Return on Investment.

I came. I saw. I was vindictive.

I got something of a vindicating call the other day. While I realize vindication doesn't pay the bills, every once-in-a-while it's worth the price of foregone revenue.

I think it was Bernbach who said, "it's not a principle until it costs you money." Thankfully, this principle cost me, but not so much so that I had to take a second out on Sparkle.

This was a client who came via an old work colleague, and came by the way of a pro-bono favor. I'm not a big one on favors--but when the person asking is someone you've known for a quarter of a century, and the client is doing something good for the world, you can stretch a point. Not too often. But once in a while and with a sort-of white-glove discretion.

The pro-bono ask was fairly simple, as they rarely are. It was just a manifesto. Having read and remembered something from a Greek philosopher called Heraclitus not too many days before, a quotation of his seem shockingly apt for the subject.

I quickly ran it by my friend, who quickly ran it by the client. In about 42 seconds I had somehow landed on that slim sliver of loft that collided somehow with dreams and aspirations--all without being so high-falutin' you want to gag on your own pomposity. 

I've worked at digital agencies. My soul has grown deep with pomposity.

In any event, in about two shakes of a mackerel's tail I was on the Ameche with my pro-bono client and my friend--reading the whole exegesis. About three-quarters of the way through, the client blurted, "you have to work for me."

In about two weeks we had a fairly hefty scope of work signed. She would pay me a little over $8500/month for the six months of the scope.

The first few months went great and I got a check with a minimum of back-and-forth emailing. But then the checks stopped. With work having been done by me on a "drop-everything" modus operandi.

Expecting me to drop-everything is not cool. Not paying is uncool-er.

H, my business director tried everything from honey to vinegar and back again. Eventually we were cc'd on an email by mistake and we heard about cash-flow issues--which are not my problem. Finally, we got a check for $2,000 out of the $8,500 owed. 

Again, tres uncool.

Frankly, I closed the books on the business.

One of the things I've learned in running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is that you can't relax on who you are, your belief in yourself, and your worth. I've worked hard to position myself as expensive and I'm not about to back-track on that well-earned posture.

Yesterday, I got an email from the now ex-client. Needing work like the work I had done for her before for another client she was pitching.

You realize along the way--you force yourself to--that your work is special and unique. That is, no one else can do it how I do it. That's why I get to charge what I get to charge.

The mathematics contained in those sentences were never understood by the holding companies. They saw the very work they did and the people doing it as cheap, interchangeable and not at all unique. 

No matter what business you're in--your job is first and foremost to be different. To do something no one else does. 

If you're an indifferent hitter and an indifferent fielder, you find a way to become an iron-man--you find a way to fill in when guys are hurt. Or you find a way to squeeze a runner over, or start a little 'bingo' if the opposing twirler is throwing aspirin. You find a way to get under the other team's skin, to disrupt a pattern, to make some noise. In advertising and in sports, many of these skills are of ephemeral importance--they're hardly seen except by the cognoscenti and there ain't too many cognoscenti left anywhere at this point. Most of them have been cost consultanted into oblivion.

The hardest thing is finding that thing. 
The second hardest thing is finding a way to actually believe it on those days when you feel like shit. 
The third hardest thing is charging for it and not relenting. 

That's vindication, too.

Twenty Universals.

Nice guy, Augustine.

And blogs!

Another party heard from.

trump removes faces of "non-believers." A tradition thousands of years old.

Someone crossed Germanicus.

Desecration.

Maybe it's a function of being old--of being old and having read a lot of history, but lately I've been thinking about some universal stories various civilizations or cultures or even social organizations have told themselves through the millennia as a way to rationalize their perceived superiority, their right to rule and their ascendance over others.

These are the things that affirm their belief in the order of the universe. Like the divine right of kings. If you look at most hegemonies today--which are bigger and more powerful than medieval kingdoms--they establish an order that posits the divine right of corporate leadership. Or the divine right of MBA. Or the natural primacy of private equity. These high posts aren't necessarily earned so much as bestowed--as they were under different polities so many centuries ago.

It occurs to me that many of their stories and beliefs large and small recur over and again throughout history. They allow us to believe in our own primacy and the rightness of our way of behaving. You see these things in countries, religions, companies even agencies. 

Almost always, after a while, they turn out to be false. Or half true, which is a measure worse than false.

1. Previous management/leadership/gods sucked. Our new management/leadership/gods are the right ones. If we listen to them, they'll undo past errors and we'll return to our ordained golden age. (For about 300 years, Roman rule vacillated between "pagan" gods and christian gods. Statues became "magic slates" with faces peeled off an replaced per the mores of the moment.

