Brownie is Beautiful.

Some years ago when Joe Frank, the brilliant writer and monologist died, a radio station I was listening to aired an hours'-long tribute to him. It featured long clips from some of his pieces

Most times when I hear, see or think something you consider extraordinary, I say to myself, "This is great. I'll definitely remember this." 

Then in about the time it takes a leaf to fall or a dog to bark, what I thought was a seminal thought is as out of my head as smoke from a diesel engine or a lie from a politician.

While I've trained myself to write things down, sometimes my octopus hands and my wide-field-of-vision can't keep up with my pencil. Like the legendary bass on some cornpone show like Andy Griffith, I'm afraid the big one often gets away.

During the tribute to Frank, I heard him tell the tale of his journeys across amerikkka, coming home from college or something, in his old Chevy Vega. When all this was happening it was, really, pre-ubiquitous fast-food, and Frank made a habit of stopping at Howard Johnson's restaurants.

You've probably never heard of Howard Johnson's. But in the 1960s, they served more meals outside the home than any organization outside of the US Army and it was the largest restaurant chain in the US.

These were generally clean, well-lighted places, with decent food, clean bathrooms and good-enough coffee. They were welcoming and human in a way that even high-end restaurants aren't today.

Frank talked about how he'd sit at the counter, often next to an elevated pastry display with various bear-claws, danish and brownies in it. When the waitress was nowhere to be found, Frank would pilfer a saran-wrap wrapped brownie. It was not something to eat. It was a way of saying I was there, like a male dog peeing on every hydrangea.

Frank would walk out to his Vega, open the trunk with his key and toss in the brownie. 

On an Iowa to Long Island, NY trip, Frank might have stopped at eight or six Howard Johnson's. So he might have pilfered as many cellophaned brownies. 

Multiply those eight or six brownies by four trips a year times five years or so, and before too long, Frank's Vega had hundreds of brownies in its trunk. He told friends about it, too. Over the years, they added hundreds of more brownies.

Next, Frank hatched a plan. On his way out west from his parents' east coast home he would stop at every Howard Johnson's he stopped at on his way east. 

However, rather than surreptitiously making off with a brownie, Frank would replace all the brownies he stole, and then some. As you might imagine, replacing was a harder task than Frank's original swiping. What's more, if you got caught stealing, your crime was easily understood. Returning a year's old, rock-hard brownie would be difficult to talk your way around.

Nevertheless, humans quest.

Like Ahab and his White Whale, like Coronado and the Seven Cities of Gold, most people--no matter how prosaic their lives--have somewhere inside them a lofty goal. Returning brownies was Frank's.

This is all I have today.

Somewhere in this meander I think there might be well-hidden, like a Viet Kong guerrilla on the Ho Chi Mihn trail, a metaphor for amerikkka or at least the advertising industry.

So many years of petty, dispiriting lies.

So many soul-sapping behaviors over time.

So many little cuts.

So many nasty pecks from a feral goose.

No matter how you try, the damage is done. You can't come back from decades or years of malfeasance.

https://www.joefrank.com/

Years later now, Frank is gone. Howard Johnson's is gone. That Chevy Vega is gone.

But somewhere I bet there exists an adamantine brownie wrapped back when the world was some degrees cooler and lightyears more innocent. It might take one of the giant drills New York sandhogs use to dig new subway tunnels, and maybe I'm weird, but I'd like to have a piece of one.

Maybe as a souvenir of amerikkka. Maybe to taste. Maybe just as a keepsake of bygone-ness.

Somehow that also seems like it might be a metaphor for something.

19 minutes of Frank.

BTW.

$1000 is more than I'm willing to spend on a gag.
But I'd love a Simple Simon and the Pieman Howard Johnson's weathervane.

If. Then.

 

If they say it's free, then you shouldn't have to watch two commercials and be hit with three credit card offers to get it.

If they say they're award-winning, then they shouldn't have had to pay for the award. And fewer than forty-in-fifty should also win awards.

If they say, 'you're family,' then their attrition rate--voluntary and involuntary combined--should be less than ten-percent.

If they say 'vote for us,' then ninety-percent of their communications with you shouldn't be about you giving them money.

