Lying in Bed.

There's a company that advertises ceaselessly on LinkedIn. They bang on and on about the incredible freedom and power and even joy employees will get from their services. I'm not sure what their services actually are because the ad is so bad and smiley. But I think it involves doing your own payroll.

A friend of mine freelances at one of the big holding companies--the single one that seems to be growing (even though they keep firing people.) If he started working there on, say, June 1st, he spent the entire first week subject to training so he could understand how to record and enter the time he spent on this project or that. 

I know there are countless software companies that make doing your own expenses, booking your own rental car or vacation, or filing something or other, allegedly as easy as destroying a democracy.

I got news for you, giant corporations. I don't want to do my own payroll. I work hard. I want you to pay me without me having to do more work. When you're a freelancer, even if you work for a friend, it often takes 90 days and three or four prodding emails to get paid. Then you get an automated email, telling you you can get your money today for a mere one-percent or the total. 

In other words, if I have a $9,000 month retainer from a company I do work for, I can pay $90 for the privilege of getting paid in 89 days rather than 90. If Frank Nitti did behaved like that on the old Untouchables TV show, Robert Stack would make mincemeat out of him.

With the Enlightenment finally over once and for all (the new US administration will kill it with more ardor and efficiency--at MBA speed--more thoroughly than Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or Nixon--I'm thinking once again about dichotomies. I'm thinking in a Manichean manner: light versus darkness, good versus evil. Or more starkly, loving fellow humans versus exploiting them.

That's where we get down to advertising.

Do brands exist to pick our pockets, maximize our profits and enrich our shareholders, or do brands exist to serve people, and thereby make us rich? In other words, do brands work via doing something good or by being ruthless.

The other way of looking at this that helps me weigh what's happening in amerika is economic. Is the pie growing or is the pie shrinking? 

During my final years at ogilvy, I realized the stark difference between the place in 2020 and the place in 2000. In 2000 there was optimism and growth--there were dozens of great and important clients and jobs to be done. In 2020, the agency had turned into a zero-sum game. There were about three awards-potential assignment a year. And if I got one, you didn't. Knives were out. Clients no longer mattered. That awards-potential assignment did. 

With apologies to Darwinists, the agency business has become "survival of the trophy-ist."

About ten years ago, I stumbled until two acronyms that capture the dichotomy between today's competing agency, brand and world view. Everything falls, starkly, into one of these two groupings and there is no venning or meeting in the middle.

What we have is a battle of YOYO versus WITT, with most enterprises, brands, agencies, social organizations, government systems most firmly in the YOYO camp.

YOYO stands for YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN. You'll get nothing from us other than a monthly automatic charge on your credit card. Most often you don't know what you're getting for that charge. You don't remember that you signed up for it. You don't use it and you don't know how to cancel it.

Further, if you need or want an explanation, if you have a problem, if you need help to make something work, YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN. 

I suppose, with a tip of the Mitre to the Catholic church, they call it self-service because self-abuse was already taken. 

This is the world without healthcare. The world without please and thank you. The world without help or answers. The world of hold times, bots and bullshit. 

The alternative, for brands, agencies, government, spouses, friends and more is WITT. WE'RE IN THIS TOGETHER. In other words, let us help you find the jello in the supermarket, explain a cable bill, show up on-time not at minute 239 in a 240-minute window. 

WITT is the vanishing world. Because in the short-run it costs a bit more.

One of the great charades that was perpetrated by all of the holding companies and all of the agencies in all of the world over the last twenty years was "the open plan work-space." All the evidence pointed to the dumbness and unproductiveness of open plan--plus people hated it--but it saved money, so it became de rigueur. As for a quiet place to think: YOYO.

Of course this post isn't about open plan, or phone trees, or anything else save do we decide as a society, an agency, an industry that we treat others as we wish to be treated or do we just MBA-the world to death and maximize the fuck out of people in pursuit of profit that goes almost entirely to people who would throw water on a drowning man.

We've made our beds.

We're laying in them and lying in them.

Our Power.

A few years ago, it might have been five, it might have been fifteen, a handful of books written in Nazi Germany and in German were finally translated into English and made available to Americans. They were written by an alcoholic Jew, Hans Fallada, who somehow survived the war and the Third Reich, though he no longer had all his faculties intact. Who does?

I leapt at the book like a seal at a bucket of fish during feeding time at the zoo. And while I didn't love them, one of them "Every Man Dies Alone," tells a story that I believe might become increasing relevant as the darkness of autocracy and FLG (fucking the little guy) spreads over more and more of what we, without sarcasm, used to call the free world.

It's been maybe a decade since I read "Every Man," but, as I've said, the book made an impact and I remember these details. 

