Friday, February 7, 2025

Inadequacy. Our New Standard.

I'm sorry for this post. For two reasons. 

First, it's going to be fairly-heavy-duty and come Friday in our  late Systems Collapse era, we'd probably all be better-served by a cold foam half cream double-shot dose of hemlock-scented arsenic. Instead of what you're about to get.

It won't go down easy. And yes, I resisted a Stormy Daniels joke.

Second, I don't know if my ability to see the things I see and make the leaps I make is a strength or a weakness. I read about the waning days of Tsar Nicholas II and I see advertising holding companies and, sadly, amerrykaka. I see life lessons and ad lessons wherever I look, from Neolithic Britain to Ancient Greece--and when I'm feeling especially potent, I use them in the almost daily new business calls I seem to have bursting at the seams of my Microsoft Calendar.

I suppose people roll their eyes and lament, "that's George. He's mad as a hatter, but he can write ads like a sumbitch."

Just now I read an article in The Economist. 


Thank you, David Abbott.

I started reading The Economist because of your ads; I stayed because the magazine was smart, well edited, and wittier than anything you'd find within sixteen miles of any ad agency anywhere. 

Their articles are short, to the point. They never have "to continue, turn to page 27." And--because they know the Economist is not your source for daily news--their articles are different. You don't read The Economist for the ebb and flow of topicality. You read it for errant angstroms of insight flaked with humor (or, even, humour.)



If you know me at all, and you look at the clip above, you can probably think of eleventeen reasons why it stopped me. The plight of incessant shorterizing. And then the Orson Welles-ian picture of Churchill in flagrante delicto, like Charles Foster Kane.


But for all the words in the article, it was a single sentence that got me, reminded me of GeorgeCo's Unique Selling Proposition, and where so many of my competitors fail and fail abjectly.

"...[they] can no longer even articulate our inadequacy."


From an advertising point of view--which is what so often matters to me because it's how I earn my daily Milk Bone--most people can no longer make salient what a client does, how they're different and articulate it in such a way as to make our clients' offerings engaging, important, worth noticing and paying attention to.

My sense is that 99.97-percent of all advertising is a mere joke--and a not very adroit one, or a BOGO offer or jargon or, worst of all, a little dance that some masturbatory creative director believes will go viral. 

Very little articulates something important to a viewer. We make commercials with all kinds of musical, sound-design and cinematic doodads that mean fuck-all to people with a problem.

In fact, if amerrykaka is still a country and we have a presidential election at all in four years, I'd suggest to whoever is running the opposition candidate's campaign (if opposition is allowed) that despite the one-billion dollars the democrats spent in 2024 they were unable to articulate the inadequacy of our government and its policies and its people and how we will fix that.

That's why we're in the state we're in.

In advertising, too.

Advertising has always been excoriated by people like Orwell. I get it.

But today our rattling stick is so esoteric it doesn't rattle anymore. No one hears it. It whispers.


Our job is to articulate a scintilla of humanity about a brand, product or service so people see you care and want to make a difference.

Do that. Or inadequate.

And sorry for the Friday post.














Thursday, February 6, 2025

As Reliable as a _____________________.


Excuse the continuity issues.

There's a great line from the great Frank Capra movie, "Meet John Doe," written by Robert Riskin, and uttered by a good actor, but a bad human being, Walter Brennan. It's one of those lines I'm not sure shows up in movies nowadays. It's about 82-percent more cynical than people today can bear--that is, 82-percent truer--and it doesn't contain a cuss, a sex act or blood. Therefore, it ain't modern enough for today's audiences.

You'll find it in the first twenty seconds of the clip above and you owe it to yourself to, once a decade or so, acquaint yourself with a world view that involves more than fukking the other guy or avoiding taxes.

Pursuant to shaving and drunken barbers, I realized just now the entire problem with the world. Maybe it was prompted by going to the local supermarket and finding them out of bananas. I'm 67-years-old, I've never before NOT been able to buy bananas.

And then it hit me, in what used to be the "last best hope on earth," what used to be "a government of the people, by the people and for the people," has been taken over by an unreliable narrator.

Someone who spins BS as easily as he breathes. It's convenient, malevolent, evil, and will surely separate you from your freedom, your money, your future and your set of principles, that is, if you have any left.

Our industry too, all industries, are being led by unreliable narrators.

Narrators who tell you they have to downsize. Then take $49,000,000 golden parachutes. Narrators who tell you how they'll save $750,000,000/year and try to hide the fact that it will lead to the end of at least 7,500 jobs (at $100K/job.)

This is your trade-press.
Calling mass firings "cost savings [sic] and structure updates.

A gallery of unreliable narrators.


Narrators who claim to believe in DEI, until they don't.

Narrators who believe in diversity, that doesn't include Jews and people over 50.

Narrators who fire people and hire dumbness-producing AI bot machines and call it "marketing."