2. You might not see the truth. But that's ok. I do. Trust me and you'll be ok.

3. Anyone who disagrees with me/with us is wrong. They are to be disparaged--even hated and killed--because they don't follow the one true way.

4. There is one true way. But only we can see it and do it.

5. It doesn't matter that our enlightened path isn't helping you yet--and is only helping my friends. We'll get down to your sort before too long.

6. If you're impatient, you're a doubter and not true to the cause. Therefore you deserve nothing.

7. You must be one-hundred percent obedient. I can do as I wish. My supremacy means the rules that apply to you don't apply to me.

8. I get special treatment because I deserve it and am special.

9. Money and wealth are magic. They will accrue to me even if I am serving no one but myself.

10. Anyone against me is against you. Hate them.

11. Any consequences of our actions can be cleaned up by others in the future. We don't need to worry about them now.

12. We possess magic. Only we know how it works and how to use it. Everyone else is deficient.

13. My profit comes now. Your profit will come later.

14. I get paid first. You'll get paid eventually.

15. Prophecies you pay for are self-fulfilling.

16. Agreement and approval can be bought cheap.

17. Doing less and charging more is the secret until you're caught. And when you are caught, change the rules.

18. It can be done just by pressing a button if you know how.

19. I have the data that proves it.

20. The system helps only those who create it.

21. Move onto the next place before you get caught. 

It hardly matters what entity you're associated with. These are the beliefs that rule our world.

Read carefully enough and you'll see them in every campaign promise and every corporate press-release.

Incapacitated.

Last weekend, March 21st to be exact, was my younger grandson's first birthday and my wife and I dutifully fired up our 1966 Simca 1500 and drove up to Boston--about two hours from the Gingham Coast--where my elder daughter and her family live.

We did the usual grandparent stuff. Bought too many toys, too many books, too much clothing and played too many games with our grandkids. The little one's birthday party was on Sunday, March 22, and by that time he was in the throes of what seemed to be a cold. But like my own daughters--and my wife, for that matter--my grandkids are troupers and the show--in this case a birthday party for about 30 must go on. There was a $189 cake to eat and pizza from one of Boston's finest pizzerias.

By the time we arrived home early Sunday evening, I felt like I had caught a cannonball in my chest. I could scarcely breathe and as the night went on I became increasing lightheaded. That's ok, I guess. Who wants a heavy-head?

Of course, as stated above, the show must go on, and I refused to take seriously any intimations of my own mortality. I talked to clients. I did a decent amount of work. I hocked a few people who owe me money. Most important, I got an SOW signed by a new client. It's not the most money in the world. But still, I can't think of another agency who signs clients who find him--all without a song and a dance and a pitch.

By the time Wednesday rolled around, I was in full physical, intestinal, equilibrial and muscular-skeletal arrears. My head-ached like a holding company spread sheet. I had a cough like Vesuvius and no matter what I did I couldn't position myself in any way so as to mitigate the pain and discomfort I was in.

By Friday morning, my wife had finally prevailed and I consented to go to a local emergency room. In short order the Physician's Assistant prescribed Tamiflu and in just a few hours the local CVS had filled my scrip.

I had a notion--a wrong one--that a lot of the wonder drugs knock out illnesses at first blush. Apparently though, I let Flu A gestate for way too long and it had a powerful grip on nearly every sensitive bit of my corpus, which includes my soul, which I so often over look.

It's rare for me to feel mentally and physically incompetent. But this week I couldn't write, I couldn't think, I couldn't even worry. Or, I couldn't even worry about anything except maybe dying, which frankly would have been a welcome relief. As for my physicality, while I usually walk about seven miles a day--rain or shine, over the past week, I averaged about seven yards a day. 

With good intentions I'd try to walk Sparkle, but I'd make it only to the front gate before I'd feel short of breath and woozy. 

I can't one-hundred percent resolve if David Lean did better capturing my teeter in his great 1954 movie "Hobson's Choice," with Charles Laughton. Or if that recognition should go to F.W. Murnau in his 1924 epic "The Last Laugh," featuring Emil Jannings.

In all, I suppose I feel about 79% healed. Though I'm still seeing the world with Dutch Angles.

You could do worse.

Dumbbell.

Years ago, I made a career move that was about 97% dumb, but I wound up learning a lot from it.

I had joined Digitas, which was independent at the time, thinking it was an ad agency, not a ersatz consultancy like a Bain, McKinsey or Accenture. I thought it was an agency that did shitty work. Improving work is a challenge I was up for. What I couldn't handle was staring down 109 Harvard MBAs who knew everything about marketing and advertising though they had never actually done any.

