We Have a Problem.

Not too many minutes ago, I got off the phone with a prospective client who had called me somewhat unexpectedly. Sometimes that's the best kind of call. Sometimes lack of preparation and background forces you to answer questions in a "reactive" or limbic way, the way your head might react when avoiding an unexpected round-house sucker-punch.

Maybe it's a function of having been born during the Mesozoic Era and having done this a long time. But sometimes, when I'm speaking about something I feel I know quite well, I'm not only actively answering a question, I'm also "other-body-ing" things and listening to myself--almost as an outsider--answering. I actually analyzing what I'm saying, it seems to me, as I'm saying it.

That might sound like a premise out of something by Delmore Schwartz, but here's what I mean.

The prospective client asked me if I would be interested in working for his company which offers services that might be regarded as slightly less interesting than row 97, cell E on an excel spread sheet with 2100 rows and 44 different cells.

Suddenly I heard myself answer:

What good creative people have in common is simple. 
We like solving problems.

|t doesn't much matter what that problem is.
It's regarding the unraveling of that problem as the most-important part of your job. 
Yes, the problem could be selling something sexy.
More often the problem involves something boring. A vegetable soup with fewer vegetables.
It doesn't much matter what the problem is.

What matters is the vigor with which you apply your skill, your craft, your energy and your noggin to solving it.

I wondered as I heard myself blathering on with this answer, if buried not-so-deep inside my answer was one of the principle woes that have stricken down and so-damaged the ad industry.

Today, most often we're given a raft of deliverables under the general heading of "an assignment." We have a 300x250. We have a tik-tok video. A :30. A :15. A :06. We have tweets to write and key words to unlock.

We're never given a problem, or, maybe more precisely no one ever matches those deliverables back to a problem.

No one knows your name.
No one knows what makes you better.
No one knows why they should choose you.
No one knows why you exist.

Many years ago, I realized that much of online advertising is predicated on a major error. As digital grew out of direct mail, there was a presumption that your viewer was interested because, after all, your targeting is so good. Reductio ad absurdum, you didn't have to sell, you just had to tell.

That's how we wound up with the generic copy that afflicts so much of what we ignore.

The problem is, when everything is targeted, nothing is. And nothing gets you to look up and notice anything.

All of the above fail to consider that there are a lot of cars that can say exactly the same thing, and offer the same product range at essentially the same pricing as BMW or Audi. 

There's no reason why. 
There's no problem-solving.

Similar to BMW, as there are dozens of automobile brands to choose from, there are hundreds of Caribbean islands. They're all lovely. Their weather is balmy, their water cerulean, the models in their ads gorgeous.

The assignment as interpreted by modern advertising is "we have to write lines to help people navigate our site." It's not, as above, "we have to write lines that give people a reason to choose our island, not the 603 islands that look just like ours."

None of the commercials below made the brands paying for them or the agency creating them "part of culture."
None of them worked at the intersection of technology and data.
None of them won a pride of plastic lions in southern France.

They talked about the product.
What made it tick.
They showed how it was different.
They solved a problem--the primary problem advertisers face: Why should anyone care?

Now that's an idea.

Figs.

I was a kid at a time before there were a lot of "organized sports" for kids.

Sure there was Little League in the Spring, and Pop Warner football in the Fall. If you were so inclined, there were probably swim teams at the Y and even hockey leagues here and there.

But for the most part, sports just happened organically, like a stray gust of wind picking up a pile of leaves or an apple falling on a physicist's noggin.

A group of boys would somehow gather together on a patch of grass or blacktop and a game would grow up around us. We'd find our own "out of bounds," our own manholes for bases and our own rules and we'd make our own judgments. If you didn't like the kids, or you thought they were cheats, you walked home. You had special power if the ball or bat belonged to you.

Today, a couple of towns over from my Gingham Coast cabin, there's a fenced-in dog-run adjacent to a broad expanse of playing fields. Depending on the day, the parking lot is filled with giant SUVs, and each sideline of the lime-stone marked field is ringed by heavy-set parents with folding chairs watching their nine-year-old girls or nine-year-old boys play soccer, or lacrosse, or something. They're presided over by a set of be-whistled referees ruled by a time clock with snarling coaches, a pecking order and a set of strictures that could choke a goat.

It's all so fukking orderly, it could make a right-thinking person sick.

There was something we learned on those ersatz playfields unsullied by adult authority. This ain't the Duke of Wellington saying, "The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." But the catalog of things we learned was long, deep and meaningful.

