Teetering on the Ontological.

Nemesis.

Universal truth. 

The world would be better of, you would be better off, the country would be better off, every agency you've ever worked for would be better off, if we would all take a moment in consider the ancient Greek concepts--the Universal Laws of Hubris and its inevitable companion Nemesis.

(BTW, Hubris is not to be confused with U-Bris, a failed DIY-home-circumcision kit I had as a client for a while.)

Ideas come and go.

We change how kids learn math and reading.

One generation decides that you must put kids to sleep on their bellies. The next avalanches in and decides kids should sleep on their backs. 

If you're of a certain age, a simple chicken egg has gone from absolute taboo to two-a-week to good for you and probably back again and again two of three times. 92-percent of my readers likely subsist on coffee and have likely engaged with the sorts of articles here:

These things come and go.

They are subject to trends, habits, and opinions. 

But some things, like Hubris and Nemesis are under sway of much more powerful forces. 

They are governed by Natural Law. The inevitability of the universe. As count-on-able as the tides, the sunrise, blowhard creative directors and bad airline food.

There are probably more academic, more Sophoclean definitions of Hubris. But given the state of education, attention and distraction today, I'll proffer this succinct vernacular one: Hubris is when you get too big for your britches. When you start believing your godliness. When you come to the (false) realization that your shit don't stink.

Likewise there are more technically accurate descriptions of Nemesis, the foe that always shows up. But I'll leave it, hopefully mnemonically, as this: Nemesis is your come-uppance. When you get what's coming to you. 

If you want a clearer, more entertaining depiction, you might want to watch an old Hollywood gangster movie, like "Little Caesar." The two-hundred and forty-six seconds here should     do it.

From Hubris to Nemesis in 4:06.

What brings all this on is an article I read in the Times on Monday from their long-time columnist, Frank Bruni. The Times' subject line says it all. And practically wrote this post for me.

Until this actually happens of course, it remains only an emanation devoutly to be wished. Nemesis--despite Bruni's optimism has yet to appear in the ballot box. The much-hoped-for "blue wave," might not appear, it might be abnegated by corruption, or some other lever of deceit might be applied. There are many--and they're multiplying. There's also the tumpian fascist specter of federal troops. Or the stalinist precept of "it's not who votes, it's who counts."

But none of that changes the fundamental cycle of how life has always been. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Everything that rises must converge. Or, most bluntly, rust never sleeps.

My mentor and friend, Steve Hayden, created Hayden's Mandala--a simple model that explains all of life. The surpassing art-director Marc Klein designed a site dedicated to Steve. You can find it, and so much more, here. (Thanks, Marc.)

Readership of this blog has, over the last six months or so, declined. I used to get about 80,000 readers a month, now I get little more than half of that.

I can attribute that to many things. 

I write a lot at a time when fewer people read. Or can.

I've been writing this blog for nearly twenty years and maybe people are bored. All I am, really, is a one-legged tap-dancer.

Maybe the great cosmic algorithm that rules all creatures great and small has changed and I'm left out in the cold.

Just as likely, I got too big for my britches and now payback is here.

That said, there's a way back from payback.

Do what you know how to do.

Again, as Hayden taught me: "The best revenge is a better ad." That is take your cuts. Keep your swing level. And as Wee Willie Keeler said, "Hit 'em where they ain't."

Or as was written in the great but unknown epic poem, "The Blackiad," the saga of a trout nicknamed Boston Blackie, by my grad school mentor Lipton Merriwell Sipps, PhD:

PS. Professor Sipps, mama ain't there.

In Praise of Copywriting.

When tump decided to invade Iran to distract from the 38,000 times he was mentioned in the epstein files, as someone who reads a lot of history, I proclaimed to anyone who would listen (no one) this imperial, racist adventuring would not end well.

My one-sentence summation was pretty simple.

"A man with an eight-second attention span should not invade an eight-thousand-year-old civilization."

That line takes me down two separate but related paths. 

One: There's a pithiness to it. Which leads me to conclude the democratic party should hire a gag writer. That is, they need--as all brands do--someone who can "on-demand" come up with pithy quips that lodge, disrupt, upset--and in Candide's 'best of all possible world's" might make a difference.

About a decade ago, I started trading linked-in messages with Rob Schwartz. Rob's a career coach now. Back then, he was CEO of Chiat\Day New York. (I might have his exact title and agency names slightly off. No one can keep up with corporate whack-a-merger and remember who's who anymore. Which doesn't matter anyway, since they're all the same.)

If I remember correctly, and I'm sure I do, Rob and I met at the Friar's Club on East 55th Street. A legendary, but musty place that was on its last one-liner at the time.

