Fake Blame.

Last week a fake video made the rounds of musk, altman and bezos (I refuse to capitalize proper nouns when the people, places or things they're noun-ing are by no means proper) about AI being powered by newly unemployed people riding exercise bikes to power data centers. 

Yes, according to these people, we were put here on earth to be draft animals and/or cannon fodder for the plutocrat class. Before long we’ll bring back Hobbes’ nasty brutish and short lifestyle, if we haven't already. Those are the terms and conditions we’re forced to accept.

Meanwhile, back in reality-ville (a shrinking community of pariahs) headlines like these are all-too-frequent.

In what's left of the decimated ad industry (editor's note: decimatio was a Roman military concept--over 2,000 years old. It was a form of military retribution that called for the execution of one out of ten of a particular group. In modern usage, we bastardize the word to mean complete annihilation. We don't really decimate our enemies anymore we more eighty-percent-imate them) A.I. is increasingly being blamed for decimation. It is blamed for the destruction of thousands of jobs, dozens of agencies and trillions of dollars of brand-equity accumulated through the decades.

WPP blames AI. It never blames its abject "out-of-touch-with-reality-ness." What do I mean by that? They've shed 80% of their revenue and their clients and their viability. They're shrinking as fast as a libido in an old-age home. Yet they are trying (vainly) to position themselves as something they call a "growth partner." HINT: Before you call yourself a growth partner, make sure you're growing. 

AI, to my non-cataracted eyes, has become a convenient scape-goat for the destruction of entire industries and countless lives. Just as when two-feet of snow are dumped across half the country or 500-year-storms occur roughly every other years, we don't blame exxon and their fellow petrodestructors, we blame something vague and un-arrestable. We castigate climate change not big oil's role in it. 

This is a semantic shifting of the blame that 98.98% of all people are too busy bemoaning to actually realize what's happening.

Here's a more concrete example.

We blame job loses in an amorphous way on AI. (AI is un-prosecutable. We can't lynch it, despite the mention of pitchforks above. We don't even tax the billionaires behind it.)

We blame job loses on AI.

We never say, who's behind AI.

We never say
if elon musk pays himself one-trillion dollars,
that's $1,000,000,000,000,
that's the cause of disruption.

No one ever does the math and says
$1,000,000,000,000
is ten million (10,000,000)
$100,000 salaries.

The disruption is not caused by AI,
it's caused by one person deciding he is worth more to the world
than ten-million people earning $100,000/year.

musk pays himself enough to give everyone in all these states $100,000/year.

Or, the same to every resident of the 2, 3, 4, 5, and 1/2 of the 6th largest cities in the US. 

Back in 2016, WPP had an annual revenue of about $14,000,000,000, just slightly more than their annual revenue today, a decade later. (Profit has decreased in that time by more than 75%.) 

Martin Sorrell took $100,000,000 of that money as his own compensation. The compensation committee agreed to policies like these.(The compensation committee decides its own compensation):

I refuse to blame "exogenous" technologies for the destruction of giant swaths of our industry and the world economy. 

I blame those who treat everything like it is an extractive industry. They remove all value and leave nothing but slag and mercury-poisoned water behind.

An example of destruction from "The Radical Potter,"
by Tristram Hunt.

I blame greed. That most biblical and second-most damning of all sins. (Hubris is first.)

And the world’s most-effective and least-prosecuted killer.

Shakespeare, as usual, could have written this post in a dozen words. As in Cassius' to Brutus in "Julius Caesar." (Not about salad.)

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, 

Wolf Man.

There aren't many people who have experienced Lycanthropy, just as there aren't that many who even know what the word means. But having grown up as I did, with a borderline mother given to fits of uncontrollable madness, I am well aware of the ailment, though you can't ever, really, get accustomed to it. 

Lycanthropy is an ancient disease. It's named, in fact, after a king in ancient Greece, four millennia ago, who was punished by Zeus by being turned into a wolf.

Instances of Lycanthropy appear in western thought as early as the bible. In Daniel 4, Nebuchadnezzar (who is more well-known today as a large bottle of wine) was "driven from men, and did eat grass as an oxen." He was in real need of a makeover. His "hair grew like eagles' feathers" and his nails as "birds' claws." 

