By the Sea.

There's a seaside walk that starts or ends at my seaside cottage on the Gingham Coast that is, I believe, one of the great walks in all the world. For three-quarters of a mile, with no cars crossing your path, you can walk uninterrupted along the sea. I think it might be the longest non-car-affected walk you can take in the tri-state area. And all the while, the sea is just over your shoulder, mere yards away.

I don't love it up here in Gingham-ville. 

I miss the people and the energy of New York City.

I miss a variety of foods.

And how I can get anything I want in minutes.

I miss the anonymity of the city, how if you have a shitty neighbor you can all-but ignore them. That's harder to do in upper-suburbia where those shitty neighbors are apt to leave their garbage pail in front of your walk, just to provoke you. 

I have an infinitesimal annoyance fuse.

There's a lot I hate up here.

But this walk almost makes it worthwhile.

I have been taking this walk two or three times daily for the almost seven years we've been up here. And while I generally don't carry my cellphone with me while I walk, on occasion, I need to make a call and I try to kill two birds with one scone. (All baked goods in the area are stale. Always.)

For all the years I've been doing this, I've always gotten good reception and have had few dropped calls. 

This week that changed.

I don't anymore get cell service on my walk.

My wife has a cousin in one of amerika's most expensive zip codes--near the Getty Villa in Malibu. And another cousin in another of amerika's most expensive zip codes in Palos Verdes Estates, south of LAX. Each of the cousins involved has come to accept that they cannot get cell service from their multi-million dollar homes.

I think this is our AI future.

Despite all the blandishments about how AI will improve everything, everything will continue to get worse.

AI is probably f-ing up cell service. It's in everything. Why wouldn't it be in tele-communications?

Despite all the trillion-dollar corporate PR we're being force-fed about AI, you can't make a return, reconcile an overpayment, get an answer to a simple question, extend or change a hotel reservation, get search results that don't return a listing for a Dunkin' Donuts when you're looking for Cuban food.

AI oppression has gotten so bad, it's no longer worth fighting with the giant holding company you're freelancing for when they find a way to schtup you (and they always do.) I could have the fight. But to get the additional $4000 they owe me would cost me probably $10,000 of aggravation.

Before we trust our legal system, our medicine, our education, our everything to AI, it would be nice to see something simple like a phone-call completed with a success rate similar to what we might have experienced 75 years ago.

I think about battlements and forts.

About one-thousand years ago architects realized that curved fortifications would resist ballistic onslaughts better than right angles. Most castles and forts adjusted.

Then, a few hundred years later, those curved walls were deemed old-fashioned and the world went back to flat walls, not caring they were less safe.

Technology is great. 

But it needs people in charge. 

If only to say "when" like kids do when you fill their glass with milk.

"When."

When to non-tax paying plutocrats.

When to rapist presidents.

When to complicit congresses.

When to technology that extracts from humans.

When to 99.7% of "becoming part of culture."

When to not reading.

When to YOYO (you're on your own.)

As a society we no longer say "when."

We've decided, like Scarlett O'Hara decided, to throw restraint and common-sense out with both hands.

When.

Black Dog.

For reasons too personal and too numerous to delineate, I've been dealing with a ferocious Black Dog for about a week-and-a-half. It's been a long time since I've had one of these bouts, but this one came on hard and the Dog gripped me with vise-like jaws that gripped and locked.

I tried almost everything to get the Dog to relent. I called friends. I called more friends. I doubled down on working hard. I took long and vigorous walks. No matter what I did, the Dog kept his unrelenting grip on me.

The Dog, in fact, was getting worse--more vicious, not less--as time went by.

Some of this is age related. I realized at the age of almost 69, many many of the little things in life that I've always cherished have been homogenized or modernized out of existence. Or they just don't have them up here on the Gingham Coast where I spend the majority of my time.

For instance, you can't get decent Chinese food up here. I can drive an hour round-trip to a Chinese place near one of the big casinos. But the food, in reality, is not as good as any of the greasy spoons (or greasy-chopsticks) that dot most New York City neighborhoods. I suppose I have a craving-driven diet. When I need a good chicken and broccoli or a good pork fried rice, something ersatz just won't do. So, I remain unsatisfied. Which is no way to go through life.

The same holds true for bagels. 

