All You Can't Eat.

There was an article in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend about "all-you-can-eat" buffets. If you can get past the paywall, you can read it here.

Once many years ago, a young account person and I were sent out to Rochester, Minnesota to visit an Eero Saarinen-designed factory, where that once-vaunted and important company made servers. (It's since been sold.)

I was a bit of a celebrity in the IBM server cosmos in those days, and I had a long day the next day talking to engineers and filming the factory. (Agency relationship tip: Clients like when you visit them, understand and are interested in their business and offerings and make them feel valued.)

Yet another metaphor for advertising.

In any event, the only restaurant near the dry-wall hotel we were staying in was a place called a paean to plastic trays, acid reflux and gluttony.  

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[Borscht Belt interlude: Q. How can you tell when you're in the best restaurant in Rochester, Minnesota? A. You can leave your tray on the table when you're done eating.]

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Until I went to an expensive resort in Costa Rica, all inclusive, and all inedible, I haven't gone to many all-you-can-eat places. Even the occasional hotel that has such an indulgent breakfast has very little appeal. I really don't need a plate with sixteen warmed-up scrambled eggs, three-quarters of a pound of bacon, yogurt, out-of-season fruit and four croissants. The problem is, you wind up taking too much because it's there for the taking. In fact, if you don't stuff your face, you'll probably feel like you cheated yourself out of something.

It's hard to eat like a human when you're offered in-human quantities. Even the most austere consumer is likely to indulge her Lucullan tendencies.

It occurred to me just now--and having glanced at the Wall Street Journal article above--that all-you-can-eat-ness is today nearly a perfect metaphor for the current course and speed advertising business.

Advertising is like all-you-can-eat buffets.

Nothing's very good, but there's so much of it.

So we pile more on.

While there's a bit of Yogi Berra in that, I think it's worth repeating: Advertising is like all-you-can-eat buffets. Nothing's very good, but there's so much of it.

Right now I'm struggling with a very big (for me) and very difficult client. 

I've worked with him for more than six years, and of late, have interviewed a dozen people affiliated with his company--from employees in a bunch of different disciplines, to private equity consultants, to clients, to affiliates.

It's painful.

Everyone sees the company in a different way.

And at the top of their voice.

Maybe it's that way with most businesses today. (I read somewhere that when Hilary Clinton ran for president in 2016, her marketing teams proposed to her 216 different taglines. That's not an indication of creative fecundity. That shows that you don't know what you stand for. Certainly, Clinton's winning tagline was as flat as a plate of piss. "I'm with her," means a whole lot of nothing and foists on the viewer a faux sensation that they're passionate about her, when most people--even those who liked Clinton, merely tolerated her.)

When I start with clients, I present something to them I call the Four Ds.

Before I do anything for the client, before I create any messaging, I have to answer the toughest, the most-important and least-commoditized part of my construct. I have to get the client to agree who they are, what makes them different and why they exist.

I believe about 99.879667-percent of all companies cannot do this or fail to do this or don't know they need to do this. (See Hilary Clinton above.)

For instance, I don't think anyone knows the difference between United and American and Delta. Or Hilton and Marriot and Intercontinental. Or Nissan and Toyota and Honda and Kia and Audi and VW and BMW. Or Publicis and WPP and Omnicom and Havas.

Adding insult to injury, since none of these companies and their agencies can do the most important of the jobs they need to do, they make up for their nothing-ness with quantity.

They don't produce the six messages a year that tell the world (and as importantly their own employees) who they are. Instead they spew out like Etna with diarrhea a lava eruption of un-differentiated molten crap and hope somehow something sticks, or somehow no one notices, or someone makes a ketchup filled running shoe and that gets their CMO some buzz.

When Charlotte Beers was CEO of Ogilvy, she propagated a line that I'm not ashamed to admit I often co-opt and rewrite. She said Ogilvy's aspiration was to be "Most-valued by those who most-value brands."

You don't see much today that's big, memorable, defining and enduring. You don't see much that fulfills D1.

