Un-Obsolete Yourself.

 

You can read the above here.

For about as long as I've been circling the sun and that's a lot of circling, people have been decrying the fact that "no one reads anymore." 

You can always find data that proves that point, and there's probably no time in history since Gutenberg was horsing around with his olive press that people weren't bemoaning the sorry state of human intelligence.

Of course, since we have a felon-in-chief who's never read a book outside of an Archie Double Digest and makes up history as it fits his racist invective, maybe it is truer now than ever before. In fact to be completely honest, a large portion of me believes that we do live in a dumbed down world. You only need to watch a TV show from the 1950s or 1960s, and you'll hear words and complex thoughts the likes of which are missing, almost completely, from public discourse today. There have been many times when I howled at the militarized moon and suggested that like the Romans of yore, we must have lead in our pipes leading to societal IQ-decline.

However, there's a counter-point out there, if you're looking for one. Kids might not know the state capitals like I did when I was ten. They might not be able to declaim Longfellow's "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." And while "only 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun 'almost every day', about half the figure in 2012," lamentations about communications technologies are as old as Cuneiform. Tom Wainwright, of the Economist writes,

Socrates disliked writing, arguing that the ability to write things down weakened the powers of memory....

Nearly a thousand years later, people were worried again, this time about a sinister new thing called the printing press.... Similar criticisms were made of the typewriter, invented at the end of the 19th century...One newspaper of the era opined that the typewriter 'destroys originality' and 'gives to everything that is written a mechanical touch'.

What's more, and back to kids, I'd say many of them on the other hand have a faculty for things which would have bleared my eyes back when amerikkka was a notional democracy. From computers, to software, to electronics they're way smarter than I was as a boy. And given the plethora of data in sports, they might also have a greater grasp of mathematics than I had. 

I think what we often overlook when assessing the relative intelligence of different generations is that we don't consider that those TV shows I enjoy from the 1950s were going to a much more rarefied audience than most shows do today. In the early days of television, for instance, the medium was almost wholly urban, white collar and college educated. It was a pretty select mass medium.

That digression aside, the Economist writes in the article pasted above,  

"People everywhere are sounding the alarm about a decline in reading. Parents struggle to cajole their children to pick up a book; professors despair that students cannot finish reading lists.... More than half of American adults say they have not read a single book for pleasure in the past year.

The panic is summed up in “The New Dark Ages”, a polemic by James Marriott, a bookish Times journalist... He rounds up the evidence that reading is in decline, placing most of the blame on smartphones, “predators of our attention”. “Dickens wrote in the reasonable belief that [his work] might be the most absorbing entertainment in your house—hence the average Dickens novel being about 800 pages...” 

Seeing as many readers in this space slog--maybe daily--through my writing, I can surmise they value the written word. For them, and for myself, perhaps there is some hope--and some not-to-be-overlooked value in what writers do--even if 'no one can read anymore.'

Maybe this is how writers--you and I--can market ourselves in a world that no longer values writing. 

The same Economist article says,  

...writing allowed cultures to “externalise” their thoughts, making way for more complex ideas and allowing them to be laid open to dissection... sophisticated mental processes, like logical reasoning and abstract categorisation, derive “not simply from thought itself but from text-formed thought”. Whereas oral delivery often employs a “backlooping” structure, the speaker rambling and repeating as they hone their argument on the go, writing allows for logically structured reasoning....

Let me repeat the above with "key words" highlighted. Key words that might persuade all those millions of clients and colleagues who say "nobody reads" of the importance of writing.

...writing allowed cultures to “externalise” their thoughts, making way for more complex ideas and allowing them to be laid open to dissection... sophisticated mental processes, like logical reasoning and abstract categorisation, derive “not simply from thought itself but from text-formed thought”. Whereas oral delivery often employs a “backlooping” structure, the speaker rambling and repeating as they hone their argument on the go, writing allows for logically structured reasoning....

In other words, it's writers who will help decipher (and make sense of) complex ideas. It's writers who will lay process and procedure open to dissection (so it can be understood.)

