Seminal Behavior.

Not too many minutes ago, I went out for my morning walk. 

Since I was booted out of Ogilvy for "harkening back to the 80s," WPP/Mark Read-speak for being of the generation where I expected to be rewarded for my dedication, talent and skill, I've exerted some control over portions of my life I had neglected while in the crush of the Holding Company hegemony.

My west coast Doppleganger, Rich Siegel wrote about this, in his manner, on his blog earlier this week. Rich is always wise and worth reading. By wise, I mean Rich likes potato chips. 

At the start of my walk I checked my US Post Office mailbox which sits about one-hundred feet from my front door. We usually check for mail during Sparkle's noon walk. But with the crush of work being what it is, both my wife and I forgot to check yesterday--thus foiling the efforts of countless local financial planners inviting us to a free lunch and a "financial assessment."

In the mailbox, surprisingly, was a forest green envelope with our names and address hand-written (neatly) upon it. 

Artist's rendering.

It was a Thank You note from my elder daughter, S, who despite all the travails of modern life and parenting was brought up essentially right.

Sorry if the word "right" is "judgey." 

There are right ways to behave, treat people, work, love, play. When we started propagating the idea that standards are mutable, and norms were a couple of guys who hung out at the barber shop, we got to tump and tumpism.

I thought about the "propriety" and "old-fashioned-ness" of a hand-written thank-you note. I thought about what semiotically getting such a note--and having had the upbringing to feel compelled to write that sort of note--means.

A hand-written thank you note is about as archaic as you can be in the crass, nasty and inconsiderate world we live in today. From an MBA's point-of-view, I'm sure the ROI of human decency just doesn't add up. "Do you know how much time you spent on that note? Not to mention the cost of a card and a stamp? You spoke to your old man after your son's birthday party. You thanked him. A relic like a thank-you note just is not cost-efficient."

A hand-written thank you note is as old-fashioned as putting your "calling card" on a silver tray and being announced by the butler.

NEWS FLASH TO THE WORLD IN GENERAL AND MARKETING IN PARTICULAR

Not everything has to have an ROI. And meet KPIs. 

Beyond such contrived and concocted metrics there are other, unmeasurable, metrics. There's something ,for the purpose of this post, I'll call the HDB.

The Human Decency Bonus.

The seemingly inefficient, un-intelligent, not-worth-the-effort things people do to express human decency and kindness. 

Holding the door for someone.
Giving up your seat on the cross-town bus.
Listening.
Not interrupting.
Expressing yourself with care, artistry and kindness, not merely algorithm.

As we descend further and further down the pubic-clogged drain of artificial intelligence, things that make no sense will become more and more rare. 

From a "we all share this planet" point of view, from a "communications that breakthrough" point of view, those behaviors that make no sense will begin to make more and more sense. Simply because they show the recipient of those communications that you genuinely thought about them and took a moment to show you care.

An AI generated ad, or a bot on a chat, or a computer generated voice on a phone tree are all cost-efficient ways of doing business. 

But, generally speaking, they make a lot of "customers" aka people feel like shit. 

They remind people of this:

There is a reason, even though it makes no economic sense, to say "please" and "thank you." To look up from your computer when someone is speaking. To make eye-contact. To smile. 

Just to be all Rosser Reeves about it: Decency could be your unique selling proposition. If you still believe in old-fashioned nostrums like that.

It's all here, BTW.

Start at 2:05 if you're time-pressed.

Start at the beginning if you're a human.

Faith.

The gods are powerful, and the law that governs them is strong. It is by this law that we believe the gods exist; it sets the rules for what is right and wrong in our own lives. If, faced with it, you disregard it … there will be no more fairness in the business of humanity. 

—EURIPIDES, HEKABE, 799–805 

"I hear it's about a whale. Is it about a whale?"

"Damned if I know what it's about." 

                                                            —CONVERSATION WITH HECTOR, AUGUST, 1975 

Like a lot of post-Holocaust Jews, I was born into a world where for many, faith had been gassed along with six-million of my co-religionists. Of course I know people who are still believers. Who pray to Yahweh. Who light the Shabbat candles. Who observe the high holy days and teach their children. But I never could.

