 kilometers or so and be in another state. Columbus, for instance was turned down by about half-a-dozen nobles before he found one to pay for his voyages. In other words, you could shop around until you found someplace that didn't suck so bad.

That shopping around ability disappeared under the Song. It thrived in Italy and the Hanseatic League when the renaissance bloomed.

When I was a boy in the business, the advertising landscape in New York was essentially a Kleinstaateri. There were literally scores of decent agencies. If you weren't happy with the leadership, the pay, the opportunities, the work, or even the location of one, there was another agency up two floors or over two blocks.

As one of those many small agencies, you had to keep your eye on other agencies. Who was hot, who was dynamic, who was innovating. There was a ferment of ideas. There was competition. There was competition. There was social mobility. 

If you fell behind, you died. So you stay on top of things.

Those are hallmarks of a healthy system.

Today we have a Soviet of agencies. A rigid cabal that controls everything and imposes its will and philosophy (the power of the bottom line) on all. Step out of line and you step into unemployment.

Essentially a monolith-lead industry, lead by entrenched leadership bent not on innovation but on individual enrichment and self-preservation.

The Chiat\Day of pirate days, or the Goodby of kicking-establishment's-ass days are now rectangles on an Omnicom spread-sheet. They're a P and L who have to follow the mothership's modus operandi on pain of corporate Torquemada-isms.

This two year old chart from R3 is severely out-of-date, but still useful as an illustration. Many voices--the little type--have been reduced to just a few voices--the type row of blue type.

Consolidation of wealth and power into monopoly control is often good (for a while at least) for the monopolists who own the monopoly. But like arteries, monopolies, eventually harden and become ossified. The "blood" of a business and its workers stops flowing. They no longer work to get ahead (there is getting ahead). They work to not be fired. 

They no longer work as they should. They usually become dumb, become slow, become obsolete. Especially when someone comes in with a better idea and defeats them. Which eventually happens to most.

The consolidation of wealth and power--1000 years ago in China or 10 minutes ago on Madison Avenue--suppresses innovation, invention, ingenuity for inconspicuousness.

Before long--by age or deportment--you're ruled by a gerontocracy. Risk adverse, cautious, slow, and retrograde.

There are countless nation-states we could learn from. Including the amerkin nation-state in which the well-being of many is sacrificed to protect the enormous wealth of the powerful. 

Good things seldom come from arrangements like this.

You could look it up. 

Friday Faulkner.

We might have heard it this week. 

About 27 different times.

The last dingdong of doom.

In fact, humankind (which is an oxymoron) have been hearing the Chimes of Midnight since we went bi-pedal if not before.

I had a professor in college who one day during a lecture used the phrase.

The last dingdong of doom.

I was paying attention in class and I laughed out loud. It's a funny sequence of words.

He came at me. "Do you know what that's from?"

I didn't. 

The next class or the next class after that, he had a record-player sitting on his desk. 

He played the entirety of William Faulkner's "Banquet Speech." When he accepted the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. 

The speech, which I've printed and linked to below, is not for lightweights. And Faulkner's voice and delivery aren't the easiest to listen to. What's more, Faulkner is a writer you don't "breeze" through. You have to read and re-read and think unravel complex ideas. He wouldn't make it today. He's not TLDR. He's worse than that. He's TLDT. (Too long, demands thought.)

BTW, if tump speaks at a fourth grade level, Faulkner is at a 24th-grade level. It's not complexity for complexity's sake. It's complexity in the service of explaining life in all its messy noise.

In any event, below is Faulkner's speech. 

I was talking to a friend on Wednesday morning, a surpassingly intelligent and literate planner. I mentioned Faulkner's speech and how it was shaped and shaded by the existential fear of what seemed like incipient nuclear annihilation. The United States had exploded an h-bomb. The Soviets were on their way to exploding theirs. An iron-curtain had descended across Europe. A lot of megatons were chomping at the bit.

The speech in four words can be summed up as:

Stand up to fear.

Today, I believe, we are facing a fear of technological annihilation. The axing of 10,000 ad people earlier this week and the wholesale destruction of our industry along with most of all of human-ness in communication is the result of this fear. That fear is the fear of the insignificant-izing of people. That really only twelve or twenty-two hyper rich men matter.

We've forgotten to stand up to fear.

And our current politics and the constant onslaught of "news" and pings and hyperbole and catastrophe enflame the fire of fear.

I wondered instead if I could re-cast Faulkner's address. And substitute the current fear of Tech Dominance for his fear of H. Edited for length.

Below is his.

Below that, in italics, is mine.

  Navigate to:   Summary-- Facts-- Biographical-- Bibliography-- Banquet speech-- Nominations-- Photo gallery-- Other resources Award ceremony video Presentation Speech

William Faulkner’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950 *

Ladies and gentlemen,

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

--

Ladies and gentlemen,

...There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be replaced? When will my 'self' disappear. When will my soul be subsumed by the big money and bigger greed that has turned most of our planet into a slag heap? The young man or woman creating today has been victimized by a trillion dollars of messages telling them that humanity, that soul, that life itself doesn't matter.

We must learn again that we do matter. We must teach ourselves that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching ourselves that, forget fear forever.

Until we do so, we labor under a curse. We write not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. Our griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. We write not of the heart but of the glands.