Here's an example from a zoom I had with my longest-running client not six hours ago. We were discussing an upcoming photo shoot of his technology, factory and offices.

CLIENT:       

The problem with shooting here is our factory isn't finished. It's kind of a mess. It doesn't look neat and architectural.

GEORGE:     
That's ok. That's good in fact. You're a science company, a technology company. Science and tech are never done, they're always improving and changing. If things are neat and tied up with a bow, that could imply that ​you're stagnant and not inventing.

CLIENT:       
Oh. You're right.

There might be a bit of ratiocination in the 98.7% genuine dialogue above. But that's ok. 

We might live in a post-reading, post-writing era. But cultures still need writing and the methodicalness of writing to "externalise their thoughts." To think things through with labor and intent not blurt and bombast.

I've had many conversations through the years with advertising writers I respect. Many of them do what I often do. Before we start with headlines, or TV spots or any other "content," we start writing about what we're trying to sell--what it does, how it's different, why it's better, why you need it.

We have a conversation via our keyboards with ourselves or a imaginary friend about what we're selling and why.

This is from Dominik Imseng's great book "Ugly is Only Skin-Deep." And this is how Bob Levenson, DDB's eventual copy-chief and Helmut Krone's third partner wrote about how he wrote.

In other words there's something about words. And the writing/thinking process that gets you to words that work.

Here's the obituary that DDB ran when B died.

Before we write an obituary for writing, it might make sense to read the writing in this obituary. 

It might remind us of our power. The power we have. The power we can use. The power no one, not holding companies, algorithms, or pomposticators can wrest from us.

To make it easier for you (and to repeat for emphasis):

I do not, cannot, will not, will never believe that jumping from facts into the realm of ideas is replaceable, machine-made-able, or will ever be obsolete.

Word.

A Milling Cove.

For whatever reason, maybe it was the fourteen-days of day-rate (reduced) I just got from [large agency], the phrase "milling cove," popped into my head last night and I couldn't quite get it out.

Of course, I did the usual searches on Google, and got nowhere fast. Thought I did find an article on Mousley Hurst, the long-ago center of English pugilism, pre-Marquis of Queensbury, and of one Samuel Elias, the English bare-knuckle champeen in the late 18th century. Champeen is how you pronounce champion in da Bronx and the adjacent city, Yonkers, where I was born back when Pterodactyls competed with DC9s for air space.)

Dutch Sam, AKA Samuel Elias, a Milling Cove.
Dutch was known as his era's hardest-hitter and earned the 
mellifluous moniker, "The Man with the Iron Hand."

Before long I switched to an AI search engine, Perplexity, and I found this piece from just a week under 75 years ago, September 22, 1951, by one of my favorite writers, A.J. Liebling:

Every-once-in-a-while, you read something by a writer you admire that can restore your faith in humanity and people who care about the words they choose, and the stories they tell. 

My friend Debra Fried just sent me her latest Riff from her Substack, 'Ruffle' and, frankly, I had to put my computer down after her first paragraph. It was one of those passages that made me mumble aloud, 'well, fukaduk,' and feel wholly unworthy of my keyboard.

She begins:

Wow.

Debra and I are friends, both copywriters and around the same age. Though we've never spoken about it, our competitiveness sneaks out sometimes. It prances about our crania like some version of Terpsichore showing off, and then it hides so as not to derail our friendship.

There's been so much in the news lately about AI coming for all of humanity and on the cusp of destroying or enslaving all of us. (It's funny how private equity and tech bros assign blame for their bad actions to the technologies they create, gin-up and finance. It's never andreeson, horowitz that needs restraining--it's AI that's to blame for AI, not the carom-ing balls they set into motion.)

For all that hype about the last ding-dong of doom, it's worth thinking about all the small crafty things that have not been killed by supplanting technology. Podcasting for instance is basically old-timey radio. It is more vibrant than radio has been for more than 80 years. People still like beautiful hand-made clothing, furniture and wall-coverings. Even a wretch like me is

dying to wear this human-hand-stitched suit next time I wear a suit. I don't think a machine can do most good things. Most good things take humanity.