Despite the sincere efforts of friends, psychiatrists, rabbis and people I respect, I can't "just let it go." It happened on god's watch. Which makes me think if god exists at all, he wasn't watching, or he doesn't care, or he sucks at his job.

As woody allen (he deserves no caps) once said, ‘If it turns out that there is a God...the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.’

In short, I have no faith.

No Mary Poppins/Annie "The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow." If it does, it'll probably give you a melanoma. Right when tump eats medicare to pay for his trillion dollar 'already-won' wars.

I have no faith.

But I have batting practice.

That is, I have the regimens I've adopted over the years that allow me to
a) work with integrity,
b) maintain personal dignity and
c) do my job well.

When I played ball those were getting to the clubhouse early, listening to Hector, my manager, watching the game and the opposing pitcher for 'tells.' And practicing my "craft" like a madman to perfect (as much as possible) the precision and power of my swing, and my discernment of the strike zone. 

In the field I took thousands of grounders. I'd spread rocks and gravel in front of third to anticipate bad hops. And I metronomed my throwing motion so I could throw hard, fast and accurate and from nearly any angle in the hopes of beating even the fastest-runner to the bag.

The same sort of assiduousness applied to my advertising career. I listened. I read. I award-booked. I got in early. I worked and worked and worked and worked.

I filled pages. 
Then I'd hide them.
And filled some more.
Again.

Faith never intervened when I got an assignment and had 16-tons of pressure and no help. What intervened was work.

My business, because of that creed, and touch wood lest I jinx things, has been good. But I never shorten my sails, believing that doing so will abridge my sales. I work on new business all the time. Connecting with people I don't know. Staying connected to those I do. And of course, writing my GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company ads and this blog, which probably at this point has amassed about three-million words--maybe one-hundred thousand of which show my intelligence and skill to positive effect.

No matter how the phone and the cash-register ring, I am almost always nervous. 

I have no faith that my string hasn't played out. As I say to the few people I open up to, "I'm afraid the George-show has gotten tired." 

No one wants a one-trick Georgie.

So, Dig I Must.

Like an old Timex watch, I take a lickin' and keep on tickin'.

At a time in my business where the uncertainty of amerika's economy, and the oppression emanating from the creepy holding company hegemon seem to be working against little people, I worry more than usual.

There's no place to go.

But time spent worrying doesn't diminish time spent working and being me and taking my advertising agency equivalent of daily batting practice.

Less than two hours ago, in the course of just 20 minutes, I got two emails from two former CEOs of major global agencies sending clients who are their friends my way.

I write this not to brag.

But to remember.

As I say to many of the people who call me after they've just been shit-canned by this holding company or that, "figure out who you are and what you do well. And be you. No one is better at you than you are."

That could be pablum.

But this is only a dopey blog on advertising. 

And at least it comes in four flavors.

Heavy For a Blog on Advertising.

I never thought about this until I read "Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens" by David Stuttard. I started the book a week ago and finished Monday night. I've been thinking about it pretty much 24/7 since I read the review in the Wall Street Journal, which you can read here.

Before I begin, I'd guess about 99.7-percent of world has no idea what the ancient Greeks meant by the idea of Hubris. 

I wish more people grasped the concept. 

Especially during our current benighted era.

The Greeks regarded Hubris as the worst of all wrongs.

 

Studdard writes in his introduction, "hubris originally meant a deliberate and dishonouring transgression of status boundaries, (i.e. when you get too big for your britches--over-stepping your bounds) often involving physical violence, with specific reference to the boundaries that were believed to separate humanity from the divine. In English, the definition has been broadened to include overconfidence or pride. In this book, readers should especially bear the former definition in mind.”

In Georgian words, the transgression of Hubris is when:
You start thinking your shit don't stink. 

You can do no wrong.
You're smarter than everyone else. 

The world owes you a living.

The laws that apply to regular folks don't apply to you.

I'd say, while I'm dishing out blanket statements, about 99.7-percent of the ad industry's problems stem from behavior that's been fundamentally hubristic. And about 99.7-percent of amerikaka's problems, too. Maybe 99.9-percent.

