Owned.

More than two decades ago, as a brief chapter in my Agency-wandering-Jew-ness, when I had four jobs in three cities in two years, I found myself in a giant coroner office of a giant bland agency that had hired me to un-bland them as long as I could do that without
a) spending money or 
b) demanding original thinking or
c) upsetting their profitable status quo.

In other words, like so many clients who hire new agencies that act just like their old agencies, I was supposed to change everything without changing anything.

Early on in my twenty-month tenure, a senior art person came into my office to show me some work.

She was gushing with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm that was hard to reconcile with the singular so-what-ness of her thinking and executions.

When you start at a new place, you never know what you're going to get in these early-on creative meetings. You have to be firm re the quality of the work but not an asshole. Otherwise you'll quickly get branded as someone no one wants to work for, or a hiring mistake. As my ex-Ogilvy CCO used to say, you have to be tough on the work, not the people. That's tough because so many people regard it as essentially defamatory when you don't praise even the mediocre up to the heavens. (See art-adorned refrigerators and French award-shows won by agencies hemorrhaging business.)

I said something to this art director to the effect of "I don't see an idea here."

The art person showing me the creative slowly closed her eyes. Maybe she exhaled noisily, somewhere between Darth Vader and a Golden Retriever, begging while you're eating. She tried to stare me down and spoke to me as if I were hopelessly ignorant.

"Don't you see?" She buffeted. "We're going to own the color blue."

A moment later I said something like, "IBM spends a billion a year on advertising. They're known as big blue. AT&T spends a billion a year on advertising, their logo is blue. GM spends a billion a year on advertising, they're also associated with blue. I think there are only two chances of 'owning the color blue.' 

One, slim. 
Two, none."

Last week on Rob Schwartz's excellent substack Rob had a line that served as the impetus for this post. (Any creative who isn't all the time reading, btw, isn't worth their weight in unravelled grease pencils.) 

Rob's post was about the importance of advertising that gets noticed. And it's a sad state that people have to make the argument for impact, attention, differentiation and stopping power, but that's where we are today. In the AI era of machine-made advertising, the technocrats have convinced their technocrat clients that inundation of people by ads means more than ads that make an impact on people's brains.

The Rob-line that stopped me--as so many of his lines do--was this:

In other words, marketers and their agencies, "owning David Beckham is about the corporeal equivalent of owning the color blue." 

This commercial is for?

This commercial is for?

Ownable?

Ownable?

Today we hear ad nauseam about brands becoming part of culture. Becoming part of culture usually involves taking a part of culture and slapping your logo on it. 

Frankly, I've been hearing the phrase "part of culture" for about fifteen years, I've never really seen it it real life, with the possible exception of Nike/Randy Newman/LA "I Love LA" spot--which I'd argue very few brands could ever do. The syzygy behind client/song/culture happens about as often as real syzygy and about as often as someone taking a moment to look up the word syzygy.

My point in all this is simple.

Like Rob's David Beckham example above, it's easy to draft on a vector of culture. Just as it's easy to use the color blue. But it's nearly impossible to own something that doesn't actually belong to you. Few brands have the money, patience or time to make that happen.

BMW about 20 years ago tried to own the word "Joy." I would imagine that effort cost the brand thousands of sales and billions in brand equity.

You're way better off showing a brand that elicits joy without saying joy.

The car here:

Is much more evocative than the cars here:

One shows the joyousness of white-knuckled driving, and the exhilaration the brand attributes to genuine German engineering. The other just uses a word. 

An unownable word.

Messaging is only good, only effective, only empathic and influential, only yours if it comes from the innateness of the product or brand itself. And is expressed in a way no one else could.

There's nothing extraordinary about this ad below.

Except that everyone got out of the way and let the product speak.

There's not a single unique word in the ad above. What's unique is the product the words are about.

The "thing," blueness, Beckham, joy is generic. 

Here's the copy for the "paint" ad above. 

The goal was to own the notion of a car that was made honestly, intelligently, obsessively.

No David Beckham required.

After we paint the car we paint the paint.

  You should see what we do to a Volks-
wagen even before we paint it.

  We bathe it in steam, we bathe it in
alkali, we bathe it in phosphate. Then we
bathe it in a neutralizing solution.

   If it got any cleaner, there wouldn't be
much left to paint.

   Then we dunk the whole thing into a
vat of slate grey primer until every square
inch of metal is covered, inside and out.  

    Only one domestic car maker does this.
And his cars sell for 3 or 4 times as much
as a Volkswagen.

    (We think the best way to make an
economy car is expensively.)

    After all that dunking, we bake it and sand
it by hand.

