Dig?

“For a first-class shoveler there is a given shovel load at which he will do his biggest day’s work. What is this shovel load? Will a first-class man do more work per day with a shovel load of 5 pounds, 10 pounds, 15 pounds, 20, 25, 30, or 40 pounds?”
--Frederick Winslow Taylor.

When I was a relatively young man in the business, I was quickly hailed as very smart and very good. My boss was very good but very cantankerous.

As these things go in times of pinched-pennies, agency management decided to let go of E, my boss and promote me. 

I was easier to work with, almost as good and I cost $100,000 less.

At a very young age--just about 30--I was partnered with M, a man twenty years older than I and an executive vice president executive creative director.

We worked together, shoulder to shoulder for three years. M and I respected each other but we never became friends. We were too far apart in too many ways.

M and I were on a very busy account--a retail account where we often had to conceive and sell and then produce a couple of ads a week. That meant there wasn't a great deal of time for nonsense in the office. We'd get in in the morning and work. We'd come up with ads, call a meeting with the account people, and sell them internally. A day or two later, we'd be down at the client selling them to the client. A day or two after that, M would be shooting and I would be writing copy.

Along with that workaday life, we also had new business tasks to get to. Leading pitches and whatnot so hopefully, we could escape the tedium and the pressure of creating two ads a week.

By the way, these ads weren't what we aggrandizingly call ads today. They weren't 3-inches by 5-inches and smaller. They were usually just short of a full-page in The New York Times. 

M and I were both old school about work. We weren't thrilled with the assignments we got, but we respected the client and the space they were buying. What's more our friends in the industry knew we were doing those ads. Lest we would be accused of being hacks, we worked hard to do a good job. We worked hard, in short, to have 'the best ad in the paper,' on any given day.

When I go online today--particularly on LinkedIn which is the only social site I use--it seems to me that about 97.968-percent of the posts from your connections, from companies or from brands is about some technology or some magical shortcut that will make the things you have to do easy and take the tedium out of life.

AI, in short, is essential microwave cooking.
It's really fast.
And usually leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
They leave off the bad taste part, 
and keep emphasizing the three-minute potato part.

M, as I said, was about 20 years older than I. He grew up working class in England just after World War II ended. As such he grew up with an austerity and a lack many people can't even imagine today. I guess M was a bit like my father. Metaphorically, he packed a lunch every day and went to work. Work meant sweat and worry and hours of toil.

There was no waiting for a lightning bolt to strike or some deus ex machina to hand you a glorious something on a silver platter.

In all the years I worked with M, all the ads we did together, I don't think we ever had a lunch out together or a drink after work. We were at work to work. While we might talk about a movie we'd seen or something we were reading or something with our kids or wives, most often those extraneous conversations related back to work somehow. 

I'd be thinking of a visual and bring up a Buster Keaton movie. Then I'd find the VHS and show it to M. Then we'd talk about the ad we were doing and if this sort of thing captured the idea we were trying to convey.

Along the way, M would strengthen the visual idea and I'd find a headline somehow that related to home-equity lines of credit.

M often annoyed me. He often compared work to digging ditches. He embraced the orderly work that went into work. He kept his head down and kept at it.

So often today as my docket of work gets longer and longer makes me think of M. Especially when I am overwhelmed, feeling out of my depth and don't know how I'm going to get it all done.

When I was the night cashier in a Rush Street, Chicago liquor store, Bragno's, and the line was 12 deep with impatient drunks, I was worried how I was going to get it all done. When I played ball and someone had rising heat or a sneaky slider, I wondered how I'd not embarrass myself swinging like a rusty gate. Later when I worked on big accounts with giant budgets and was competing against six or nine other teams--sometimes even against the very people deciding which work would move forward, I leaned on what I learned from M.

Often I'd get in at seven. I'd have a pile of work puzzles on my desk that I had to figured out. Manifestos to be written. Spots. Print ads. Even strategy decks, which all too often would fall to me, usually after someone else came up fallow. I'd dread the pile on my way in, hating and resenting it. It would be impossible to get through it all. And I'd curse it.

And then one after another, I'd did what M showed me how to do. I dug the ditch and moved onto start another one.

I believe that you can get faster at work.

But there are no short-cuts. 

You can't skip steps or logic leap your way to completion.

You put another shovel in the dirt. You fill it. You toss the slag away.