If nothing else reveals itself, that's not a bad paradigm to steal.

For a copywriter: "To be most-valued by clients who most-value breakthrough work."

For a blogger: "To be most-valued by readers who most-value thoughtful discussion about things they're interested in."

For a comedian: "To be most-valued by people who most-value belly-laughs."

For someone on a dating site: "To be most-valued by people hoping to settle down with a mensch."

I'll find a way to do D1 Define for my client.

D1 Define will be strengthened by D2 Demonstrate.

I'll get well-paid and thanked for it.

I'll get incremental revenue, and maybe another six years of work.

I'll be damned if I'll serve an all-you-can-eat meal.

Burp.

Teetering on the Ontological.

Nemesis.

Universal truth. 

The world would be better of, you would be better off, the country would be better off, every agency you've ever worked for would be better off, if we would all take a moment in consider the ancient Greek concepts--the Universal Laws of Hubris and its inevitable companion Nemesis.

(BTW, Hubris is not to be confused with U-Bris, a failed DIY-home-circumcision kit I had as a client for a while.)

Ideas come and go.

We change how kids learn math and reading.

One generation decides that you must put kids to sleep on their bellies. The next avalanches in and decides kids should sleep on their backs. 

If you're of a certain age, a simple chicken egg has gone from absolute taboo to two-a-week to good for you and probably back again and again two of three times. 92-percent of my readers likely subsist on coffee and have likely engaged with the sorts of articles here:

These things come and go.

They are subject to trends, habits, and opinions. 

But some things, like Hubris and Nemesis are under sway of much more powerful forces. 

They are governed by Natural Law. The inevitability of the universe. As count-on-able as the tides, the sunrise, blowhard creative directors and bad airline food.

There are probably more academic, more Sophoclean definitions of Hubris. But given the state of education, attention and distraction today, I'll proffer this succinct vernacular one: Hubris is when you get too big for your britches. When you start believing your godliness. When you come to the (false) realization that your shit don't stink.

Likewise there are more technically accurate descriptions of Nemesis, the foe that always shows up. But I'll leave it, hopefully mnemonically, as this: Nemesis is your come-uppance. When you get what's coming to you. 

If you want a clearer, more entertaining depiction, you might want to watch an old Hollywood gangster movie, like "Little Caesar." The two-hundred and forty-six seconds here should     do it.

From Hubris to Nemesis in 4:06.

What brings all this on is an article I read in the Times on Monday from their long-time columnist, Frank Bruni. The Times' subject line says it all. And practically wrote this post for me.

Until this actually happens of course, it remains only an emanation devoutly to be wished. Nemesis--despite Bruni's optimism has yet to appear in the ballot box. The much-hoped-for "blue wave," might not appear, it might be abnegated by corruption, or some other lever of deceit might be applied. There are many--and they're multiplying. There's also the tumpian fascist specter of federal troops. Or the stalinist precept of "it's not who votes, it's who counts."

But none of that changes the fundamental cycle of how life has always been. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Everything that rises must converge. Or, most bluntly, rust never sleeps.

My mentor and friend, Steve Hayden, created Hayden's Mandala--a simple model that explains all of life. The surpassing art-director Marc Klein designed a site dedicated to Steve. You can find it, and so much more, here. (Thanks, Marc.)

Readership of this blog has, over the last six months or so, declined. I used to get about 80,000 readers a month, now I get little more than half of that.

I can attribute that to many things. 

I write a lot at a time when fewer people read. Or can.

I've been writing this blog for nearly twenty years and maybe people are bored. All I am, really, is a one-legged tap-dancer.

Maybe the great cosmic algorithm that rules all creatures great and small has changed and I'm left out in the cold.

Just as likely, I got too big for my britches and now payback is here.

That said, there's a way back from payback.

Do what you know how to do.

Again, as Hayden taught me: "The best revenge is a better ad." That is take your cuts. Keep your swing level. And as Wee Willie Keeler said, "Hit 'em where they ain't."