If they market themselves as an award-show, then public voting and asking people to vote for your entry shouldn't be a part of it.

If they say they're a 'trusted growth partner for the world's leading brands, then they should also be growing.

If they believe in creativity, then they should hire creatives and put creatives in charge.

If they boast that they've won 'network of the year,' then they should be forthcoming about their financial metrics, not just the awards they won. 

If they offer "high-speed internet," then it should be faster than dial-up at least twenty-percent of the time.

If they have a "complaint line," then you shouldn't have to fill-out ten-minutes worth of forms (so they can data-collect) before you can make a complaint.

If a company claims "they're for people like you," then they should have to prove they know who you are.

If "your call is important," then they should hire people to answer those calls.

If "your call is important," then the people answering those call should be able to address the problem you're calling about.

If your platform is upgraded, then you should have the option not to accept the upgrades--which are usually just new things the platform wants to sell you.

If a company with a $2.8 trillion market cap boasts they're devoting $20 million to combat climate change, then they should have to disclose that that's merely .00000714 of their worth. (Like someone making $300,000 giving $2.14 for a cause they're promoting.)

If a waiter asks you 'how's everything tasting?' rather than saying 'how does your meal taste?', then they should tell you why they're using the gerundive.

If a hotel mini-bar charges you $7 for a can of Coke, then they should give you $7 if you steal a can from the conference you're attending and re-stock the mini-bar.

If you pay for  service and something is missing from it (there's no restroom in the cabin on my flight) then you should receive a refund.

If you dent your car, then you should be able to snap off the dented piece and replace it like a Lego block. Replacing a dented fender should be like eating around the bruise in a banana.

If you're a pundit and make serial predictions, then you should be required to publish your hit rate. Especially if you work in advertising.

If you write a list like this, then you should be prepared to be considered a doofus.

A Long Story.

 

If you read Odyssean books like I do--books that take as long to complete as one of Captain James Cook's three voyages around the world--you quickly realize (if you're paying attention) that there's a value in learning about different periods of history that goes beyond being good at Jeopardy! Or at least Jeopardy! before 91-percent of its questions were about popular "culture."

You can read books like the one shown above (which I recommend) for the dates and names and papal bulls. Or you can read them on a more macro-level, like trying to identify the early origins of white/Christian superiority and therefore racism, and the very beginnings of our modern world.

You can also find metaphors that are often elastic enough to give context to today's realities.

All of the history in "Contested Continent" takes place before the West started adhering to the idea of "germ theory." That is that diseases and illnesses are caused by unseen micro-organisms spread by rats, fleas, coughing and other bodily effluvia. Before that theory, most people believe that "miasmas" and illnesses were caused by mal-aria (bad air) emanating from bogs and some ancestor of my mother.

The English at Jamestown, for instance, starting back in 1607 brought over thousands of people--usually felons, fatherless children and the indentured every year. At the end of every year, those thousands were reduced to hundreds. It took emigrations of about ten thousand people to get the population up to about fifteen hundred.

One reasons for that is the complete lack of understanding of germ theory.

Without knowing about germ theory, you think nothing of dumping the population's effluence (feces and urine) into the river and streams you drink out of, wash and bathe in. 

Cholera. Who'da thunk.

(One reason previous societies drank so much beer and wine is that it usually was unpoisoned by, for instance, Gladys Moscowitz who has fairly persistent diarrhea, as you do when you over-do the prune danish. )

If humans as we know them have lived on our planet for 200,000 years and have been living in cities for about 12,000 years, it's really only during the last 150 years that anything approaching washing your hands between surgeries came into vogue. People believed in spontaneous generation until recently, the idea that creatures grew organically out of other matter.

Germ theory, despite the onrush and ascendance of highly-positioned and highly-influential science-denialism and science-denialists, still seems to hold today. Though I'm sure in some darker trumpian precincts it's considered as dumb and unprovable as the roundness of the earth, the moonlanding, gravity, evolution and the human right to health-care.

I bring all this up because shitting in the river where you get your drinking water has fallen out of fashion. Germ theory made it a no-no. And it seems crazy to think that anyone in their right mind would ever do so.