My first impression of Rob--I'm not one who goes gently into new relationships--was this: "Oh, he has the gift of quip." That is talking to Rob was a series of jokes, barbs, punch-lines and gags. Mixed in with intelligence, humanity and nice discernment.

 Philip Roth alluded to a more malign "gift of quip" in one of my favorite passages from his classic "Portnoy's Complaint." A scene I often show to gentiles who don't understand New York Jewish.

“My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!”

Rob has no mean in him. But you get the point. What's more, my phrase "Gift of Quip," was also an homage to the great John LeCarre, who said of his most famous creation, espionage agent George Smiley, "He has the gift of quiet." 

Leona Helmsley (a convicted felon) once said about donald trump, "I wouldn't believe [him] if his tongue were notarized." Politicians and brands should hire people who can write lines like that.

I do something for clients I call "The Nifty Fifty." Fifty funny attention getting ads that keep their brands top of mind and stop the scroll. The democrats currently besiege people with boring crap. There must be a better way to change minds and hearts and votes.

Two: The second path is more lamentable.

With everything today quick and shallow, nobody anymore knows anything about anything except that which is unimportant.

We can spend billions on a war and we know nothing about who we're fighting or why or anything vaguely related to the history of the region. 

As Simon Sebag Montefiore writes in his new book, "Cauldron," about the area we are constantly invading: 

“Today it seems irredeemably turbulent and explosive, which is why I have entitled this book, The Cauldron. The ingredients are beautiful and inspiring but also volatile, pyrophoric–and increasingly fissile. 

Its particular, disparate composition is the result of its tri-continental location as bridge and seaway, thoroughfare and crossroads; its very middleness makes it unavoidable for every local power that aspires to intercontinental influence and every planetary hegemon that seeks multi-domain power. Most of the empires who have conquered or influenced it–and what a list it is: Akkadians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Crusaders, Mongols, Turco-Mongols, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, French, Italians, Greeks, Americans and Soviets–have done so partly for its own sake but partly to reach, control or protect other places; once inserted and committed, they have each had to expend much blood and treasure just to keep control of this tinderbox, even for the shortest time. 

It is not a surprise that this region has been so shaped by these foreign invaders and colonists, migrants and settlers–such movements of people are the engine of all world history and of our present. Its web of peoples, sects and languages vividly reflects every empire that rose and fell here precisely because each tried to change it, to settle it, to shape it to their own designs and to serve their own gods. Even today, the politicians who send armies and jets into the region, and the activists who march in Western streets demanding interventions are both equal parts of that inescapable tradition.”

What I wouldn't give for a political leader, a business leader, anyone, who reads anything with an historical perspective or a point of view informed by more than a sound-bite or the latest outrage.

I suppose what I'm saying is a more than a little self-aggrandizing. But that's ok. What's a personal blog for if not at least a soupçon of feeding one's ego? 

But here it is: our world--our politics, our brands, the ad industry--culture itself--would be better off if there were more people who combined the "turn of a phrase" with an understanding of the world.

In other words if you could take what's meaningful and make it memorable. 

Like this, from Shakespeare's Henry V's 

We've gone too fast and too ugly from Lincoln's eloquence "last best hope on earth," to the tump's gutter, "We're the HOTTEST Country Anywhere in the World,"

That's a Gibbonesque Decline and Fall as depicted by Wile E. Coyote, a cliff and maybe an anvil.

83-seconds of amerikkan metaphor.

That's what happens you when you don't hire a copywriter.

Yes, Indeedy, I'm Walking.

For a person who is very often fueled by ardent competitiveness that teeters across the line into fury, for a person who is often angered by some sin of commission or omission, there is little my three-year-old golden retriever Sparkle can do that will get me mad.

While my sleep is often a long-time coming, fitful when it does come and usually more anguish than rest, last night I might as well have been in a sealed casket, deep inside a marble sarcophagus, buried under six feet of well-packed soil.

I was out. 

I was clonked-by-Sonny-Liston-out.

Out until 4:40 AM when I heard a sharp bark from Sparkle, who was downstairs nestled in her Taj-Mahal-like crate. I ignored the noise, hoping it was a dream or a party in some bed-bugs' pied-a-terre, or some house-creak I had never heard before.

But, it persisted. 

It wasn't a series of staccato barks. It was a one-off about every fifteen seconds. There was a long-enough between each bark that I was hoping Sparks had just had a doggie nightmare and would soon return to her usual nearly-comatose slumber. But then, another bark would come. Pause. And another.

I threw on yesterday's jeans and t-shirt and made my way downstairs to see what was going on, if something were amiss.