I'm sure there are robotic agents who, it is claimed, can do all that for you.

I'm sure the savvy-Egyptians probably toted around "The Dummies Guide to Building Pyramids." But the truth is, it's one rock on top of the next, or one shovel then the next.

There ain't no shortcuts.
Even employing slaves will wind up biting you in the arse.

Work, M taught me, is work.

With all the joy, pain, frustration and exhilaration that comes with toil.

Enjoy. 

That's the point.

Enjoy.

I Don't Care.

Since the rise of trumpism aka the descent of decency I've been quick to notice how the corruption of amerikkka and the corruption of the holding-company dominated ad industry look shockingly similar.

I can sum up their similarities in a simple sentence.

Neither amerikkka nor the ad industry are any long reality-based.

All the numbers are false.

Everything is a lie.

All accolades and measurement are falsehoods.

The entire system is reverse robin hood. Steal from the poor and give to the rich.

Don't believe anything you read.

The only ones who will get out alive from either entity are the ones at the top who will likely die with billions or hundreds of millions before any regulatory body or investigative organ (they've all been destroyed) ever catches up with them.

A perfect example of this macro-cosmic deceit is trump, for instance, proclaiming amerikkka the hottest nation ever, when hundreds of millions of people are living paycheck to paycheck. Or the ad industry selling itself to the ad industry and then firing everyone in the ad industry while accepting a trophy and a nine-digit payout and calling yourself network of the year in an industry that is no longer viable.

We are living in an empire of illusion.

When we unbleary our eyes, what we see won't be pretty.

Here's what got this post going.

Again, this is reductive.

Boiled down.

Clear.

The 97 text messages I get every day from political candidates or their "party," asking me for money. Pretending to be my friend and asking me for money. Using my phone number without my permission to ask me for money.

Ask not what politicians can do for you. Ask where to send them your money.

This morning I read a very sad article in The New York Times about poor people.

It seemed like something John Dos Passos or John Steinbeck might have written 90 years ago as the great depression unfurled.

Read the whole article here.

Part of my strength as a human (if that's what I am) is my naïveté. I believe politics can make things better. I believe advertising can make things better. I believe they're each supposed to be a force for good. For hearing people and responding to their needs.

I don't see companies telling people how they're helping them. How 

they're making middle seats larger, customer service better, and providing an alternative to "shrinkflation."

There's very little in advertising of what a company does for you any more. It's all about companies working to get your money and more and more of it for less and less in return.

In politics too.

There's nothing about helping people.

It's all what I can do for them.

And do it now.

Or else.

There's no empathy anywhere.

That's another similarity.

And you're left with the feeling that in an entire country and an entire industry, there's not one decent human being left.

Just brands and politicians trying to bogo you to death.

We used to care. And then say, here's how we'll help.

Now we beg. And then say, here's what you can do for us.

We can should must do better.

We can should must at least try.

In a time of universal selfishness, caring is a revolutionary act.

Two Georges.

During the darkest days of Covid, my wife and I had National Public Radio on for hours a day. 

To listen to the news, we'd follow the feed through different cities. Tuning into Boston public radio, New York, Philadelphia. We'd follow the sun to Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles. We were trying our damndest to stay informed. To know what was going on. 

I realized after about a month of this rather than becoming better informed, we were being driven crazy.

When the news is always on, it's always on repeat. 

And as far as reporting on Covid went, the same stories, with the same bifurcations were played over and over again. Half the reports were about deaths and crowded hospitals. Half the reports were about Covid being nothing more than a bad cold.

The sides were drawn.

The stories on repeat.

Minds were made up.

The news was no longer providing information. It was just reinforcing adamantine points of view.

It was then I turned off NPR, and in fact, all broadcast news. 

Since then, judging by my social media feeds, the propensity of the news not to be 'new' has only gotten worse.

Every day there are 27 or 39 or 76 outrages. 

Every day there the sides get further and further apart.

The tone gets shriller.

The scorn and disdain angrier.

And every day it's on repeat.

We learn nothing, we improve not a lick, and we're no better able to entertain empathy or learn about the other "side."

I suppose I could sum my thesis up in just give words.

There's no news in news.

That's probably not quite accurate. But because the news has to fill so much time, because it has to always be on, much of it is repeated to the point of meaninglessness.

I think the same has happened to advertising.

