Eleanor and Me.

There's a quotation attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt that, no matter who said it first, I've always liked.

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

For my two cents (a valid measure until the tump misministration decides to take all the dollars and feed the pennies to the poor) we could easily re-write Roosevelt's words for today.

Allow me:

The spillage of digital ink over AI is among the most staggering onslaughts I've witnessed in my almost-68 years. It's like an avalanche wrapped inside an earthquake covered in a tsunami.

You'd think, given the hype we've heard, the intelligence we're supposed to be harnessing, the breakthroughs and advances that are just about to cascade through every aspect of life on earth--and into the outer reaches of the solar system, you'd think we'd all be able to cite chapter and verse of all the great things that have happened or are on the cusp of happening.

Like even a good coffee Heath bar ice cream from a company that isn't anti-Israel. Oh, and won't make me fatter.

But I can't name one.

I take that back. 

Trying to get help through a bot has decreased my "time-to-scream" by 48% and my personal NPS score by about 1900%.

All I really see from AI is that somebody made another crappy commercial for 29-cents that's been seen only on LinkedIn, had no revenue consequences and none of us can even remember the brand it was for. I'm not feeling that the inevitable "parachuting gorilla" commercials are worth all the mucky-bushwa we've had to wave through.

I also can't help but be reminded that not too many hours ago

we were hearing the same cacophony of blather about bored apes and NFTs and fake money. And google glasses. And a thousand other things that have had the salutary effect of a bucket of warm spit.

We're all gonna be rich!

The number of people, panels and pomposticators who promulgate and proclaim that "this will change everything," and "everything else is dead" is in itself practically deadening. And 99.79-percent of these non-entities pass like a banner ad in the dark of dumbness.

Two ships passing in the night. (Artists rendering.)

In 1916, just over 100 years ago in the country formerly known as amerrykaka, the poliovirus infected more than 27,000 Americans and killed more than 7,000 people. This in a nation of 100-million, not today's 340-million.

About 40 years later, say 1955, Drs. Sabin and Salk raced to bring the polio vaccine to the world. When they did, they fundamentally changed life on earth. 

Their discoveries and their science made a provable, empirical, non-adjectival difference in the (longer) lives of billions of people. They didn't have to fake-name their potions "super-intelligent," or "claude," or "anthropic," or any other concoction to re-label a stock manipulation to package financial ponzi-ing and legerdemain as progress.

They didn't have to have their product pretend it was a person and use human pronouns. Their product didn't presume to address you by your first name as if they're a friend, not a surveillance bot looking to steal your soul, the better to sell you crap.

They had actual data that showed the difference they were making. And none of the difference they were making involved an unhelpful, inscrutable chatbot, another shitty commercial and answers praising nazism excused as an purportedly benign ha-ha-hallucination.

Salk and Sabin and real advancers of life on earth often employ this increasingly rare side-dish. I call it "real data." (Not we got 458,570,485,948,472,409 trillion earned views and created a verb out of Q-tips. 'Dude, are you q-tippin'?' ie. we became part of culture. Which to my mind is like becoming part of a Superfund site.)

In fact, imagine if the vaccine "hallucinated." "Sure it eradicated polio, but people grew a second head." Heroes don't hallucinate. And real progress is not based on press-releases and things that will happen and spurious predictions by the unaccountable class who shoulder no consequences for their lies.

Last week, GeorgeCo's 2025 revenue officially outstripped that of WPP, according to Form 10K which this particular Delaware Company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

All of the above might be biting the well-manicured hands that feed me, because much of GeorgeCo., LLC's revenue come from various technology companies who are working on various AI advances. Some of them could read all this and decide that I am a traitor in their midsts, a veritable eggs benedict arnold. 

The truth is, I tell them and wrestle with them, is no one really cares about AI. They care about what AI actually does. That's what we should be talking about. Not the purported "gold in them thar hills," but actual gold you've sluiced out of a mountain, taken to the assay office and converted into cash (not crypto.)

I'm tired of small minds dominating large news feeds. 

I'm tired of small minds issuing blanket statements with no accountability or follow-up or scrutiny.