    Then we paint it.

    Then we bake it again, and sand it again
by hand.

    Then we paint it again.

    And bake it again.

    And sand it again by hand.

    So after 3 times, you'd think
we wouldn't bother to paint it
again and bake it again. Right? 

    Wrong.

Crashes.

I finished late last night during another losing battle with Dame Insomnia, Andrew Ross Sorkin's great book you-should-drop-everything and read, "1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation." You can order it here for $12.52, with free shipping.

If you order this book, or any book for that matter, you'll likely have it delivered in plastic packaging. The packaging will be packaged with ads. It's not enough for people to sell you a book and leave it at that. They have to maximize your life-time value and throw ads at you.

Now, you might wonder, what does Andrew Ross Sorkin's "1929" have to do with any of this? One is a book about the speculative ginning up and money grab of the stock-market nearly a century ago. The other is about used books I buy from abebooks.com because I like a bargain and don't mind buying used.

That's easy.

Last night, I read this bit, which confirmed a story about the depression I had always assumed was apocryphal. 

After a week "in the world," back in my New York City apartment, I returned Saturday to our Gingham Coast house made of straw. Waiting for me were about seven small bundles of incidental books I had ordered that had arrived during my absence. Each of these books was wrapped in plastic and each plastic envelope was stuffed with ads of the "penny-saver" ilk. Truly junk.

The burial insurance ad above is representative of them. It was 'art-directed' to look like a quasi-official document like a state-issued license or deed. You can get great used books cheaply--and that's a blessing. But like everything today, you'll also be inundated immediately with garbage. Dumb, gross, insensitive and aggressive. Also, about 98% of these ads treat you like you're an idiot--that you'll be fooled by the faux "check" they're mailing you.

Go to a website once. Spam for life ensues. And of course my "free" gmail box gets into the act, with more and more lies that are masquerading as email from brands that, you'd think would do their best to protect themselves from these obvious scams that are trading on their "good" names.

I do no business with CapitalOne, which seems to me a bank only slightly less upstanding than the neighborhood loan shark. They're slightly to the unethical side in a Wells-Fargo-ing way. 

And the likelihood of Tiffany giving me a "complimentary" something-or-other "crafted for this moment" (whatever that means) is about the same as tump presenting a fair, affordable, color-blind and helpful healthcare-for-all plan.

Even my Kindle, which cost me nearly $200 after I paid for the protective cover--and who charge through the nose for access to badly laid-out books that aren't really "optimized" for digital reading, gives me an ad every time I "wake" it up. Even though amazon's trillionaire owner pays a smaller percentage in taxes than I do, he feels its within his rights to inundate me with more stupid ads I don't want, ostensibly so he can make more income he pays no tax on.

The point in all this is that like stock market tips and speculation almost a century ago, or the AI-market today, advertising inundation is out of control. The plethora of ads diminishes the value of each one until they are as plentiful and useful as flies around a dead carcass in the Sahara. They annoy. They make you hate. Not want.

The inundation reminds me of Joseph Kennedy's stock tips. There's too much. Coming from everywhere. With no buffer. No respect. No restraint.

The great money grab--where advertising went from six-minutes of commercials per hour to 25 per hour (not counting logos on uniforms, on playing fields, on the referees, on the chyron) has chased people away. The paying to watch three times is even worse.

Once your monthly access fee.
Once with your time.
Once for a streaming service
is all a form of abuse.

It's no wonder more and more consumers are post consumer, ie. they ignore all.

It reminds me of clients who ask for bits of the copy to be bold. Then another bit. Then another. Then another.

Before long the whole thing is bold. So nothing is.

This is the state of advertising today.

As Spencer Tracy says to Ernest Borgnine at about 2:40 in the above clip, "You're not only wrong, you're wrong at the top of your voice."

That's us. Wrong and wrong at the top of our voice.

Bob Levenson wrote in DDB's famous "Do This or Die" ad sixty years ago: "No donkey chases the carrot forever. He catches on. And quits."

The world has quit advertising. Advertising has quit serving.

And the holding companies are bigger asses than asses.

An Act of Cod.

Toward my waning days at Ogilvy (and when you work for a holding company, your days are always waning) I was asked to help out on a pitch for a passel of Johnson & Johnson products. 

After centuries as J&J, J&J changed its name to Kenvue. I think they believed this would help indemnify some portions of the company from billions of  lawsuits against it talc-based business. DuPont did something similar not too long ago. Spinning off its chemical division, calling it Chemours, and hoping to shield itself from litigation around the deadly forever chemicals they made a fortune producing.