I grew up in a world where most marketing people understood that "the best advertising is news." But when brands decide to release literally thousands of ads a day, much of those ads are far from news. They're merely repetitions. 

Many times I've reprinted six rules for better writing from Orwell's seminal 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language." Over my 42-year career, I've probably shared it with one-hundred agency people and fifty clients. 

Here it is, one more time.

And because maybe it can stand some freshening after 80 years of being ignored, I took a hand and adapting Orwell's tips for our era of messaging inundation. (Current media practices say, impact doesn't matter--repetition does. That being the case, my rules--and I'm no Orwell--might be of nominal value.)

My Six rules, which no one will read, might be worth following.

An Oak. Fallen.

I've been mired in a Sargasso sea of a cold. Like a barnacled ship of old, wrapped in thick seaweed with no wind to propel myself through it. Each time I lay down to rest, whether in the space between meetings or for the evening, I hope I'll wake up with my usual energy. But no. 

In fact, for one of the first times in my life, I woke today with aches all over. It feels like, I think, what a mobster must feel like after he's been beaten pulpy by some professional thugs. My body hurts in places I didn't even know I had body.

Back when I played ball for the Seraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League, when the earth was somewhat cooler and democracy had maybe a slightly firmer grip on amerika, I was laid low with a similar cold. Hector saw me laying across a pine bench on our locker room and muttered un 'roble caído, un roble caído, un roble caído.' A fallen oak.

Like today--so many years later, oaks, even fallen ones didn't then and don't now get days off. I suited up of those phlegmy games, head woozy, legs like I had just stepped off lurching ship after a long voyage. But we know what we have to do, and sick or not, we find a way to corral a sharp grounder, or smack an opposite field line-drive and dirty our flannels.

Two dogs. One ball.

With all that going on above my shoulders, the Moss' three-year-old golden retriever, Izzy, is over for a day and a night. The Moss' return from their son's wedding in Italy tomorrow and since we live just two houses apart, we share puppy tending responsibilities when one of us needs a hand, or a paw. I will say, I don't believe in hoary concepts like 'women's work.' But such country conviviality is wholly the domain of L, my wife. She seems more popular in this ramshackle of a community than a snow-plow in the winter. As a consequence, everyone, also knows me, and not just as the dopey slug who's married to L, but very nearly, and for the first time in my almost 69 years, a person in my own right.

Even with my cold, fall has come to New England, and its a nostalgic season for me. For once, for the first time in a long time, the weather feels seasonable. We carbon-exhausted and green-house-gassed away the seasons. We seldom have cold Octobers any more and the frost is seldom on the pumpkin. Millionaires owned by billionaires play baseball in stadiums paid for by poor folks for the benefit of giant corporations. They play into November, when they should be wearing long johns.

However, today I woke, with billowing Winslow Homer clouds and a light spit. The waves thundering from the remnants of some storm somewhere. But by 5PM, when I took Izzy out for her post-dinner needs, the sun had emerged and Winslow Homer had given way to Andrew Wyeth and a golden wheaty sun.

Many of the streets in my little neighborhood have been milled clean of asphalt and the dirt beneath has been machine tamped down prior to laying another three inches on asphalt down once again. This cheap ripping up and laying down of new pavement is in many amerikkkan municipalities the equivalent of a full-employment plan for local construction companies. I'm sure millions change hands at a time when new home construction and summer re-modelling work is slow. Would that I owned a Peterbilt and a backhoe and could collect some largesse almost as an annuity.

As I walk, I know what this land looked like--or I imagine I do--before 'first contact' with europeans, on my block around 1636. The indigenous people were many and while the wars between different groups happened often, there was an agreement--unspoken of course--to limit their devastation.

Their wars weren't western wars of annihilation. Each side would kill six, kidnap ten, then trade captives and go back to their separate spheres. They fought a bit like Sparkle and Izzy fight in my house. A nip and a growl then a hour sleeping on the sofa.

Just four-hundred yards from my house, 390 years ago british musketry cut down hundreds of Pequot. The better to bring them the one true religion.

By the time the english came to these shores, or even the dutch who sailed by some decades prior, the indigenous had been living here for over 10,000 years. 

To modern people that's an inconceivable amount of time. We are today, closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the building of the great egyptian pyramids, and 5000 years before they were built, there were already people living here in Connecticut.

The sky from our front step.