--

Beyond Hubris, the Greek word, not the book title, what I found most interesting in Stuttard's book is the detail with which he writes about the great buildings of ancient Athens. Temples like the Parthenon, one of many sacred buildings Athenians built to venerate their gods, were not just buildings. In an age where few people could read (like today) they told the stories and myths of a common culture.

Where we see slabs of broken down marble, the Greeks saw more. Every bit of Greek temples had a meaning, and a story to tell. We don't see this today, because we haven't ever learned to read such things.

Each of the areas called out in the diagram above were "story-telling" opportunities. They'd be adorned by sculptures and friezes that imparted the foundation myths of the world's first Democracy. Battles. Gods. Victories. Epics.

Like a well-written long-copy ad of the old style, every corner holds something of meaning, and interest. Maybe even something more and larger.

Eventually, as Athens grew greater and greater, becoming the world's dominant power--having vanquished the <er> Persians and the Spartans, politicians and wealthy people (who, if not politicians, run the State) wanted to shift the credit formerly given to the gods for Athens' rise to themselves. As Stuttard writes, “the motivation behind temple building was not primarily religious but political. And the danger was that others saw this, too.” In fact, images of Pericles--bloated by Hubris--were positioned on formerly exalted and godlike places.

All this of course, living in tump's amerikka, scares the p-p-p-Pericles out of me. Seeing buildings renamed. Coins minted with his plastic "comic-book superhero" visage. And his proposed triumphal arch (when we are losing, while adding trillions to the indebtedness of the unborn) are all examples of Hubris writ not large, but XXXXXL, or even one-size-fits-all. 

BTW,
Hubris kicks another god, Nemesis, into action. She is surely waiting just off stage like any good Deus ex Machina. 

Nemesis is the “winged goddess, blue-eyed unbalancer of life, the scourge of hubris, punisher of mortals who transgress the boundaries that separate mankind from gods." Nemesis is the personification:
Of retribution.
Of payback. 

Of you'll get yours.
Of karma.
Of what goes around comes around.

Of 'you'll be sorry.'

You don't have to believe in the gods. You don't have to believe that there is any fairness in the universe. You don't have to buy any of it. You can call all of it a bucket of warm bushwa.

Personally, though (and this is a personal blog) I believe in Newton's Third Law of Motion. Living on the seashore, I believe it in part because I see it every day with the coming and the going of the tide.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

As an amerikan, I worry about amerikan Hubris. All who live under a criminal regime are guilty. Even those who speak out.

A Metaphor Strained.

There was an article in The New York Times over the weekend that reminded me of the demise of the ad industry, at least the industry I grew up with. That industry provided a good way to make a living. It gave you an outlet for your nuttiness. And it allowed you to help clients while having a modicum of fun and hanging out with funny people. 

That industry is gone.

WPP alone has, in the last ten years, gone from $32B in market cap to just over $3B. And has gone from employing 203,000 people to employing 99,000 people (by their count.) That descent ain't because of AI or "the changing media landscape," it's theft and greed which can all fit under the heading of modern business management.

A friend who is a long-time freelance creative sees people treated by the holding company hegemon little better than the day workers suburban housewives used to pick up in the ghetto for some light dusting, verbal abuse and unpaid overtime. People are hired for the day at diminished wages and kept until the exact moment they're no longer needed. Then they're dropped like a seagull aiming at your head.

In truth, I see the strip mining of the ad industry as a parallel construction to the strip mining of amerikkka. If you can muster up the attention span to read George Packer's "The Unwinding,"
you'll see what I mean. And you'll understand a bit more about what's happening.

The article from the Times that reminded me of advertising can be found here.

The MBA\Blackstone\Blackrock money that bought our industry are like bad guys in a bear-suit. They cause damages, sue for damages, get paid out by the putative insurance companies that compensate the super-wealthy and then they walk away.

BTW, forget about Pubicgrease, Omnicon, Hamas, Dent, and Schtupwell. Our owners are listed below:

Who owns Omnigraft?

For years, MBAs in metaphorical bear suits have clawed at our industry. They said:

"ideas are dead." 
"data is everything."
"AI can do it."
"Social ads the size of thumbnails can do everything a brand spot does."
"No one watches TV."
"No one believes differentiation."
"Everything is parity."
"Creative is unimportant."
"The algorithm is everything."

