Meanwhile, Back in the Reality-Based Industry.

All I know, I learned from Bazooka Joe.

Last Tuesday, I got briefed on the fifth of what is slated to be ten projects from a Fortune 100 company. The first four of my assignments have gone well. The people I'm working with are pleased (they keep coming back) and the client is pleased (they keep coming back.)

Unlike with Herpes, coming back is good.

Like so much of the world today, however, there was a wrinkle. New marketing people at the client meant what we had done to date might be deemed not right for the new marketing efforts or simply, 'not invented here,' and therefore thrown away. When you're less-than-halfway done with a large assignment for a large client, the last thing you want to do is leave money on the table.

My direct contact--the intermediary between me and the client--called me and explained the situation. No one likes when personnel changes threaten their livelihood. My contact asked me if I could do some work--framing the campaign, making sure it aligns--to help lessen the threat posed by the new people.

Without hesitation I said yes.

I'm a loyal guy. When people are good to me, I'm good to them. Within reason, that's the way the world works.

I believe that loyalty should be divided, like Caesar's Gaul, into three parts.

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. 
(Kit Katia est omnis divisa in partes duo.)

1. There's loyalty to your client and your co-workers.
2. There's loyalty to your craft. Loyalty to doing a good job. 
3. There's loyalty to yourself. That's demanding that the work treats you as well as you deserve.

This aggregate job and the people I'm working with answered the bell from all three of those spheres.

And so, I was duly briefed.

Confused. Complicated. And much more work than I was told. 

Like I said, I was briefed on a Tuesday and thought a bit the same day. I downloaded the appropriate files, read through the docs and organized the docs I was sent into some folders. By Wednesday at 10, I was ready to think. By Wednesday at 12, I had an idea I knew could carry the exigencies of the assignment.

I sent a note to my contacts.

I wasn't "done" with the work I had to do, but I was ready to put pressure on myself.

"I'll be ready to show you work on Thursday at 9," I tersed.

"Wow, that's fast," they replied.

We agreed to meet on Friday morning.

Feeling that pressure, having the intensity of a promise hanging over me, I buckled down as I do. I'm not called "Old Iron Ass" for nothing. I can sit in expensive upholstery and before long have six manifesti and 75 ads.

I worked.

I tinkered.

I worked and tinkered some more.

I was happy with what I did long before our Friday meeting. And things went well on Friday. 

But one of the reasons things went well was the pressure I put on myself. There was no "timing" on this. No project management breathing down my neck. Or client workshop we had to meet.

Just the idea--the motivating force of agency.

I spent the first 20 years of my career with traffic people who would check in and prod me now and again. The next 20 years I worked with project managers who treated me like I was a project that needed managing.

I think if you looked at the overall arc of the industry, you'd see we were better off because we we're "we want to do it people." Today that modus operandi is gone. We're "we have to do it people." Or "we can win an award people." Not "this is how we help clients and make money people."

If you have to make people do the job they're supposed to do, if you have to remind them, poke them, threaten them and stand over them, something is rotten in the state of your business.

Real efficiency comes from passion and ardor.

As they used to joke, "the beatings will continue until morale improves." That didn't work out.

Priests.

Back in 1980, newly minted with a Masters Degree in English Literature from Columbia University, I was plumb out of money and even plumber out of parental support and encouragement. Rather than keep studying the eddies of Moby Dick and the like, with rent fast coming due in a dangerous city, I had to find myself a job.

Mind you, at this point, I had only ever worked as an aluminum-sider, a game-room attendant at a seaside penny arcade and a cashier in a liquor store. I was also the "assistant dean of students" for Barnard College, the women's school of Columbia University but that was a gussy-up-the-resume way of saying "night watchman."

The first job I took had been classified under the heading of copywriter. I was hired to write catalog copy for the shoe division of the Montgomery Ward catalog. It paid $225/week and I was promised a raise to $250/week if I lasted six months.

During my time at there, I probably wrote 300 catalog pages a year, and I stayed two-and-a-half years. I then went to work in the advertising agency within Bloomingdale's. There, I wrote ten ads a week fifty weeks a year. I stayed at Bloomies for two-and-a-half years as well. So, by the time I arrived at Marschalk for my first agency job, I had written about 2,000 ads.

In the 42 years since then, I've probably written another 8,000 ads, including the thousand or so I've written to drive my own agency, GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, forward. In all, to be generous with myself--something I'm not very good at--I might have written 10,000 ads.

I know when I've done a good job. When something has stopping power, wit and is memorable. But I in fact, though I run about an ad a day for my business, I have absolutely no idea which ads I run will gain "traction," and which ones will "lay there like a lox."