Until we relearn that only humans can create. That only humans with our six-trillion synapses and four-million-years of struggle on this planet can create, imagine, explore and discover. Until we relearn this, we will write as though we stood and watched the end of mankind. I decline to accept the end of us and the rise of robots.

It is easy enough to say that we are immortal simply because we will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that mankind will not merely endure: we will prevail. We are immortal, not because we alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because we have a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. We alone. Not Musk. Not Bezos. Not Altman. Not algorithm.

The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is our privilege to help mankind endure by lifting hearts, by reminding all of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of our past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of mankind, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help us endure and prevail.

----

And, BTW.

Owned and Operated.

Maybe because I've very-nearly reached the enviable status of being essentially post-consumer, I seem to notice the aggressiveness and omnipresence of modern amerikan assault-marketing more than ever before.

Today, for instance, you are just sold via ads, but every newsfeed and seemingly half the articles in even the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal seem to be banging on about Black Friday. 

Boys and Girls, Black Friday is not a holiday. It's not a real thing. It's the point after which retailers have traditionally earned a profit. Yet there it is, like its Thanksgiving of Christmas or Veterans Day, in our calendars which are run by giant platforms which are also giant advertisers and giant retailers.

Cyber Monday ain't real either, though you'd never know it from a-merr-kahching's two most-important newspapers, aka 'pennysavers.'

Some years ago, I stumbled upon a new economic term that I stored in my prodigious memory. I thought it would catch on, but I think the same powerful forces that are ginning up a constant retail frenzy must have blocked the phrase and the concept behind it.

In fact, if you google "bionic monopoly," you get served an ad for amazon. Ostensibly because they sell the game, Monopoly.

The way I understand the term Bionic monopolies is straightforward. 

Old time monopolists, like Frick, Schwab, Rockefeller and Carnegie, dominated markets. You went to them or you went without.

Frick, Schwab and Carnegie sold 95% of the steel in the US--but they could only sell it once. Rockefeller sold 90% of the oil--but only once. Swift and Armour, 90% of the meat--but only once.

Moo.™ A wholly-owned subsidiary of trillionaire.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, CVS, Walmart and their ilk sell you products, but own your data identity. They sell it and sell it and sell it and sell it. You and your endless stream of data are their product. You are not a human. You are a revenue stream.

They sell to you endlessly because they own you and your attention (and thereby your wallet) completely.

Today, three advertising holding companies (down 25% in the last two weeks) control about 70% of the jobs in the ad industry. Keep your mouth shut and your head down or you'll never work in this town again.

Here's a bit from The Nation, I'll admit, a liberal journal. Nevertheless, here are some facts. Not sure what you and I can do about any of this (even though not long ago ad agencies were proclaiming 'the consumer is in control') but it might make sense to at least know you're being fucked coming and going when you're being fucked coming and going.

Yes, it's easy for me to say, try to notice these assaults on your time, your money and your freedom. As I said above, I buy hardly anything anymore.

A screendoor screen when Sparkle paws her way through one. One Pelikan m200 fountain pen a year, in whatever is their color of the year. An occasional Ebbets Field Flannels baseball cap or two.

Of course I buy three gallons of gas a week for my 1966 Simca 1500 with 224,000 miles on it. I buy food at the grocery. And a bagel now and again and when I'm in town, some Kung Pao (not too spicy) and about three Pastrami Queen sandwiches a year and now and again an order of kasha varnishkas. 

But the jumbo walmart/costco shopping carts filled with 128-ounce cisterns of mayonnaise, well, those days are not now and never were my bag.

I don't need or want 99.9979-percent of the shit that''s being hawked my way. What's more, since I fired xfinity, six months ago, I no longer have access to television. I haven't turned the set on since April, and I don't miss it and its addictive oppression.

As the giant cigarette companies years ago loaded tobacco with to up the amount of naturally-occurring nicotine, today's marketers do much the same with their addictive additives to hook us. With incessance, flashing lights, their name on everything, to things like the text messages I got on Thanksgiving (nominally a holiday) from Verizon beckoning me the "unwrap 2 great iphone offers."

I can't help but thinking there's a giant cosmic bamboozle being perpetrated. A whipped up frenzy that tells us with each passing pixel that if we don't jump in now with both feet and buy this that and more of this and that and still more of this and that we'll miss out on all of this and that for all time.

Be passive and don't act now!

AI tells us AI is the end-all-and-be-all. And bombards us with more AI-generated content that tells us how great AI is. They then tell us that we have to build nuclear powered data centers to power the AI that AI tells us we need more of. Of course then we need more nuclear-powered data centers, for more AI and no one is supposed to talk about waste we can't dispose of that will poison our planet for 100,000 years--AI will figure a way out of it, and we need AI and more of it every day. 

 

--

The same sort of bushwa is happening everywhere. Omnicom-IPG is good for the industry because Omnicom-IPG says its good for the industry--forget about the loss of thousands of jobs, the enshittification if the industry and the few jobs that are left. We're told it one-thousand times a day. It  must be true.

If you take a moment and think about how you're treated like they own you, perhaps you can begin to understand and maybe resist. Giant malefactors of great wealth feel compelled to bang a drum to blot out dissenting voices. That's a sign of bullying. Not benevolence.

Only you can stop the onslaught.

One step, then another.