The unreliable-narrator-ness is endless.

In fact, if you go to the front page of Ad Age--the nominal advertising journal that stole their name from this blog--look at every story and append to that story the words "unreliable narrator."

Do the same when you turn on the late-term abortion that is television news. Or the slightly earlier-term abortion that are The New Tork Yimes or the Stall Wheat Germinal. 

When you hear anything from our Liar in Chief, or his ruling Kakis, felon muskmelon, the blonde spokesthing: Unreliable Narrator.

Any agency award, any agency press-release, any blather about the effect of man-in-the-moon superbowl marketing: Unreliable Narrator.

I remember as a three or four year-old hearing this lyrics and asking my mother about their incongruity. She babbled something about silliness. Missing, as we all have for too long, the Unreliable Narrator of Life. 

The cosmic Drunken Barber.

It rained all night the day I left
The weather it was dry
The sun so hot, I froze to death
Susannah, don't you cry.

Or maybe this is better, by Yip Harburg, Harold Arlen and Billy Rose.


Say, it's only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me

Yes, it's only a canvas sky
Hanging over a muslin tree
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me

Without your love
It's a honky-tonk parade
Without your love
It's a melody played in a penny arcade

It's a Barnum and Bailey world
Just as phony as it can be
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me


Or, Conrad.



Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Maintenance.

If you own a co-op in New York City, you're familiar with the term "Maintenance." It's a fee you pay every month to live in your building. It helps the building's management keep things up to snuff. Or it helps them snuff things up.

It covers payments for the underlying mortgage, salaries for doormen and the super and the handyman, keeping the boiler working, keeping bricks from falling, paying insurance and taxes.

No one likes to pay maintenance. But it's a necessary cost of life on earth--or in a New York co-op, whichever comes second.

These days, I'm finding too many parallels between the collapse of amerika and the demise of the ad industry.

In amerika, we no longer want to pay maintenance. So our roads are pocked and poxed and unsafe. Our air-traffic control system is unsafe. Our cops and law-enforcement are missing. It's why our borders are permeable, our medicine is missing, our air is filthy, our schools don't teach, and so on and so on.

If you delve into the notion of "Societal Collapse," which is what amerika is undergoing now, you'll realize it happens when maintenance stops. It happened in Knossos 3,500 years ago. It's happening in your town, today.




Societal Collapse has also afflicted the ad industry. 

Agency brands stopped spending money on their own brands and stopped upholding their own values. They stopped paying for people, paying for training, treating our profession like a profession. AI can do it.

Clients--and their agencies--were even worse. Most products I grew up with spent tens of millions of dollars developing and propagating the ingredients that made them unique. Their advertising told the world about these ingredients. They cost a fortune, but they returned more money to the corporate coffers. 


Today, most consumers cannot tell one car from another, or a generic mouthwash from Listerine. Mostly because agencies and clients no longer tell people why they should pay for better products. They're no longer "maintaining" the differentiators or the vig that the brand spent, in some cases, years or decades establishing.



Compare these two Volvo spots as a for instance. 

This lack of maintaining is a function of lack of spend. But it's also a function of lack of smart. 

For things to maintain their value you have to tell people why they are valuable. 

And that messaging is never "set it and forget it." It must be done with regularity, with consistency, with repetition.

Maintenance. 





Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Money, Honey.

These days, if you're into harrowing, and if you're alive and paying attention, you surely are, it's hard not to be worried about he chaos, criminality and perversion of norms coming out of trump's Washington.


I can't seem to remember where I read about "Emergency Money," which you can buy from Amazon's fascist-owned site for $50, but I quickly shelled out the ducats, and the book duly arrived at my seaside cottage on Thursday night.







I've pasted about twenty images below. I'll admit, I did a shitty job, neither squaring up the photographs or orienting them correctly. That's ok. And my lack of attention might add to the harrowing-ness of the images found in the book.

I don't know enough about economics to foresee Weimar level inflation in what used to be the United States. But when your nation is run by a seven-time bankrupt, a charlatan, a stock-market speculator and a band of thieves who will surely pillage government coffers while taking bribes at every turn, phrases like "sound as a dollar," will be more obsolete than ever. As will social services, things like healthcare, social security, veterans' benefits and everything that staves off societal collapse.

Below, you'll notice a lot of pictures of people shitting money. That's what it was worth. Shit. And a lot of devils, prelude to the Holocaust. And art by Otto Dix, which should warn just about everyone.

For those of you unaware of what happened 100 years ago as a prelude to Nazism, here's a bit to think about: A loaf of bread in 1922, in Germany cost 163 marks. In September 1923, it cost 1,500,000 marks and at the peak of German hyperinflation, a loaf of bread cost 200,000,000,000 Marks. 

We got trump due to ten-percent inflation. What happens when inflation is ten-million-percent?