Last week I ran something I thought was very smart and clever. As of this writing, it's gotten fewer than 500 views. Another ad, I posted just minutes later, which I wrote in about twelve seconds and typeset in about twelve more, was much more "successful." In fewer than 26 hours it's gotten over 6,000 views.

Now, I'm not a computer. I don't spend my days poring over reams of data. But after having written and produced about 10,000 ads, I have a confession. I have no idea which ads will "catch on." And which ads will be blah.

I don't think anyone does.

Here's where the point of today's post comes in.

The whole point of our modern-technological era is the promise of If-Then-ness. In fact, predicting what would happen was why Eniac--perhaps the world's first computer--was invented in the first place. The army wanted to see the effects of large explosions, particularly atomic ones. They created football-field-sized computers to calculate what would happen if you exploded one. 

If we dropped a bomb on Moscow, then this would happen.

Just as "pentagon" thinking spread through government ("we had to destroy the village to save it") it's spread through our entire world. If you read the sports page today, both the Cleveland Cavaliers and the San Antonio Spurs will show you statistically how they defeated the New York Knicks, though the Knicks beat those teams 4-0 and 4-1. 

Continuing, the if-then-technocrats quickly took over the advertising business. They started with "if these dopey creatives can get rich by writing Miller Lite commercials, imagine how much we can make with our brilliant business acumen." That's an easy sell to investors. 

There's an apocryphal story about Albert Einstein and a chorus girl. "Suppose we had children," she said. "With my looks and your brains." Einstein asked, "what would happen if the kids got my looks and your brains."

The Einstein-Chorus-girl scenario was played out at the best agency of the 1970s and 1980s, Ally & Gargano. They merged with account powerhouse MCA, hoping to get Ally's creativity and MCA's punctiliousness. The opposite happened and in short order the place went belly-up. As the entire industry has, today.

Nevertheless, the if-then-technocrats sold to clients causality. If you put a click now button here, if you re-target, if you inundate you'll be wildly successful. Now, they're selling (with about 2% margin) if you game the AI-algorithm you'll rise to the top of search and targeting. Then you'll be successful.

For as long as there have been humans the priestly-caste (today, technologists and private equity nabobs and consultants) have been selling their ability to predict the future and therefore guarantee success.

AI (augmented intestines) circa 2000 BC.

Examining the liver of a slaughtered ox, the entrails of birds of prey, even the way a feather falls through the air and wafts to the ground. They were all meant to be unfailing portents that empowered those who had the secret knowledge to understand them.

When King Croesus of Lydia asked the Delphic Oracle if he should attack the Persians, he was told if he did he would "destroy a mighty empire." So, attack he did, thinking Persia would fall. Instead, the mighty empire that was destroyed was his own. 

Or 2400 years ago Philip of Macedon and the Spartans had an exchange almost the same as that between tump and the Iranis. Give up your wealth, your nuclear ambitions, your oil, if you don't I will destroy you. If, they Iranis victoriously replied.

No one knows.

If-then is something we can wish for.

Not something we can really make happen. 

Why not watch the first 2:30 of this?

In short, I'd suggest keeping these words by an ancient Galician Jew quoted by Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz somewhere on your desktop.

Next time someone says, 'I know,' you'll know.

Force-Feeding.

The recently concluded and deluded Cannes Mess-tival of Technology might just as well have been as Hollywood-style hype premiere for some trillion-dollar blockbuster some studio or another is banking on. The news was all AI, all the time. Though I challenge anyone to tell me one, just one time, they saw something as spectacular and wonderful as a scene like this coming from AI. Or if, honestly now, they think they ever will.

When have you read a line of prose, an email subject line, a couplet of poetry, a commercial, a politicians speech, a customer 'service' bot, copy on the box of corn flakes written by a machine that has anything close to that drama, skill, perspicacity and humanity. 

What's happening is very simple. 

It starts with this fact, reported in the June 15th edition of The Economist.

In other words, giant corporations and their private equity enablers (think Medellin-cartel but on Wall Street) have invested trillions into the efficacy, utility, safety and 'inevitability' of AI. The results to date, in terms of efficiencies gained, money saved, advances realized, profits 'earned' have been non-existent. But the doyens of dollars have invested too much to let it flounder, fail or even develop on a natural timeline. What you're seeing now is a "cramming of AI" down our collective thoraxes. 

If in 2012 dollars, the Manhattan Project cost $30,000,000,000 (thirty billion) if the AI-ers are spending at 100 times that rate, they've spent 3,000,000,000,000 (three trillion) on making AI work. Did we really need to spend $3 trillion so a machine can make and place a banner ad? Where's the 'vig' in that?

It's thirty-million million dollars. ie 30,000,000 x 1,000,000.

That means out of every four people in California, three could be millionaire for what is being spent on AI.