I quickly learned something--this is 22 years ago--that has been more relevant since I quit Digitas in 2005. I learned that in many places whatever it management cannot do or cannot understand, they find a way to say those things they can't are not important.

If you owned a fleet of cars and a dusty parking lot and no hose, you'd formulate data that demonstrates that having a shiny car is dumb. That keeping a car sparkling is a waste of time and money. If you owned a sailing ship and had no access to vitamin C, you'd probably find data to suggest scurvy will overtime strengthen the fleet and the bloodlines.

Management consultants, to be blunt, don't understand creatives or creativity. So they've constructed huge ratiocinations to deny their importance and the need for creativity.

According to WPP's Annual Report of 2017, WPP had 203,000 employees. In WPP's Annual Report of 2025, released a week ago, WPP had 99,000 employees.

The corporate headshots who have presided over the halving of the workforce and a nearly 85% loss of market-valuation, of course are the only ones who know how to turn the ship around. 

Here's a small sampling of quotations about their business and the services WPP provides from the 2025 annual report.

I've spent my entire life in the ad industry, as have many of my friends. None of the quotations selected here has even the vaguest connection to what was my chosen profession. To be clear, I don't even know what most of them means. 

In fact, it all reminds me of Richard Feynman's academic writing on Quantum mechanics, which I also can't even pretend to understand.

“Quantum mechanics” is the description of the behavior of matter and light in all its details and, in particular, of the happenings on an atomic scale. Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen.

Newton thought that light was made up of particles, but then it was discovered that it behaves like a wave. Later, however (in the beginning of the twentieth century), it was found that light did indeed sometimes behave like a particle. Historically, the electron, for example, was thought to behave like a particle, and then it was found that in many respects it behaved like a wave. So it really behaves like neither. Now we have given up. We say: “It is like neither.”

If that's clear to you, you might be qualified to write some BOGO ads for Applebee's "Cheesestravaganza."

The clip from above that really rubbed me the wrong was was the last one I chose, one portion of it in particular: "our role will become more...important, as marketing continues to evolve and becomes more fragmented and complex."

Here's a metaphor.

The scientists currently running the ad business seem to think they will reach effectiveness Valhalla if they can count all the stars in the sky, all the sand in the sea and all the pockmarks on trump's keister. They spend their billions trying to find ways to sift through massive amounts of data with great efficiency. They never for a second say, the alternative to complexity is not a better accounting mechanism, but is more focus, more clarity, more definition.

They look to nuance and slice and mince and dice to find the precise moment to sell synthetic motor oil to blind non-drivers using left handed stick-shifts in 1922 Dusenbergs. They never say that granularity--is the enemy, not the answer.

What so many in advertising and in technology fail to reckon with is the enormous complexity of the human brain. Attempts to "recreate" thinking or "synthesize" it have been around since the beginning of time. It's one of those play-god-like things humans hubris over. They seldom say, "this is beyond us." 

According to Matthew Cobb, the human brain, has 90 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses and its billions of glia (these figures are all guesstimates), so the idea of mapping it to the synapse level will not become a reality until the far distant future. Yet we believe we can predict behaviors and create stimulus to guide those behaviors.

Cobb says “systems can involve astonishing degrees of complexity. For example, in the body wall of a maggot there are cells that respond as the maggot stretches when it moves, forming part of a circuit that controls movement. Each of these cells has eighteen input synapses and fifty-three output synapses; most if not all of these synapses can involve more than one neurotransmitter.  All that just to tell a maggot muscle movement circuit–not even its brain–that its skin has stretched. Researchers have recently described a single inhibitory neuron in a region called the visual thalamus of the mouse–it has 862 input synapses and 626 output synapses. What exactly the cell does is not clear, beyond the fact that it is involved in many different functions. The complexity of the nervous system–any nervous system–is simply astonishing.”

You really believe data based on a poorly written survey will get me to produce "strategic, imaginative work that will drive client growth."

Most things closest to the cores of our souls we can sum up in three or four words.

We should Love thy neighbor.
Care for our children.
Clean up our messes.
Lend a hand.
Chew our food.
Rotate our tires.
Don't over-eat.
Don't drink and drive.

Most brands, the ones we carry with us used to do the same.

The ultimate driving machine.
Soup is good food.
Kills germs on contact.
The quicker-picker-upper.
Have it your way.

If you can't write things like that--which holding company management can't--you convolute ways of saying that way of communicating or thinking no longer matters.

You make something up, that only you understand.

Thoughts from Don McKinney.