As I walk under pink skies over the dirt-revealed streets, I think about the 300 generations of people who walked here before me, and maybe--with luck--the 300 who will walk here after me. 

I suspect that their shoulders were also heavy with pain and responsibility and the burden of worry. The stress of making a living, the cacophony of what always has been the modern world of too many demands and too little time and being too much of what the romans called a vox clamantis in deserto, a voice crying in the desert. 

I walk down these dirt-revealed streets, the asphalt stripped away and I look into the sullen soil for sinew, and shards, and bones of those voices crying before me. Of those millions and millions here and gone and un-accounted for and, unless you read long-histories, not even recognized as having lived, since it seems that in amerikkka today every person thinks they're the first person ever with all the rights and privileges as if the world belongs to them.

There are no bones, no past, no memories in our denuded streets. They would be bad for commerce if a horde of Yale archaeologists scholared in and started sifting. Better just to pave the past over and pretend it never was, and look up at the pink cumulus rather than the sere of what was.

There are ranch houses to be built. Streets to be paved. Dogs to be walked. And colds to be fought.

Achoo.

Brownie is Beautiful.

Some years ago when Joe Frank, the brilliant writer and monologist died, a radio station I was listening to aired an hours'-long tribute to him. It featured long clips from some of his pieces

Most times when I hear, see or think something you consider extraordinary, I say to myself, "This is great. I'll definitely remember this." 

Then in about the time it takes a leaf to fall or a dog to bark, what I thought was a seminal thought is as out of my head as smoke from a diesel engine or a lie from a politician.

While I've trained myself to write things down, sometimes my octopus hands and my wide-field-of-vision can't keep up with my pencil. Like the legendary bass on some cornpone show like Andy Griffith, I'm afraid the big one often gets away.

During the tribute to Frank, I heard him tell the tale of his journeys across amerikkka, coming home from college or something, in his old Chevy Vega. When all this was happening it was, really, pre-ubiquitous fast-food, and Frank made a habit of stopping at Howard Johnson's restaurants.

You've probably never heard of Howard Johnson's. But in the 1960s, they served more meals outside the home than any organization outside of the US Army and it was the largest restaurant chain in the US.

These were generally clean, well-lighted places, with decent food, clean bathrooms and good-enough coffee. They were welcoming and human in a way that even high-end restaurants aren't today.

Frank talked about how he'd sit at the counter, often next to an elevated pastry display with various bear-claws, danish and brownies in it. When the waitress was nowhere to be found, Frank would pilfer a saran-wrap wrapped brownie. It was not something to eat. It was a way of saying I was there, like a male dog peeing on every hydrangea.

Frank would walk out to his Vega, open the trunk with his key and toss in the brownie. 

On an Iowa to Long Island, NY trip, Frank might have stopped at eight or six Howard Johnson's. So he might have pilfered as many cellophaned brownies. 

Multiply those eight or six brownies by four trips a year times five years or so, and before too long, Frank's Vega had hundreds of brownies in its trunk. He told friends about it, too. Over the years, they added hundreds of more brownies.

Next, Frank hatched a plan. On his way out west from his parents' east coast home he would stop at every Howard Johnson's he stopped at on his way east. 

However, rather than surreptitiously making off with a brownie, Frank would replace all the brownies he stole, and then some. As you might imagine, replacing was a harder task than Frank's original swiping. What's more, if you got caught stealing, your crime was easily understood. Returning a year's old, rock-hard brownie would be difficult to talk your way around.

Nevertheless, humans quest.

Like Ahab and his White Whale, like Coronado and the Seven Cities of Gold, most people--no matter how prosaic their lives--have somewhere inside them a lofty goal. Returning brownies was Frank's.

This is all I have today.

Somewhere in this meander I think there might be well-hidden, like a Viet Kong guerrilla on the Ho Chi Mihn trail, a metaphor for amerikkka or at least the advertising industry.

So many years of petty, dispiriting lies.

So many soul-sapping behaviors over time.

So many little cuts.

So many nasty pecks from a feral goose.

No matter how you try, the damage is done. You can't come back from decades or years of malfeasance.

https://www.joefrank.com/

Years later now, Frank is gone. Howard Johnson's is gone. That Chevy Vega is gone.

But somewhere I bet there exists an adamantine brownie wrapped back when the world was some degrees cooler and lightyears more innocent. It might take one of the giant drills New York sandhogs use to dig new subway tunnels, and maybe I'm weird, but I'd like to have a piece of one.

