Pep Rally.

In a time of universal techno-hypnosis, believing in the human brain is a revolutionary act.

I'm blessed or cursed with curiosity and a love of learning.

I'm voracious, in fact.

There's hardly a field I'm not piqued by.

And it's all fed by my reading habit and my wide field of vision. 

I see a lot. I read a lot. I curious a lot.

Ergo, and apologies to Descartes, I am a lot.

Friday is the day new book reviews come out in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. 

Yesterday, I read, shared and ordered these five. 

A fairly typical Friday for me.

I won't read them all. 

No one could.

But I've been invigorated, I've learned, I've been curious-ized and made more "me" by each review, each book, and each rabbit-hole I triumph down.

Here's the Pep Rally part.

Apocryphally, George Orwell is said to have said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

Whether he said it or not, the statement is still grand and still worth thinking about. 

One of the things I love about the quotation or fauxtation above is how adjustable it is. The in a time of part can be changed to encompass just about any thing, and the action part (telling the truth) can be similarly changed.

In baseball for instance, a wily manager might say, "In a time when pitching has the upper hand, slashing line-drives is a revolutionary act." In advertising, "in a time when everyone is chasing after the latest trend, basics are a revolutionary act."

You get it.

Today and every day, I get about sixteen calls and emails and texts and lacrymotic episodes about the descent of man, the dumbness and the evil of amerikkka and the machine take-over of nearly everything that used to be human. 

I had one yesterday, a long one with H, my friend and business director. H is an optimistic person. But yesterday she was as gloomy as a sump pump.

I went to the Orwell above.

You know, H, I said Orwell said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." let's revise that for today.

In a time of universal stupidity, reading, thinking, sharing, learning is a revolutionary act.

In a time of universal stultifying machine-lead bureaucratic bumbling, helping people, being a human is a revolutionary act.

In a time of universal cutting of costs in the name of efficiency, doing something by hand is a revolutionary act.

In a time of universal deaf ears, listening is a revolutionary act.

I grew up during a period of historiography where the contrast between the glory that was Rome, the eventual Renaissance and the in-between Dark Ages was regarded as light and dark.

As if the Dark ages had no light.

Yes, life might have been nasty, brutish and short as Thomas Hobbes said in his book "The Leviathan." But there was also laughter, loving and learning.

It might not have fit the historical narrative but it was there.

Always and forever, laughter, loving and learning are revolutionary acts.

Laughter, loving and learning are our revolutionary acts, H. I vehemented. 

No matter what the crazy measles-loving, algorithm-adoring, profit-perverts do to our lives and our world, we can

Laugh, love and learn.

If we do that, I'm sorry--optimism, George--WHEN we do that, we cannot be defeated.

As Faulkner said, our voices may be puny.

They may be overwhelmed by graft and money and theft and sick Lucullan plutocratic foie-gras-goose like self-bloating, but we have our souls.

We have our laughs.

Our eyes.

Our hands.

Our minds.

Our souls.

I ran into this poem yesterday, by a doctor called Harold T. Meryman, a cryobiologist who saved millions of lives because he figured out how to freeze blood so it can be stored and shipped to people who need it. He wrote this, in part, to explain what he does

I also read this, by a fourth-grader by Isobel Cooley, who wrote this poem as a school assignment.

These are not the products of sophisticated AI systems backed by trillions of dollars of R&D and data centers.

They are joy and laughter. 

Again to Faulkner, when he accepted his Nobel, as the world faced nuclear obliteration in 1949, he wrote,

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.

Props and souls with which we will feed as we feed our worlds as best we can with laughter, loving and learning.

Sure, I'd rather have millions in the bank, economic fairness, justice, honor and universal healthcare, but those aren't right now on the muskian-agenda.

We have ourselves and each other.

We don't have to buy the story-line of the inevitable undoing of humankind at the "hands" of super-powerful, super-brilliant machines. We don't have to buy the narrative that the trillionaires are forcing down our throats for their further enrichment. 