William Blake painted Nebuchadnezzar like this, hardly a picture you'd put on your Hinge profile, unless, of course, you're into wolf-kink, as so many are.

Of course, if you think for a minute about modern horror movies, werewolves are practically a leitmotif, with literally thousands of films made about, in essence, Lycanthropy. Here are a mere smattering.

These movies didn't emerge fully-formed from the head of Zeus. For thousands of years, around the world cautionary tales of primarily men being turned into wolves abounded.

Some years ago, my therapist of four decades, O, suggested I read "The Parnas," by Silvano Arieti. Arieti, a psychiatrist, a survivor of both the Holocaust and an attack by wolf-Nazis was one of the Twentieth Century's great minds. He was one of the world's foremost authorities on schizophrenia and has written one of the great books on creativity, "Creativity: The Magic Synthesis."

Here's how Arieti describes his up-close encounter with a small group of Nazis, seeing them transform.

Freud in his study of Little Hans--a boy who turned into a wolf wrote, "Lupus homini lupus." Only a wolf acts like a wolf to man.

I'm 98.7-percent Freud was wrong here. I've seen Lycanthropy. I'm a survivor, in fact.

This isn't something I joke about.

There are many who know about Lycanthropy who claim that whole cultures can turn lupine. I am one of them.

Sixty million Germans shuffled their iPods one morning. They switched from Beethoven and Mozart to the Horst Wessel lied and Deutschland Über Alles.

Today, fifty percent of amerika is snarling and drooling spittle and blood and chanting in Leni Riefenstahl guttural exhortations USA USA!

Soon goons will be clamping down on those of us not goose-stepping. We will be arrested. Assaulted. Categorized as üntermenschen. The wolves are here. 

They attack in packs.
And the packs normalize the attacks.

My country tis of thee,
Sweet land Lycanthropy,
Of thee I mourn.

Triple Trouble.

As happens so often when you play, either as an amateur or a professional, either as an "I-wanna" or an "I-can," I got plunked in the noggin during a late inning of the first game of a twilight twin-bill.

When I started playing ball for serious in say 1973, when I first started showing up as "good" and as "someone to watch," batting helmets were about as primitive as an old DuMont television set. The kind of sets that took a good ten-minutes to warm up and had you getting in a Muhammad Ali sparring session with the vertical hold. You did more punching against the set's wooden cabinet than most fighters do during a three-round prelim.

The helmets I wore in my playing days were not heavy, lusty affairs like players today wear. I liken them to the chocolate sauce soda jerks would dip a cone in. The helmets were basically a thin shell congealed over your cerebellum--more to give you the idea that you had some protection than actually providing real protection. Even after Tony Conigliaro was almost killed by a fastball to his eye-socket, the strength of helmets was more cosmetic than functional. If a drunken sparrow flew into your head, you might be lost for three games or a week.

All that being said, a fastball aimed at my temple led me to a reunion with my unconscious in the Mexican dirt. I lay sprawled on the ground, kicking my legs with pain. When I woke up and saw a horde of grim faces around me, I noticed also the slow floating particulate of dust wafting down to earth from the heavens. It looked peaceful almost. I felt almost like the horse in Frost's great poem, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening."

I gave my big dumb head a shake

I asked if there was some mistake.

The only other sound's the hush,

Of cerveza cries, and brains of mush.

-

I got up slowly from the ground and wiped off--a son of a harridan mother's influence--from my off-white flannels. My tunic emblazoned with a teal script "Seraperos" insignia looked like it had spent a year in a trench during the Somme or Ypres or Argonne battles.

Two teammates flanked me and we flight-of-the-bumblebee'd the 20 or 30 shuffles back to the clubhouse. I tottered like a 40-year-old drunk ending year twenty-seven of a twenty-five-year-bender. 

I sat on the bench in front of my locker. Someone handed me a small dixie cup of ice-water, someone else poured the same over my head. Thin mud washed through my scalp like a summer rain on a dirt road.

Jesus Verduzco, our backup short-stop and third-year medical student at Tecnológico de Monterrey, whom we all called pre-maturely "el doctor," came over with a few clean towels and a galvanized bucket filled with ice. With skilled hands he constructed a compress--a sandwich of ice and terry--and guided me to lay down on the varnish.

