Worms.

One of my first big bosses, a recent inductee to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, was John C. Jay, who steered the creative department at Bloomingdale’s in-house agency in the early 1980s. Later, John helped make Wieden & Kennedy great and Nike as hot as they ever were. 

John had an amazing array of talents. But perhaps more than anything, he could spot a trend long before anyone else. I guess in ancient Mesopotamia or Athens or Rome, he would have been reading animal entrails and telling fortunes and serving kings and emperors. In our world today, he served the kings of commerce.

Trend-spotting appears on no list enumerating my protean talents. Sure, I can look at a line of baseball stats and guess someone’s going to be good. I can even look at an annual report, and comment on the viability or “vaporability” of this purported trillion-dollar company or that. But as for seeing things that aren’t even blips on the radar-screen, I’m as blind as a Single A umpire.

That said, I’m sensing something now, that belies the heavy-handed bullying that we’ve been bludgeoned by for so long by various un-accountable tech-bros and their willing executioners in finance, banking, PR and marketing.

In short, I think the AI “solve” everything bludgeon we’re clonked with today is the 2026-equivalent 1880’s “miracle elixer,” medicine show ads that have always been such a part of the world. Who doesn’t want something that will cure everything with no pain, work, cost or side-effects. (That in a nutshell, after all, was the essential promise of the tump kakistocracy.)

As a digression—and I’m good at digressions—the Treniers in this clip below sing a song of Hadacol, a popular remedy in the “dry” south, that really just got its users drunk off their keisters. Not a bad metaphor for trillion-dollar valuations of companies that have never come close to turning a profit. 

The Treniers sing Hadacol.

Hadacol was 24-proof magic elixer, popular in “dry” counties in the South.

All that being said, I think the worm might be turning.

On Friday morning, I sent my FFB (friend from blogging) Dave Trott an article from the Times by John McWorther. I know Dave is interested in an ever evolving and mutating language and in New York. This article was about why The Bronx has a The in it, and how many young people are, today, dropping the The, which I would never think to do.

Dave sent back a short clip, nominally in English, from the movie “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The clip, below and well worth watching, contained this line: “He’s cold as a coma.”

It ain’t much of an epiphany, but never in 32 trillion years will an algorithm, a pattern-matching machine come up with language like the above.

It’s still 6AM on Friday morning as all this is happening, and I read this book review in The Wall Street Journal. Containing the line I’ve highlighted below.

If freedom is the essence of music, captivity must be its mortal foe. Yet in “The Midnight Special,” a fresh new take on American music, Colin Asher profiles five artists whose works were shaped by incarceration.

Never in 32 trillion years will an algorithm, a pattern-matching machine come up with language like the above. 

Next, I read an essay by the great Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times.

It contained these adroit sentences.

After about ten years and I’d guess a trillion-dollars of AI is a miracle blitzkrieg, these observations are telling. There’s been scarcely a dissenting voice to the chorus of AI miracle-ness permitted anywhere.

Then there’s this.

On the front page of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

I’m no John C. Jay. 

But maybe, just maybe I’m seeing the drunk-ness is sobering up.

Venereal Advertising.

Not too long ago, there was an opinion piece in The New York Times by the founder of the retailer Patagonia. Assuming you can still read, you can find it here.

Chouinard’s essay starts like this:

Over 50 years ago, my wife, Malinda, and I bought a chef’s knife of carbon steel that we still use. It could be passed down to several generations. Compare that to the junk stainless steel ones that might not rust but that won’t hold an edge to cut a tomato.

Cheap products, made poorly and thrown away quickly, are killing people and the planet.

Not to gild Chouinard’s lily, I’d add that cheap advertising, made poorly and thrown away quickly, are killing brands, brand equity, major corporations and the entire (as if this matters) advertising industry.

(BTW, the calculus behind cheapness—usually filed under the heading of ‘efficiency’—costs brands billions. I heard a story from a client about how AI and the legion of MBAs running their AI, told the fast-food brand Chipoltle to stop topping off their bowls. It was costing the millions. The problem was, customers associated the topping off with generosity. And when they stopped topping off, Chipoltle was regarded as cheap and mean. Today, we see such calculus everywhere. Replace experienced creatives with juniors—and see how our margins will widen. That seldom works out.)

In Chouinard’s piece, he cites the novelist Terry Pratchett. Pratchett's devised something he calls the "boots theory of socioeconomics.” 

Pratchett’s theory goes like this: some time ago, 

"A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in 10 years’ time.  While a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent $100 on boots in the same time--[he'd probably have spent $20/pr. five times on five different pairs] and would still have wet feet.”