Or as was written in the great but unknown epic poem, "The Blackiad," the saga of a trout nicknamed Boston Blackie, by my grad school mentor Lipton Merriwell Sipps, PhD:

PS. Professor Sipps, mama ain't there.

In Praise of Copywriting.

When tump decided to invade Iran to distract from the 38,000 times he was mentioned in the epstein files, as someone who reads a lot of history, I proclaimed to anyone who would listen (no one) this imperial, racist adventuring would not end well.

My one-sentence summation was pretty simple.

"A man with an eight-second attention span should not invade an eight-thousand-year-old civilization."

That line takes me down two separate but related paths. 

One: There's a pithiness to it. Which leads me to conclude the democratic party should hire a gag writer. That is, they need--as all brands do--someone who can "on-demand" come up with pithy quips that lodge, disrupt, upset--and in Candide's 'best of all possible world's" might make a difference.

About a decade ago, I started trading linked-in messages with Rob Schwartz. Rob's a career coach now. Back then, he was CEO of Chiat\Day New York. (I might have his exact title and agency names slightly off. No one can keep up with corporate whack-a-merger and remember who's who anymore. Which doesn't matter anyway, since they're all the same.)

If I remember correctly, and I'm sure I do, Rob and I met at the Friar's Club on East 55th Street. A legendary, but musty place that was on its last one-liner at the time.

My first impression of Rob--I'm not one who goes gently into new relationships--was this: "Oh, he has the gift of quip." That is talking to Rob was a series of jokes, barbs, punch-lines and gags. Mixed in with intelligence, humanity and nice discernment.

 Philip Roth alluded to a more malign "gift of quip" in one of my favorite passages from his classic "Portnoy's Complaint." A scene I often show to gentiles who don't understand New York Jewish.

“My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!”

Rob has no mean in him. But you get the point. What's more, my phrase "Gift of Quip," was also an homage to the great John LeCarre, who said of his most famous creation, espionage agent George Smiley, "He has the gift of quiet." 

Leona Helmsley (a convicted felon) once said about donald trump, "I wouldn't believe [him] if his tongue were notarized." Politicians and brands should hire people who can write lines like that.

I do something for clients I call "The Nifty Fifty." Fifty funny attention getting ads that keep their brands top of mind and stop the scroll. The democrats currently besiege people with boring crap. There must be a better way to change minds and hearts and votes.

Two: The second path is more lamentable.

With everything today quick and shallow, nobody anymore knows anything about anything except that which is unimportant.

We can spend billions on a war and we know nothing about who we're fighting or why or anything vaguely related to the history of the region. 

As Simon Sebag Montefiore writes in his new book, "Cauldron," about the area we are constantly invading: 

“Today it seems irredeemably turbulent and explosive, which is why I have entitled this book, The Cauldron. The ingredients are beautiful and inspiring but also volatile, pyrophoric–and increasingly fissile. 

Its particular, disparate composition is the result of its tri-continental location as bridge and seaway, thoroughfare and crossroads; its very middleness makes it unavoidable for every local power that aspires to intercontinental influence and every planetary hegemon that seeks multi-domain power. Most of the empires who have conquered or influenced it–and what a list it is: Akkadians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Crusaders, Mongols, Turco-Mongols, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, French, Italians, Greeks, Americans and Soviets–have done so partly for its own sake but partly to reach, control or protect other places; once inserted and committed, they have each had to expend much blood and treasure just to keep control of this tinderbox, even for the shortest time. 

It is not a surprise that this region has been so shaped by these foreign invaders and colonists, migrants and settlers–such movements of people are the engine of all world history and of our present. Its web of peoples, sects and languages vividly reflects every empire that rose and fell here precisely because each tried to change it, to settle it, to shape it to their own designs and to serve their own gods. Even today, the politicians who send armies and jets into the region, and the activists who march in Western streets demanding interventions are both equal parts of that inescapable tradition.”

What I wouldn't give for a political leader, a business leader, anyone, who reads anything with an historical perspective or a point of view informed by more than a sound-bite or the latest outrage.