You can find them up here. But they're the store-bought, six-in-a-cellophane bag type of circles. They don't get stale and they have a list of ingredients longer than a New School Masters' thesis. A simple, fresh, warm bagel made with just water, flour, yeast and a pinch is impossible to come by. The few bagel shops that make facsimiles of New York bagels falls as far short as a Twinkie does to a soufflé.

We used to call these Chinese cookies. They were a metaphor for life.
It took work to get to the chocolate.
Today, you can find them stale and packaged in cellophane in various New York delis.
You can no longer find them fresh.

The final Black Dog straw was the Sunday Times NOT arriving once again. For about 45 years, 52 weeks a year, I've rewarded myself for completing the week by taking an hour and a good fountain pen and doing the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. 

There are more challenging puzzles, but the Sunday Times' combination of size and difficulty was perfect for me. It made me think and allowed me the joy of unravelling something tough. It was a way for me to pat myself on the back and say, 'geo. you did it again.' 

Over the last 2,340 Sundays--that's 52 a year for 45 years--I've probably done 2,300 puzzles. That regularity has a salutary effect on me. Even as life gets more and more chaotic and haphazard, I've always had the puzzle to unwind with. I could count on it. It wasn't quite like counting on the tides, but it was as close as you can get in our tump-flected sumpiverse.

Last Sunday, the paper arrived. But without the magazine section. This Sunday, the entire paper was like ethics in politics--a no-show.

Delivery of the Times, if you're a New Yorker is like trees blooming in the Spring. Or a rainbow after a storm. Or a smile from a pretty girl. It's one of those things you can take for granted, but really are too important not to.

The paper and puzzle MIA pushed me right over the abyss. I said to myself, "Everything I hold dear is gone. Everything that matters to me has vanished. All my verities have disappeared."

I played those sentences in my head--trying to refute them. I couldn't. I tried again, again I couldn't. The Black Dog drew blood and gripped tighter.

I started the Sunday puzzle on the Times app, and that's fine. But it's not the same thing. It's like eating a steak from a feeding tube.

So I went downstairs and checked my email.

In it there was a four-word email from a client of mine--my longest-running client. We had worked together for five years--then separated. Now he's back.

The note said:

Thank you. Let's proceed. 

That's when the Black Dog began to release his grip. And that's when I realized that for all the impermanence in the modern world, for all what so often feels like a complete lack of control, the old order isn't as fleeting as the Black Dog had me thinking it was.

The thing that doesn't change is working.

Working hard.

Doing the work.

Getting the clients.

Getting knocked down.

Getting up again.

Working hard.

Doing the work.

Getting the clients.

That's what moves me forward. That's what staves off the Black Dog.

That's what keeps me alive.

Politics and the American Language.

If you've been reading in this space for any appreciable period of time since I've started writing here in 2007, you've been urged by me to read George Orwell's seminal 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language." 

It's an essay I've likely recommended to a thousand creatives and clients through the years. If you care about words from a communication point of view, not an effete one, you'll copy it and keep it no more than an axe-length from your keyboard. You might even read it. Even think about it.

Here are two passages you'd be better off not passing over.

While Orwell deals with loftier topics than I do in a dopey (but consistent) blog on advertising, to my withering mind, it makes nothing but sense to treat language with precision, elegance and even beauty (if you can get there.) No matter who you're writing for.

As humans we have to choose how we use language. We can use it to communicate. Or we can use it to deceive. Today, it seems to be the deceivers are out-pacing the communicators like Secretariat would out-pace my grandson in his Cozy Cart. Deception is winning going away.

In amerikkka since the 1960s, and the liberal attempt to uphold both the letter and the spirit of the 14th and 15th Amendments, the now-eviscerated Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other stabs at upholding what Lincoln called 'the was best hope for man', there's been more than a little murmuring about yet another 'Civil War.'

Civil War itself was one of those terms Orwell was warning us about. As Anthony Conwright points out in a recent essay in The New York Times, 

Rebranding rebellion is nothing new. Americans take it for granted that the war between the Confederate states and the Union was always called the Civil War, but it was not. 

During the war and in its aftermath, it was primarily called an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” 

Its current name is a result of decades of lobbying by Confederate heritage groups and white Southerners committed to rejuvenating the South’s image and ignoring its treason and slaveholding.

