For Sale.

Dame Insomnia on her way to my bedside.

About five years ago, I switched from a Kindle to an iPad mini for my daily nightly reading. This week I decided to switch back to Kindle. 

Rightly or wrongly, truly or falsely, I've read enough to believe that the light from a computer, in whatever form it takes, Mac, pod, or phone, interferes with sleep patterns. Over the last few years, Dame Insomnia's grip on me has grown ever-more-potent, and I'm willing to do nearly anything to break that grip and get three straight hours of slumber a night.

About 36-hours after I ordered the Kindle, it arrived on the stone doorstep of my small seaside ramshackle up here on the Gingham Coast. I tore the flimsy packaging open and went to work synching my old Kindle app to my new device.

But first.

But first, I was hit with about seven screens of ads. Do I want to sign up for something called "Good Reads." Since I live between the sea and extensive wetlands (what we used to call a swamp) do I want to sign up for something called "Good Reeds." (joke.)

The ads were all so bland and un-promising, that I clicked them away in a, well, click. But still, I was annoyed. What's more, why does every illustration look exactly the same? Maybe someday someone will realize what's gained when you pay an illustrator and let that illustrator do something that attracts notice--which is why you hired an illustrator in the first place.

Mostly, I'm annoyed that the prevailing winds in our Oligarchic Corporatist state are completely devoid of respect for the consumers who have made that Oligarchic Corporatist state possible.  As above--just send crap their way. Crap messages with crap writing and crap illustrations and crap offers because everything's crap and why bother.

The giant corporations that come into our homes from about one-thousand different angles no longer feel like they are "guests" in our homes--uninvited guests at that. So, they no longer creep in on little mercantile feet, that barge in like the Mongols galloped through Europe not too many years ago. 

There was no Mongol E-Z pass.

Today advertisers act like personal space-invaders and we--that's you and I--are not their customers but rather their victims.

What set this off was deleting un-asked-for emails in my gmail this morning. I do this digital housekeeping every so often. It's a semiotic thing. I'm trying to believe I have some control over my own email boxes.

Under my "promotions" tab, though I had just cleared it ten days ago, I had over 1100 messages to delete. That's over 1100 unasked for slings and arrows corporate amerikkka and other institutional scammers are barraging me with. 

If you ever wonder how the Iranis feel after being bombarded with $40,000,000,000 worth of amerikkkan explosives, just look at your screens. 

What's happened in marketing should be thought about if you work with a brand that still strives to be different.

Semiotically, marketing has shifted.

The consumer isn't to be treated with respect. 
Boundaries (your 'property line') is no longer inviolate.
You, as a holder of money, are theirs.
They, as a getter of money, can do anything at anytime at any volume at any frequency with any ugliness and wrapped in unregulated lies, to separate you from what's yours

This is no longer "marketing."

It's "onslaughtering." 

Or slaughtering.

It's slaughtering decency, manners, respect.

No wonder as an industry, a society and a nation we are dying.

Nancy. Face. Laughing.

I'm not at all religious. 

Yes, I'm Jewish. I have fealty toward the Jewish people. I recognize Jewish holidays, but frankly, more for the food, the tradition and the wishes of my wife than any obeisance to a non-existent or largely missing god. 

God and I had a falling out more than half-a-century ago when I started reading about the holocaust. I mean, where the fuck were you--doom-scrolling?

Despite all that, yesterday evening my wife and I lit a Yahrzeit candle for my sister Nancy. 

That's a candle that burns for 24-hours in commemoration of a loved one's death. 

Nancy was a loved one.

She died on Mother's Day, in a motorcycle crack-up on 12th Avenue at 7AM, nineteen years ago. 

The last time I saw Nancy was on a slab in the morgue. They had cleaned her up, but she was mangled and black-and-blue.
When I cab by the City Morgue on First between 31st and 32nd, I have to look out the opposite window. Still.

I don't need the flame of a small candle the size of a Dannon yogurt container to remind me of Nancy. I think about her all the time. Especially when I barbecue up in my little cottage on the Gingham Coast. 

Nancy had a Lucullan appetite. I can practically see her with barbecue sauce on her face, grease on her hands and little pieces of corn in her hair.

Nancy also loved dogs. She would have spent her days up here, if she hadn't died, laying on the floor and hugging Sparkle, my two-and-a-half-year-old golden retriever. That would be a picture of pure happiness. Barbecue and golden retriever fluff. And Nancy's crooked smile.

We lit a candle last night at dinner.

It's a solemn thing, even if you're a non-believer. Jews have been lighting candles for thousands of years. Even though for most of Jewish history, deaths have out-paced paraffin.

I looked at the candle last night as I was moving food around on my Wedgwood. 

Now that I'm old, I don't have much of an appetite anymore.

I looked at the candle and saw a line of five-point type.

"Product of China," it said.

A Yahrzeit candle made in China.

You have to think about that, really.

The economic incongruence of that. 

Somehow even a $1.29 candle in a small glass enclosure that commemorates the death of a Jew must be made in China. This isn't anti-Chinese manufacturing.

It's about how MBAs' and their incessant ROI-ism have determined that everything in our lives and in every business, must cater to efficientism.

Their non-missing god is the god of margin. If you can widen the gap between the cost of making something and the price you can get for something, to their calculus, they've done something holy.