Otto and Elise Quangel are a working class couple in Berlin. They were not interested in politics, but after Elise Quangel
learned that her brother had fallen in France, she and her husband began committing acts of civili disobedience.

To authoritarians, the greatest act of civil disobedience is telling the truth. So Otto and Elise began writing leaflets on simple postcards that made people aware of realities they worked to avoid.

They wrote hundreds of them, leaving them in apartment stairwells and dropping them into mailboxes. They knew the law made this a capital crime but they didn't care. Eventually, Berlin's Chief of Police enlisted virtually his entire force to find the Quangels. They continued their work for well over a year until they were betrayed and arrested. 

They were tried by Nazi judge Roland Freisler and were executed in Plötzensee Prison. 

There's not a lot normal people like the people who read Ad Aged can do to combat the billionaire class and the forces of stark and mean totalitarianism. And this post could be an over-reaction to things that haven't happened and might never. Maybe, somehow, amerika will regain its moral bearing. Or at least the morals of bears.

But it pays to remember the power of what we can do. Us FLGs.

I'd wager that many of the 80,000 or so people who read Ad Aged every week type for a living. We can type what we see and help other people see it. As Orwell is said to have said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

The notes the Quangel's wrote and distributed were not eloquent. They were not sophisticated. They weren't erstwhile Thomas Paine's. They told the truth bluntly. They didn't adorn. 

Often, unadorned bluntness is effective.

...

This is a deep dark rabbit hell-hole I've wandered down today. And I might be wrong and melodramatically wrong. 

I hope so.

But let's remember, always, that we have power. We have the power of our brains, the power of our craft, the power of our hearts. Etiam si omnes, ego non. Even if all others, not I. We have the power of those words and that way of being.

Again. Maybe I'm over-reacting to things that might never happen. 

But Hans Fallada.

Oh, and Claude McKay, too.

Long History.

There's something wrong about 24/7 news coming to you from 247 different channels, in addition to the added inundation of what you're getting from your friends, on social, via texts. Even the "news" you get if you take a cab, or fill up with gasoline. Because in amerika in 2024, you are never, never, never further than an axe's length from a screen blaring something.

The always-on-ness of the news hurts. Because it delivers a constant stream of more. It would be like going to a restaurant and being served 247 courses. You barely have time to savor course number 58 before you're hit with 59. Before long, you can no longer taste, remember, enjoy. Before long, you're obese, bursting at the seams, and too captive to even realize what's happening.

Another way of thinking about this is to imagine your brain as a bucket. Water is filling the bucket at a gallon a minute. You can only bail out the bucket at three-quarts a minute. The bucket overflows. All you can do is keep bailing. You have no time to mop up what's spilling all-over your hard-wood, old-growth lumber floors.

This is not fully-formed in my head. But history, learning, even understanding takes perspective. 

I'd imagine when Phoenician letter-forms came to Greece thousands of years ago, it took a long time to get from recognizing the shapes, to associating the shape with a sound, to putting sounds together, to understanding the sounds as words, to meaning. We don't think about that because our brains are trained to that process--but it wasn't always that way.

I think we're having the same issue understanding advertising in a typical commercial break and always on information. We lose what's been beamed at us for the next bit of beaming.

Life today reminds me of the snail who was mugged by a turtle. When the cops finally arrived on the scene and asked the snail what happened, the snail could only reply, "I don't know. It all happened so fast."

When the Covid pandemic started, historians, particularly Walter Schiedel started trying to look at what was happening with a long history point of view. 99.999-percent of people we're busy worrying about who's sick, what's happening at work, who's wearing a mask, where's it spreading and how-many people died today. A similar dynamic appeared, I'm sure 700 years ago when the Black Death killed more than one-out-of-every-three Europeans.

It takes long-history, a special kind of perspective to say, "the Black Death led to the modern economy because it led to labor shortages. Labor shortages gave more power to workers. The tethers of serfdom frayed, and workers left baronial estates for higher wages elsewhere. It set the world in motion and changed everything."

Of course, you can't think about stuff like this when everyone around you is dying and you're afraid you might be next. But you don't have to be a marxist to recognize that history--that which cannot be destroyed--is a dialectic. A struggle--an ongoing, never-ending struggle between tectonic forces. With different sides "winning" at different times. 

For a while, I'd say the little guys had the upper-hand. All at once we could work-from-home, there were worker shortages and wages rose. The momentum like a pendulum metronomes wildly, like Khactaturian on amphetamines. Where it stops, nobody knows.'

Actually, it never stops.

But you can.

And you can try perspective.

Buy Now! Bye Now.