In any event, the pitch was awful. We pitched Listerine, Zyrtec and a few other brands I can't remember. 

When the work was still good, a suit from WPP came in. He "knew" the client, killed all the work and boring-ized it so we would win. We lost. Two will get you seven he's still employed and playing golf.

There were no ads at all in the pitch, or few. There was certainly no broadcast. There was also no reason to believe--from either an agency or a product point of view.

Mostly people ran around doing social strategy which, we were assured, would carry the day.

Right after Ogilvy did NOT win the business, Covid descended on all of us. My wife and I relocated (supposedly temporarily) to the Gingham Coast. 

When you buy a second home, one of the first things you do is buy again everything you haven't thought about buying for years. 

You buy aspirin, tylenol, qtips, listerine, cleaning supplies, etc etc. Basically, what happens is you go to one of the two drugstores left in amerikkka, Walgreens or CVS, and you buy everything you've always had that you don't have in your new house.

I realized something at that moment.

I hadn't seen a commercial or a print ad or anything for a FMCG (fast-moving consumer good) since I was home sick from eleventh grade and looking forward to Jane Russell in Playtex Cross-Your-Heart bra commercials.

What I realized was that for about half-a-century, I had seen no commercials with a bona-fide "reason-why." No drops of retsin. No platformate. No kills germs on contact. No lifts-and-separates.

So, when you're buying and you see the Listerine for $9.29 and CVS brand for $3.89, when you haven't been told why Listerine is "worth more," you wind up buying the store brand. There's no reason not to. Or, if there is a reason, no one's told you the reason in a memorable way. What you're left with is no reason to buy something more expensive.

Years ago, I read a great book by Tom Nichols called "The Death of Expertise." Nichols never mentioned it, but brands lost their expertise, too. As did ad agencies.

Over the past 30 years or so, since the digital emerged and TV declined, billions in brand value that brands like Listerine accrued over decades--or even centuries, disappeared in a sea of 2"x2" ads in your social feeds. Ads that said nothing and established no reason why expensive brands are more expensive. Social-first strategy was supposed to save brands billions. Of course no one added up the cost in brand-equity-deterioration. 

Over the past 30 years ago as the industry stopped doing "product advertising," and instead worked to make brands part of culture (whatever that means) billions in brand value that brands like Listerine accrued over decades--or even centuries, disappeared. 

BTW, I never really knew what making a brand a part of culture meant until the Graham Platner debacle when he was a misogynistic, nazi-tattoo'd, platitude-spouting, senatorial candidate in Maine. His viability of the candidate wasn't about him, the product, it was about how he represented Maine's ethos and culture. This is what happens when you sell everything but what's intrinsic to the actual product.

From my vantage, agencies go with the flow. There's not one that says, "sure you'll save via cheap in the short-run. But what about a month from now?"

I just saw the below from the Wall Street Journal on Sunday morning. The article is about "big food." But, I believe, the dynamic probably applies to just about every category, including agencies themselves, who no longer sell anything that isn't generic, or parity, or meh. 

According to the line graph below, private-label share of groceries has grown more than ten-percent in just four years. While Campbells and General Mills have seen the PE ratios plummet. These are signs that would scare the crap out of me if I worked for one of those companies, or the holding companies that kowtow to them.

This is a fairly easy concept.

If you don't tell people why you're worth more, people won't pay more. This is as true with real estate, friends, finding a good lobster roll, and mouthwash. 

As Yogi is reputed to have said, "If people don’t want to come to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?"

Or even before that, some of us learned this ditty. Some of us still remember it. Some of us still take it to heart.

Everyone but clients and agencies.

We Have a Problem.

Not too many minutes ago, I got off the phone with a prospective client who had called me somewhat unexpectedly. Sometimes that's the best kind of call. Sometimes lack of preparation and background forces you to answer questions in a "reactive" or limbic way, the way your head might react when avoiding an unexpected round-house sucker-punch.

Maybe it's a function of having been born during the Mesozoic Era and having done this a long time. But sometimes, when I'm speaking about something I feel I know quite well, I'm not only actively answering a question, I'm also "other-body-ing" things and listening to myself--almost as an outsider--answering. I actually analyzing what I'm saying, it seems to me, as I'm saying it.

That might sound like a premise out of something by Delmore Schwartz, but here's what I mean.

The prospective client asked me if I would be interested in working for his company which offers services that might be regarded as slightly less interesting than row 97, cell E on an excel spread sheet with 2100 rows and 44 different cells.