Like the bear attacks written about above, these are fake assaults that have done real damage. They have allowed an industry to shed people and costs (we can't afford FTEs) while the compensation committees at the Holding Companies perpetrating the attacks award the dressed-up and camouflaged attackers with eight-, nine-, or ten-digit compensation packages.

People still need information to buy products. Brands still need definition. Those have been human truths since your ancestors went bipedal.

But according to the non-advertising men in expensive three-piece bear-suits, not anymore.

Accordingly, they'll leave down. Edifices falling like the House of Usher, while they're carrying bags of Mammon to 12-bedroom homes with underground-shelters in Mustique.

Here's one point and maybe unfair example. After consolidating Y&R, Grey, JWT and others into oblivion, after destroying the individual agencies bought for such significant multipliers and expunging their names from the record, after diminishing 'Ogilvy' and the like and turning them into a mayonnaise entity called 'WPP Creative,' I see this:

This is an executive and corporate bear attack. You destroy and then say, 'it's been destroyed so we'll destroy it some more. Then we'll change what it is so we can't be blamed for destroying it. But not before we walk away with $100,000,000.'

Do you really think you can have a "culture" 
(whatever that is) amid nearly $700,000,000 of cost-cutting?

People aren't worried about culture at that point, they're worried about rent.

Close Encounters of the MBA Kind.

Three times last week I got an email telling me that something I either had or hadn't subscribed to was either renewing (automatically), going up in price, or renewing automatically and going up in price.

I'm not necessarily cheap but I do toss nickels around like manhole covers especially during these parsimonious times when paying clients are trying to become non-paying clients simply because so many purveyors, not me but like me (this includes giant global ad agencies or once-giant global ad agencies) are willing to work for legumes. 

That's my way of saying, spending-wise I look before I leap. And while the machinations of "subscription" "services" make it hard for you to know what you're subscribed to, how much it costs, or what you get for your expenditure, I do the best I can to keep an eye on my scheckels, especially since I plan to hang up my spikes in just over 1450 days, when the calendar turns to 2030.

If I earn money in the year 2030, it means I will have been gainfully employed by the sweat of my own wrinkled brow for parts of six decades. That surpasses my baseball hero, the Cuban Comet, Minnie Minoso, who played major-league horsehide in five decades-- the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. If I can earn my day rate in 2030, I'll have done so in the 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, 20s and 30s. A skein of six decades. A record, I believe. Or if not a record, good enough for me. I ain't under any circumcisions (that was intentional) going for a seventh decade.

But back to last week and the re-subscription emails I received.

The first was for something called YouTube Premium, which was raising their price from $12.95/month to $15.95. I got a woman on the blower and asked to cancel. (There was no link that would have made it simple--or I couldn't find one.)

"I can lower that price," she chirped "to $9.95." 

"I never signed up in the first place," I snapped. "I already pay god-knows-what for the YouTube TV streaming service that I never use and I don't want this."

"But I'll lower the price."

The next email I got was from the all-but-defunct trade magazine Advertising Age--the ones who stole the name of this blog for their magazine. 

They were charging me $199.99 for a digital subscription. Again, I don't remember signing up for one. And every thing I click on on their site--everything of any ostensible value--is paywalled. I can't have at it unless I subscribe at a higher-level, I think for $699.99. I'm sure at that point there's still more blocked content and they'll try to get me to spend $999.99.

Again, I could find no cancel button. So I suppose I spoke to someone in Myanmar which is somehow cheaper than having a cancel link.

She tried to upsell me to the $699.99 package for only $499.99. I said no, I just want out. At which point she offered the $199.99 package for $99.99.

Finally, I got an email from WeTransfer, a service that costs I think about $12.99/month that I use about once a year if I have a high-res MP4 to send to someone. They offered to lower my price to $9.99/month, and again I said, "no."

There's a point in this--a macro one about self-appreciation and self-belief. It pertains to all of us and our entire industry. Maybe our entire world.

Especially amid the word on the street that a certain holding company is growing because they give creative away while only charging for media, and another holding company is giving everything away to try to gain some account-win momentum.

If you lower you're prices every time someone barks or sneezes, if you can't charge what you believe you deserve and what you're worth, you're not a business-person, you're a charlatan. You're one step below or above a busker in 16th century England singing for your supper.