We learned to fight. 
To stand up for our beliefs.
We learned to argue.
To form an argument.
To bring evidence to bear.
We learned to form sides.
We learned to walk away if we felt the other side was cheating.
We learned to stick to our guns.
We learned to raise our voices when they needed raising.
We learned to speak up.

Even when I was older, in my early twenties and I would play basketball with the neighborhood ruffians down at St. Catherine's park on East 68th Street, we "policed" ourselves. "No blood, no foul" was harsh. But we made it work.

Those incidentals were the currency of getting along. They were the currency of establishing "self" amid bigger, stronger, older kids. They were means of developing your stature and person.

Once many years ago, I wrote a note to the head of HR at Ogilvy. It was "360-evaluation" time and I had just read an article in The Wall Street Journal about how organizations need trouble-makers and untethered cannons. That seemed a very "David Ogilvy" way of thinking.

I remember exactly what the former head of HR wrote in reply:

"We're looking for collaborative bridge-builders."

Build a bridge up my ass.

The demise of this industry, the dearth of good work comes from collaboration, bridge-building and worst of all, politesse. 

Politesse: a courteous formality. A stilted tarnished dishonest cohesive togetherness. 

Serendipitously, this video came across my desktop the other day. You can, as I did, learn from it. More important, our almost dead industry could learn from it. 

Yeah, I know, it's easy for Larry David to be an asshole. He's earned $1,000,000,000. But maybe he earned that much because he had the strength to be an asshole.

At some point we might have to start being mean. Start walking away. Start sticking to our guns.

Being feckless and accommodating, being a collaborative bridge-builder.

It hasn't just not worked.

It's been a disaster.

And, no figs.

E Pluribus Grift.

Two things happened yesterday or the day before that not too terribly long ago would have had a profound impact on my life.

First WPP, the holding company that's shed more than half its people over the last ten years, has just announced yet another round of "restructuring."

It's hard for me, a guy who shuns euphemisms and prefers honest language, to accept a world that's allowed the word "restructuring" to usurp in meaning the word "fired." 

I'll admit I'm old fashioned. But I like language that uses words people understand in order to communicate. As I read once in the Economist, "words you can stub your toe on." 

I remember years ago reading a novel which was set in upper-crust salons in Victorian England. Somehow someone offends someone else, remarking on her "sizable obliquity." 150 years ago that's how posh people said, "she has a fat ass." IMHO "communication companies" like WPP should try to trade in clarity and truth, not subterfuge and circumlocution. Obliquity, my ass.

In other words, since the currency of effective communication is truth, we should, now and again try telling it. Speaking of truth, my supposition is that WPP gave Ad Age false data about how many people they've fired over the last 20 years or so. The data from "company disclosures" is very different from the data you can find if you do two minutes of research. I wouldn't expect such diligence from the trade press--by all appearances the trade press is bought and paid for. Their reporting is Shakespearean in that it's, "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

The second news item on my idiosyncratic radar was the nearly 24% drop in the share price of IBM, my client for more than a dozen years, in just one day.

Here again, there's some semantic bushwa happening, and in the feckless spirit of our modern age, no one is called out on their bald-faced prevarications. 

When your share price drops 23.93% in a single day, you shouldn't be able to get away with saying your company "faltered." That's like abruptly driving your car into an outdoor cafe and killing twelve. You can't say, "my steering faltered." 

That's not faltering. 
That's disaster.

Likewise when you've missed projections by seven-hundred-million dollars that's not from "not anticipating the magnitude of the capex reprioritization." In the parlance of pre-Jalen Brunson Knick basketball, "that's stinking up the court."

$17,900,000,000
- 17,200,000,000
       700,000,000 

Believe it or not, though, this isn't a post about either WPP or IBM.

It's a post about using language to lie, to confuse, to mislead.

It's a post about the press, and readers like you and me, not being outraged when we're being lied to. Not questioning, not noticing, not looking for the nearest pitchfork. Or Molotov.

It's also a post about what happens to once great companies when no one any longer (including the people who work for those companies) knows what they sell or what makes them different or better.

Here is a screen shot of IBM's homepage. 

1. I have no idea what that means (and I'm pretty smart about technology) and
2. I would have hard time having confidence in you when you've lost 23% of your value in a single day.

3. Your company has lost $69,000,000,000 in market cap since the start of the year, please don't talk about modernization--you might disappear in a quaint old-fashioned way. (Maybe this message isn't getting 'traction.')