Suddenly I heard myself answer:

What good creative people have in common is simple. 
We like solving problems.

|t doesn't much matter what that problem is.
It's regarding the unraveling of that problem as the most-important part of your job. 
Yes, the problem could be selling something sexy.
More often the problem involves something boring. A vegetable soup with fewer vegetables.
It doesn't much matter what the problem is.

What matters is the vigor with which you apply your skill, your craft, your energy and your noggin to solving it.

I wondered as I heard myself blathering on with this answer, if buried not-so-deep inside my answer was one of the principle woes that have stricken down and so-damaged the ad industry.

Today, most often we're given a raft of deliverables under the general heading of "an assignment." We have a 300x250. We have a tik-tok video. A :30. A :15. A :06. We have tweets to write and key words to unlock.

We're never given a problem, or, maybe more precisely no one ever matches those deliverables back to a problem.

No one knows your name.
No one knows what makes you better.
No one knows why they should choose you.
No one knows why you exist.

Many years ago, I realized that much of online advertising is predicated on a major error. As digital grew out of direct mail, there was a presumption that your viewer was interested because, after all, your targeting is so good. Reductio ad absurdum, you didn't have to sell, you just had to tell.

That's how we wound up with the generic copy that afflicts so much of what we ignore.

The problem is, when everything is targeted, nothing is. And nothing gets you to look up and notice anything.

All of the above fail to consider that there are a lot of cars that can say exactly the same thing, and offer the same product range at essentially the same pricing as BMW or Audi. 

There's no reason why. 
There's no problem-solving.

Similar to BMW, as there are dozens of automobile brands to choose from, there are hundreds of Caribbean islands. They're all lovely. Their weather is balmy, their water cerulean, the models in their ads gorgeous.

The assignment as interpreted by modern advertising is "we have to write lines to help people navigate our site." It's not, as above, "we have to write lines that give people a reason to choose our island, not the 603 islands that look just like ours."

None of the commercials below made the brands paying for them or the agency creating them "part of culture."
None of them worked at the intersection of technology and data.
None of them won a pride of plastic lions in southern France.

They talked about the product.
What made it tick.
They showed how it was different.
They solved a problem--the primary problem advertisers face: Why should anyone care?

Now that's an idea.

Figs.

I was a kid at a time before there were a lot of "organized sports" for kids.

Sure there was Little League in the Spring, and Pop Warner football in the Fall. If you were so inclined, there were probably swim teams at the Y and even hockey leagues here and there.

But for the most part, sports just happened organically, like a stray gust of wind picking up a pile of leaves or an apple falling on a physicist's noggin.

A group of boys would somehow gather together on a patch of grass or blacktop and a game would grow up around us. We'd find our own "out of bounds," our own manholes for bases and our own rules and we'd make our own judgments. If you didn't like the kids, or you thought they were cheats, you walked home. You had special power if the ball or bat belonged to you.

Today, a couple of towns over from my Gingham Coast cabin, there's a fenced-in dog-run adjacent to a broad expanse of playing fields. Depending on the day, the parking lot is filled with giant SUVs, and each sideline of the lime-stone marked field is ringed by heavy-set parents with folding chairs watching their nine-year-old girls or nine-year-old boys play soccer, or lacrosse, or something. They're presided over by a set of be-whistled referees ruled by a time clock with snarling coaches, a pecking order and a set of strictures that could choke a goat.

It's all so fukking orderly, it could make a right-thinking person sick.

There was something we learned on those ersatz playfields unsullied by adult authority. This ain't the Duke of Wellington saying, "The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." But the catalog of things we learned was long, deep and meaningful.

We learned to fight. 
To stand up for our beliefs.
We learned to argue.
To form an argument.
To bring evidence to bear.
We learned to form sides.
We learned to walk away if we felt the other side was cheating.
We learned to stick to our guns.
We learned to raise our voices when they needed raising.
We learned to speak up.

Even when I was older, in my early twenties and I would play basketball with the neighborhood ruffians down at St. Catherine's park on East 68th Street, we "policed" ourselves. "No blood, no foul" was harsh. But we made it work.

Those incidentals were the currency of getting along. They were the currency of establishing "self" amid bigger, stronger, older kids. They were means of developing your stature and person.

Once many years ago, I wrote a note to the head of HR at Ogilvy. It was "360-evaluation" time and I had just read an article in The Wall Street Journal about how organizations need trouble-makers and untethered cannons. That seemed a very "David Ogilvy" way of thinking.

I remember exactly what the former head of HR wrote in reply:

"We're looking for collaborative bridge-builders."

Build a bridge up my ass.

The demise of this industry, the dearth of good work comes from collaboration, bridge-building and worst of all, politesse. 