I'm tired of small minds promising big things.

How about big minds making big progress small-step by small- step by small-step--the hard-work way, not the 'next-round-of-funding' way.

Here's one Eleanor Roosevelt didn't say but could have.

--

BTW, if think of progress as an inevitable march toward the better, please consider this:

Way back 2,500 years ago or so, the Greeks discovered that building curved fortifications was smarter than building forts with right angles. Spears, javelins and the ballista from catapults would do less damage to rounded walls than flat walls. A missile that hits obliquely and from an angle is not as powerful as a dead-on hit.

The Greeks conveyed that information to the Romans. And for about 1,000 years, curved fortresses were all the rage throughout the Roman world. This got carried over to a lot of the Medieval world, too. Look at the 13^th Century Cathedral Basilica of Saint Cecilia in Albi, France and you get the general idea.

Except, people decided to stop building things that way. They forgot what the Greeks had discovered and the Romans had executed.

This chateau in Angers, France was built in the 13th Century"

This Palais in Avignon, one-hundred years later.

As Holding Company potentates call 58-percent drops in revenue "negative growth," you might call this change in design "backward progress."

There was no material reason for this architectural shift.

But it became the style.

The old way, rounded walls, though superior, was rejected because because. And because. And also, because.

I fear this is happening today globally.

We spend time talking about the miracle of AI.

When as a species we've virtually forgotten the miracles that come from actual thinking, laughter, and hard work.

Three Words on Media. Or Six.

There was an obituary in last week's New York Times that I think those of us in the communications business really ought to think about. You can read it here. 

The obituary was of John Cleary. 

Fifty-five years ago when he was a 19-year-old freshman architecture student at Kent State University in Ohio, Cleary was shot by one of the one-hundred M-1 carrying National Guard troops Ohio governor James Rhodes ordered onto campus. This was after students burned an ROTC building on campus, protesting Richard Nixon's illegal expansion of the Vietnam war into neighboring Cambodia.

Four students ("four dead in O hi O as Crosby Stills Nash and Young sang) were killed. An additional nine were wounded.

I remember sitting in 7th Grade English and hearing about this. Cleary was just seven years older than I, a seventh-grader.

The M1 rifle like the ones carried by troops on the Kent State campus in 1970. General Patton called the rifle "the greatest implement of battle ever devised.

General George S. Patton, hardly a pacifist, famously praising the rifle used by government-directed US soldiers on college campuses as "the greatest implement of battle ever devised." The M1 has a muzzle-velocity of 2800 ft/second (it can travel a mile in less than two-seconds) tremendous penetrating power and an effective range of five-football fields, or about six city blocks.

Currently in cities across the United States, including Washington, DC, Chicago and Los Angeles, National Guard troops are wielding significantly more ballistic power: an M4 rifle and a M17 9mm handgun. The M4 can fire about 800 rounds per second, has about ten-percent greater muzzle-velocity than the M1 and about 10-percent greater range. 

The relatively benign M17 pistol today's soldiers are carrying has a muzzle energy of a mere 395 foot-pounds. That's considered ideal for hunting large game and long-range shooting.

The troops occupying amerry-cant cities today carry M4 rifles and the M17pistol.
These ain't cap guns.

In 1970, Life was "America’s ‘favorite magazine’ and had over 8 million subscribers.

Hold your horses, and your gunfire, I'm getting to the advertising point of today's post. And yes, despite all the gore, there is one. And you can find it reading an excerpt from Cleary's obituary in the Times.

I want to focus in on the two sentences I've underscored above. 

Today no photo, no image, no boom of gun-fire has impact. No news provokes anger. When Life Magazine was around the news had stopping power.

Stopping power today has been supplanted by "scrolling power."

As I've written many times before, in advertising, we used to strive for impact. We now make do with inundation. Thousands of dumb little ads rather than one powerful one.

They are not and never will be equivalent. 

Last week, I was talking to my good and wise friend Rob Schwartz about a campaign I was doing for a client who's important to my business. I must have blurted something about today's 'advertising a la mode's' practice of plastering the walls with messaging before the definitional message is established and woven together with an indelible image or an "etched in marble" set of differentiating words.