"Are you dizzy," Verduzco asked me in passable English. "Do you have an ache in the head?"

"I am seeing three of you," I answered staring up at him like a knocked-down boxer the referee. "Are there three of you?"

"It is just me," Verduzco said. "Alone." 

He grabbed each of my hands and tugged. He was checking to see if I offered back strength and resistance. He felt at the knot on my head, had me pivot onto my side and applied another cold compress to the cranial insult.

By this time game one was over. It would be a half hour before game two and the team came in for a smoke and beer or a sandwich. Hector came right to me.

"You are ok, Jorge," he asked/told me. "He is ok, Jesus," he asked/told Verduzco.

"I am ok," I answered/lied. Not wanting my pain to get in the way of my toughing out of the pain. "I already am feeling twenty-percent less bleary than just a minute ago."

Verduzco again pressed around with his thumb. He origami'd another compress and applied it. "It feels pain," he asked in his passable English. "It feels less pain," I answered in my unpassable Spanish.

"We lost game one" Hector said to me. "Do you think you can play in game two. I am not so desperate as to call on Perez-Abreu."

I am one of those benighted souls who plays through pain. Before too long it's expected of you. The pain still hurts. But no one knows that. They just count on you. That's the real cost of pain, living with it in silence.

Fernando Perez-Abreu, a back-up utility man was in his fourth season in the Mexican Baseball League. He was good with leather but had yet to hit anywhere near his weight.

"I am seeing three of you, Little Cheese," I answered. When I joined the Seraperos de Saltillo, I had el-Norte'd Hector's full-name, Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla into the more or less palatable Hector Quesadillo. This in my addle I had truncated into mere "Little Cheese."

"I have many times been kicked in the head by the horse," Hector said. He had pulled up two small folding chairs, with a thin ass-cushion on the seat. One chair was for him and one was for Verduzco. Hector had one loving hand holding my compress in place. The other held my left hand in his. He held it like I was seven and scared of a lightning storm.

"There are many times we are kicked in the head by the horse," Hector continued. "This is the natural confluence of head and the fates. This is like rocks and waves. It is like tax and collector. It is like axe and the neck of the turkey."

"It is like Prometheus and eagle."

Hector laughed with me on that one and squeezed tighter my hand.

The in-between mayhem of 25 men between games was in the triple decibels. The raucous bounced off the metallic of the lockers, the linoleum of the floor and the tile of the showers. But my head shut it down. I could hear only Hector and feel only the love that traveled like an electrical pulse from his hand to mine and through my 178-pounds.

"There are many times we see triple, hear triple, get kicked in the ass triple." He was reverie-ing now, like a Shakespearean tearing through twenty-stanzas of the Bard. "We have triple the pain. Triple the hurt. Triple the musts. Triple the not-understanding. We have three of pain. But we must not not show up. We must be triple times triple stronger than the seeing-three of the pain."

"I am seeing still three of you," I said, opening slowly and closing my eyes. When it hurts to blink, that is when you know you know pain.

"You will play tonight," Hector squeezed. "Tomorrow the pain will be less but because of your strength your self will be more."

"And when I am in the field and I see three not one grounder hop my way, or when I am up at the plate and see three not one curveball break high and into my power, when I see triple, Little Cheese, what then?"

Hector laughed. 

He removed once again the compress from my temple. He handed the wet towel to Verduzco and he quickly re-filled the towel with melting ice. Hector, with love, lay the compress on my wound. He did not believe in anything larger than himself, but with his eyes he mouthed a short imprecation--hoping the gods would respond. Take from Jorge the pain, he said.

He caressed the compress so as not to caress me.

"When you see three grounders bounding your way, or three curveballs fat like a holiday supper," he said, "When you see three, do what always I did."

Silence so as not to interrupt timing as universal as the cosmic Borscht Belt.

"Do what always I did," he said, "Grab the middle one."

The Bill of Goods We've Been Sold. Coming Due.

For about the last fifteen years or so, I disparaged digital media because so many people were gulled by it into believing communicating with other people (either one-to-many or one-to-one) would, through the magic of "free" media, be forever inexpensive or even free.

Seeing that you could make ads and run them for little or no cost--certainly not the cost of, say, a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, Time or Seventeen, led people into devaluing along the way the care they took in creating the messaging. 