Of all the many and tremendously wise "Ogilvy-isms" I've learned and absorbed through the years, I think the one that's most important is the one that's most ignored. [I'm de-genderizing it lest I get excoriated for being part of the "patriarchy."] 

The consumer isn't a moron; they are your significant other.

In other words, and to be Talmudic about it (another set of rules no one knows or anymore follows) treat others--even in your ads--as you yourself want to be treated.

That's so goldenly-obvious and so rare. Disappeared even.

As the ad industry flees humanity (and humanity flees the ad industry) nearly every bit of writing treats viewers like they're idiots. Jokes are tired, insulting, dumb. Over-blown-ness is everywhere. And more generally, slap-dash thinking that's a slap in the face of everyone who thinks. 

Whether you call it crap, hack or slop, we can blame it on algorithms and machinery. But it's us that lets it happen and it's us that says that it's good enough to pay for and represent the brands that pay us. It's us that posits people aren't worth real work and that AI-made drivel is enough to answer the bell.

You need only read closed-captions to see how little care is expressed in accuracy and verity of the captioning. You need only to look at one seven-minute video with two or three commercial breaks that happen anywhere, even in the middle of a scene or a word to see how little our industry cares about either the viewer or what they're watching. That's a human decision, expedited by machinery. That's an imperious choice we have made.

Headlines like this abound. They make Slip Mahoney look like Nöel Coward.

I've never had a job with a degree.

The Milling Coveness I began this post with was from feeling pummeled and punished by people and a system that wouldn't know Shakespeare from the shipping news. Fourteen days of that left me feeling like I was laboring at the wrong end of a shooting gallery.

Bang!

That said, it led me to the A.J. Liebling I mentioned above. It led me to a couple emails with friends. It lead me to being more determined than ever to hold-fast to who I am, what I believe and what I do. What I may do better than anyone else.

It also led me to these sentences and paragraphs. [CAUTION: Liebling uses language that means I have to write a trigger-warning. He calls Black people 'colored' or 'Negro.' Such was the practice of the times. O tempora, O mores! as Cicero exclaimed. Oh the times, Oh the customs.]

All that said, it makes me feel like less of a milling cove to see work and people who treat work and people with a soupçon of respect and dignity. I feel less like I was knocked off my feet and left to die, lying prostrate on the filthy canvas that is life.

By the way, if you apply a little elbow grease I'm sure, even if you don't subscribe to the New Yorker, you can find the entire article online. Or you can buy Liebling's great book, "The Sweet Science," on abebooks.com for $6.52, not including tax and shipping. One of my two copies sits to my left right now, not five feet away from my good shoulder.

The problem with that is that my good shoulder hurts worse than my bad shoulder.

Abrams and his hair.

--

BTW, here a video the fight Liebling writes about above, colorized and condensed down to just over 18 minutes. The commentary is by undefeated heavyweight champeen, Rocky Marciano. It's concise and astute. If you hang in to the end, you could learn something about life, about getting hit, about life.

Bubbling Down.

Bubbles.

I suppose at least until the last ding-dong of doom reverberates through our super-heated no-longer atmosphere, that there will always been certain things we can count on. 

Living near the sea, as I do now, the tides are one such linchpin. As is of course the rising in the east and the setting in the west of the sun. As is renaming major lakes and parts of the ocean for hate and xenophobic effect.

But of all of our planet's verities, more than dinner being late or crappy neighbors, the verity most inviolable is this: creeps will always chase after, flock to, speed toward money. The more money there is, the more and faster they will chase after it.

We are no different, humankind I mean, from ants after a bit of spittle. 

(I think, btw, social media might more accurately be re-titled social-mania. Now you can see everyone and her cousin doing something inane or flat-out dangerous on any one of about thirteen trillion platforms, and you feel compelled as well to do it. We've even invented an acronym for it, and everyone has it and is driven by it: FOMO. We never consider FOFF(ALLAA). (Fear of following flocks and looking like an ass.)