Now however, most of the West is about thirty years into enshittification. Like diseases centuries ago, enshittification is passed from person to person via the prevailing belief in efficiency above all else, especially common-sense. Enshittification is the process where efficiency reigns, everything gets worse and more expensive but about four stock-holders get rich.

You see it in every industry. Efficiency becomes the mantra. People get cut. Service gets worse. Because service gets worse customers leaves or prices are forced lower. Consequently more customers leave, more people are fired, more cost-cuts are needed and so it goes.

That process to my eyes is as destructive as standard operating procedure was before the acceptance of germ theory. 

Efficiency improvements are the name of every game today. And if you're working with a company getting more efficient, from Adobe to your telco to your ad agency to Zenobia, your pistachio nut provider, you know things are only going to get worse.

My point in all this is that if there's any hope for the future of capitalism, someone will come along with a catchy explanation, like germ theory, of how the killing disease of so-called efficiency spreads. 

Maybe they'll call it squeeze theory.

And declare that our general economic and innovation malaise comes from the sickness and reliance on efficiency. Squeeze theory will state simply that we're squeezing ourselves to death.

If you have something that makes more sense, LMK.

How It's Going.

I don't eat fast food. 

In fact the last time I went into a QSR (quick service restaurant) was when my elder daughter gave birth to her second child and there was a McDonald's in the hospital complex. I was sent down to get her a coke.

I suppose they put McDonald's in hospitals because it cuts out the middle-man. 

In any event, QSR is a triple mis-direct.

There's no quick.
There's no service.
And I don't count them as restaurants.

But semantic anomalies are par for the course in the modern world--getting more and more glaring as I get older and older.

When I got to that post-natal McDonald's I was confronted by touchscreens. I was meant to type in my order and hope for the best.

I paid a real person, and when I asked where lids and straws were she grunted and nodded, as if I were stupid. Neanderthally she directed me left, where utensils and napkins are placed, efficiently atop trash bins. 

Not too long ago I read about the new CEO or CMO or Customer Success Doyen of some QSR or another speaking about how impersonalization has gone too far. I can't find the article or quotation, but it was about the absence of humanity in what at one time was the most-human of experiences--eating.

It's pretty obvious to me what's happened.

QSRs aren't run by people who cook food, love food, enjoy food and relish in relish. They're run, like everything else today, by efficiency experts who, quoting Oscar Wilde, know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Everything is supply-chain optimized to work just great and everything sucks. I'm sure the hotel I'm staying in right now is run by people who know how to turn a room over in 51 minutes rather than 52. They save 8374 minutes a year, which nets them an extra $74,094 in revenue per room so they get promoted. Eventually they'll succeed their way toward ruining everything.

Yet, no one ever talks about the stranger's public hair in the shower.

That's an MVP. (Minimal Viable Pubic.) And they teach it in b-school.

The same thing, I see has happened and is happening in the ad industry--the ever-consolidating ad industry, which is now down to four big holding companies and zero unique brands. Consolidation, in fact, might be MBA speak for a septic system's leach field. The effluence is distributed efficiently, and that's considered success.

Just now an advertising friend I worked with in the early 1980s sent me this article from what remains of the bought-and-paid for trade press. (They report nothing that reflects ill on the decimated industry. AdAge and Adweek do more PR than reporting.)

Essentially what's happening to QSRs, ad agencies and just about everything else is simple. 

Contemporary management policy has bought them all up.    Contemporary management policy has made them efficient. Contemporary management policy has rendered them like Gertrude Stein's Oakland: "There's no there there."

Or in the words of Ed Butler, my boss at Ally & Gargano from 1990--1992, everything now is "flat as a plate of piss." And nearly as appetizing.

Everything has gotten so efficient and so well-run and so cost-effective that everything is in danger of going belly-up because everything is so devoid of humanity, kindness, decency, respect and soul.

Our spiritual tectonic plates have shifted from "Let me find out and get back to you," to "your call is important to us. Your call will be answered by the next available customer success specialist in 27 minutes."

We've gone from "Let's make it different" to "Let's not offend." Distinctiveness, point of view, ethics and philosophy has been superseded by "best-practices," which invariably is synonymous with "most-efficient practices," which is invariably synonymous with suck. And pubic hair in the shower.