This all reminds me of one of those colossal Broadway failures. They've spent millions on the script, on the sets, on the actors, on the hype, on the theater.

It doesn't matter that it stinks to high-hell.

They've spent the money. 

They'll tell you it's great.

It's like a $3,000,000,000,000 Prime Day. 
They've spent $1,000,000,000,000 telling you how great the deals are. They've hotted you up like a teenager about to have sex for the first time.

Today when the 'news' talks about a new movie, they no longer mention the reviews. They don't compare it to "Citizen Kane," or "Battleship Potemkin," or "Vertigo," or even "The Incredible Mr. Limpet." They tell you its opening box office.

Because that's what worries the people behind the movies. The money. Not the value of what they made.

The value of their investment.

And will they get the all-important ROI.

It seems half my LinkedIn-feed has taken the "taste of the addictive drug." All I've seen so far is machine-made plasticine jiggling and drivel acting.

Force-feeding is what's happening.

It's not good for your digestion.

This is not the ad business.

This is something different.

It is certainly not progress.

Methusalah Speaks.

This is going to sound like I'm one-hundred years old. 

To be fair, I practically am.

But in any event, when I started in the business--and going back 25 years before that because my father was in the business, agencies used to be classy places.

Their offices used to be beautifully designed, sometimes by famous architects. Their decor. Their stationery. Their furniture. Right down to their memo pads and pencils.

These things were regarded as important signs of an agency's taste and even success. Like a salesman wouldn't be seen driving a 1992 Oldsmobile to a client's office, or wear a cheap, ill-fitting suit, no agency dared present itself to the world looking like a beige file cabinet shrouded with carpet tiles.

We sold substance.

We also sold appearance as well.

However, as the agency business became more and more fixated on the ephemera of design--decoration without meaning--their appearance has grown more and more debased. When I was shit-canned at Ogilvy, the office looked like Port Authority albeit with better copiers and worse wireless.

Some years ago I read something I thought was smart about dating sites. Rather than fill out a profile--which I'm told often include exaggerations and half-truths--people should instead upload pictures of their bookshelves and the inside of their refrigerators. Those locales might provide a better barometer of a person's character than what can be gleaned from a self-reported questionnaire. 

Today office "design" is nothing more than providing a backdrop for instagram.

(According to the Wall Street Journal, instagram’s recommendation systems
guide users to networks selling child sexual abuse material.)

As an industry, we're ok with that.

Today, outside of a trophy case which is often filled with "pay-to-play" award-gaming, with trophies for ads that never ran, or other sort of entry-jockeying-legerdemain, there's really no way to measure an viability of an agency. 

Reading agency about sections is like diving head-long into an Orwellian swimming-pool filled with offal and feces--you know, tump's reflecting pool. To make matters worse, suppose you're up to your neck in shit, and someone starts throwing baseballs at you. What do you do, duck?

Today, of course, as I wrap up my blogging week's tour of GeorgeCo's physical space, it occurs to me that for about 99.978-percent of all agencies today--at least the agencies I've visited since the business was desiccated, diced, minced and otherwise sullied by accountants and consultants and investors (they were buying cash-flow)--no agency anymore has a "decor." 

They might have a logo.
They might have a set of colors.
They might even have a well-groomed corner where they take photos of executives on the precipice of some press-release pontifications, but they have no physicality. 
Nothing that shows a care for their employees, their craft, or their own brand. There's no place someone can be alone, take a moment, put their feet up, spread out.
Nothing shows love of their work, their clients, their people, their lives. That ain't good, or natural.

I saw this first when office name plates went from embossed, or etched, or raised-lettering affairs to a xerox of your name on a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve. We went from a sense of belonging to a crumple-up-the-hammermill disposability.

At GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I refuse to give in to today's current culture of mean impermanence. How can you make ideas, platforms, words and images that are meant to define a company for years if not decades if you're surrounded by flimsy ephemera that won't last past tomorrow's trash pick-up?

In many ways we are products of our environment. An environment without taste, depth, caring, kindness, reflection, comfort and quiet, is doomed to produce work lacking in those qualities as well. 

Care in = Care Out, in other words.

My friend Brian Collins, of Collins fame, has an office with nearly 6000 books. His office's library seems a sanctuary that encourages, stimulates, inspires. 

Brian's office has two books for every one of mine. But of course, books ain't a number's game. It's a game about having what it takes, in the words of pre-subsumed Chiat\Day to "think different." It's a world where smart people (and Brian is among the smartest) find ways to make themselves uncomfortable when they're complacent, and comfortable when they're anxious. 

Most of us know when we need a smack in the noggin and when we need an arm around the shoulder. We know the movies, the music, the pictures, the people, the places, the phonecalls, the dawdling we need to engage with so our physical space is no longer a place to be, but turns into a place to be better.