Mr. Conwright plumbs history to find out what we today call euphemistically call the Civil War was called in the past. In1861 Senator Samuel Pomeroy called it “the slaveholders’ rebellion.” 

The slaveholders' rebellion.

All the talk--and please pay attention about the 'next civil war'--is really yet another incipient slaveholders' rebellion, masquerading as a battle for liberty and freedom.

The slaveholders here are the big tech leaders, the lindsay grahams and mike johnsons, the mitch mcconnels and ken paxtons who don't like the idea, as the slaveholders before them didn't like the idea, that they have to be fair, pay taxes, pay people, and not transfer wealth by way of an outdated tax-code from people who are income earners (most people) to people who don't have to pay tax because they don't earn payroll taxed income.

If you think you're not a slave, in the last half-century, wages have plummeted, costs have sky-rocketed, permanent jobs have evaporated, pensions are no more, health-care is out of reach. As Billy Pilgrim said in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse, "And so it goes."

The slaveholders' rebellion can be read about here. Metaphorically, I mean.

A book that seeks to explain why this has been allowed to happen. Those people, the ones at the top of this graph are the slaveholders who are rebelling. And they're using the tactics that the super-wealthy plutocrat class has always used. They're turning people against each other, so the slaveholders win.

Next time you hear about "civil war," or 'christian values," or "american exceptionalism," "class warfare," or any other far right shibboleth, think Orwell. Fast.

See all this for what it really is, "the slaveholders' rebellion." A few people who prefer war and destroying equality so they can get out of paying tax.  A few people who will pass on their untaxed wealth to their children and cement that most-un-amerikkkan of ideas--a permanent aristocracy.

Until we learn what's being said and how they say it, and what's really meant by their coded language, they will win. They meaning the slaveholders.

Customer Journeys, Odysseus and Intoxication

I haven't yet seen Christopher Nolan's new movie rendition of the Odyssey, so I don't know when or if the island of the Lotus-Eaters made the final cut, or if, because falling asleep and being afflicted with ennui ain't necessarily cinematic, it wound up on the rosy-fingered cutting-room floor.

Even when you read the Odyssey, and I've read it two dozen times or more (counting reading kids' versions to my daughters when they were knee-high to a Cyclops) the Lotus-Eaters don't make much of an impression. If the adventures of the Odyssey were a football game, the island of the Lotus-Eaters would be as inconsequential as a huddle.

Lotus-Eating anyone?

Nevertheless, I often feel like much of the ad industry has checked onto the island and never checked out. By that I mean much of the industry is drunk and like those on the island of the Lotus-Eaters don't realize--not a bit--how lost at sea they are. In addition to eating Lotus, humankind has been intoxicating itself since about the time we decided to do that bipedal thang. Fermented beverages have been all the rage since probably before fire, and chewing leave like the coca or the eucalyptus was no rare affectation. 

Most of humanity has been high for most of humanity.

My point is, the more you look at the world, the more you realize it's been shaved by a drunken barber. If 'he' has the whole world in his hands, chances are is hands are attached to a body that's three, four or fourteen sheets to the wind.

Without naming names or mentioning holding companies (this is a family blog, after all) not too long ago, I was given a brief in the form of a 72-page deck that had in it a "customer journey" that looked like this. I think they too must be drunk on Lotus or wine of their own incestuous ferment:

I've often said that the definition of a customer journey is a journey no customer has ever been on. Just as I've often said that every content strategy is essentially the same, 'make more content.' But outside of the island of the Lotus-Eaters, I cannot imagine a reality where anything anywhere is nearly as orderly and sequential as this folderol.

I think the same people who draw powerpoint like this also design IKEA instructions. They make sense in a perfect universe that exists nowhere but a conference room that doesn't exist anywhere.

However as denizens of the island of Lotus-Eaters, we're all obeisant to flow charts like the one I scribbled above.

There's a reason design like this has adorned buildings practically since buildings were built. They're there to remind us that straight lines are a chimera.

Now, back to Homer's Odyssey.

The reason smart people read things that are more than a news item-or a tweet -old, is simple. Things that have lasted have perspective. They've seen things and experienced things you might have been too caught up in to notice. That allows literature or history to give us a perspective we wouldn't otherwise have. Like mike tyson is said to have said, 'everyone has a strategy until they get punched in the schnozz.'