I suppose what I'm saying is a more than a little self-aggrandizing. But that's ok. What's a personal blog for if not at least a soupçon of feeding one's ego? 

But here it is: our world--our politics, our brands, the ad industry--culture itself--would be better off if there were more people who combined the "turn of a phrase" with an understanding of the world.

In other words if you could take what's meaningful and make it memorable. 

Like this, from Shakespeare's Henry V's 

We've gone too fast and too ugly from Lincoln's eloquence "last best hope on earth," to the tump's gutter, "We're the HOTTEST Country Anywhere in the World,"

That's a Gibbonesque Decline and Fall as depicted by Wile E. Coyote, a cliff and maybe an anvil.

83-seconds of amerikkan metaphor.

That's what happens you when you don't hire a copywriter.

Yes, Indeedy, I'm Walking.

For a person who is very often fueled by ardent competitiveness that teeters across the line into fury, for a person who is often angered by some sin of commission or omission, there is little my three-year-old golden retriever Sparkle can do that will get me mad.

While my sleep is often a long-time coming, fitful when it does come and usually more anguish than rest, last night I might as well have been in a sealed casket, deep inside a marble sarcophagus, buried under six feet of well-packed soil.

I was out. 

I was clonked-by-Sonny-Liston-out.

Out until 4:40 AM when I heard a sharp bark from Sparkle, who was downstairs nestled in her Taj-Mahal-like crate. I ignored the noise, hoping it was a dream or a party in some bed-bugs' pied-a-terre, or some house-creak I had never heard before.

But, it persisted. 

It wasn't a series of staccato barks. It was a one-off about every fifteen seconds. There was a long-enough between each bark that I was hoping Sparks had just had a doggie nightmare and would soon return to her usual nearly-comatose slumber. But then, another bark would come. Pause. And another.

I threw on yesterday's jeans and t-shirt and made my way downstairs to see what was going on, if something were amiss.

I duly threw a too-light jacket on (we had our first frost last night) and took Sparkle for a walk, thinking that something inside of her had to get out of her. But there was no vector in her walk. She sniffed the air, sensed wildlife in the neighbor's hedges or maybe a fox or coyote up from the nearby wetland--which when I was young we called a swamp. Sparkle seemed unphased by it all. In short order I hustled back to our house and put Sparkle back in her crate.

I was back in bed by 5 or 5:15, hoping for another hour or two of rest. 

Sparkle had other ideas.

The barking began again, and once again I re-dressed, tsked my way downstairs and, this time with a warmer coat, took her out again, to much the same effect.

There would be no more sleep for me.

So I did what I do, which is I went for a long seaside walk. 

The bright stars of a clear cold night were fading and were soon replaced by salmon colored streaks that, rosy-fingered dawn-like, accompanied the chilly sunrise.

I saw the gulls working the coast, looking for piscine detritus or as gulls are not known for the culinary discernment, just slightly-toxic suburban detritus--a pizza crust, a chicken bone, an apple core.

A long way off, I heard the honking of geese. I scanned the brightening sky and finally found them in a lopsided V. Three on one side, thirty-three on the other. "They need to go back to flight school," I murmured to myself. They didn't hear me and continued with their taxi-cab-level ruckus.

By now, it was nearly seven.

The fishermen were walking to the sea, their spindly rods as hopeful as an ingenue. Some early morning runners were starting off on their daily loneliness--the New York City Marathon is eight days away--and if you're running alone at 7AM on a Saturday, there's a decent chance you're running with some purpose.

Twenty-four hours ealier on Friday morning, walking the same route, a young runner stopped and held her phone up to her eye. I stopped to see what she was photographing, and out on a nearby rock, she pointed to the white head (the 'bald' head) of a preening and proud bald eagle. For all the world it was a US quarter turned to life. Maybe the last time before the mid-terms turn the proud amerikkka eagle to the sinister nazi one, or the comic 'Get Smart' one.

It's hard to live in the world today. 

