Easy.

 

I remember back to 1980.

I had just left college--and home.

I had not two dimes to rub together.

And was getting evicted from Columbia housing where I was paying $90/month sharing a two-bedroom with an apprentice diamond cutter from Philadelphia and 22,000 feral cockroaches. Columbia wanted me out. I was no longer a student.

I grabbed the fifty-page want ad section of the Sunday Times. Like a 1930s corn-fed movie, I circled the one or two things I found of spurious interest that I was remotely qualified to do.

One was a running-shoe salesman at Paragon sporting goods on Broadway and Union Square. One was a junior catalog copywriter for the Montgomery Ward catalog--whose "fashion" divisions were based at 393 7th Avenue, in the garment district.

I got offers for both jobs and took the writing one, regarding it as having more of a future. Later that day, I signed a lease on a small one-bedroom on 109th, between Broadway and Riverside. 

The Montgomery Ward job paid $11,700 per annum, but gave me time in the evening to work on my portfolio or to play basketball at a nearby private school or to pick up some work somewhere if I could find it.

My girlfriend at the time, my wife today, helped me find some freelance work with the husband of a woman she worked with. Somehow N owned pages in the glossy free-standing inserts that were stuffed into the newspapers of the day. 

N would go to clients with deals. For instance, show two proofs of purchase having bought this toothpaste or that, and you can get two free games of bowling at your local alley. If N sold that as a concept--to someone at Colgate, he then would charge them to create an ad announcing the offer. N would come to me to write the ad.

I remember thinking, toothpaste and bowling. That goes together as naturally as tiramisu, spam and bug-killer, but ok. And I got to writing the ad.

Quickly I scribbled "Get Bowled Over," and some sub-copy that explained the workings of the offer. For that I was to get paid $500, which was more than two-week's of my Montgomery Ward pay.

"This is easy money," I said, as I nervously showed it and a few other choices to N. 

It's been 50 years now.

I think I'm still waiting to be paid.

Wednesday night, I was out for dinner with the JCrew, a coterie of older ad people I'm associated with. We're all in the later stages of our careers but still working and sweating and shaking our heads about the work styles and/or the lassitude of the people we work with. Still wondering if it's worth it or when the fun that was supposed to be part of the business will actually show up.

Two or three of the constituents list night have their own legitimate agencies. They have account people, and CFOs, and project-managers. You know, the trappings of a grown-up business. And they have worries like rent, salaries, the leases on copiers and the tsurus that comes from people not showing up or the elevator being out or the bathroom toilet being clogged.

That said, they have accounts and reputations and PR machines that proffer the illusion that Mammon is waiting in the next room. They fly to conferences, book blocks at seaside Cannes hotels, and wear expensive sunglasses even when its dark. At some point, I can hear the sub-rosa utterances we all sotto voce at one time or another primarily to ourselves.

"This is easy money," we whisper, hoping the fates don't hear us and thereby punish us.

After 68 years of bowling people over with this banality or that banality, for this client or that, what I've learned is very simple and very blunt.

No matter how easy it seems,
no matter how accustomed you are to doing the work,
how well you know the client
or how well-versed you are in the product or service,
there is never,
never,
not once,
not ever,
never ever,
there is no such thing
and never will be
as easy money.

The sum total of all I've learned so far is this:

Easy money isn't.

Where There's Smoke There's Salmon.

I don't have many friends, and never really did. 

Even when I was at my most popular, I drew my spiritual covers close under my chin and didn't share my blanket with many. My coterie of friends is usually one or two close ones--maybe three--and a small periphery beyond that inner orbit.

It takes years for me to put out the welcome mat. 
It takes milliseconds for me to whisk it away.

Since I stopped working in a proper office and started spending about 95.67-percent of my time in my basement office well beneath the surface of the earth, my network has contracted. Not only did my best friend of fifty years die (such friendships don't come with understudies) so too did my work father/mentor die just last summer. Adding to that, I work more and more independently now--mostly sans art director and sans "support" people like I had when I worked for others. I employ one person--who's a friend, but we're three-thousand miles apart, and both wired for efficiency, not a chatty-kathy geniality.