Here's WPP's homepage:

1. It's hard to call yourself a trusted growth partner when you've shed 51% of your work force and lost 87% of your market cap and killed many of the brands you bought and brought into your holding company.
2. If you have to say you're trusted, you're not.

--

Some months ago I got called by a jerk asking me if I would pitch a vodka brand being developed by a fourth-tier 72-year-old Hollywood "star" and his 29-year-old creative director/wife.

Around that time I started hearing about a start-up whiskey brand called 'Uncle Nearest.' They had produced an "origin story" video that could make you weep. I would be proud to produce work like Uncle Nearest did. 

GUY 1: Every layer has been so genuinely good and interesting and fascinating, that our main job here was to not screw it up.

GUY 2: This is something important and this is something that's gonna last. This is something that's going to be beyond us.

And then.

It's not unreasonable to conclude, when a country elects two times a six-time bankrupt, a convicted defrauder and a con-man as president, allows its political class to engage in insider trading, and permits the super-wealthy to "donate" hundreds of millions in "campaign funds" to candidates all while letting them not pay taxes, maybe all of amerikkka is just one big grift.

From agencies to agentic to alcohol.

On a lighter note, may I suggest this as a replacement for our National Anthem.

Hummable.

Lindsey.

Some years ago when I first opened GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, my new business phone was ringing fairly off the hook. Though nobody wants to be fired from a steady job, I came to believe that the timing of my firing was actually pretty good.

Not only was I able to beat the Covid "let's-fire-everyone-rush," when I was fired Ogilvy hadn't yet lost its reputation as a legitimate agency. To outsiders it still had meaning, like having played for the 1961 Yankees as opposed to the 1964 Washington Senators. Ogilvy's reputation while tarnished, still had the slightest bit of glow. A luster and meaning that's all-but vanished today.

As much as there's no good time to be shit-canned, my timing was actually pretty good. 

One afternoon, I was sitting in my office in my ramshackle seaside cottage on the Gingham Coast in Connecticut and my cellphone lit up like a Hanukkah menorah. The screen read "unknown caller," but against my usual sterling judgment, I answered it anyway.

I said "hello," and a stern voice on the other end of the blower began speaking.

"This is George Tannenbaum," it growled. It was more of a command than a question.

"This is he," I grammared.

"Hold please for Senator Lindsey Graham."

I held the receiver away from my face and looked at it quizzically like a cartoon double-take. Soon, in a soft Southern lilt, I heard a man's voice.

"Mr. George," he said, "This is Senator Lindsey Graham. Ahm planning on introducing a new cookie. It's a campaign idea one of the boys had."

"A stunt. A way of humanizing you. A way to get some buzz?" 

"They told me you was one smart New York advertising Jew and they weren't just pullin' my seersucker, were they? That's exactly right."

"Thank you, Senator. How can I help you?"

"Ah like that Ah do. You New York Jews are as quick as a hongry cat at a fish market. You're off and runnin' like a bootlegger at a traffic light. You're tongue is flappin' like a blind dog's tale in a butcher's shop.

"Mr. George, Ah need you to use all your advertising accy-u-man to hep me launch this here biscuit. Ah know your jus' the New York Jew Boy who could do it. You do know of my fervid support of Israel, correct?"

"What kind of cookies are they, Senator?"

"They's delicious, they is. Talk to my aide and we'll dispatch y' a passel in two shakes of a senate page-boy's ass."

And with that Senator Graham handed the phone to an assistant to make all the necessary arrangements.

Suffice to say, though the cookies were indeed delicious, the Senator's people and I couldn't agree to payment terms and with the press of paying clients as is was, I wound up turning down the job. 

Senator Graham died on Sunday, and I am mourning his passing. 

I will never know what became of  Lindsey's Filling-Busters.

"The cookie that keeps your lips moving.®"

Unintentional.

Back about five years ago, I got a call from Steve Hayden, a friend and mentor. Steve had not only been the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather, he probably won more new business for that agency than any ten other people. He was also the copywriter on Apple's "1984" commercial, a spot many people regard as the best or most-famous or most-important ever.

Steve had a client who needed manifesto-ing help in addition to good-old-fashioned thinking. Self-effacing as Steve was, he didn't feel he had the stamina to do the day-in and day-out of the assignment and he called to see if he could rope me in.

As the Barbara Stanwyck-character said about the Henry Fonda-character in Preston Sturges' funniest movie, "The Lady Eve," "I need him like the axe needs the turkey." In other words, I jumped at the chance to take on the assignment.