It seems weird to me to spend billions on agency "consolidation," aka subsumation and then have to spend millions more attempting to return things to how they were before they were blanderized and forced to comply.

Every once in a while, when I'm in a dark mood, I think about the sort of thinking that would lead to companies delivering what they call a "minimal viable product" to their customers, who are in effect "minimal viable economic entities."

It staggers me that companies and agencies would create things purposefully sucky and offer such crap to their most valuable "asset"--their customers aka their "minimal viable economic entities." We make crap for crap while using monopoly power to drive margins being the modus operandi of most of the world.

I can imagine a manager coming out to the mound after a pitcher's giving up an extra-base hit to the third batter in a row. "Well, I threw him my minimally viable slider"

But,
george,
that's 
the
way
we
do
things.

If 
you're
ready 
to sail
with us,

we're
ready
to welcome
you
aboard.

Challenging.

When advertising people get together as about fifteen of us did last Tuesday, October 6, courtesy of Bill Oberland, Jason Harris and Indie at Large, you'd be right to anticipate some carping. 

That does not mean fish was served.

We met in a top floor space for dinner, drinks and discussion at a penthouse on West 4th Street, and we followed the all-too human predilection. We complained about how everything's changed and nothing's as good as it used to be. And we weren't wrong.

For all my personal lugubriousness, I have a fractured relationship with pessimism. 

In fact, I'd say I'm optimistic about pessimism. I'm upbeat about the downbeat. My blues are multi-hued.

That is, no matter how dark things seem, something in me keeps fighting, keeps trying, keeps believing that somehow we can make things better. Maybe I've read Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning," too often. Or maybe I've taken it too much to heart. But resisting despair is the best way to deal with despair.

At dinner on Tuesday, we had a rectangular-table discussion about the pressures Indies face.

There's the anti-competitive pressure from the big four holding company oligopoly. The downward pressure on pricing. The stupid obeisance and belief in AI. And more.

As usual when I am with other people, I don't go along with anyone. I seldom agree with or even experience the same things that other people go through. 

I think what makes me me can be simply summed up. I don't follow rules and I work hard to be different. Or, I  just am.

If the industry says good advertising becomes a part of culture, well, I just don't believe it. As someone who is cultured, I don't want brands interfering with my culture. I prefer my culture, my sports, my "experiences" without brand logos interpolating the fuck out of them.

If the industry says we have to lower our prices to compete, I'm apt to say (to myself) law-firms and McKinsey ain't lowering their prices. I'm as smart as they are--and I can write ads--why should I?

You might say that my personal brief, or what used to be the brief for every good creative and every good agency is the one that Chiat\Day wrote for Apple almost 30 years ago: Think Different. 

Instead, 97.978-percent of the industry Thinks Same. And calls it 'best practices,' and follows the rules laid down by the consultants, MBAs, technologists and insurance-salespeople who never worked in advertising and who today run the remnants of the contracting (non)-industry.

If you look like anyone else,
if you behave like anyone else,
if you judge yourself by anyone elses' standards
(including Cannes')
you're doing it wrong.

If you read the bought-and-paid-for advertising-trade PR-organs, (Adweek and Advertising Age) and you have the stamina to do a word search, you'll quickly learn that most clients are looking for speed, cheapness and efficiency. And awards.

Well made. Well designed. Built to last.

Cheap. Shoddy. No lasting value.

That's why commercial breaks, which used to offer something to look at like a nice up-scale neighborhood, now look like shanty towns or a mobile-home park after an EF-5 tornado. 

Years ago, I read Adam Morgan's "Eating the Big Fish." It lays out some rules for upsetting the apple-cart. For challenger brands, which is what we're supposed to be, no matter our size. We're supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. 

I'm surprised more people haven't memorized this or stored it on their hard-drives. 

What here doesn't make sense for you?

Advice for a Better.

I have an issue with generosity.

I had such an empty childhood, I was so starved of love and attention, and praise and kindness, that now, about 20 years into dotage,I still feel that deprivation almost every day.

Who wouldn't.

As compensation, I am generous to others. With my close family--with money and love. With many others, with time and listening.

I hope to fill my internal void through the filling of others' voids.

That exchange never works out, really.

Because my lacks (and therefore needs) aren't other peoples'.