You, I, your brain, my brain has 90 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses and its billions of glia (these figures are all guesstimates). We can out-work, out-play, out-think, out-love, out-silly, out-solve, out-out anything ever created or anything that ever will be created. And the next hype cycle and the next.

What's more, we have laughter, loving and learning.

And that's enough.

Norman is an Island.

There's a phrase I learned from having spent more time than I wish I had in direct marketing. That phrase is "member-get-a-member." And though the work that comes from most direct marketing is horrid and immediately shreddable--I think the notion of member-get-a-member is Bernbachian in its embrace of simple, timeless human truth.

If something is of value, people will tell their friends. That's what it means. 

Member-get-a-member is also not just a way of selling, it's a way of living. If you're a decent human being.

From an advertising point of view, in my ill-informed way of looking at the direct-marketing world, the apotheosis of member-get-a-member was the work done for MCI, the nascent phone company, when they helped break AT&T's monopoly. 

Messner, Berger, Vetere, Carey, McNamee, Schmetterer, and others developed MCI's "friends and family" work. Basically, they premised, you probably make 92-percent of your calls to just four or five people. If you help MCI sign up those people everyone will save some high percentage on their calls. You win. Your friends win. MCI wins.

That's what marketing is supposed to do. Offer advantages and benefits and information to people that helps them get things they wouldn't ordinarily otherwise get. And thereby help clients, too.

A friend of mine, a one-time client once said to me, a good ad should make a viewer feel like "where have you been all my life?" Maybe that means there should be a bit of a revelation in it, a new-ness, a wow. Our single litmus test on the launch of IBM Watson was that the ad had to tell the viewer of something they could do that they couldn't do before. "I couldn't do this, now I can." Now, that's a net-take-away.

I'm 99.79-percent sure a $49.99 phone plan, or a mom driving an SUV-full of plastic children to soccer practice in the rain doesn't do any of those things and bores the corpuscles out of you to boot.

Much of the marketing world, rather than offering something materially different, or emphasizing some benefit for the viewer hopes to get by, instead, by pretending to give a hoot about their putative customers. As you wait on hold for hours at a time, or wrestle with an imbecilic bot, you'll likely be told twice a minute that your call is important to the company so assiduously ignoring your call.

Marketers are quick to call people members or family. Their loathe to actually treat customers with any semblance of kindness or decency. If I had a dime for every ad agency that says, "we treat people like family," I'd have at least eighty cents now. (I think there are only about eight agencies left. Nine more than we need.)

My local supermarket calls itself "your family market," but it's hard to get one of their low-wage workers to ring up your order, slice your turkey, help you find something, not put the eggs under the detergent or attend to the clean up in aisle six.

I suppose if I adhered more to the Marxian dialectic, I'd file "member-get-a-member" under the heading of cognitive dissonance or bait-and-switch or robbing-peter-to-pay-paul. You can't just call someone a member and not treat them with kindness, consideration, caring and decency. Most people can see through that like they can see past trump's cranial merkin.

Corporations call people members but treat them like members on the cheap. They hope to proffer loyalty through dopey things like bonus miles or rewards that pay for nothing, that can't be used for what you want, and expire just as you need them.

About two weeks ago, I was sent a direct mail piece by American Express (I've been a member since 1982). The package included literally ten-feet of single-spaced six-point type delineating all the conditions under which the lavish membership rewards they promise cannot be used. 

That's giving something only to take it away just as quickly. It's advertising three-card-monte. And it's treating people like, in David Ogilvy's words, morons. No one is too stupid not to notice insults like these. And the can'ts and I'm sorrys and other excuses you get in response to every reasonable request or complaint.

Just as a principle isn't a principle until it costs you money, customer care isn't customer care until it costs you money. Even if the money just goes into creating something thoughtful, informative, and interesting, not banal and machine-made.