If you're in the middle of fighting a battle, it's hard to consider precedent. It's hard to maneuver. You're too busy staying alive. Life and literature can give you intelligence and proportion that the frenzy and danger of actual living wrest from you.

We forget about Bernbach's simple, timeless, human truths because we're too busy making page 109 of our powerpoint beautiful and the meeting's tomorrow and there are 88 comments from 23 account people, planners, and CCOs that haven't been addressed.

So we pretend there are straight-lines in customer journeys. We Lotus-Eat ourselves into believing in clockwork causality when ever since the Big Bang we've been entropying our way through Heidegger's "thrown-ness" universe.

Dr. Heidegger.

And BTW, in case you're wondering what a journey looks like, here's a map of Odysseus', simplified and with the real terrors of life and man eating monsters removed. 

This is what customer journeys look like. Marketers 3,000 years ago knew more than we know today. Even if the "home sweet home" bit is over-sell.

A real 'customer journey.'

Some more, just to beat a Trojan horse:

Indian Spice Journeys.

All this for a tie.

Ca

Captain James Cook's three voyages.

I just wanted to type Frontenac.





I can see my house from here.

Happy Exploitation Day. (A repost.)

(Today is an amerikkkan holiday called Labor Day.  And this is a Labor Day repost. Most of the numbers below have gotten worse. The trend is still the same.)

To my readers outside of the be-nighted states of amerika, today is Labor Day in amerika. We celebrate Labor Day in September in this nation to remove from a day celebrating workers any possible association with May 1st, or May Day, or International Workers Day, which to the recidivists in the be-nighted states has an association with Communism or Socialism, or equally rancid in the eyes of so many powerful amerikans, any semblance of workers' rights.

Over the last fifteen years or so as the giant advertising agencies and holding companies have massively consolidated and, along the way, shed tens of billions of dollars in market value, many in our industry and its periphery have assigned blame for the industry's collapse to a variety of forces, as if those forces, and not their behavior is responsible for that sucking sound.

Divestiture of media is blamed, as is media's fragmentation. AI is blamed, as are FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) and lately, MANGO (Meta, Apple, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI.) Or even MANGOT (all of the above, plus tesler.)

Others cite silly ideas like "the big idea is dead," or today "people are post-consumer."

The point no one seems to bring up is the pillaging of the advertising industry by the very people who are meant to be running the advertising industry, nominally protecting and promoting the industry.

CEO pay in all of industry is out of whack in relation to that of typical workers. The ratio was about 20:1 when I was a teenager. If a worker made $10,000, his boss made $200,000. Now it's almost 350:1. If a worker makes $100,000, his boss makes $35,000,000.

No one points out, for instance, that Mark Read's compensation has increased as the holding company he used as his personal ATM decreased in value from roughly $31Billion to $5.5Billion, an almost 84-percent decrease in value in just a decade.

4 Sep 2026

What Read and his ilk have done is increase their pay vis a vis their workers while decimating the number of workers (the people actually doing the work clients nominally pay for) and therefore the market cap of the companies they're supposed to be running. They're selling the milk from the cow while they're selling off the meat. Cindy Rose, WPP's new CEO (though a WPP board member for a dozen years) has slowed the shrink and has been eight-figures rewarded for that. She's done that in large measure by firing five-figures of workers.

Imagine if you did this to your family. 
Fired people and shrank.

In sports, if the owners sold all the best players, saw the team get worse season after season, and saw attendance and broadcast revenues plummet accordingly, sooner or later, people would blame the greed of ownership for destroying that which yesterday was strong.

Somehow in advertising, we blame exogenous conditions and excuse the malfeasance and bad faith of management. I'd betcha, for instance, Read will be paid by WPP for the next 25 years. Martin Sorrell, Read disgraced predecessor after all, is still being paid by that company.

And as anyone who's watching knows, Mark Read is no Bobby Bonilla.

He's worse.

Or as Eugene O'Neill wrote in "The Emperor Jones," “They's two kind's of stealing. They's the small kind, like what you does, and the big kind, like I does. Fo' de small stealing dey put you in jail soon or late. But fo' de big stealin' dey puts your picture in de paper and yo' statue in de Hall of Fame when you croak."