As is all-too typical for what used to be called "the advertising industry," (I refer to it these days as the holding-company-Ponzi-industry) an event that was supposed to change everything changed absolutely nothing.

All through election day--perhaps the most consequential (or the last) election in amerikan history--amerika's marketers couldn't even take an hour off from their incessant and ceaseless inundation of the amerikan public.

Here's a small slice of my email box as millions voted and millions more votes were reputedly counted.

Marketing today reminds me of Kaytusha missiles. The sort the Soviets used as they advanced inexorably west from Stalingrad and took over more than half of Europe. 

There's little ready. 
There's no aim.
There's an abundance of fire.
Every day another Gotterdammerrung. 

As a matter of fact, if I were still in a holding company agency, I think I'd take the two videos I've pasted here, embed them in a PowerPoint deck and add a title page that reads, "Our Media Plan in Two Videos." I'd bet even the boys in procurement would be impressed.

There's no point in this post because no marketer worth his bonus would ever take a break from marketing for something as non-pecuniary as peace. 

Solemnity is a loser's game. Things like respect for veterans, presidents, war dead, religious holidays--they're just impediments to making more money. That's why--except for Christmas--every amerikan holiday is tacked onto another day so we can gave a three-day weekend and buy more shit. Then grill it.

Years ago, I began believing that amerika should change the slogan on our money from E Pluribus Unum--which no one understands or believes--to Tabernam Usque Ad Stillabunt: Shop till you drop. 

I know being a consumer is a personal choice. We can avert our eyes, decide to not buy shit we don't need and even, as I do, keep the TV turned off. 

But the incessance of modern amerika marketing machine has changed every moment into a "purchase occasion." We have no values other than BOGO and save 25% if you buy now. 

There's a lot to worry about in the world today. And maybe rampant over-consumption or frenzied selling doesn't make it to the top ten.

But to me, it's all evidence of a soulless nation. Which seems to be getting not only the leader it wants, but the leader it deserves.

Tarnished-Lining Notebooks.

Though I try with every new assignment, every new project, and in the past tried with every new year or new agency, I've never been able to keep a notebook. 

I've seen friends--even my wife--who keep a MLO (Moleskine Like Object) and assiduously write down the major events of every meeting they attend. They date things. Some people even keep these notebooks. They collect them over time and store them in file cabinets or bookshelves. I don't need to search for more reasons to flagellate myself. But my inability to take neat notes is up there. 

(BTW, years ago I read "The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti: IBM, the CIA, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World's First Desktop Computer." From that book, I read about these notebooks and have been buying them ever since.)

Despite swearing to myself to take serious notes, about thirty minutes in to most meetings, my mind starts wandering. Sometimes I'll start writing headlines. But more often, I'll sketch little pictures of people in the meeting. (My drawing skills haven't advanced since I was about 14.) As time goes by, I'll doodle. I'll draw sports cars or boats or city skylines. Or interlocking geometric shapes.

That said, I often write a note to myself, something I've heard that sounds "headline-able," profound, or even, thematic and platformic. 

When I get to one of those statements, no matter how long the meeting I'm in is due to last, essentially, I'm done with the meeting. I know what needs to be said. I know my brief. Now I have to a) convince others of what I've heard. And b) write something that explains it. A spot. A manifesto. Or one-hundred headlines.

Because I have a frightening memory, I don't usually need a notebook to refer to. When I find one of these answers, they're pretty high in volume. They get my attention. They seem like barnacles to me. They latch onto whatever lobe will take them and I can't shake them away. I virtually never lose them. 

I don't know how many people reading this have this malady. There are ads I've had from 40 or 50 years ago that I didn't nail. I remember those ads, and I'm still working on them during my fallow moments.

With all that as background, I am enduring the slow process of un-over-stuffing my over-stuffed New York City apartment. Just now, I found three spiral bound Muji notebooks on the floor alongside an expanse of filled to the brim bookshelves. I flipped through them and they revealed my usual forensics. 

Each notebook had a serious start. Then devolved into doodles and notes to myself. Then, 127-empty-pages.

This week has been a helluva week whether you're young and have had your horizon cut short, or you're old like me and, as the Ol' Redhead might have said, "And you're rounding third and heading home."

I've felt that aged despair for a while. I guess it comes with the territory when all you really have in life is your work. I love my work. I love many of my clients and the people I'm lucky enough to work with. But, as above, I am rounding third and heading home. What do you do with your time if you don't work and don't play golf?

Maybe it was a line in one of the notebooks I just perused that got me all Wordsworth-y and thinking, dreamily, of my mortality. I saw a line in one of them. I must have been freelancing at Ogilvy, before I was hired for my second stint.