If you want to see an example of thoughtful, informative, and interesting, take a look at this. Maybe no one outside of the industry in real-life noticed the descender in the "y" in the headline breaking into the body copy. I'm sure you can't track the ROI on that sort of craft. But these things are felt and sensed, and they add to the value of a brand (and to sales.)

Instead, we eliminate descenders breaking into body copy, asserting (because they can't be measured) no one cares. Let the algorithm do it. My customers are too cretinous to notice.

The Yale art-critic Vincent Scully once said about New York's Mead, McKim and White designed Penn Station which was torn down in 1966 and replaced with a low-ceilinged, fluorescent lighting, linoleum and gale-force wafts of stale urine horror.

Gods or rats live in our work, too.

Who emerges from our work is up to us. Gods or rats.

WPP, in its own PR, misses the point. I don't know anyone anywhere who wants exponentially more content, especially in a world where more 99.79-percent of the time exponentially more means cheaper, dumber and uglier.

In the meantime, in my world, about 94-percent of the work I get  comes from friends who call me or recommend me. About three or six times a week, I call someone or recommend something. 

Member-get-a-member, friends and family, human decency takes real skin in the game. It takes real quid to get a pro-quo. It takes kindness to get kindness.

Good work, good effort, good you-ing gets you good.

I guess the shorthand in all this was said best by John Donne, in  his poem "No Man is an Island," writ in 1624.

No man is an island,

Entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thy friend's

Or of thine own were:

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind,

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 

It tolls for thee.

Or, it was said even earlier as in "do unto others."

Old and corny.

Which marketers, and politicians, never learned.

Fornicating Fowl.

Oh, Fukaduk.

Writing a blog for a living, or for part of a living, or as a contributor to one's living is a strange, almost devotional thing. I feel at times almost like Simon of the Stylus, Simeon Stylites, a Syrian ascetic from 1600 years ago who lived for 36 years perched atop a pillar near Aleppo, Syria as a sign of his faith.

Writing is a testament of faith.

Putting it out there.

Practicing often.

Working at it.

And working some more.

As Beckett said, 

Strange and wonderful things happen when you put yourself out there. When you try something new. When you stick to your knitting when everyone else is telling you to buy a sewing machine.

Strange and wonderful things happen when you stay true to you. 

You might even exhort, fukaduk.

Here's what I mean.

Along the way you meet strangers.

I meet strangers.

I meet strangers, some of whom stay strangers.

Some of whom become, oddly, friends. 

Even if we've never bent an elbow or broken bread or even had a phone conniption.

If you are the writer, the spreader of words, if not the word, they find you, they come to you, they become your followers. 

We, as a culture, have watered down and co-opted the word follower. It no longer means what it's always meant. Once it was tinged with holy.

It now means someone, who, probably accidentally, pressed a button. In many worlds, in mine, it means more. At least at times.

It means learning from people you admire, and love. Whose words and thinking you hang on and learn from. Today the word follower is as casual as a gumball down a dirty slot.

Last week from out of the now-superheated formerly-blue, I got a note from a reader. A reader I never even knew I had.

The reader, I'll call him "Doc," wrote:

It took me some time, but I wrote and pasted back.

This is not all of the serendipity that comes from putting yourself out into the world. 

Something to think about as more and more people like myself must reckon with the isolation that comes from aging and suburban living in nearly equal parts.

Last night I was sent a link by a long-time reader and some time correspondent I'll call Benny. Benny sent me a link from The New York Review of Books. It brought me a poem from 1975 by the poet Kenneth Koch, called "Some General Instructions." You can find it easily. Here are two excerpts.

...

Some months ago, and for no particular reason, Benny sent me a package in the mail along with a hand-written note. The package included this photo with no explanation except that Benny is aware that I like a well-turned ankle, though none are in this photograph, I can conjure ankles with my mind.

I think there might be an advertising lesson in all this if you're willing to think about advertising in ways they don't think about advertising in books about advertising.