Maybe as a souvenir of amerikkka. Maybe to taste. Maybe just as a keepsake of bygone-ness.

Somehow that also seems like it might be a metaphor for something.

19 minutes of Frank.

BTW.

$1000 is more than I'm willing to spend on a gag.
But I'd love a Simple Simon and the Pieman Howard Johnson's weathervane.

If. Then.

 

If they say it's free, then you shouldn't have to watch two commercials and be hit with three credit card offers to get it.

If they say they're award-winning, then they shouldn't have had to pay for the award. And fewer than forty-in-fifty should also win awards.

If they say, 'you're family,' then their attrition rate--voluntary and involuntary combined--should be less than ten-percent.

If they say 'vote for us,' then ninety-percent of their communications with you shouldn't be about you giving them money.

If they market themselves as an award-show, then public voting and asking people to vote for your entry shouldn't be a part of it.

If they say they're a 'trusted growth partner for the world's leading brands, then they should also be growing.

If they believe in creativity, then they should hire creatives and put creatives in charge.

If they boast that they've won 'network of the year,' then they should be forthcoming about their financial metrics, not just the awards they won. 

If they offer "high-speed internet," then it should be faster than dial-up at least twenty-percent of the time.

If they have a "complaint line," then you shouldn't have to fill-out ten-minutes worth of forms (so they can data-collect) before you can make a complaint.

If a company claims "they're for people like you," then they should have to prove they know who you are.

If "your call is important," then they should hire people to answer those calls.

If "your call is important," then the people answering those call should be able to address the problem you're calling about.

If your platform is upgraded, then you should have the option not to accept the upgrades--which are usually just new things the platform wants to sell you.

If a company with a $2.8 trillion market cap boasts they're devoting $20 million to combat climate change, then they should have to disclose that that's merely .00000714 of their worth. (Like someone making $300,000 giving $2.14 for a cause they're promoting.)

If a waiter asks you 'how's everything tasting?' rather than saying 'how does your meal taste?', then they should tell you why they're using the gerundive.

If a hotel mini-bar charges you $7 for a can of Coke, then they should give you $7 if you steal a can from the conference you're attending and re-stock the mini-bar.

If you pay for  service and something is missing from it (there's no restroom in the cabin on my flight) then you should receive a refund.

If you dent your car, then you should be able to snap off the dented piece and replace it like a Lego block. Replacing a dented fender should be like eating around the bruise in a banana.

If you're a pundit and make serial predictions, then you should be required to publish your hit rate. Especially if you work in advertising.

If you write a list like this, then you should be prepared to be considered a doofus.

A Long Story.

 

If you read Odyssean books like I do--books that take as long to complete as one of Captain James Cook's three voyages around the world--you quickly realize (if you're paying attention) that there's a value in learning about different periods of history that goes beyond being good at Jeopardy! Or at least Jeopardy! before 91-percent of its questions were about popular "culture."

You can read books like the one shown above (which I recommend) for the dates and names and papal bulls. Or you can read them on a more macro-level, like trying to identify the early origins of white/Christian superiority and therefore racism, and the very beginnings of our modern world.

You can also find metaphors that are often elastic enough to give context to today's realities.

All of the history in "Contested Continent" takes place before the West started adhering to the idea of "germ theory." That is that diseases and illnesses are caused by unseen micro-organisms spread by rats, fleas, coughing and other bodily effluvia. Before that theory, most people believe that "miasmas" and illnesses were caused by mal-aria (bad air) emanating from bogs and some ancestor of my mother.

The English at Jamestown, for instance, starting back in 1607 brought over thousands of people--usually felons, fatherless children and the indentured every year. At the end of every year, those thousands were reduced to hundreds. It took emigrations of about ten thousand people to get the population up to about fifteen hundred.

One reasons for that is the complete lack of understanding of germ theory.

Without knowing about germ theory, you think nothing of dumping the population's effluence (feces and urine) into the river and streams you drink out of, wash and bathe in. 

Cholera. Who'da thunk.

(One reason previous societies drank so much beer and wine is that it usually was unpoisoned by, for instance, Gladys Moscowitz who has fairly persistent diarrhea, as you do when you over-do the prune danish. )

If humans as we know them have lived on our planet for 200,000 years and have been living in cities for about 12,000 years, it's really only during the last 150 years that anything approaching washing your hands between surgeries came into vogue. People believed in spontaneous generation until recently, the idea that creatures grew organically out of other matter.