Let's think about one industry for a moment--just one--so as to limit the breadth and width of my frayed blanket statement.

In the last 40 years in advertising:

• Every agency has consolidated.
• Every agency diversified into non-advertising related fields like auto-racing, sports-agenting and more.
• Every agency sold all the diversified interests they diversified into.
• Every agency has merged with two or three dozen other agencies.
• Every agency destroyed about 80% of the agencies they bought.
• Every agency has relocated and un-designed its work-space.
• Every agency has divested its media arm.
• Every agency has un-divested its media arm.
• Every agency has sold itself to one of essentially three holding companies.
• Every agency has eliminated offices and quiet and privacy.
• Every agency has jammed people together so "they can communicate better."
• Every agency has abandoned platforms for tiny tactics.
• Every agency has lowered creative salaries.
• Every agency has competed on price, not business' built.
• Every agency has chosen pay-for-play awards as a way to signal its viability and quality.
• Every agency has raised c-suite pay and lowered regular-person pay.
• Every agency has abandoned the agency-of-record schema and become instead a vendor.
• Every agency has stopped partnering with clients (WITT--We're In This Together) and started charging by the infinitesimal pixel.
• Every agency has self-decimated in hunt for: 
     -programmatic magic
     -digital magic
     -six sigma magic
     -scrum magic
     -agile magic
     -some planner with a cool accent magic and
     -AI magic
  
• Every agency has differentiated itself via lock-step sameness. 
• Every agency does exactly the same as every agency because that's what every agency does.

To sum all of the above up in a single sentence, Every agency has been so busy chasing after the 'easy money' that every agency has forgotten what agencies can and should do in order to grow. 

They've abandoned challenging ideas that get attention and drive sales. They've abandoned leadership.  They've abandoned risk. Campaigns. The need to be better than the programs they interrupt. They've abandoned respect for customers, their own employees and they've abandoned commitment to a client.

Charlotte Beers--the CEO of Ogilvy 30 years ago said she wanted to make the joint "Most valued by those who most value brands." Spoken or un-spoken those words guided Ogilvy and a dozen places like it for dozens of years.

Today--as we chase after wherever it is with think the money is--agencies seek the be "Most valued by those who most value .00564-percent more margin, and quarterly growth via manipulation of spreadsheets, and the numbers we show the street."

We chase so vigorously after money we left our souls in the dust.

Dumb. Desiccated. Destroyed.

Rosy-Fingered Dawn.

If you've been at all engaged with the Odyssey beyond Christopher Nolan's blockbuster movie, from it you can learn a lot of things about life. And yes, a lot of things about advertising.

I don't mean to sully one of the seminal pillars of western civilization by bringing it down to a mercantile level. But, if you consider Bernbach's dictum, that advertising ought to leverage "simple, timeless human truths," you're likely to find more of those in Homer than you will in about every commercial ever made.

Wise people fish in deep lakes of human truth. Those lakes are most often filled with epic literature--the foundational books of our world--history, movies, opera, theater and more. I know it will be a shock to some, but many human truths pre-date the gyrating sexuality of tik-tok and the latest trends. They've shown up for centuries if not, like the Odyssey, for millennia. 

Homer is rife with repetition.

Because it was composed--and sung--before it was written.

Repetition makes words easier to recall.

Women are often "white-armed," "high-breasted," "ox-eyed." 

Men are "shining," "born from Zeus," "high-hearted."

The sea is "wine-dark." 

The Morning sky "rosy-fingered dawn."

Athena is "grey-eyed." Odysseus, "sacker of cities," "cunning," "hot-headed."

There are dozens of such epithets that recur in Homer and in so much of literature and history. They made the epic easier to remember. That's what repetition does.

Some short weeks ago, I spent more time than I wish I had inside the rotting carcass of a giant (once giant-er) holding company agency. 

What struck me beyond the bloated and hackneyed creativity was how little the people there on staff knew of the ancient and perennial hallmarks of communication. The things that make words work. Things that school kids knew when I was a boy, repetition, rhyme, alliteration and phrases fractured for effect (like 'I shoulda stood in bed', or 'line up alphabetically by height') have disappeared from the arsenal of the Trophy-Seeking class. In other words, they've thrown out, or never knew those linchpins that unlock memory and "stickiness." 