These interactions of late, and maybe thousands more through the years, are the result of a conscious effort on the part of my "brand" to be on brand. Better, on the part of my self to be my self.

The writing and the "putting it out there" that I do with near-religious regularity and fervor are evidence of my belief that brands must be active, interesting, present, surprising and in the world. As I've finger-blurted so many times, people like brands that act like people they like.

That's what this is about, really.

Not pretending to have all the answers.

But to be available for the questions.

I think that might be the best branding advice I've ever writ.

Or the worst.

--

BTW,

--

hock—an old British term for German white wine, especially Rhine wine—mixed with carbonated water. In modern terms, it is essentially a white-wine spritzer.

--

Givens.

One of the worst things about the human species is that it seems each human born is born with a relatively empty hard-drive. Until some tech non-tax-paying trillionaire figures out how to do brain implants to give their own kids and no one else's an advantage so they can be quadrillionaires or quintillionaires, not just trillionaires, and also skirt taxes, all new people have to start at essentially the same cognitive blank slate.

No one is born knowing how to talk, "toilet" themselves and with the ability to harness AI for the generation of more sextillionaires. We all have to learn to mama and dada. We all have to learn to teeter and walk. We all have to learn a certain corpus of knowledge that allows us to order a grande half caf soy pupik at the local coffee oligopoly.

Of late, and this may be a function of my rapidly advancing age, many things that I thought were knowledge "givens," that is learnings that I believed we could posit that everyone accepted are no longer accepted.

Of late it seems like saying things like, "the earth isn't round," "all people aren't created equal," or "certain citizens deserve more rights than others," is considered by more and more perfectly acceptable.

Things we used to take for granted, things we used to accept have been abnegated by millions and millions. We question things that were once unquestionable. 

Before long there will be online fora for those who believe the sun rises in the west. We're already seeing the words of the Second Witch in Shakespeare's Macbeth ring truer than they have since the days of kissinger and macnamara. Our battles now--just listen to the felon-in-chief about the Iran war he started, our battle's are "...lost and won." And, as all three of Macbeth's witches said, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair..." Or in the roughly similar words of Chico Marx, "who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"

The undoing of what we thought was signed, sealed and delivered is the hallmark of our era. Cue the three witches: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair..."

The below is from Times' essayist, David French. An account of questioning things that we used to posit. Little things, like equality.

vance-isms like the below are so anti-amerikkkan, they'd probably even make our slave-holding founding fathers emancipate the shit out of human chattel.

A Heritage American, in their formulation, is someone who can trace his lineage back to the founding of the country, preferably even before. You get an A grade if you’re “colonial old stock,” meaning your ancestors came here between 1607 and 1789. You get a B if you’re “antebellum stock,” a C if you’re an “Ellis Islander.” You get a D if you or your ancestors arrived after World War II....

It’s a short trip from inherited virtue to inherited entitlement. And at its most extreme, the Heritage American idea bears an eerie resemblance to the so-called 14 words of white supremacy — “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Of course as behavior in advertising is merely a microcosm of how we behave in amerika, there are many similarities in our business.

We no longer posit the need to breakthrough, to get attention, to communicate clearly, or to persuade people. We no longer accept as givens the power of repetition, the power of mnemonics, the power of differentiation and the saliency product attributes. Those attributes, which have been communication mandatories since humanity began, are no longer accepted as truths.

Instead we gallop down today's one-size-fits-all shibboleth that the only thing advertising must do is "become part of culture." There's so much I don't understand about that goal--what it means, for one, and what culture even is, for two. Not to mention the idea that my culture is the same as yours.

The basics of communication, like the very basics of Enlightenment thought have been thrown out by big-money know-nothings who propagate the "hot," without proof or ballast and by spending billions on propagation of their untruths have destroyed both advertising and democracy.