Germ theory, despite the onrush and ascendance of highly-positioned and highly-influential science-denialism and science-denialists, still seems to hold today. Though I'm sure in some darker trumpian precincts it's considered as dumb and unprovable as the roundness of the earth, the moonlanding, gravity, evolution and the human right to health-care.

I bring all this up because shitting in the river where you get your drinking water has fallen out of fashion. Germ theory made it a no-no. And it seems crazy to think that anyone in their right mind would ever do so.

Now however, most of the West is about thirty years into enshittification. Like diseases centuries ago, enshittification is passed from person to person via the prevailing belief in efficiency above all else, especially common-sense. Enshittification is the process where efficiency reigns, everything gets worse and more expensive but about four stock-holders get rich.

You see it in every industry. Efficiency becomes the mantra. People get cut. Service gets worse. Because service gets worse customers leaves or prices are forced lower. Consequently more customers leave, more people are fired, more cost-cuts are needed and so it goes.

That process to my eyes is as destructive as standard operating procedure was before the acceptance of germ theory. 

Efficiency improvements are the name of every game today. And if you're working with a company getting more efficient, from Adobe to your telco to your ad agency to Zenobia, your pistachio nut provider, you know things are only going to get worse.

My point in all this is that if there's any hope for the future of capitalism, someone will come along with a catchy explanation, like germ theory, of how the killing disease of so-called efficiency spreads. 

Maybe they'll call it squeeze theory.

And declare that our general economic and innovation malaise comes from the sickness and reliance on efficiency. Squeeze theory will state simply that we're squeezing ourselves to death.

If you have something that makes more sense, LMK.

How It's Going.

I don't eat fast food. 

In fact the last time I went into a QSR (quick service restaurant) was when my elder daughter gave birth to her second child and there was a McDonald's in the hospital complex. I was sent down to get her a coke.

I suppose they put McDonald's in hospitals because it cuts out the middle-man. 

In any event, QSR is a triple mis-direct.

There's no quick.
There's no service.
And I don't count them as restaurants.

But semantic anomalies are par for the course in the modern world--getting more and more glaring as I get older and older.

When I got to that post-natal McDonald's I was confronted by touchscreens. I was meant to type in my order and hope for the best.

I paid a real person, and when I asked where lids and straws were she grunted and nodded, as if I were stupid. Neanderthally she directed me left, where utensils and napkins are placed, efficiently atop trash bins. 

Not too long ago I read about the new CEO or CMO or Customer Success Doyen of some QSR or another speaking about how impersonalization has gone too far. I can't find the article or quotation, but it was about the absence of humanity in what at one time was the most-human of experiences--eating.

It's pretty obvious to me what's happened.

QSRs aren't run by people who cook food, love food, enjoy food and relish in relish. They're run, like everything else today, by efficiency experts who, quoting Oscar Wilde, know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Everything is supply-chain optimized to work just great and everything sucks. I'm sure the hotel I'm staying in right now is run by people who know how to turn a room over in 51 minutes rather than 52. They save 8374 minutes a year, which nets them an extra $74,094 in revenue per room so they get promoted. Eventually they'll succeed their way toward ruining everything.

Yet, no one ever talks about the stranger's public hair in the shower.

That's an MVP. (Minimal Viable Pubic.) And they teach it in b-school.

The same thing, I see has happened and is happening in the ad industry--the ever-consolidating ad industry, which is now down to four big holding companies and zero unique brands. Consolidation, in fact, might be MBA speak for a septic system's leach field. The effluence is distributed efficiently, and that's considered success.

Just now an advertising friend I worked with in the early 1980s sent me this article from what remains of the bought-and-paid for trade press. (They report nothing that reflects ill on the decimated industry. AdAge and Adweek do more PR than reporting.)

Essentially what's happening to QSRs, ad agencies and just about everything else is simple. 

Contemporary management policy has bought them all up.    Contemporary management policy has made them efficient. Contemporary management policy has rendered them like Gertrude Stein's Oakland: "There's no there there."

Or in the words of Ed Butler, my boss at Ally & Gargano from 1990--1992, everything now is "flat as a plate of piss." And nearly as appetizing.