In short, it's not unusual for me to go an entire week and have maybe two human conversations. Those are usually with clients, so I suppose--to be mean about it--I could put the word human in italics, as if it were written by Salinger, replete with sarcasm.

All that being said, I am seldom lonely. My interests remain varied and keep me occupied, and my connection with Sparkle, my nearly-perfect two-and-a-half year-old golden retriever keeps flourishing. While she is different from Whiskey--slightly less present, she is a wise companion as we take long seaside walks looking for trouble along this coastline or that. On top of Sparkle, I have developed an interstitial way of reading and writing where one things leads to another. I keep finding new things to learn about and keep developing and deepening my world view. There are a lot of people with scores of friends who have no world view. I'd rather be alone with one then surrounded and devoid.

Just about 90 minutes ago, I arrived in New York's newly developed Moynihan train-station by Amtrak, the chronically under-funded amerikan't train system. The new train-station is built inside an old post office and is really just a mall with diesel exhaust and intermittent whiffs of urine-soaked-homelessness. amerry-cannot has a decimal place problem. Everything that kills or enriches the plutocrat class has plenty of numbers to the left of the decimal. Everything that helps the lümpen has few numbers to the left. 

It looks like this: Murderrapemayhemreverserobinhoodtheivery.00
Good.00

The northeast corridor includes 17 percent of the country’s inhabitants--about 58 million people--and 20 percent of its trade on just 1.4 percent of its land.  The I-95 Corridor Coalition calculates that 60 percent of the thruway’s urban sections are already congested and predicts that car traffic will increase by 85 percent by 2035. And nearly half of the nation’s domestic flight delays originate in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. In 2019 (pre-covid) six hundred fifty thousand passengers ratted through Penn Station each day, more people than flew out of Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark airports combined.

New York, especially after a few months of stultifying connecticutness, can be a dispiriting place. Everyone is head down rushing like mad, no one is watching where they're going and fully-a-third of all those people look like they haven't showered since amerikkka's previous illegal war, about four weeks ago.

But New York is New York. There is a quality here that makes sense, a conviviality, a warmth and a humanity that in the rest of ameridon't seems to have been cost-consultanted out of consideration. We live in a nothing for nothing nation. And now that everything you buy, everyplace you go to for help, everything you eat is owned by one or another giant private-equity held money squeeze, decent treatment, politeness and smiles are off the MBA-world's agenda.

But as I said, New York is New York.

I got on the "whites only Q train" outside of Macy's. (I say "whites only" because the train goes no further north than 96th Street. Not daring to enter black and brown Manhattan.) In moments I was disgorged at 72nd and Second amid the Vik Muniz subway art and the effervescent and always under-construction Upper East Side gentility I love so much.

I headed like a migrating animal to Sable's, an Asian-run Jewish appetizing storefront that's been a fixture in the neighborhood for over 40 years, since Kenny broke off from Zabar's on the Upper West Side and opened up his own small smoked-salmon Shangri-la.

I'd been having a craving for a lox on a salt bagel sandwich of old-school dimensions for about a month. I had thought about stopping by Barney Greengrass on West 86th Street, the last place I had had such a treat (about four years ago) but they were closed for Passover, so Sable's it was.

No sooner did I enter the small shop when a burly Asian man behind the counter handed me a small-niblick of bagel with about four-ounces of hand-cut smoked salmon on it. I hadn't even ordered anything yet. But Sable's calculus has always been, "treat customers well and they'll keep coming back." 

I did the math in my head. They returned a $6 sample of lox on my $100 expenditure. Not a bad ROI for anyone but an MBA.

Today, in New York or not, treating people with pre-emptive dignity and kindness is a vestige of a naive era. Why bother? Everything is owned by a monopoly and there's no place else people can go, so fuk'em.