There is so much horrific, and incipient horrific everywhere. Between AI, trillionaire tech rapists, political rapists, rapist spokespeople saying a campaign commercial supporting child rape is ok, and more. Maybe if trump subverts the midterms, or once again incites deadly riots--an veritable attempted coup-- the president's state of the union address, will be supplanted by the more accurate 'rape of the union.' "Ladies and gentlemen, the rape of the union is good!"

That's not a metaphor. It might be a gloomy prediction.

It's hard to live in the world today.

Then your dog wakes you.

Then the sea says good morning.

Then Orion's Belt and a trillion stars blink hello.

Rosy-fingered dawn reminds you to re-read Homer.

An eagle sits like a god.

Keep walking.

Man Who Makes the Clothes.

For about the last thirty years of advertising, everybody and his bastard cousin has talked about branding, re-branding, the importance of brand, and various brand-related things like brand architecture, brand strategy, branded content and the like.

Everything but 40% brand flakes.

To paraphrase Mark Twain in his, probably apocryphal, quip about the weather, everybody talks about it, nobody does anything about it.

I see more companies--new companies, old companies, small companies, large companies--tinkering with their logos, their typography, their colors or some amalgamation of those elements and announcing, as if anyone outside of the incestabubble of the marketing industry gives a bloody rat's ass.

You also hear people--doyens of the industry--talk about things like brand advertising and performance advertising as if they're separate and distinct, as if one is different from the other because their bottom lines and reporting structures are different. As if anything a brand does is devoid of its influence on its own brand. 

We use the word brand like a blind man uses a .30-caliber air-cooled machine gun. We spray it everywhere. We hurt things with it. But we don't know what we hope to accomplish with it or why. Ready, fire, aim.

In fact, most brands as they're articulated by most companies and most "branding" agencies, are nothing but "design." (I write that though some of the people I most respect in the advertising industry work for some of the big design shops.) But what's missing from most of the verbal onslaughts we hear about brands is a simple idea which I sum up in a sentence.

We like brands that act like people we like.

You probably missed that. So I'll repeat it.

We like brands that act like people we like.

That Keatsian sentence (that is all there is to know and all ye need to know) is unknown, unconsidered, unheeded to by about 99.78797-percent of people who use the word brand.

In fact, I have about four-dozen pdfs of brand guidelines on my hard-drive, ranging from about 15-pages in length to over ten times that. 

From these so-called guidelines (which are more lines and less guides) I can neither discern nor understand how any of these brands act, who they are, how they behave, what makes them different or, to be simple about this, 'what they are like as people.' Yeah. I know what they look like.

So what. 

As Schaffner said to Marx, 'clothes do not make the man. Man makes the clothes.'

Maybe because I used to love the ad industry with such ardor, I'd say that the holding company and agency entities that profess to be brands might well be the worst offenders.

Yes.

They all have a be-fukkin-spoke font. A system of colors. Some ratiocinated logo treatment. A way to get in and out of videos. A look and feel. And an about section that means about as much as a politician's promises. As Alban Barkley said about the vice-presidency, "It ain't worth a bucket of warm shit." You can say that about most of the words below.

This isn't just a case of the cobbler's children having no shoes. This is an entire industry not even knowing what shoes are. Or even feet.

This is Shoelessness writ large. Not knowing what they're for, or why we're better off with them than without them.

This is like designing graphic guidelines for a human heart but forgetting that it first has to work as a pump.

[advertisement.]

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is a one-person agency that helps companies figure out who they are, why they're different, why they matter, what they do, why they exist and what they sell.

I don't have a patented process to get to the nub.

You'll never see me employing the "Trapezoid of Truth" or the "Helix of Heuristics" or the "Polyhedron of Personality."

Yet, I employ the oldest and most effective discovery process known to our species. 

I talk.

I listen.

I question.

I think.

To founders, progenitors, scientists, practitioners. People who love you. And people who hate you.

Then we write it all down.

Simply.

Memorably.

With indelible ink.

A set of beliefs. Behaviors. 

A way of being you.

And no one else.

Condensed for legibility and memorability.

It's not for everyone.

But it might be for you.

And no one else.