I'd bet dollars to donuts (a phrase that no longer makes sense because donuts, today, cost more than a dollar) simple precepts like using mnemonics are simply no longer even considered.

In short the industry has been so avid about chasing the "latest" that we no longer bother with the permanent.

Of all the modern economic reasons behind the collapse of advertising, of all the financial legerdemain that has pillaged the business and rendered it a crappy career, the most pernicious element of our own self-immolation is that today we study flourish not foundations. We decided it's better to decorate a brand than define a brand.

Ergo our destruction.

We think about what will impress judges for twenty minutes rather than what will influence buyers for twenty years.

We're stuck two rosy fingered fingers up the ass of common-sense and considered that salutary.

That's why so many people, clients and formed ad-people have given the industry the (rosy) finger.

By the Sea.

There's a seaside walk that starts or ends at my seaside cottage on the Gingham Coast that is, I believe, one of the great walks in all the world. For three-quarters of a mile, with no cars crossing your path, you can walk uninterrupted along the sea. I think it might be the longest non-car-affected walk you can take in the tri-state area. And all the while, the sea is just over your shoulder, mere yards away.

I don't love it up here in Gingham-ville. 

I miss the people and the energy of New York City.

I miss a variety of foods.

And how I can get anything I want in minutes.

I miss the anonymity of the city, how if you have a shitty neighbor you can all-but ignore them. That's harder to do in upper-suburbia where those shitty neighbors are apt to leave their garbage pail in front of your walk, just to provoke you. 

I have an infinitesimal annoyance fuse.

There's a lot I hate up here.

But this walk almost makes it worthwhile.

I have been taking this walk two or three times daily for the almost seven years we've been up here. And while I generally don't carry my cellphone with me while I walk, on occasion, I need to make a call and I try to kill two birds with one scone. (All baked goods in the area are stale. Always.)

For all the years I've been doing this, I've always gotten good reception and have had few dropped calls. 

This week that changed.

I don't anymore get cell service on my walk.

My wife has a cousin in one of amerika's most expensive zip codes--near the Getty Villa in Malibu. And another cousin in another of amerika's most expensive zip codes in Palos Verdes Estates, south of LAX. Each of the cousins involved has come to accept that they cannot get cell service from their multi-million dollar homes.

I think this is our AI future.

Despite all the blandishments about how AI will improve everything, everything will continue to get worse.

AI is probably f-ing up cell service. It's in everything. Why wouldn't it be in tele-communications?

Despite all the trillion-dollar corporate PR we're being force-fed about AI, you can't make a return, reconcile an overpayment, get an answer to a simple question, extend or change a hotel reservation, get search results that don't return a listing for a Dunkin' Donuts when you're looking for Cuban food.

AI oppression has gotten so bad, it's no longer worth fighting with the giant holding company you're freelancing for when they find a way to schtup you (and they always do.) I could have the fight. But to get the additional $4000 they owe me would cost me probably $10,000 of aggravation.

Before we trust our legal system, our medicine, our education, our everything to AI, it would be nice to see something simple like a phone-call completed with a success rate similar to what we might have experienced 75 years ago.

I think about battlements and forts.

About one-thousand years ago architects realized that curved fortifications would resist ballistic onslaughts better than right angles. Most castles and forts adjusted.

Then, a few hundred years later, those curved walls were deemed old-fashioned and the world went back to flat walls, not caring they were less safe.

Technology is great. 

But it needs people in charge. 

If only to say "when" like kids do when you fill their glass with milk.

"When."

When to non-tax paying plutocrats.

When to rapist presidents.

When to complicit congresses.

When to technology that extracts from humans.

When to 99.7% of "becoming part of culture."

When to not reading.

When to YOYO (you're on your own.)

As a society we no longer say "when."

We've decided, like Scarlett O'Hara decided, to throw restraint and common-sense out with both hands.

When.