I suppose this is about soul. 

There's nothing materially wrong about a Chinese-sourced candle. But somehow I think things from candles to commercials, from cars to computers, from hamburgers to hula hoops, somehow I think things might mean more when they're made by people who care about them, people who believe in them. 

Of course that includes advertising.
There I go again, harkening back.

You can outsource efficiency.
You shouldn't outsource love.

No matter how efficient the surrogate claims to be.
No matter how prolific that outsourcing is.
No matter how many ducats are saved and no matter how much 'value' is returned to investors.

I ain't buying it.

Sometimes you have to believe, breathe and bleed.

There's more to life, or should be, than "the spread."

Like sisters you miss.

Because they died too young.

Nine Ways to Improve an Advertising Holding Company.

The last of Ad Aged's three-part tribute to Fred Manley and Hal Riney's 1963 classic, "Nine ways to improve and ad." We will return to our regular programming tomorrow. If I live that long.

Nine Ways to Improve Your Messaging.

Yesterday in this space, Ad Aged paid homage to Fred Manley and Hal Riney's 1963 article in Communication Arts, "Nine Ways to Improve and Ad."

With so much having changed in the world and the ad industry, little of it ambient, this writer set out to expand and modernize the original Nine Ways. 

That being said, here is Part II of III, in which I encourage readers to remember "illegitimi carborundum est bonus." "Letting the bastards grind you down is good."

 

Nine Ways to Improve an Advertising Agency.

Sixty-three years ago, Communication Arts, (a magazine you should subscribe to) ran this article, written by Fred Manley and illustrated by Hal Riney. As fishermen say, it's a 'keeper.'

For the next three days, I'll be up-dating this masterpiece for the modern era of advertising.

I'm sorry I had to do this in public.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Three-Fer Friday.

 
PART 1.

It's your job, if you're a functioning human, to be present.

Present at home.

Present when you're at work.

Present with your loved ones.

Present with your friends. And your puppy.

It's your job, if you're a functioning human, to be present and to notice the linguistic corruption all around us. A corruption that would make George Orwell look like a Hallmark card smothered in saccharin.

I just saw, of all things, a small caption on the digital front-page of Thursday's Wall Street Journal. If you subscribe, or care, you can find it here.

The three word phrase, the chilling three word phrase that got me was "select layoff events."

What a horrid sterilization of pain. 

To turn the systemic firing of thousands of people--the shit-canning, the axing, the eliminating, the schmising--into a "layoff event."

Almost 90 years ago, as murderous governments were killing millions and were bent on taking over the world, Hitler's Nazis euphemized "liquidate," as a synonym for murder. That was picked up in a kids' movie, The Wizard of Oz.

If you're, like me, a denizen of the ad industry, you've probably been fired a few times. Even if you despised the job you were fired from, getting fired is no joy.

I'd bet not a single person in the history of the world has ever come home and said to their significant other, "Honey, I've been subject to a 'layoff event.'"

Along with linguistic canoodling like layoff events, goes our Iran war which as of this writing isn't any longer allowed to be called a war, though people are shooting at people, bombs are dropping, people are dying and ships are sinking.

There's so much nonsense happening in the world, between layoff events and international skirmishes.

I can only say, pay attention.

Be aware.

And try to fight.

----------------------

 PART 2.

Not too many years ago I read a book called "Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts." You can amazon it here, so bezos gets even more money he pays no taxes on, so concomitantly, your tax bill rises.

In "Craeft," Alexander Langlands abjures modern technology and goes back to the old way--the "craeft" way of doing things. He does this to see if the "modern" ways are really better. 

I think about this as every day, I see about 32,000 paeans to the amazingness of AI. I wonder with all the hot air, and all the people saying, "I made this in two-seconds for two-cents," and all the energy-gobbling and real-estate subsuming-ness of "data centers," if we're really, when all is said and done, saving anything with AI--either money or time.

The example from Craeft that I can't shake comes from Langlands front lawn. He decides to use a scythe to cut the grass rather than his old Toro lawn-mower. 

Which, really, saves time.

Yes, using his Toro he can do the job in about 30 minutes. 
Using the scythe takes him four hours.

But, using the scythe, Langlands no longer has to spend an hour a day at the gym. He gets his exercise "organically."

But, using the scythe, Langlands no longer has to drive to the gas station for gas to fill the Toro. He no longer noises up the neighborhood and fills the air with CO2. He no longer has to maintain the lawnmower.

Instead, he goes out in the sunshine and gets the kind of workout people pay a fortune for. He also gets the sweaty satisfaction of a job he did himself, with his sinew and muscle. A sense of satisfaction modern humans no little about.

I think we should think about costs more and "savings" less. That is we might think more about our human-ness rather than the splendors of modernity.

--

 PART 3.

In the 1940s, the news scene in New York City was dominated by right-wing, retrograde forces like the Hearst syndicate and Henry Luce's Time/Life conglomerate. Their publications were by and large isolationist--against fighting the nazis, and they were often anti-semetic.

A man called Ralph Ingersoll, financed by millionaire Marshall Field, III, in June of 1940, launched a left-leaning daily called PM. It lasted until 1948.

Below was their code, their belief, their declaration of principles.

We could use a little PM this AM. Every AM.