My office is not neat. It never will be. But my lack of neatness leads to the meander of looking for things you don't quite know the location of. Looking and stumbling upon something you weren't looking for is often where unexpected ideas come from. This picture here is of the over one-thousand movies I own, if I'm looking for X, sometimes I've found you're better off landing on Y.

You might, if you look with some perspicacity, notice on my shelves some small statues of Greek goddesses. That's Athena holding the owl--the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom. That's Artemis, with the deer. Always hunting, always fighting. There are Toby Mugs, too. Which I don't officially collect, but I love. 

You'll find Laurel and Hardy, who as much as Groucho, have made me laugh for 65 years--and still make me laugh today. No one I know could write, "I was dreaming I was awake--then I woke up and found myself asleep." If you ever need reminding that to have impact, you need a twist, Laurel and Hardy can give you the heart you need to win laurels. 

There's Winston Churchill, too. To me the granite example of courage, of never giving up and of the power of a few choice words. His WWII oratory was every bit as uplifting as Shakespeare's "St. Crispin's Day" speech. He reminds me to work my ass off to make it better.

Then, you might find a pirate or two. Pirates. People who broke all the rules to create a better world for themselves. Again, think Chiat\Day. And a masked man I think of as my own personal Scaramouch: A man, who in Rafael Sabatini's words, "was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

Like Scaramouch, that, not mammon, was my patrimony. 
And I'm blessed for that.

BTW,

I got about forty notes this week.
People asking me if they could stop by my office.
No, you can't.
I'm not trying to be stand-offish.

I'm just busy.
And don't have the time.
I'm sorry.

Mapping the World.

When I was just a little boy about 600 yards from my parent's house, in a section of town that hadn't yet been given over to tract-houses each with one spindly tree in front, there was an old gas station of the Goober-and-Gomer-school.

That is to say two guys ran it, not a giant corporate behemoth. Each of those guys had grease under their fingernails, on their denim and in their hair. They spent most of their days spelunking under Chevrolet, Studebaker, Ford and Plymouth chassis, and wheeled out from under only when someone needing gasoline would drive over the rubberized hose that would ring a bell twice announcing they needed two bucks' of ethylene, with no-knock lead added.

The area behind their little shack of a station was junk-strewn. It was filled with discarded auto parts and a boy with an imagination and without parental oversight (which few had in those days) could find himself repairing Gemini space craft with old spark plugs and fan belts. It was a toy store, of sorts, with toys you created with your imagination.

They also had an old Coke machine aside the garage itself. The kind that stored bottles like soldiers at attention on a ramp. If you had a dime and permission, you pulled a handle and a bottle would roll down like an earthquake, cold as a dead fish. There was a slot with a bottle opener and bottle caps fallen like snowflakes, their Jughead serrated-brimmed whoopie caps  looking up at the sky.

In those days gas stations gave out road maps the way today giant consultancies hand out white-papers. They often had maps of places I only dreamed of. Not nearby states--the states whose license plates you might see on a given day--but far away lands inhabited by cowboys, Indians, farmers and stampeding herds of long horns.

Often I'd sneak in their cramped little office find a pile of maps and like some latter-day treasure seeker, rifle through the place hoping for Arizona, or Colorado, or Idaho--which I imagined was filled to the brim with nothing but potatoes.

Over the last 65-years my love of maps has hardly abated. Though we're meant to be satisfied with advances like GPS that tell us exactly how to get from A to B, exploring maps, marveling at the topographic detail, wondering about place-names is a form of exploring in and of itself. What's more, most of the arriving people do comes from first getting lost. GPS doesn't allow lost-ness. Therefore, foundness is also obviated.

In my well-lighted yet partially-subterranean office I have dozens of books of maps. These allow me to travel to places I'll likely never go, and to time-travel too. They give me ideas about how worlds are created. How setting and space are important. And how to show people the world so you can inform, excite and persuade them. If you're an advertising person, you might think of the messages you create as a form of road map. A guide to readers to visit and explore whatever it is you're charged with selling.

There are as many different sorts of maps as there are sorts of places. I probably have 3,000 years or so in my small space. From Thucydides' accounts of the conquest of Alexander, to Strabo's compendium, to 15th Century Atlases like the Nuremberg Chronicle. 

Searchable, here.

Claude AI. Not.

My Latin is a little rusty.

Of course, Edward Tufte is a map-maker. As is David McCandless. And the less-well-known Hannah Ritchie, who works at the surpassing site "Our World in Data." She is worth following. Her site worth seeing.

This also is a map.

A map is anything that plots out a path that makes understanding easier. They don't have to be about how to get to I87 from I24. They can be about anything that could be helped by directions that show you the way.

More often than not, even if we no longer know it, that's our job.