I did, to be honest, about 97.9-percent of the writing. Steve, as he did so well, gave me about 97.9-percent of the confidence I needed. He pushed me ahead, would say every few lines, "that's good," and once in a while would ask me why I dropped something I shouldn't have dropped or would, gently, point out a logic leap or insert or remove a word that made all the different.

Somewhere amid the thousand or so photos on my iphone, I have a picture of Steve holding up the check I mailed him with his social security number on it. We needed it for tax purposes. 

Here's a bit of a manifesto we wrote for the investment firm. 

The key in the writing above and the point of today's post is the phrase "unintended side-effects."

It's really hard to know what's going to happen next when you push something forward. No one knew when the car became everywhere that before-long cities would become clogged, our air would be full of lead, carbon levels would increase, the planet would warm and much of the thirty-or-so-percent of the earth's population that lives within thirty miles of the coast would be imperiled by rising sea levels.

Unintended consequences are a good reason for brakes. For looking before leaping, for regulation, which is regarded as oh-so-archaic and out-of-date today.

We don't really know what the unintended consequences of so-called artificial intelligence will be any more than we could anticipate the deadly effects of widespread tobacco use or "smart" phones. In a century or so, we might look at these "advances" and think of them like we think of the Romans using lead in their pipes--leading to a steady decline, decade after decade in cognitive ability.

What were we thinking?
Not that.

Unintended consequences is a schmancy way of saying we don't know what we're doing. Or as Yogi Berra is said to have said, "We're lost, but we're making good time."

Just now, as an unintended consequence of having a wide-field-of-vision, I read an essay in The Wall Street Journal that kicked off this little writing sortie. You don't have to like the neo-fascist politics and trump-apologia of the Journal, but you have to admit, they know how to write. In this case, a subhead that makes you have to read what follows. If you can get by the Journal's Draconian paywall, you can read the essay here.

The writer, Roland Fryer, an economics professor at Harvard (I'm impressed by titles like that) starts this way, and you know from sentence one, he's a good writer. Details like the ferry crossing being 527 feet long are rich and interesting:

The ferry crossing from Chappaquiddick to Edgartown, Mass., is only 527 feet long. But no matter how rich or important you are, you have to wait to get on the boat. Sometimes you wait in your car. Sometimes you get out. Someone complains about the line, the weather, our politics or the UPS driver who goes to the front of the queue. Someone else laughs. A conversation begins.

This isn’t a defense of bad maritime logistics. But spending time around that ferry has made me wonder if modern life has undersold inconvenience. We treat waiting as wasted time. Often it is. But sometimes waiting does something useful: It forces people into the same place, with nothing to do, long enough for conversation to begin.

The unintended consequence of all the digital friction-free-ness we've been sold isn't ease and convenience is loneliness, isolation and, I believe, a decline in the general level of work--as well in the general appreciation and tolerance of other people's points of view.

Living as I do by the sea, my little ramshackle cottage is ringed by the rock-lined shore. The stones are often rounded and are roughly soft-ball-sized. As the gentle waves of the sound move in and out the rocks are pushed here and there. They make small abrading sounds something like a single marble streaming down a chute in some sort of kids' game.

It occurred me that the elimination of friction goes against the mighty physical laws of the universe. Mountains rise through friction, continents move, rivers cut through the earth and more.

Fryer puts it this way:

Which brings me back to that ridiculously inconvenient ferry and what I call the friction theory of friendship. The idea is simple: Some inconveniences aren’t merely costs. They are the hidden scaffolding of social life....

This is why friendship is often a product of something else: work, school, church, children, sports, errands, waiting rooms. It is produced not by misery, but by enough common friction to make conversation natural. Modern life has spent decades eliminating that friction. We can work without offices, shop without stores, exercise without gyms and communicate without looking anyone in the eye. Each improvement is defensible, some phenomenal. Together they have made interaction with other people increasingly optional.

Like Fryer, I don't love going to the grocery store. Or the general boorishness when you go to a movie, show or concert. Or the crowds on the subway. Or, most certainly, the inconvenience of going into the office.

Most of these "inconveniences" are enough to pop a blood vessel

But there's the other side to them as well. 

I'll call it the "kibbitz-side." The banter with the guy slicing pastrami at Katz's. The "see the game last night" with a stranger on the Lexington line. The foot-shuffle in a crowded elevator and the "are-you-getting-off-here" dance with someone who inadvertently jostles you, then follows up with a winsome, as she gets off on 4.

There's a big difference in watching a funny movie in a theater and watching it through your earpods. You might see and hear better at home. You might be more comfortable. You can pause the action when you need a pee. But in that theater, laughter begets laughter and you feel, even if just for a moment, a part of something.