I'll admit, I've worked for five decades in this business and I've worked with a therapist for a similar amount of time. My experience, my acclaim, my success, my busy-ness, my self-belief and more have allowed me--not without some internal sturm und drang--to charge what I charge.

The demise of the advertising industry--on both the ecosystem-level and the individual-level--is that we've willingly allowed ourselves to be devalued. Somewhere along the way, it became easier to roll-over for $X than it was to fight for $XX.

I ain't doing that for now.

Hopefully, I won't have to over the next 125,630,782 seconds. 

In the meantime, if you have an Advertising Age log-in I can bum, HMU.

The Trade Press.

My friends often deride me because I so often deride the cowardice and mediocrity of the advertising trade press. 

You'd think that if the trade press still employed journalists who did more than regurgitate press-releases and gossip, someone would be writing about the lack of honesty in the industry, not to mention the loss of literally hundreds of thousands of jobs. 

Instead we get pablum--mush with no nutritional value--posing as news.

We used to have a calculus (other than awards) of assessing the economic viability of agencies. Their major accounts, their revenue, the number of their employees. That gave us critical information about agencies--empirical, not "for sale." Of course a lot of that was fudged. But largely you knew who was doing what and how well.

All that information is missing now. Now we pick agencies based on awards they pay for. And often the same companies that are major investors in awards shows are major investors in agency holding companies. Often the agency of the year in, say 2024, is an agency out of business in 2026. That's trumpian in its dishonesty. It's like competing against judge and jury and hangman.

WPP in their 2026 annual report claims they employ 99,000 people. In 2017, WPP claimed they employed 203,000. You'd think a loss of more than 50% of your employees would be a lead story. Somewhere.

Imagine if major league baseball consolidated Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and St. Louis into one team, called, say, the Polymers and then that team went belly-up. You'd think that would earn some ink. But no. The press hasn't covered the geo-politics of the rapine of the industry anymore than People magazine would cover the closing of the Straights of Hormuz.

The top headlines of today's Ad Age (the magazine that misappropriated the name of this blog and took it as their own) read like dispatches from an unrecognizable industry. What they report on doesn't matter and they report only on things that don't matter.

Most pernicious is their editorial conceit "XX creative campaigns to know about today." I don't know if these headlines includes duplicates, but looking at all the campaigns "to know about," you'd think there was a shitload of great work out there. Most people I talk to see about one decent piece of work a quarter--or less if you don't count what Apple makes. Yet here on the front page of Ad Age are 36 campaigns worth paying attention to. Are there 36 ads in the world right now not offering Buy One Get One?

To my glaumy eyes, the most annoying of all editorial devices is the "listification" of what used to be journalism. I just got an email from Campaign US calling for entries on some "40 over 40" contest, which will turn into editorial, which will turn into selling swag, which will turn into an $500/plate dinner, which will turn into incessant LinkedIn self-promotions from the nominees and winners, which in turn will turn into yet another permutation of this even covered with maybe slightly different dressing.

Consider my rough math on the above.

If they get sixty nominations for their 40 over 40 at an average entry fee halfway between the standard and the extended rate ($360/pp) you quickly see that CampaignUS magazine makes $21,600 from this "editorial." In all my years in the business, I've never seen a copy of Campaign on someone's desk. They have a lot of different ad units for sale, but I can't believe they make much through either subscriptions or ads.

To me, it's much more likely Campaign US and so much "journalism" like it is like so many of the phonus balonus-ness that has tattered the legitimacy of every industry everywhere. They're in the business of charging real fees for fake awards then more fees for fake awards dinners.

Entries here must net them a lot. Though what this award proves beyond that you entered and paid a fee is unknown to me. £6750 is a lot for dinner for 10, too--at a time when most agencies have about a $8 dinner allowance after 9PM and you might be able to expense a pogo stick home.

So journalism isn't reporting news, it's fabricating it. They're so divorced from the idea that people will pay for useful information that they no longer even try to supply it. Instead, as I said above it's regurgitated press-releases and awards press-releases. With no perspective, honesty or investigation.

The trade press is now a flack.
They chose to be flacks over reporting facts.