Everything has gotten so efficient and so well-run and so cost-effective that everything is in danger of going belly-up because everything is so devoid of humanity, kindness, decency, respect and soul.

Our spiritual tectonic plates have shifted from "Let me find out and get back to you," to "your call is important to us. Your call will be answered by the next available customer success specialist in 27 minutes."

We've gone from "Let's make it different" to "Let's not offend." Distinctiveness, point of view, ethics and philosophy has been superseded by "best-practices," which invariably is synonymous with "most-efficient practices," which is invariably synonymous with suck. And pubic hair in the shower.

It seems weird to me to spend billions on agency "consolidation," aka subsumation and then have to spend millions more attempting to return things to how they were before they were blanderized and forced to comply.

Every once in a while, when I'm in a dark mood, I think about the sort of thinking that would lead to companies delivering what they call a "minimal viable product" to their customers, who are in effect "minimal viable economic entities."

It staggers me that companies and agencies would create things purposefully sucky and offer such crap to their most valuable "asset"--their customers aka their "minimal viable economic entities." We make crap for crap while using monopoly power to drive margins being the modus operandi of most of the world.

I can imagine a manager coming out to the mound after a pitcher's giving up an extra-base hit to the third batter in a row. "Well, I threw him my minimally viable slider"

But,
george,
that's 
the
way
we
do
things.

If 
you're
ready 
to sail
with us,

we're
ready
to welcome
you
aboard.

Challenging.

When advertising people get together as about fifteen of us did last Tuesday, October 6, courtesy of Bill Oberland, Jason Harris and Indie at Large, you'd be right to anticipate some carping. 

That does not mean fish was served.

We met in a top floor space for dinner, drinks and discussion at a penthouse on West 4th Street, and we followed the all-too human predilection. We complained about how everything's changed and nothing's as good as it used to be. And we weren't wrong.

For all my personal lugubriousness, I have a fractured relationship with pessimism. 

In fact, I'd say I'm optimistic about pessimism. I'm upbeat about the downbeat. My blues are multi-hued.

That is, no matter how dark things seem, something in me keeps fighting, keeps trying, keeps believing that somehow we can make things better. Maybe I've read Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning," too often. Or maybe I've taken it too much to heart. But resisting despair is the best way to deal with despair.

At dinner on Tuesday, we had a rectangular-table discussion about the pressures Indies face.

There's the anti-competitive pressure from the big four holding company oligopoly. The downward pressure on pricing. The stupid obeisance and belief in AI. And more.

As usual when I am with other people, I don't go along with anyone. I seldom agree with or even experience the same things that other people go through. 

I think what makes me me can be simply summed up. I don't follow rules and I work hard to be different. Or, I  just am.

If the industry says good advertising becomes a part of culture, well, I just don't believe it. As someone who is cultured, I don't want brands interfering with my culture. I prefer my culture, my sports, my "experiences" without brand logos interpolating the fuck out of them.

If the industry says we have to lower our prices to compete, I'm apt to say (to myself) law-firms and McKinsey ain't lowering their prices. I'm as smart as they are--and I can write ads--why should I?

You might say that my personal brief, or what used to be the brief for every good creative and every good agency is the one that Chiat\Day wrote for Apple almost 30 years ago: Think Different. 

Instead, 97.978-percent of the industry Thinks Same. And calls it 'best practices,' and follows the rules laid down by the consultants, MBAs, technologists and insurance-salespeople who never worked in advertising and who today run the remnants of the contracting (non)-industry.

If you look like anyone else,
if you behave like anyone else,
if you judge yourself by anyone elses' standards
(including Cannes')
you're doing it wrong.

If you read the bought-and-paid-for advertising-trade PR-organs, (Adweek and Advertising Age) and you have the stamina to do a word search, you'll quickly learn that most clients are looking for speed, cheapness and efficiency. And awards.

Well made. Well designed. Built to last.

Cheap. Shoddy. No lasting value.

That's why commercial breaks, which used to offer something to look at like a nice up-scale neighborhood, now look like shanty towns or a mobile-home park after an EF-5 tornado. 

Years ago, I read Adam Morgan's "Eating the Big Fish." It lays out some rules for upsetting the apple-cart. For challenger brands, which is what we're supposed to be, no matter our size. We're supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. 

I'm surprised more people haven't memorized this or stored it on their hard-drives. 

What here doesn't make sense for you?