For instance, much of the ad industry looks to martin sorrell, who's destroyed two holding companies, WPP and S4 Capital as some sort of sage. As we look to fascist enablers as upholders of democracy. Soon we'll look to bernie madoff for financial advice or buy elon musk's guide to fatherhood or the holding company's guide to stopping ageism. Or adolph's guide to Judaism...

Remember, the same people who have abnegated impact, clarity, persuasion and repetition are the ones who have sold us programmatic, digital first, AI, divestment of media, consolidation of agencies and a whole host of other troughs of tripe.

I don't very often work with a big holding company agency, but I read what's left of the trades and I see it 21 times a day. What. passes for advertising no longer moves people, it merely assaults them. Impact has been replaced by inundation and reason replaced by trendiness.

Certain things, like the spherical nation of our earth, should not be questioned.

We should be beyond questioning the need to get people to notice us. We should be beyond questioning the need to tell people why a product is better, needed or different. But we're not. Those characteristics of communications are now considered trite and outmoded.

No wonder just as more and more people question the very viability of amerikkka--what Lincoln once called 'the last best hope on earth,' more and more people question "creativity." That is, what Bernbach called the "last unfair advantage we're legally allowed to take over our competitors."

There's nothing wrong with capital d democracy that decency, fairness, representation and equal justice won't fix. And kindness. There's nothing wrong with advertising that good advertising can't fix.

Except the agenda of those who seek to profit through their destruction of it. 

They're sowing doubt where there should be truth.

Yom at Heart.

Today is Yom Kippur.

For the remaining 16,000,000 Jews left in the world (that's about one-fifth of one percent of the world's population) it's the holiest day of the year. 

Though many Jews, myself included, live in fear of the inimitable or perhaps inevitable re-ascent of anti-semitism, we still cordon off a day every year to beat our breasts and bemoan all the things we have done wrong.

Only about one-in-forty amerikkkans are Jewish. But in amerikka, three-out-of-five victims of hate crimes are Jews. 

That said, we are not, by the calculus of the day considered to be a "minority." We are not members of a protected class. Jews on average pay a higher percentage of their income as tax than any other group and their children have a harder time getting into top colleges. This isn't paranoia. It's data.

That said, we still atone every year for all we have done wrong. Some do it publicly in temples that require metal detectors and armed guards against potential terror attacks. Some do it privately, internally and as I do, daily. Yes, daily.

This I learned from my father. 

A man, like so many fathers of his generation, a man who was most missing when he was most needed. 

That was a sin. A sin visited upon his children.

Stan was about as religious as a lamb chop, but he took atonement as seriously as a gavel.

During Yom Kippur, Jews traditionally recite something called the Al Chet ten times. (Al Chet, I realize sounds like the name of  a midwestern sports-reporter. To make Al Chet properly Semitic, add a little spittle to it. Al will rest easier, as will Chet.

The Al Chet is like Kasey Kasem’s Top 40. They’re the recitation and confession of the biggest, most universal and most human of sins. Not of the “I left the refrigerator door open” ilk. The Al Chet confesses serious shit—hard-heartedness, impurity of speech, disrespect, evil talk. And so on.

It’s how Jews ask forgiveness and atone.

It's how we always have, and no matter what happens to our dwindling and besieged cohort, how we always will.

You can do the standard catalog of sins. 

Like my father before me, and likely my children after me, while the list above is good and encompassing, I prefer my own list. It feels realer, truer, more atoney-er that way. I've never been afraid to re-write what was written. Even the word of god.

So, simply, I am asking forgiveness and atoning.

For the sin I have sinned when I have thought differently.

For the sin I have sinned when I refused to do as I was told.

For the sin I have sinned because I know my worth.

For the sin I have sinned when I made a joke during a meeting.

For the sin I have sinned when I wrote something instead of talking about writing something.

For the sin I have sinned because I am old.

For the sin I have sinned because I am old and still energetic.

For the sin I have sinned because I am old and still energetic and still ambitious.

For the sin I have sinned because I have questioned you.