Rob said this. 

I wrote it down and tried to make it more memorable.

I even thought of a companion piece.

If John Cleary, or some other 19-year-old on a leafy campus were shot today, we'd scroll right by. 

Look! A cat video.
Look! A recipe.
Look! Sydney Sweeney in a tight-fitting dress.
Look! A banality.

Look! An outrage.
Look! Topeka State beat Fresno A&M by 12.

Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!
Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!

Look! At everything and see nothing.

All the looking has stopped us from stopping.

Stopping people is our job.

Instead we decry diminished attention spans, scattered media channels and keep on making invisible ads by the literally thousands. That's what we're choosing rather than concentrating our communication forces and trying to be big somewhere.

Today, we'd know nothing about John Cleary.

Just like no one knows anything about your brand.

--

PS. If you work in media and you'd like to debate this, I welcome the discussion. I'm not a media person and maybe I'm wrong.

Be Careful Out There.

 

About 40 years ago, I realized I had made a big "world-view-level" mistake. 

I was born in 1957. You could argue that was the "golden age" of a-merkin liberalism. After 300 years, the nation was beginning to start to slowly to attempt to undo the huge horrors of our historic racism and concomitant adherence to white supremacy. The gap between rich and poor was being narrowed. Progressive programs like the GI Bill were funded and in full-swing. Housing was being built and was affordable. Upward mobility was not rare and anomalous and reserved only for the children of those who Theodore Roosevelt called the "malefactors of great wealth."

In 1957, the top .1-percent of amerikans earned 10-percent of all income.
Today that percentage earns about 25-percent of all income.

If the population were 1000, and total income were $1000,
in 1957 the top one person earned $100.  Today that one person earns $250.

All those things were happening and a million more. So many, to my eyes, positives that despite backlash and little "blips" like Vietnam, I grew up believing liberalism was the normal course of human events. As Dr. King once said, I believed "that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

In my old age perhaps my outlook, often as dark as a Hasid's closet at midnight, has dimmed. The current political sump has further darkened my world view. It's hard to find a flicker of hope.

I've come to realize that the period I was born in was perhaps anomalous. And the world we're living in now, which in Thomas Hobbes' words about life in the Middle Ages, life on our planet will be "nasty, brutish and short."

A close-up of tumpism in practice.
Appropriately enough, those marks look like nazi runes.

I'm reading now, or slogging through, the book pasted above. It's a long history of the universal practice of slavery, cruelty and subjugation that most westerners know very little about. 

As Marozzi points out, for every one-hundred books about the Atlantic slave-trade and slavery in the "west," only one book has been written about slavery in the "east."

That disparity despite these facts:

All that has led me to think about things I'd rather not think about. 

We all grew up believing "freedom" and "human rights" and "no kings" were our norm. 

Maybe we were wrong.  Maybe they are anomalous. 

Maybe this is normal:

Who's riding you?

And if you've ever wondered why about 75-percent of agency creatives are freelance and the average tenure of a creative at a holding company agency is about the length of the lifespan of a mayfly (Dolania Americana has the shortest adult lifespan of any mayfly: the adult females live for less than five minutes) consider this:

And then consider this:

And then this, by Voltaire:

In all this, here's the part that semiotically squeezed my scrotum.

For most of the last eight-to-ten thousand years--since humans started settling in cities, adopting agriculture, amassing surpluses and a powerful "noble" class has emerged, those nobles have subjugated the peasants.

More painfully, tens of thousands of girls and women, hundreds of thousands, were institutionalized rape victims, being trafficked into slavery and kept as concubines under a regimen of systemic rape and captivity. Tens of thousands of boys and men--hundreds of thousands--were castrated and made eunuchs--between ten and ninety percent of those being severed died afterwards. Many many thousands for many thousands of years lived on ball-less-ly.

It wasn't unusual for a minor potentate to have a harem of 4,000 girls and women. Harem is politesse for "sex slaves." Also, it wasn't unusual to have an army of 10,000-100,000 male eunuchs. That's slaves who the "state" castrated. 

