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.

The Triumph of Theory.

I don't remember where or when I first heard it, but it hit me like an avalanche. 

Mostly because it might have made me obsolete.

The phrase I'm talking about became popular with the rise of planning. 

Around the time the word "insight," replaced the notion of facts.

I was told and told and told then told some more, that giant purchases were no longer based on rational reasons why. 

Rather they were based on brands forming an emotional connection to people.

Brands had to be cool.

Part of culture.

If they liked the music I liked, or endorsed the causes I believe in, I'd like them.

I grew up in a different era where, I believe, clients and their agencies had more respect for the intelligence of their potential customers. They believed that not every purchase was impulse based. That if someone were buying something that cost a couple of week's salary, they might want an actual reason why one such offering was different/better than another.

Here's one example.

I annotated the copy below and numbered all the facts I noticed. I bet you know more about this 1961 Volkswagen than you do about anything Volkswagen has made in the last 30 years. Or longer.

What precipitated this post was an article I just read in Monday's Wall Street Journal. 

I read it before 7AM on Monday, and I immediately sent it to a group of my ad friends. Senior people of my generation who still care.

If I were an automaker, or I currently had a car-account, it would scare the shit out of me. I've enumerated two bits you might want to pay especial attention to.

1. "Look-Alike Range Rover." I underscored that because a lot of marketing used to be about adding value to a brand or a product by telling people what made it different and better. Anyone can make a car that looks like a more expensive car. If you don't tell people of the intrinsic value of your product or service, they'll almost invariably choose the cheaper look-alike.

Generics work for pharmaceuticals where the composition of a drug is regulated. You can't change the formula. It has to be the same. Generics don't work for products that vie for customers' dollars. But most advertising advertises generics. Most advertising fails to include useful consumer information proprietary to the brand or product paying for the ad.

This sameification of everything has destroyed countless brands--and just about every agency brand and every agency creative. No, it's not enough to say you're award winning, or borderless, or anything else. You have to find, establish, inculcate and own your intrinsic better-ness. 

2. U.K.'s bestselling vehicle in September. In September, 2025, Chery, the Chinese-owned manufacturer of the ersatz Range Rover was barely in the top-20 in UK sales. A year later, they're #1.

Of course brands like Range Rover left themselves vulnerable. 

They stopped (just as ad agencies and copywriters have stopped, and politicians and hotels and restaurants have stopped) telling people why they're worth more.

I do understand how these ads could get me to spend more on a particular product or service.

I am unable to fathom what these ads do to help a brand attract a premium price.

There are a lot of theories behind the decline and fall of advertising. 

If you ask ten ad people, you'll probably get twenty different reasons. Maybe thirty if one of those people is in senior management.

The fracturing of the media landscape.

The rise of the holding companies.

The demise of the commission system.

A lot of people will blame consumers. 

They'll say they don't care.

Can't read.

Don't watch.

Care more about influencers and peer reviews.

I don't really buy any of those reasons.

I think the reason people stopped caring about advertising is that advertising stopped caring about people.

Advertising stopped giving people useful information so they could make better decisions that would get them the most for the money they've spent.

Advertising stopped serving people and started pandering to them.

You probably think all of this is stupid.

But if you were writing your dating profile or selling your apartment, you'd probably find a way to differentiate yourself, to make what it is you have to sell desirable among thousands of look-alikes.

I wrote the ad to sell my Connecticut home already, though it's not for sale.

Here's the first sentence.

"We're as close to the sea as you can get without being in a flood zone. But if you're a light sleeper, beware. The sound of the waves and a distant clanging of a buoy bell might keep you up at night."

This is the shit people usually write:

"Meticulously maintained and beautifully updated, this exceptional home offers refined coastal living in the desirable Fenwood Beach Association."

You choose.

Napoleon Blown Apart.

About three decades ago, or ten amerikkan invasions of sovereign Middle-Eastern countries ago, I read an article in The New Yorker. A portrait of a high-ranking general who decried the current modus operandi of war. The infrastructure of how we fight.

The general, whose name I forget, talked about the amerikan war to oust sadaam hussein and he talked about the materiel needed to fight that war.

How we had to move thousands of tanks, thousands of trucks, thousands of humvees, ping-pong tables, air-conditioners, cots, coke-machines. Not to mention millions of tons of weapons and munitions and food.

He used a phrase that stuck with me.

He called all that "moving the metal mountain."

That's good writing. (Better writing than you'll likely find in advertising.)

I read this about the year 2001.