For the sin I have sinned when I asked you to explain.

For the sin I have sinned when I tried to lead with a channel other than broadcast.

For the sin I have sinned because I made myself a product expert.

For the sin I have sinned because I believe people want information.

For the sin I have sinned because I believe people will read what interests them.

For the sin I have sinned because I favor conversations over texts.

For the sin I have sinned for not using jargon.

For the sin I have sinned because I don’t believe ______ is dead.

For the sin I have sinned because I still don’t know what agile means.

For the sin I have sinned because I don’t believe agile has a place in creative.

For the sin I have sinned because I believe advertising is a service business, not a servile one.

For the sin I have sinned because I leave nine-hour meetings early.

For the sin I have sinned because I suck at small-talk.

For the sin I have sinned because I don’t allow myself to be cookied.

For the sin I have sinned because I use ad-blockers.

For the sin I have sinned because I don’t ass-kiss.

For the sin I have sinned because I trust myself.

For the sin I have sinned because I spend too much time helping young people.

For the sin I have sinned because I don't buy the hype.

For the sin I have sinned because I won't give musk or trump or any other blowhard, air.

For the sin I have sinned because I don't go with the flow.

For the sin I have sinned because I don't try to become part of culture.

For the sin I have sinned because I say prove it.

For the sin I have sinned because I don't AI.

For the sin I have sinned when I tell the emperor he's stark naked.

For the sin I have sinned because I speak up.

For the sin I have sinned by dissenting.

For the sin I have sinned when I say something that sucks sucks.

For the sin I have sinned when I call out the inherent evil of big concentrations of wealth.

For the sin I have sinned because I refuse to dumb-down.

For the sin I have sinned because I won't.

For all these sins and a trillion more, I ask forgiveness and pardon.

And Happy New Year.

Shoots.

When you're a ball player, no matter what kind of ball, from bowling to ping-pong to golf to basketball to baseball to badminton whatever, there are two ways to deal with a slump.

The same holds true no matter what you do for life, no matter what temporal adversity you face.

There are two ways to deal with it.

First is what new-age people might call centering.

First, acknowledge and respect and even welcome the slump. Slumps happen to everyone. They happen whenever they want to happen. You can't obviate or avoid them anymore than you can skirt a politician's lies or lie with a politician's skirt.

Slumps are just a fact of life. In fact, without slumps, without the inevitable lows, you wouldn't, really, take in the equally inevitable highs. You've never ridden on a roller-coaster that doesn't have peaks as well as troughs. Roller-coasters, like most of everything, are metaphors. You might think about how they're built, why they're built and why so many millions of people flock to them.

One thing you might want to do, right now for instance, is head over to ebay or amazon and buy some version of the centuries-old board game "Snakes and Ladders," or as we called it when I was knee-high to a dust-bunny, "Chutes and Ladders."

Speaking of metaphors, Chutes and Ladders is a good one. If you're in an agency, either as an interchangeable part or a "leader," your job, in a sense, with your bosses, colleagues and clients is to--however possible--maximize ladders and minimize the effects of chutes.

As you might expect, Johnnie Mercer and Harold Arlen said it best, "You've got to accentuate the positive/Eliminate the negative/Don't mess with Mr. In-between."

So, back to my two ways to deal with a slump.

One: You can panic. You can second-guess. You can over-react. You can punish yourself. You can change everything you've always done.

Two: You can think about who you are. The quality and quantity you've always delivered. Your reliability and stalwartosity® and you can confidently get through the slump. With time.

Of course, look at the video tape. See if you dropped your elbow a tad. Examine the circuitry of what you do and see if you got into a bad habit. We all do.

But don't linger on your demise. Or the evaporation of all that brought you to where you are in the first place. If your career and life has been punctuated by ladders, the ladders will once again, and probably before long--probably sooner rather than ladder--present themselves once again.

This is the best I can do on a rainy Sunday morning before six AM.

See you ladder.