The Greatest Pep Talk in the History of Art.

 

I don't usually turn this space over entirely to something I've read somewhere. In this 8,000-post play that is a portrait of my life, I've assumed a central role. Most of my posts, in one form or another, are about me. What I think, what I do, how I feel about something.

In fact, my agency is called GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company because like this blog, my agency is about me. It's about how I think advertising works. What I think good is. How I think clients should be won and treated and served. I could have called my business "Purple Tangerine," or "Glia" and subsumed myself, my drive, my humor, my subversive intelligence as I have through most of my life. But setting out on my own, I decided--painfully--to be my own self.

All that having been said, an ablative absolute Latin construction, I just came across this letter written by Sol LeWitt to his student Eva Hesse. Hesse was having, as we all have about fifty-seven minutes out of every sixty, a crisis of confidence. LeWitt's letter is considered "The Greatest Pep Talk in the History of Art."

I guess to be reductive and to keep my typical role as the reliable and active narrator of this space, I can reduce all this to a few words.

As my therapist Owen said to me thirty years ago as I was hesitating sending 50 TV scripts to Steve Hayden who had just hired me only a few weeks earlier, "push the send button."

Or even briefer, dear brief candle, and in the words of LeWitt:

Do.

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Dear Eva,

It will be almost a month since you wrote to me and you have possibly forgotten your state of mind (I doubt it, though). You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it. Don’t! Learn to say “Fuck you” to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, learning, hunting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, rumbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO.

From your description, and from what I know of your previous work and your ability, the work you are doing sounds very good. “Drawings—clean-clear but crazy like machines, larger, bolder, real nonsense.” That sounds fine, wonderful—real nonsense. Do more. More nonsensical, more crazy, more machines, more breasts, penises, cunts, whatever—make them abound with nonsense. Try and tickle something inside you, your “weird humor.” You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world. If you fear, make it work for you—draw and paint your fear and anxiety. And stop worrying about big, deep things such as “to decide on a purpose and way of life, a consistent approach to even some impossible end or even an imagined end.” You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO.

I have much confidence in you and even though you are tormenting yourself, the work you do is very good. Try to do some BAD work—the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell—you are not responsible for the world—you are only responsible for your work—so DO IT. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any preconceived form, idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be. But if life would be easier for you if you stopped working—then stop. Don’t punish yourself. However, I think that it is so deeply engrained in you that it would be easier to DO.

Darkening. Harkening.

When I was fired from Ogilvy, though I was making the agency a shit-ton of money and almost single-handedly doing much of the creative on a large account, Mark Read, the then CEO of Ogilvy's Holding Company WPP said in the press that the senior (mostly creatives who were fired) "harkened back to the 80s."

He posited that thinking and learning from a time when the industry was more creative, more vital and more prosperous was a bad thing.

Harkening back to such a time was a pejorative. 

Mark Read has since left WPP with a gigantic severance package (about 50 times what a 20-year employee would get) and he's gotten a job from a company he bought while running WPP that WPP has since sold. That's about as gangster as capitalism gets.  [BTW, when Read was forced out of WPP, the feckless trade press allowed him to claim he left WPP in a secure financial position. 

The holding company's market cap has plummeted from $32,000,000,000 when Read joined the firm to about 1/10 that today. Saying WPP has a secure financial position is like Eichmann saying Auschwitz had great showers. Many people believe our current economic systems is capitalism for the poor--we live day to day. And socialism for the rich--they get more help than we can even imagine.]

Since leaving WPP in a 'secure financial position' 12 months ago,

WPP's 'secure' stock has fallen from 39.77 to 17.46.

(Imagine if a baseball team went from winning 40 games to winning 18.)

In any event, last week I had a week where client meetings ran into client meetings ran into client meetings. And all of those meetings were GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company pretty much one-on-one with the CEO of one of my clients.

It's tough meeting with CEOs.

They're stern, demanding, usually cheap. And most often they haven't a clue about advertising--what it can do, what it can't and how it actually works. What's more, my current job is at least three jobs. 

1) I'm a FINDER. (I have to find business.)
2) I'm a MINDER. (I have to care for business.)
3) I'm a GRINDER. (I have to do to ads.)

In exhaustion and some exasperation I wrote a note about this to a friend of mine who's had a long and successful advertising career.

What I unwitting put my finger on in the note above is what IMHO, Mark Read and his ilk never knew and the entire industry has abdicated itself from.

The highest order of our job is not just creating ads or "culture." It's shaping who a company is, how it comports itself, what and how it sells what it does.

That's how we create real brand value.
That's how we earn our keep

However, today,
In our race to create a better BOGO,
in our race to kerpow of KPIs
in our race to make our ROI roar,

We've forgotten our true power.
Defining.
Differentiating.
Demonstrating the
who
what
why and
how

a business exists.
And making it 
lust-after-able.

Come.
Harken back with me.

A.I. Set to Music.

There's a great bit from one of Robert Frost's greatest poems, "The Mending Wall," that I wish more people would consider and think about. It ain't about mending and it ain't about walls. 

It's about life itself. About thinking about what you're doing before you do it.

Here's the entirety of the poem, with the passage I'm writing about today highlighted. If you aren't running to yet another meaningless meeting, you can take one-hundred and fifty-two seconds and hear Frost himself recite this masterpiece. It's a long way from O-O-O-Ozempic!

I bring up the highlighted lines above, "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out," because as the entire world blindly gushes about and embraces the trillion-dollar propaganda of the cocksure AI-future, no one is asking what we are keeping in or keeping out. No one's asking what we're giving up.

I had a email conversation with my friend, the Soul Captain, Karl Westman, early last week. In addition to being a mensch, Karl is the best music guy I ever worked with. He's probably scored more commercials than Carter has little liver pills, and elevated every one of them. He's also a recording artist in his own right. You can find Karl on Spotify, if you look.

In any event, I asked Karl last week about the Coltrane I posted above.

Something important and meaningful happens in those :52 seconds. Coltrane thinks. He asks to know what score he is following and why he should. He alters Rogers' original score and adds to it the trill and the flourish and the spark of unique. The stuff that genius is made of.

In short, and speaking of AI, Coltrane "doesn't follow the prompt." He doesn't play "My Favorite Things" by Richard Rogers, he makes the "standard" un-standard.

Listen.

You might also like to listen to my favorite two-minutes and thirty-two seconds of Thelonious Sphere Monk, his rendition of "Dinah, Take Two."

Monk is also, like 'Trane, defying, not following the prompt. He is asking to know what he is walling in or walling out. Of course, Monk could hit every piano key perfectly. He doesn't. He makes "Dinah" unique, different, his. Worthy of standing out among nineteen trillion other pop songs.

In about two minutes scrolling on LinkedIn, you'll see probably fifty posts on the splendiferousness of AI. Of automation. Of "generative-ness," of whatever the current forces of technology totalitarianism tells us to think. 

What's more, if you find your ChatGPT, or Claude mechanism, you can probably tell it to "write a song like Coltrane or Monk," and it will do a decent job.

But it will be missing the why.
It will be missing the ask.
It will be missing the rule-breaking.
The 'I never would have done that.'
Those are the essence of us.
Or people a human.

We're no longer asking why.
We're following the prompt.

That's not living.
That's not being.
We are being fed, in Latin, "Dronito ergo, sum."

I drone, therefore I am.

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.

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