Strange things happen when you freelance. You might have been a CCO in a previous job. All of a sudden, you're rewriting people's bios for a pitch deck. You do whatever it takes to take the money they're willing to pay you. 

This obsequiousness hurts.

It's like being a Hall-of-Fame catcher and being asked to warm up the fourth reliever down in the bullpen. It's a blow to your ego. But you take it.

I think we all feel like that.

Maybe this week especially.

Anyway, back to the summary line I ran across just now in one of my one-third filled notebooks.

"When did I start reporting to all the people who used to report to me?"

There's a lot of come-uppance in life.

In fact, maybe it's accurate to say, life is come-uppance.

That doesn't make it any easier.

Come on down.

Joy. Oh Boy.

I grew up in the Ally & Gargano style of advertising. Or, more accurately, the Carl Ally style of advertising.

I believe in this style of advertising.

Advertising that provides the reader/viewer with facts. That rarely uses adjectives. That rarely engages in emotional manipulation.

I worked at Ally & Gargano for five long years. During that time, I probably produced 300 ads. During that time, I rose to become Ally & Gargano's youngest-ever Senior Vice President, Group Creative Director. Doing all that I set my career way back--probably ten years.

Because while I was creating ads that were based on logic and facts, the industry had shifted. Shifted dramatically.

If I had a dime for every creative, account person, planner and janitor who told me I was too logical, I'd have at least ten dollars now. My thinking was old, obsolete, and outdated. People want to feel good about brands. Not know how they work and feel good that they know.

The industry decided emotions ruled the day. That rational, thoughtful arguments were too much for people. We had to tell them how happy and satisfied we'd make them. We had to show people having orgasms induced by a mayonnaise, or a nacho chip, or a beer, or a vacation destination. The only way we believed to communicate an emotional benefit was to tell people the emotional benefit and to show people smiling.

As Kamala Harris was rolling out "Joy," I think a lot of people were feeling pain. Living paycheck-to-paycheck. Fearing what drugs would do to their kids. Worrying about job loss, a factory closing, schools that stopped teaching. They worried about violence and a world that seemed to have spun off its axis.

You can say Joy once a second for one-hundred years. It wouldn't change a thing.

It's like getting crammed into a middle-seat smaller than your ass and the guy in front of you reclines and the people on either side of you hog the armrests. Being told, have a nice day, or that we're all about making you happy doesn't change that situation.

As Kamala Harris was rolling out "Joy," my Ally & Gargano roots left me with a sick, worried feeling. Sure, I want joy in my life, but how.

I sat at my computer and wrote this ad. Proclaiming Joy--whether you're a brand, a life-partner, or a presidential candidate is fine. 

How is better.

I sent this to the Harris campaign. I heard nothing back. As an ad this is so far from the tenor of the times--I expected nothing back. No one in advertising would run an ad like this. 

It's so serious. 

It doesn't show people smiling.

It demands viewers read. And the product itself might be held accountable if it puts in plain English what to expect. 

Tripe is our default setting.

When I worked on Boeing after the 737 Max crashes, I had a simple plan. Leading to the recertification of the plane, an ad a day for one-hundred days of "This is what we did today."  ie. "We're 97 days from launch. This is everything we did today to make the Boeing 737 Max the safest plane that's ever flown."

I wanted them to look like the great United Technologies ads from the early 2000s. Whether you read them or not, they looked well-engineered. So you believed United Technologies were well-engineered.

This circuitry is missing from modern advertising. Because, against the admonitions of David Ogilvy, deep-down the entire ad industry--including clients--believe the consumer is a moron, that the consumer doesn't care enough to read, or simply can't read.

So, we pander.

We say joy.

We show people who are merry.

Undistinguishable from any competitor whose SUV or clear plastic wrap also makes people merry.

We started thinking we could own adjectives and differentiate them. Our joy is better than your joy.

Before I spend my money on almost anything, I want a permission to believe. I'm too hard-assed to buy the idea that a new laundry detergent will have the affect of prozac--lemon-scented, to boot.

And if I'm shelling out $47,000 (the average price in America of a new car) I need to know more than that it has Apple Car Play and can nominally parallel park by itself, because I'm too lame to know how to.

For a pessimist I am ever hopeful.

That the Harris campaign will be a turning point.

That maybe someone will realize that there's product inside of products. And that products, people, services need to be explained, differentiated, and back by promises kept.

That seems basic to me.

And 97-99-percent of people reading this will tell themselves "George is an obsolete, angry old man." They're right.

That doesn't mean I'm wrong.

--

BTW, as examples, I've chosen some lesser-know Carl Ally ads.