It's free. Keep throwing shit out there till something hits. No consideration was giving to the cost of annoying people. Digital media became a port-o-san that was never emptied, that no one would ever think would stink and overflow.

Ads, in fact, became like steak house parsley. They didn't cost much. They didn't matter much. They didn't make much of a difference. So people stopped caring.

Many of the best companies in the world, of course, were built on good advertising. Agency people and client people forgot that. They bought into "it's cheap, who cares?" And every day, we see crappy ads drain billions from the literally trillions of brand equity good advertising helped brands amass over decades and decades.

I know of no reason to buy anything anymore, whether it's a hotel room, a Caribbean destination, an automobile or a new pair of running shoes. People used to pay extra for those reasons. Now they buy whatever's cheapest and nothing has any real value anymore.

Digital media convincing advertising people and marketers that advertising and media and reaching people are free destroyed billions in brand value. 

I was hired twice by Ogilvy. Once in the analog era and once in the digital era. As Mark Twain once quipped "the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." 

The difference between analog and digital thinking is likewise.

If I were charged with selling a new technology, I do exactly what the people who sold us on digital did. I'd say everything will save users massive amounts of time and money. Since your competitors (in my examples, old-line media and in-person training) aren't cohesive, they don't defend the strengths of their ways. 

While we were counting the money that was never delivered we also bought the idea that digital can train and inculcate people and marketers cheaply and quickly. No one ever says aloud, "online training sucks. Have you ever learned anything from an HR 'don't take a bribe' video?" No one ever says, when a customer shows up, 94% of all help is either a) non-existent, b) staring at their phone, or c) staring at their 72-ounce dunkin' coffee. 

We bought a lot of purported savings and we're convinced to ignore the real costs. Like the cost of paying the c-suite 300-1000x the compensation of their median employees. It's great for the c-suite. But I can't think of many healthy businesses now, from retail, to law, to healthcare, to education, to advertising. There's no money left for the people "doing the work." There's only money for the people who own the companies.

Right now communications suck because no one cares (they're 'free, after all.) And no one knows anything about the brands because they went through eight-weeks of online modules written to appeal to a brain-damaged gerbil. And besides they're earning less in real dollars than I earned in 1980, when I made $11,700.

The costs of buying a panacea hook line and sinker are always staggering and narly beyond comprehension. Whether than panacea is a new fuel that far out-performs the old one--like gasoline versus whale oil. Or a drug that will help you shed the "freshman ten" you've been adding to since 1992. 

Sooner or later the unintended consequences will catch up do you. Our environment will turn on us. Our drugs will kill us. Our machines will steal our privacy.

As Malcolm prophetically said after JFK was assassinated, it's a case of "the chickens coming home to roost."

We're slogging through a lot of bird shit.

But we need the eggs.

Trajectory. Tragedy.

Some years ago, the great Dave Dye, at his blog "Stuff From the Loft," created one of his in-depth portraits of the famous English copywriter, Richard Foster. You can read it here. You should read it now.

I don't quite know how Dave does what he does, or even why. Other than that he loves advertising and like any true-believer wants to spread the word about good work and the people who did it.

Dave's portraits are graduate courses in advertising. In fact, once when I was teaching at Ad House, it came to my attention that no one in the class knew what Doyle Dane was. Or who Helmut Krone was. Or Phyllis Robinson. Or Ed McCabe. Dave's blog became about 61-percent of the after-class curriculum. I'd copy the ads in his posts, make a 91-page handout and say, "Keep this in your bottom drawer. Someday when everyone else is stuck, you can read this sheaf of paper, and be unstuck. Consider this your unfair advantage."

Dave wrote this marvelous introduction to Foster on his blog. It's right on the money. Foster was more Clemente or Perez than Mantle, Aaron or Mays. Their accomplishments were greater than the acclaim they earned.

To me however, beyond Foster's work, seven offer letters Richard received were the best thing in Dave's post about Richard. Seven offer letters Richard received over the course of just eleven-and-a-half years. 