Moving the metal mountain, it occurred to me is an apt metaphor for a giant ad agency pulling together eleven-teen teams, 97 planners and 44 account people to concoct a pitch for a client that won't likely yield any profit for at least four years, by which time the account is once again in review.

Diego Garcia, indicated by the red dot. It's more out of the way than the Chocolate Factory
was when I worked at Ogilvy the second time.

The general proposed an alternative to moving the metal mountain. Highly-mobile units that can sweep in, apply irresistible force, accomplish their objective and be back on Diego Garcia before dark. The US and UK have thousands of troops on the archipelago, but you're more likely to get a straight answer from Cindy Rose of WPP than you are to find out much more about the deployments there. (Though iran six months ago iran launched two Khorramshahr-4 ICBMs at the base. We're told they did no damage.)

The iranian-built Khorramshahr-4 can travel at 16 times the speed of sound over 1,200 miles and can carry 3000 lbs of explosives.

Around that same time as reading about the metal mountain, I also read an article in the paper version of the Atlantic. It was about a fourth generation fighter pilot who was now flying and killing at that time in Afghanistan, and probably Pakistan, though that would have been omitted for various geo-political reasons. 

I remember the pilot saying that his was the last generation of pilots who will actually fly. It would not be long, he asserted, that unmanned killing machines will be run like video games from underground bunkers in Langley air force base under well-manicured lawns in suburban Virginia. 

This pilot talked about drones back when the word referred primarily to bumble-bees, not warfare.

I bring all this up because last week, humble little GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company got an RFI that was closer to the sort of RFIs that went out in the 1950s than what the world of advertising looks like today. As they used to say, Napoleon's armies looked more like Roman armies from 1800 years earlier than they looked like World War I armies from just a century later.

I have the sense that a similar dynamic reflects today's withering ad industry. Like the military proclivity where generals prepare to fight the last war, or in the case of pete hegseth, the rape and enslavement of most of the amerikkkas by spanish conquistadors (and small pox.)

In fact, the very structure of the holding company seems as outmoded and dated as an un-tattooed art director. The ad industry (that phrase is also spectacularly obsolete) isn't riveting in an age of welding, the ad industry is riveting in an age of 3D printing.

Many years ago, and I've written about this before, I read a bit by two-time Pulitzer-winning historian, Barbara Tuchman:

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts... After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. 

This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

On the other hand, comrade Lenin is reputed to have said, "There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen."

In the case of amerikkka, and the industry formerly known as advertising, I'm inclined to agree with Lenin over Tuchman. 

So much has changed so completely. 

And there are three ways to deal with giant changes.

1. You can deny it and conduct business as usual.

2. You can deny it and fight to hold onto previous practices.

3. You can embrace that change and prosper.

Very few people and social organizations ever come close to path number three. One and two will bring you to eventual obsolescence either quickly or quicklier. 

Those are the choices followed by most clients and most agencies. They know something is rotten in the state of advertising, but they're used to it so they try to make it work.

It never works.

My point in all this, though oblique, is simple. The dominant complacency of the ad industry--the holding company--is almost wholly obsolete. Outside of enriching a few already rich men, I can think of no functional reason why anyone would need a holding company.

When Marion Harper, the progenitor of the first advertising holding company formed IPG, it had a reason for being. If McCann had the Buick account, they were shut out of growth in the automotive space. That's not good for shareholders. 

But if a company owned McCann and Campbell-Ewald, you could have Buick and Chevy. Buy more agencies, buy more growth potential.

Later when so much big business went global, a client like IBM needed a central advertising brain--located in New York--and a lot of satellite offices around the world to follow orders from the main office. No one at the time wanted 164 different campaigns in 163 different countries.

But those bonafide reasons have disappeared.

Clients care little about conflicts anymore. And very few clients want a world-wide "one-voice" campaign. 

So while the reasons behind the holding companies have disappeared, they dominate still the industry.

Just as the way the world fights wars has changed but we still equip ourselves as if we're fighting World War II. 

When the British fought the Argentines over the Malvinas (Falklands) the 430-foot HMS Sheffield, built at a cost of $25,000,000 was sunk by an 18-foot long exocet missile costing about $1,000,000.

$1,000,000 missile.

Destroys $25,000,000 ship.

This sort of change has happened in warfare.

And it's happened in advertising.

Do you really need hordes of people to write a pharma commercial or a Buick commercial or a Verizon commercial? No, but that's how we do it.

We haven't woken up to it yet.