We weren't the only ones who watched "The Sopranos."

I read about all this last night and couldn't sleep for it, in large measure thinking of the Voltaire quotation I highlighted four or five inches from here.

Thinking about modern agency life, or modern life in general, a dour george advises you to think about how you're being treated.

(Rape rape snip snip, oh what a routine it is.)

Are you being abused? Are they cutting off your balls? If so, it's only mankind, that's Voltaire, repeating itself.

I might be too dark by a large percentage, but that doesn't mean all this shouldn't be thought about.

The Big Game.

With the dusky light from the street lamp outside the lone window in the small extra bedroom in Hector and Teresa’s square cinderblock home lighting the bed we shared that summer, Karmen traced the map of the scars on my head like Henry the Navigator or Gerardus Mercator mapping terra incognita.

 

The routes of the scars on my 17-year-old barely-kissed face were as interwoven as the LA road-network, weaving in, out, around and through major natural landmarks. They were semi-human in my case, not geo- or topo-graphical.

Below my lower lip was a one-inch gash from a two story fall onto the linoleum of my mother's house, my baby teeth biting through my still-tender skin. From my eyes there were small red roads like all those that led to Rome, millennia ago. Rudely healed reminders of not-so-long-ago bloodspurt. Bloodspurt that came from no one watching and no one caring and no one not pushing me around because I was littlest, and they could. Maybe, for the very reason that they had been pushed around before me, they needed me to push around now.

Karmen began with a twin set of roadways running from my right eye back halfway to my temple. The permanent gash from where one-year-old me met brick corner when he was pushed and no grown up was sober and in the vicinity.

The mountain on the forehead, a tectonic up swelling from where head met Hillerich and Bradsby’s Louisville Slugger, a concussion hidden from adults because their anger would have hurt more than cracked skull. 

There was the Passo del Stelvio of my nose, twisting like a hundred 'S' turns through the Alps from batted balls, bats and bully's fists because I grew up never backing down. 

The viaduct below my lip was the worst one, the one I re-opened with frequency when I shaved too quickly and nicked it aggressive.

Finally, there was the open gully midway between my left-eye and my hairline. It was an ancient excavation of my brain that had somehow gone wrong.

"There are so many rivers in the desert of your face, Jorge," Karmen traced with the small of her fingers. "There are so many hurts."

She traced one softly and kissed it when she reached the end. She traveled then to my cranial Vesuvius, circling it like a military battalion then ending her encroachment with another soft kiss.

"How does one young boy have a face that looks like a fisherman's hands," she asked. "Full of knife cuts and fish bites and hooks that have stung with anger like steel wasps."

"Karmen," I answered in a whisper, turning away so she would not see the tearing of my eyes. "My life is in those scars, if it were not for those scars, I would not be here."

"Those scars were your bus ticket," she laugh-kissed.

"Those scars and the ones no one can see are what sent me here so far from everything I know."

"But how, Jorge, how come the scars?"

I turned away from more to hide from her deep brown all-seeing eyes the hurt that was in my all-revealing eyes.

"How come the scars, Jorge."

"We are all bearing scars, Karmen. We are all bearing scars. There are those you can trace with your fingertips."

I thought to myself of some words I had memorized from Richard Wright's great book, "Black Boy." Until this moment I wasn't sure why they struck me hard enough to store in my head.

"With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity...And that if men were lucky in their living on earth, they might win some redeeming meaning for the having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars."

She could not hear my silence or read my memory. No one can.

"I count six on your head."

"Six," I answered. "Five before I was three. Maybe because no one was home yet the edges of the house I was born in were sharp and fractured. They would attack."

"Six." She circumnavigated my cuts counter-clockwise counting in a simple Spanish that even I could understand. "Uno." Kiss. "Duo." Kiss. "Tres." Kiss. "Cuatro." Kiss. "Cinco." Kiss. "Seis." Kiss. 

"Let us have no more scars, Jorge. You have a life of hurt in your head already and you are just a boy."