If you don't like Verizon, try AT&T, they're worse. If you don't like Delta, try United, they're worse. If you don't like the dimmycrats, try the repugnicants, they're worse. If you don't like omnicant, try pubickiss, they're worse.

You see this from almost everyone you do business with. Then after paying mandatory service charges for peremptory service, and $6 for four slices of bread, you get this, in lieu of genuine caring.

The world was better off when you got samples of lox and weren't merely a survey sample.

But now it's lunchtime.

Lox.

Six stars.

Resumé.

From a very early age, as much as I wanted to write for a living, I knew I wasn't the mattress on the floor of a six-story walk-up on Avenue C kind of guy. It was a gnarly New York I grew up in. We weren't many years away from bankruptcy, endemic arson, 2000-murders a year and the spectre of ever-present crime. Most of the shop-keepers along Broadway up in the Columbia neighborhood I lived in kept a club of some sort under the counter and such implements weren't just for show. 

New York at the time seemed like the Wild West and many sane people like myself sought to find a certain middle-class equilibrium to get away from the four deadbolts on the front door and grates on every window sort of existence.

Accordingly, while I knew kids from college who were night-time troubadours, or ersatz beat poets snapping out riffs in crooked-floored tenements with torn photos of Allen Ginsberg Howling on every third wall, I realized quickly, the Bohemian life was not for me. While I'd love to lay in bed till noon and work on my art, I knew that those plusses usually came with mean-spirited rats, roaches that swarmed like the Viet Cong during Tet and worse of all, vermin so prevalent as to be all but unidentifiable to anyone who had even an inkling of entomological training. 

In short, I worked and worked and worked until I could beat a path to a 7th-floor apartment in a white brick building on 73rd and Second. I escaped from grunge about as fast as I could pay the rent somewhere ungrunged. It was, in the words of Hemingway who was writing about something else entirely, "a clean, well-lighted place." There was laundry in the basement, doormen at the door and a sense of Scarsdale decorum without the boredom so rife in suburbia.

While I wrote stories and parts of novels and filled shoe-boxes with type-written tripe-writing, I always had a day job and the burning ambition to move up in my career and my life, which took precedence, and still does over novels and lives unfinished.

That said, it's not unusual for me to read things by the great Mason Curry, who as shown above writes often about the ways and means writers and artists persevere and become writers and artists, not merely copywriters and art directors. You can buy Curry's latest book here, as I did just moments ago. Curry's book relates stories and reflections on how  famous artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers throughout history have managed to successfully (or not) support a creative life. That is, how to do what I could not, balance their creative ambitions with the very real need to pay rent and put food on the table. 

BTW, there are those who walk among us who don't understand those who walk among us who buy more books than they can possibly ever read. And acquire more movies, as I do, on DVDs--because I like having hard copies for when elon musk and his fellow plutocrats crash the internet for their own nefariousosity, leaving us in the forthcoming digital dark ages where we've forgotten how to read ink on paper. 

I read in Nassim Nicolas Taleb's classic, "The Black Swan," that Umberto Eco had built an anti-library: a collection of books that one hasn't yet read because, as Eco asserts, "unread books are much more valuable than read ones." It's been said that Eco's library contained over 30,000 books. That's like buying a book a day for 82 years. Or to mutate the famous quip by John Kennedy, from back when amerikkka was a country, at a White House dinner honoring Nobel-Prize recipients (real ones), "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Curry writes of an artist I don't know called Agnes Martin, who (above) wrote a list of every job she ever had. 

Here's an excerpt from Curry you might like, if your faculties have remained intact enough and you can still read:

James Dickey was “office writing radio commercials for Coca-Cola bottlers while at the same time working in secret on his poetry (“ Every time I had a minute to spare, which was not often, I would stick a poem in the typewriter where I had been typing Coca-Cola ads,” he said); the composer Philip Glass, who, in the 1960s and ’70s, in between short tours with his music ensemble, ran a moving company with his cousin and worked as a plumber and a New York taxi driver (“ I expected to have a day job for the rest of my life,” he said); the abolitionist and writer Harriet Jacobs, who was born a slave in North Carolina in 1813 and who, after having her freedom purchased for her by her employer, worked as the family housemaid caring for five children seven days a week, writing her book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl at night while the children slept (“ I have not yet written a single page by daylight,” she confided in a letter); the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who, in 2018, told The Paris Review that his favorite job was as a “night watchman for three hundred cows,” though he also worked as a miner for a time (“ That was almost comical—the real miners had to cover for me,” he said); the artist Agnes Martin, who worked as a waitress, a dishwasher, a janitor, a cashier, a receptionist, a playground director, and a tennis coach, as well as jobs for a mining company, in country schools, in a factory, in a hamburger stand, in a butcher shop, in a nursery, in a cafeteria, and as a baker’s helper ('Also raised rabbits and ducks,' she noted in a handwritten list of all the jobs she ever had); the poet Lorine Niedecker, who worked as a library assistant, a writer and research editor for a Wisconsin guidebook, a scriptwriter for a Madison radio station, a stenographer and proofreader for the journal Hoard’s Dairyman, and, from 1957 to 1963, a cleaner at the Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital in southern Wisconsin—her final day job before her retirement at age sixty—during which time she adopted a unique haikulike form that became a signature of her late style; the painter Henry Taylor, whose earliest artwork included drawings of patients at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital in Southern California, where he worked the night shift as a “psychiatric technician” for eleven years, from 1984 to 1996; the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, who produced more than two dozen books during the thirty-three years he worked as a civil servant at the General Post Office, writing for three hours every morning before he dressed for breakfast; the author Kurt Vonnegut, who at various points worked in public relations for General Electric, tried to invent a board game, lasted one day as a writer for Sports Illustrated, and managed a Saab dealership on Cape Cod (his son later called him “the world’s worst car salesman”); the Swiss writer Robert Walser, who worked as a journalist, a bank clerk, an inventor’s assistant, and, for six months, a butler for a count who lived in a castle in Upper Silesia* (Walser’s time at a Berlin school for domestic servants inspired his 1909 novel Jakob von Gunten, now considered his finest work and a masterpiece of early-twentieth-century fiction); and the playwright Tennessee Williams, who as an aspiring young writer worked at the International Shoe Company factory in St. Louis and hated it so much that he set himself the goal of writing one short story per week, working late into the night at his parents’ house. After work, Williams “would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house,” his mother recalled. 'Some mornings when I walked in to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too tired to remove his clothes.'"

In my youth, I worked reserving squash courts and refunding money in a college student center, as the assistant dean of student [ahem] affairs at Barnard College, as a nightwatchman at McIntosh Hall at Barnard, as a reader of bad novels for a fourth-rate New York publishing house, as a catalog copywriter writing shoe copy for the Montgomery Ward catalog, as a game-room attendant at a penny arcade at a seaside amusement park outside of the Bronx, as a camp counselor in New Hampshire, as a dishwasher at an Italian place, as a aluminum-siding stevedore, as a night-cashier at a downtown Chicago liquor store, as a store-checker for a Chicago sausage company, as a paperboy in suburban New York, and probably two or three I don't well-remember or whom still owe me money. 

Right now I'm engaged in writing over 100 ads for a large financial services company. These are the small-type ads that I don't believe anyone really reads much-less gains useful consumer information from. But they've become somehow, this marketing flotsam and jetsam, the sine non qua of modern marketing. They have little effect but to keep people working for other people so that still other people feel important.

I've been in this situation before, and when I am done with the entirety of the work I have to do for this company and its various adjuncts, I'll have created a marketing platform which will "contain" probably 2000 ads and 50 or so longer pieces. My calculus says they'll pay me on the order of a quarter of a million dollars for all that.

Which isn't enough, of course. Though at one time it was beyond my very comprehension of Mammon. And I've always liked Mammon.

Whatever form it takes, Mammon beats a piss-stained mattress on the lower east side and roaches with a bug up their ass against you.

Simpler.