But the unintended consequences of our efficient and frictionless world is our forgetting, our abnegation of the power of friction. Sharing stresses, looks, laughs, flirtations. Little meaningless moments that mean so much.

Friction-less means less-humanity as well.

For better, yes.

But mostly for worse.

 

Boring. Not Boring.

It's pretty easy to find writing that sucks.

Most of what we're blitzed with is either machine-made with about the care put into a slice of past use-by-date "processed cheese food" or is so put through the 17-rounds-of-approval wringer that at worst it's insulting and at best it's just bland an anodyne. Or it's--maybe most egregious--MBA-vetted.

Here's one small example:

When else would you fasten your seat belt except when you're seated?

Early Monday morning as I sat down to write, however, I stumbled upon some writing that was really, truly delightful.

Oddly enough, the writing was found on the website of a self-propelled-boat-race that goes from Washington state north 750-miles to Ketchikan, Alaska.

Here's a bit of copy that made me laugh.

That made me think for a second (or half a second) maybe I should try this. And no, I don't need the steak knives.

The highlight of the site, besides the race itself, was the writing on the site. Particularly wonderful were how they handled their frequently asked questions.

By the way, some years ago, The Economist turned FAQs on their ears, though FAQs don't have ears. They came out with this book, which you can't buy even on amazon or abebooks.com. It's currently out-of-print. The example question below might explain that scarcity. I have two copies, and no, you can't borrow one.

Q.
Has recycling gone too far? Research is now underway that would allow recyclers to turn:
A. Dead fish into disposable diapers
B. Sewage into pillow stuffing
C. Liposuctioned human fat into soap

A.
And the answer is (a)

Babies, beware: food scientist Srinivasan Damodaran knows how to make an eco-friendly filler for disposable diapers out of "bycatch", the nearly 20 million tons of fish caught each year that is unsuitable for sale. Dr. Damodaran extracts protein from the fish and then treats it with a chemical known as EDTAD that lends it superb absorbency. Only a few squeamish parents stand in the way of an environmental triumph. (The Economist, 7 Dec 2000)

But back to the R2AK race.

You can, and should, look at their Frequently Asked Questions here. I've pasted a few bits here to whet your inquisitive appetite.

Frequently Asked Questions, like most things you might have to write and most things you might have to read, can go either one of two ways.

Most people look at them as garbage and treat them with very little care. They usually wind up therefore being dull, illegible and ignored.

That's why about 99.7876992% of what we see is dull, illegible and ignored. Yeah, and in-scope.

I never really thought about FAQs at all until I saw The Economist book. Then, a few years ago, the New York Times got in on the act with an FAQ on the wedding of two people I don't give a rat's ass about. You can see it here.

The Times did subsequent variations on a theme around the 2023 Super Bowl, here. And the birth of the royal baby, here.

When I taught at School of Visual Arts in New York in the early 1990s, my students would often accuse me of giving them "boring assignments."

I said to them something like "The two greatest advertising successes of the 1980s were the New York yellow pages and a package delivery company. You couldn't get more-boring assignments."

The accountants and consultants who have destroyed the advertising business, who have spreadsheeted it into irrelevance and who have optimized its enshittification don't understand the most Bernbach-ian of Howard Gossage's truths.

Our job is making things interesting.
No matter what.

There are no boring products.
Only boring ways of doing your job.

---

BTW,
all the au courant blather about making a brand a "part of culture" emanates from advertising dilettantes who believe there's nothing interesting about the products they're paid to advertise so they gussy those products up with purported cultural relevance.

I've seen catchphrases and the like migrate from TV commercials, or even print, into popular parlance and that's a bonus when it happens--but usually a serendipity-based bonus, not one you can engineer or plan for.

I'm not really sure what it means to make a brand a part of culture. I don't need a mayonnaise-derived cultural condiment or a phone service that spends more on bad celebrity-schtick than they do on customer-care.

In my opinion, culture became a barometer for advertising "awardiness" because so many practitioners of modern advertising actually hate advertising. Further they hate, or haven't even used the products they're charged with selling. Rather than deepen their knowledge, they assert that no one cares about products or product differentiation or the essential make-up of the products we buy.

To me, culture is a crutch, like trying to out-adjective others in your category. Culture, like florid language, can't be the exclusive province of a particular brand. What happens then, because no one any more talks about the really differences in products, is that most categories follow the same cultural playbook and everything in that category looks exactly the same and says exactly nothing.

Replicable emptiness.