"It's a rough game." I turned back to her. "You cannot play backing away, backing down, turning your head. I have bad hands but I am good in the field because I stop the ball with my chest and sometimes my head."

"Hector says you use your cabeza."

We for a moment laughed.

"No more scars," she said. "Because," she again kissed softly m forehead. Her mouth was warm and wet in the dry cool night. "No more scars," she repeated. "Because you have already in your head six and."

I said nothing. My eyes were ready to sleep in the cricket-quiet of the night.

"Because you have already in your head six and six-hundred more no one will ever see."

She kissed again softly and we slept with little air between us.

No More Bore.

As I've written many times before, when you write a blog as assiduously as I write this one, it changes your life.

Anything you do as regularly as I write this blog changes your life. For good or bad. For me, I think, blogging has been good. It's helped me in many ways.

For one, it makes me a better writer. In the same way that swimming every day or running or practicing French would make you better at those pursuits. 

When I worked in an agency and I was "competing" with another team (though I worked, generally alone) I would find confidence based on the fact that I've written a couple million more words than everyone else. 

That's a lot of practice.

I've worked with words long enough to know how to make words work to solve a problem. That's why whenever there was a crisis in the agency and a lot had to be done in a little time, my cage was most-often rattled. I often felt like a wily pitcher. Not only do I have command of my "stuff," I've faced this circumstance before and amn't likely to get all hetted up because there are two-on and none out. I've worked my way out of jams before. 

Second, writing every day forces upon the writer an acuity you might not otherwise possess. It's like being an avid coin collector. You get in the habit of noticing things that gallop by most others. When you're always looking for the next thing to write, you have to be aware of your surroundings. You have to be like a detective looking for clues at a crime scene. You have to heighten your awareness and your <er> perspicacity. Otherwise, you'll soon run out of subject matter.

Third, you get in the habit not just of noticing things but of noticing that you're noticing. If you don't notice that you've noticed something, you'll forget what you noticed.  By the time you have to write something down there's nothing around to write. That's no good.

One of these noticings I've made a habit of noticing happened just an hour or so ago when I was driving to the grocery store. The song I pasted above came on the car stereo.

I listened and heard all the missed notes, and the double-hit notes. Ray Charles playing "Low Society" reminded me a bit of Thelonious when he played "Dinah, Take 2." It seems to my unmusically-trained ears that Charles and Monk miss as many notes as they hit. Neither do they give a hoot.

I pressed 'back' on my car stereo and listened to Low Society again. Yep. I heard right.

Stopped at a light, I violated the law and typed myself a note about the missed notes. I typed, "Genius means making the best mistakes."

Mistakes are what make the world go round. Change. Improve. Mistakes are what make laughter. Love. Discovery. More.  Mistakes are what make humans human. 

And as I wrote for IBM Watson, when I tried to give Watson voice, "humans are my favorite carbon-based life-form."

Mistakes--not hallucinations-- are what the technocrats and the dweebstocracy behind the $4,000,000,000,000 being spent annually on AI do not, will not and cannot understand.

Just like the space between the notes makes the notes better, the errors, the ers, ahems and likes between thoughts, the mis-hit keys, make the keys eventually hit with precision more loaded with impact.

Many things are funny only because they're stupid.

Same thing here.

Many of the most interesting things in the world happen by happenstance not planning. Yet people plan their lives away then wonder why they're sad, or bored.

There's no real point in any of this other than the world should maybe take a step backwards and lighten up a bit. We should stop trying to weigh every word, process every thought and calculate causality out the wazoo.

In doing that--mankind and machinekind--perfect themselves into absolute boredom.

And if genius, as I wrote to myself makes the best mistakes. Boredom is the worst.

And will be the end of us all.

My Version

Some say the world will end in fire.

Some say in ice.

I say it will end in boredom.

Which really won't be nice.

I'd rather be consumed by fire.

Or frozen in a block of ice.

But I'll probably die by reading shit like this.

Eighteen times, not just twice.

Ho-hum.