Many years ago--through 1993--I worked, indirectly at least, for Hall of Fame art director Mike Tesch. I say indirectly, because Ally, where Mike was ECD (when that was the highest creative title) was a well-run agency. If you were a Senior Vice President, Creative Group Head, you ran your business with your account guy. You hired the people you needed. Got rid of the people you didn't and approved or killed ads as you deemed appropriate.

There wasn't a lot of meddling, so long as the work was good. That gave people a necessary sense of autonomy and kept back-biting and turfwars to a minimum.

So, while Tesch was looming in the background, I had little to do with him. Ed Butler and Mike Withers approved my work, and that was fine. Once, it must have been a summer Friday, Ed and Mike were out for the day. An account person came running down to my office fairly breathless. 

"The client just called. They need an ad this afternoon to run in the Times for Monday morning."

"But Mike and Ed are out," I stammered.

"You do it," the account guy said, making scarce for the 2:18 to Scarsdale. "Get Tesch to approve it."

I quickly wrote an ad--a headline with copy and I doped out a rough comp and trembled my way to Tesch's almost pitch black corner office.  I explained the crisis in about three words--and leggo the work I had done when he brusquely grabbed for the paper I was sweating over.

"OK," he said. And he went to work.

In about two minutes he had found me and handed me a comp. I was to sell it to the client. About an hour later the client approved it and Tesch sent it out for type and got the studio work going so the ad could plate over-the-weekend for the Monday Times.

I remember reading something about Tesch around the time in some awards magazine. It might have been on the occasion of Tesch's entry into some advertising Hall of Fame or another. The sentence read something like, "Mike believed there was no marketing problem that can't be solved by a great commercial."

Certainly, if you look at the best of Tesch's work you can see why he was a true believer.

Today, of course, no one believes statements with the sort of simplicity and directness of Tesch's belief above. 

Below is a bit from an article from The Athletic, the New York Times' really crappy sports pages.

I don't one-hundred percent know what all of the above means. I know a good pitcher and a good catcher will move the ball in and out, up and down, fast and slow. Every at bat, real or metaphorical, is a cat and mouse game with the batter. And the best way to win that game within a game is to mix things up so the batter is almost always guessing.

From a batter's pov, we hear a lot today about bat speed, angle of approach, knowledge of the strike zone and so much science. When I was a boy, we heard about two things from our coaches. 

1. Hit the ball hard.

2. Hit 'em where they ain't.

I think we can find a trillion things to say about agency marketing ecosystems and what works and what doesn't work and why. You need spend no more than nine micro-seconds on LinkedIn to get enough marketing theory to choke a hippopotamus.

Just about every third person on LinkedIn has a mini-MBA from Mark Ritson, or some certification in agentic asphyxiation from the Seth Godin Institute of Chrome-Dome-itis.  In those places you learn how to derive 192 page decks that prove your eyeballs didn't bleed when you were forced to sit through a reading of the 192 page deck and the accompanying :30-second spot with seventeen different testable offer tags.

I suppose all this professional wankery is good for the economy. It employs thousands of people to do the work of about a dozen and then tell us why they work could be better if every decision that was validated by research yesterday is invalidated by new research from today.

I don't watch a helluva a lot of TV.

But when I do, I never see anything that stops me, that intrigues me, that interests me, that makes me a promise I'll remember until the next day.

Somehow we've made it so complicated it's all spinning down the drain and no one has the balls to say so. And say maybe complication has rendered it so.

I miss Mike.

Return on Investment.

I came. I saw. I was vindictive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, tres uncool.

Frankly, I closed the books on the business.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's vindication, too.

Twenty Universals.

Nice guy, Augustine.

And blogs!

Another party heard from.

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

Someone crossed Germanicus.

Desecration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15. Prophecies you pay for are self-fulfilling.

16. Agreement and approval can be bought cheap.

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

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

19. I have the data that proves it.

20. The system helps only those who create it.

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

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

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

Incapacitated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You could do worse.

Dumbbell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's a metaphor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You make something up, that only you understand.

Thoughts from Don McKinney.