Nonetheless.

You do.

You help work friends.

You write book blurbs.

You advise people if they need advice.

You talk to them about business--even send the leads,

if something appropriate comes across your desk that

might not be right for you.

About twenty years ago, 

my wife traveled a lot for business.

Her major account was in California,

and she was out with her clients about twice a month.

Or more.

My wife is short. 

(Borscht Belt interlude: Life is short and so is wife.)

And would never be accused of under-packing.

I imagined her like Sisyphus, 

trying to muscle her Tumi rollerbag up into the overhead.

I was flying a fair amount in those days too.

When I saw someone struggling with their bag

I made it a habit to pop up and help them.

I am large of size and long of muscle.

And too mean to say I can't.

I know you can't count on karma.

What goes around doesn't always come around.

Bad things happen to good people.

But.

Kindness.

Not as an add on.

Not as a sometimes.

As a who you are.

That's a way of living.

That's a way of being.

That's a who you are.

Helping kids break in.

Helping clients in a jam.

Being there with ideas.

Being there with pain-in-the-ass-ideas

that maybe they'd never buy but will now

because they're in a jam.

Here's an example.

A tech client was having a trade show.

They called me for posters about eight hours before they had to print them.

"If you don't have them by 5, don't bother." That kind of thing.

I had talked to the clients--who over the course of year--

had become friends, about the fun and vitality of old Burma Shave sequential road signs.

In short order these were up at their event.

(Art-directed. These are screengrabs from my manuscript copy.)

In each case, #5 was their logo.

This isn't about the creative.

This is about coming through in a crunch.

Being generous with your mind,

your references,

your energy.

Your confidence that no matter what you can what.

This is about getting last minute assignments, with no brief, no scope and no time.

And no complaint.

And doing it.

Coming through.

And trusting that your client will come through, in turn, for you. Or some client will because you've put enough good into the world.

Long ago Steve Hayden turned a client over to me. I still work with them almost seven years later.

One afternoon, Steve called me and asked how it was going.

I answered, "He just called me up for help writing a eulogy."

Steve said, "I'd say that's pretty good."

Somewhere along the way we went from serving our clients to serving ourselves, our egos and our corporate overlords. 

We forgot that the greatest emanation is to be the first call a client makes when they're up a tree without a paddle. 

Don't call McKinsey.

Call McGeorgie.

It takes a lot of coming through, a lot of unpaid sweat to earn that position.

I'm sure the aforementioned McKinsey would say the KPIs and ROIs and WTFs of generosity are all not properly metric-able.

Neither is 'do unto others.'

But there's gold in that there rule.

Go Fact Yourself.

Somehow, this seems more germane today than when it first ran 55 years ago.

If you want to piss me off--not that it's not easy to do--call me a "wordsmith."

I hate that locution almost as much as I hate contrivances like "job creator," or "big beautiful bill," or "operation desert dildo," or whatever the current administration monsters are calling our illegal war in Iran.

Copywriters are meant to make copy read well.

But we ain't John Keats. 

Though we could learn from him.

Abridged. 

The beauty we convey isn't supposed to be about the words we use but the products and services we write about. The AO (advertiseable object) is supposed to stand-out. Not our skill.

In other words, I believe we should be more 'detectives' than 'stylists.' What makes the thing work, not how can I make the thing sound pretty.

Most often when I work on a big assignment (I do about one a month) I spend a portion of my time interviewing the people who have made the product, designed the product, use the product and sell the product.

In other words: I learn about the product.

This forensic phase takes a few days.

After those days, I present the client with a document of "pull quotes," I call "What I heard." 

At that point they're usually as happy as a teenage boy un-hooking his first bra. 

They're fairly gushing at my words.

I'm quick to tell them the truth.

Those aren't my words.

They're your words. I just gussied them up a bit to make them easier to remember or shorter.

After that, selling them is easy.

I don't make things up.

I do something hardly ever done in advertising today.

I tell the truth.

I realize that put me far from today's ideal of becoming "part of culture."

I wouldn't have it any other way.

--

Here are 15 car ads, you've probably not seen before.

None by DDB.

That use actual details of the car to sell the car. They don't try to be part of culture. They use the product to sell the product.

Revolutionary.