Some months ago, a guy contacted me on LinkedIn. He wanted to talk to GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, about helping him launch a vodka with a minor-celebrity's name attached and the minor-celebrity's 45-years-younger-than-he wife as their creative director.

The guy, whom I won't dignify with even an initial (I'll just keep referring to him as 'the guy,') sent me to a site and sent me a powerpoint that showed how much money we could all make when the vodka brand that had no awareness, no distribution and no real differentiation somehow went from selling 2,000 cases a year to 700,000.

I know fuckall about the liquor business, but I'd imagine that everyone who attempts to get into it and launch a new brand has wetdream fantasies about their product becoming Absolut like I dreamed of becoming Willie Mays. 

This guy had convinced himself that he had the next Absolut. All he needed was me to write some ads, like the ads I write for GeorgeCo., and off we'd fly enjoying that "hockey-stick-thing" along the way.

Wow, I said to myself, my bank account, the 529s that I've set up for my two-grandsons, J and R. Wow, I said to H, my long-time friend and Account Director. Wow, I said to L, my wife who cares about me feeling that I'm fruitful, creative and relevant.

We duly met with the minor-celebrity, over zoom, and his shapely amalgamation of silicone, lips and more silicone for good measure. We talked for over an hour. They quizzed me, I answered with my usual perspicacity and humor, we all laughed and slapped each other's virtual backs.

The guy asked for my address and H's, so he could send us some bottles. He asked for a scope, which H sent in fewer than six hours. 

I did what I always do when I get to work. I create a word doc with the client's name and the word "running" next to it and a date. Then, I write down everything I think of for the client and the brand. In a short while I had a dozen lines, with H scowling at me, as she should, about thinking before having a signed scope.

Then.

Nothing.

No bottles. 

Nothing.

Then.

You cost too much.

Then, we cut down the scope.

Then from the guy: "Minor celebrity doesn't want to agree to the scope until he sees the work."

Click.

Last night I saw something from another vodka brand called Neft. I have no real interest in vodka per se. But I thought I'd look at what they're doing. 

Once again, another brand that has all their digital ducks in a row but they've spent no sweat, money or real effort to get known outside of the six-person-reach of their infinitesimal website.

There are about 97,000,654,934,384 brands like this in the tech world. 

About 478,384,038,937 candidates like this in the political world.

 About 344,930,028,080 hamburgers like this in the fast-food world.

About 830,038,112,021 white SUVs like this in the automotive world.

They're all dressed-up,
With no place to go,
They didn't spend the dough,
To let anyone know.
So, they don't grow.
They disappear like August snow.

Maybe the worst offenders of not telling people what they do or why you should buy them are advertising agencies and the holding companies that ate them.

I'm not sure what any of the words above mean. And I'm edumacated. The slogan of my college was NOT "Close Cover Before Striking."

I do know what this means:

Years ago, when I worked on what at the time was a major tech brand and is now a virtual irrelevancy, I would actually spend time reading their annual report to find out what the brand was doing that no one felt was important enough to tell the agency about.

In today's WSJ. The article noted IBM has 270,000 employees. 
In 2010 they had 400,000.

The client and the agency at this point had devolved into full messaging puffery. Never say something strong when you can say something "me too." 

I was trying with ardor NOT to produce another ad anything like this.

I found a fact in the annual report and my partner and I made an ad out of it.

When I presented it to the client they "shit a brick." 

"Where did you get that information," they stammered.

"Well, the 70% fact was in your annual report. Page 7. The 2.3% fact is available to anyone. You can Google it in less than a second. I just put the two together."

"We can't say that." 

"It's in your annual report. Your annual report goes to the Security and Exchange Commission." 

"We can't say that," they repeated. This time in all-caps. 

No one helped me. 

Not planning. Account. Creative colleagues. Not even a client who understood advertising.

If you don't find anything differentiating about your brand or your self, and you don't spend any money making a name for yourself, everything we do, every hour we spend, every dollar we burn is a waste.

Clients have come to realize that advertising in its current form is a waste. A cost center, not a profit driver.

That conclusion leads me to conclude:

Change its current form.