During that niblick over a decade, Richard's wages rose from ten pounds a week to £400/week. Plus two-percent equity in his agency. Plus a £10,000/year car allowance. If you were to graph Richard's trajectory, it would look something like this:

There's a lot of gibberish in the world about the demise of the advertising industry. In my lifetime, we've laid the blame on:

• The rise of data
  
• The atomization of the media landscape
• Changing consumer habits
  
• AI
• Influencers
  
• 39,876 other causalities.

What no one ever mentions is that for decades--or half-centuries even--the potentates at the top of agencies and their holding companies, took tens of millions--even hundreds of millions (pounds or dollars, it doesn't much matter which) straight off the revenue line of the entities they were paid to manage. 

When Martin Sorrell paid himself $100,000,000, that meant one-thousand $100,000 creatives weren't hired. That has proven to be less-than-salutary for the long-term-efficacy of what was at one time, an industry.

What's more, ascents like Foster's depicted below in offer letters and above in my rough-graph, were no longer possible. 

It's hard to attract bright and ambitious people to an industry if they have no job security and raises come at 2-percent increments every 36 months. All for the joy of doing the 16,876,877th commercial for a telco with Kevin Hart.

People talk (too much) about culture in ad agencies. I never really understood the fuss about culture or even, frankly, understood what was meant by the term.

When I started in the business you could make a good living and rise quickly. Today, wages are lower in real dollars than they were 50 years ago, and agency tenures are shorter and less reliable.

Here's an idea.

Pay people well.
Let them buy their own culture.

(more than a 40x increase in 12 years.)

Digging In.

I've been looking at, admiring, coveting, studying Dave Trott’s ad work since the mid 1980s. That’s when I saw his (and John Webster’s) Courage Best work and his Toshiba work (which, at the time i didn’t get.) I never met Dave in real life, though I came close once, at some art directors club function in the west 30s, but chickened out.

However, Dave and I correspond a lot. We trade articles and emails and general commentary on life--in the industry, and more often outside of the industry.

Dave posted this about a week ago.

If you're over 55, you remember a time in the industry when creative people had to do more than make ads pretty and culturally relevant. They had to live the product/brand/service. They had to do a factory tour. They had to speak to people who made the product and used the product. They had to investigate and interrogate the product. Only then, could they write about the product in a way that was unique to their client and not just a generic ad.

Here's a commercial example that illustrates that modus operandi. Though not my favorite of Wells Rich Greene's work on Braniff, this commercial, shot by Howard Zieff, is an almost perfect example of what I mean. Understanding of a product, or the customer pains around the product, was not gained second-hand via a discussion with a planner, or through reading a powerpoint deck. Understanding was gained through living and breathing the brand. And through something called "empathy." Empathy today is as obsolete as loving thy neighbor. It's a game for saps.

Today, such non-quantifiable aspects of advertising have been time-sheeted out of existence. All ads (no matter what form they take) all communications, for that matter, look, sound and feel alike because the people behind them have been allotted about 90-minutes to create them. The details of life, the facts of a brand cannot be uncovered in that time. Instead, we default to pablum and "buy one get one free." We don't do work that comforts the afflicted or afflicts the comfortable because the corporate chieftains who strip-mined our industry, deemed that such work would not make them their billions fast enough.

• As an industry, we no longer understand people or even try to.
• We get out information about humans from columns and rows.
• Or in antiseptic conference rooms.
• Then we're told nobody wants to see anyone who's not smiling.
• 97.9% of all commercials end with a grin-fck, a high-five or a dance move.

For the past six years since I've been running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I've been my own planner. Eva Augustyn, Ogilvy's former head of planning on IBM, wrote this about me, unsolicited, about ten years ago. I've converted that into permission to myself interview clients and customers about what they do for a living. What they do differently. About why it's different and important. About why they're proud.

Right now I'm in the middle of about 20 interviews with clients about their technology products. I know an AI's worth more about AI than I did before I started these chats. And think I can begin to work out--to salutary business effect--the first of my two marketing Ds. 

I'm a very shy guy. I don't like talking to strangers. I don't even like talking to friends. And many times I wish I could outsource these interviews to someone else and read their eight-page executive summary.

But this is the only way I know to do advertising.

To get to the soul of a brand.

To differentiate at the corpuscle level. Not the decorative or stylistic level.

If I look a little grey-er and seem to have a little less pep in my step than usual.

This is why.

But the work is better.