Politesse: a courteous formality. A stilted tarnished dishonest cohesive togetherness. 

Serendipitously, this video came across my desktop the other day. You can, as I did, learn from it. More important, our almost dead industry could learn from it. 

Yeah, I know, it's easy for Larry David to be an asshole. He's earned $1,000,000,000. But maybe he earned that much because he had the strength to be an asshole.

At some point we might have to start being mean. Start walking away. Start sticking to our guns.

Being feckless and accommodating, being a collaborative bridge-builder.

It hasn't just not worked.

It's been a disaster.

And, no figs.

E Pluribus Grift.

Two things happened yesterday or the day before that not too terribly long ago would have had a profound impact on my life.

First WPP, the holding company that's shed more than half its people over the last ten years, has just announced yet another round of "restructuring."

It's hard for me, a guy who shuns euphemisms and prefers honest language, to accept a world that's allowed the word "restructuring" to usurp in meaning the word "fired." 

I'll admit I'm old fashioned. But I like language that uses words people understand in order to communicate. As I read once in the Economist, "words you can stub your toe on." 

I remember years ago reading a novel which was set in upper-crust salons in Victorian England. Somehow someone offends someone else, remarking on her "sizable obliquity." 150 years ago that's how posh people said, "she has a fat ass." IMHO "communication companies" like WPP should try to trade in clarity and truth, not subterfuge and circumlocution. Obliquity, my ass.

In other words, since the currency of effective communication is truth, we should, now and again try telling it. Speaking of truth, my supposition is that WPP gave Ad Age false data about how many people they've fired over the last 20 years or so. The data from "company disclosures" is very different from the data you can find if you do two minutes of research. I wouldn't expect such diligence from the trade press--by all appearances the trade press is bought and paid for. Their reporting is Shakespearean in that it's, "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

The second news item on my idiosyncratic radar was the nearly 24% drop in the share price of IBM, my client for more than a dozen years, in just one day.

Here again, there's some semantic bushwa happening, and in the feckless spirit of our modern age, no one is called out on their bald-faced prevarications. 

When your share price drops 23.93% in a single day, you shouldn't be able to get away with saying your company "faltered." That's like abruptly driving your car into an outdoor cafe and killing twelve. You can't say, "my steering faltered." 

That's not faltering. 
That's disaster.

Likewise when you've missed projections by seven-hundred-million dollars that's not from "not anticipating the magnitude of the capex reprioritization." In the parlance of pre-Jalen Brunson Knick basketball, "that's stinking up the court."

$17,900,000,000
- 17,200,000,000
       700,000,000 

Believe it or not, though, this isn't a post about either WPP or IBM.

It's a post about using language to lie, to confuse, to mislead.

It's a post about the press, and readers like you and me, not being outraged when we're being lied to. Not questioning, not noticing, not looking for the nearest pitchfork. Or Molotov.

It's also a post about what happens to once great companies when no one any longer (including the people who work for those companies) knows what they sell or what makes them different or better.

Here is a screen shot of IBM's homepage. 

1. I have no idea what that means (and I'm pretty smart about technology) and
2. I would have hard time having confidence in you when you've lost 23% of your value in a single day.

3. Your company has lost $69,000,000,000 in market cap since the start of the year, please don't talk about modernization--you might disappear in a quaint old-fashioned way. (Maybe this message isn't getting 'traction.')

Here's WPP's homepage:

1. It's hard to call yourself a trusted growth partner when you've shed 51% of your work force and lost 87% of your market cap and killed many of the brands you bought and brought into your holding company.
2. If you have to say you're trusted, you're not.

--

Some months ago I got called by a jerk asking me if I would pitch a vodka brand being developed by a fourth-tier 72-year-old Hollywood "star" and his 29-year-old creative director/wife.

Around that time I started hearing about a start-up whiskey brand called 'Uncle Nearest.' They had produced an "origin story" video that could make you weep. I would be proud to produce work like Uncle Nearest did. 

GUY 1: Every layer has been so genuinely good and interesting and fascinating, that our main job here was to not screw it up.

GUY 2: This is something important and this is something that's gonna last. This is something that's going to be beyond us.

And then.

It's not unreasonable to conclude, when a country elects two times a six-time bankrupt, a convicted defrauder and a con-man as president, allows its political class to engage in insider trading, and permits the super-wealthy to "donate" hundreds of millions in "campaign funds" to candidates all while letting them not pay taxes, maybe all of amerikkka is just one big grift.

From agencies to agentic to alcohol.

On a lighter note, may I suggest this as a replacement for our National Anthem.

Hummable.