Last Friday, unsolicited, a potential client reached out to me. It’s always nice when that happens, though more and more I feel like I should hang around my office those World War II posters warning soldiers about venereal disease. Like VD, bad clients are easy to get but hard to get rid of. In fact, to be New York-dire about this, they can cost you your life. (My wife, as she has so often, rejected this decorating idea.)

The potential client spent an hour with me on the phone. She explained how high the stakes were. That she had a much better capitalized competitor. She explained how large the potential market was. And how important it would be to capture that market.

As a seasoned professional, you listen to these things. I quickly realized to the client, she was in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, two men on and down by two. 

That’s a metaphor for her position.

She needs an advertising-Willie Mays coming next to bat.

As I promised, I sent her a scope.

Reflecting what she needed done, and the stakes involved. Also, the imperative of over-delivering and getting it right. This wasn’t just an execution—she needed a platform to squash her competitor while skyrocketing her own sales.

The scope was, accordingly, large.

In about twenty minutes I got a note back saying I was twice the price as other people she was talking to.

I thought two things reflexively, importantly.

1. Buy cheap; buy twice. And, something that my therapist of 35 years taught me to say and served as my screensaver for half a decade:

2. I’m sure you can find to do it at a price you’re willing to pay.

I could have thought one more thing, but I didn’t.

Anything you have to offer me, ain’t worth getting VD for.

(Unless that means Very Dollary.)

Sketchy.

One of the great joys of my life in a life that, despite my lugubrious mien has many, is abebooks.com. Though abe sold itself to amazon back in 2008, and I despise amazon and its non-tax-paying owner, trillionaire jeff bezos, I still shop there. That’s the beauty of today’s monopolies. Standard Oil could sell their petroleum only once. Armour and Swift could sell their cows and hogs only once. Amazon can sell your data forever. Your pixelized corpus is their playground.

They hear cah-ching.

You get cah-ass-fucked.

For thirty years abebooks has aggregated the collections of hundreds or thousands of small independent book stores. Somehow those book stores have cataloged and priced every book they own. According to the latest information I could find, which is from 2006, abe claimed an inventory of over 80-million books, selling 25,000 books every day.

Most often you can find what you're looking for, at a stupidly-low-price, in nano-seconds. About a week after ordering it, that is, clicking a few buttons, it shows up on your doorstep. Maybe an especially enamored reader of my jottings will someday send me something special, you know, out of gratitude. Or not.

Last week, Brian Burch of LinkedIn acclaim, and I had a DM interaction. Brian mentioned a couple of books by Milton Glaser. I'm never one to turn down an excuse to buy another book, and thanks to Brian's recommendations, I bought half-a-dozen in two-shakes of an ICE-agent's taser.

BTW, here's what I mean about the splendors of abebooks.

I got this, in very good condition on nice thick paper, and beautifully-produced for $3.59. (Shipping cost $4.99.)

Last week I wrote a post about a collection of famous thinkers' notebooks. I showed pictures of Isaac Newton's college scribbles (in Latin). Albert Einstein's 1912 Theory of Relativity in German. And scribbles by Alan Turing on the Enigma code and Johnny von Neumann on designing ENIAC, in good old fashioned English.

Brian had written that Glaser's "Sketch & Finish" did a similar job in showing the "thought patterns" of Glaser. How he worked and adjusted and made changes along the way. The cover illustrations below show you something of that journey. But there are 165 pages of them in all. So you get eighty or so examples of starting "here" and getting "there."

I'll admit (though I don't get a vote) I like some of Glaser's sketches more than I like some of his finishes. But that's not really the point. The point is to never stop thinking. Another point is, if Glaser works hard at making things better, at improving his work, why aren't you. Or worse, why are you trusting AI to take over.

I also ordered this book by Glaser, "Drawing is Thinking." While the price was higher for this book, there was no shipping charge. The whole kit-n-kaboodle cost about what a tuna sal-sand would cost at Pret-a-Manger. Unlike a  tuna sal-sand at Pret-a-Manger, it ain't stale.

There are 204 drawings in the book. That means you can own the book for 7.33 cents/drawing. You won't have to tolerate my snapshots.

There was a time when if you worked at an agency, there would be people bringing in books like these. Or you'd see a special reel or portfolio. You'd get exposed to things that weren't algorithmically-fed. We're not that lucky today. 

As Dorothy Parker is said to have said about Katharine Hepburn’s acting, “She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.” With the pattern-matching suggestions of today’s web—we go down some very limited rabbit holes. 

Today we can potentially see everything that's ever been done in a virtual instant. However we don't bother to find something we haven't seen before or something that isn't winning awards right now. 

Somehow, 7¢ a drawing is more than we want to pay. 

We certainly couldn't expense it through the agency.

We lost something when we stopped sketching.

And working.

And starting over from scratch.

And starting over from scratch.

And starting over from scratch.

And thinking.

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.