I duly threw a too-light jacket on (we had our first frost last night) and took Sparkle for a walk, thinking that something inside of her had to get out of her. But there was no vector in her walk. She sniffed the air, sensed wildlife in the neighbor's hedges or maybe a fox or coyote up from the nearby wetland--which when I was young we called a swamp. Sparkle seemed unphased by it all. In short order I hustled back to our house and put Sparkle back in her crate.

I was back in bed by 5 or 5:15, hoping for another hour or two of rest. 

Sparkle had other ideas.

The barking began again, and once again I re-dressed, tsked my way downstairs and, this time with a warmer coat, took her out again, to much the same effect.

There would be no more sleep for me.

So I did what I do, which is I went for a long seaside walk. 

The bright stars of a clear cold night were fading and were soon replaced by salmon colored streaks that, rosy-fingered dawn-like, accompanied the chilly sunrise.

I saw the gulls working the coast, looking for piscine detritus or as gulls are not known for the culinary discernment, just slightly-toxic suburban detritus--a pizza crust, a chicken bone, an apple core.

A long way off, I heard the honking of geese. I scanned the brightening sky and finally found them in a lopsided V. Three on one side, thirty-three on the other. "They need to go back to flight school," I murmured to myself. They didn't hear me and continued with their taxi-cab-level ruckus.

By now, it was nearly seven.

The fishermen were walking to the sea, their spindly rods as hopeful as an ingenue. Some early morning runners were starting off on their daily loneliness--the New York City Marathon is eight days away--and if you're running alone at 7AM on a Saturday, there's a decent chance you're running with some purpose.

Twenty-four hours ealier on Friday morning, walking the same route, a young runner stopped and held her phone up to her eye. I stopped to see what she was photographing, and out on a nearby rock, she pointed to the white head (the 'bald' head) of a preening and proud bald eagle. For all the world it was a US quarter turned to life. Maybe the last time before the mid-terms turn the proud amerikkka eagle to the sinister nazi one, or the comic 'Get Smart' one.

It's hard to live in the world today. 

There is so much horrific, and incipient horrific everywhere. Between AI, trillionaire tech rapists, political rapists, rapist spokespeople saying a campaign commercial supporting child rape is ok, and more. Maybe if trump subverts the midterms, or once again incites deadly riots--an veritable attempted coup-- the president's state of the union address, will be supplanted by the more accurate 'rape of the union.' "Ladies and gentlemen, the rape of the union is good!"

That's not a metaphor. It might be a gloomy prediction.

It's hard to live in the world today.

Then your dog wakes you.

Then the sea says good morning.

Then Orion's Belt and a trillion stars blink hello.

Rosy-fingered dawn reminds you to re-read Homer.

An eagle sits like a god.

Keep walking.

Man Who Makes the Clothes.

For about the last thirty years of advertising, everybody and his bastard cousin has talked about branding, re-branding, the importance of brand, and various brand-related things like brand architecture, brand strategy, branded content and the like.

Everything but 40% brand flakes.

To paraphrase Mark Twain in his, probably apocryphal, quip about the weather, everybody talks about it, nobody does anything about it.

I see more companies--new companies, old companies, small companies, large companies--tinkering with their logos, their typography, their colors or some amalgamation of those elements and announcing, as if anyone outside of the incestabubble of the marketing industry gives a bloody rat's ass.

You also hear people--doyens of the industry--talk about things like brand advertising and performance advertising as if they're separate and distinct, as if one is different from the other because their bottom lines and reporting structures are different. As if anything a brand does is devoid of its influence on its own brand. 

We use the word brand like a blind man uses a .30-caliber air-cooled machine gun. We spray it everywhere. We hurt things with it. But we don't know what we hope to accomplish with it or why. Ready, fire, aim.

In fact, most brands as they're articulated by most companies and most "branding" agencies, are nothing but "design." (I write that though some of the people I most respect in the advertising industry work for some of the big design shops.) But what's missing from most of the verbal onslaughts we hear about brands is a simple idea which I sum up in a sentence.

We like brands that act like people we like.

You probably missed that. So I'll repeat it.

We like brands that act like people we like.

That Keatsian sentence (that is all there is to know and all ye need to know) is unknown, unconsidered, unheeded to by about 99.78797-percent of people who use the word brand.

In fact, I have about four-dozen pdfs of brand guidelines on my hard-drive, ranging from about 15-pages in length to over ten times that. 

From these so-called guidelines (which are more lines and less guides) I can neither discern nor understand how any of these brands act, who they are, how they behave, what makes them different or, to be simple about this, 'what they are like as people.' Yeah. I know what they look like.

So what. 

As Schaffner said to Marx, 'clothes do not make the man. Man makes the clothes.'

Maybe because I used to love the ad industry with such ardor, I'd say that the holding company and agency entities that profess to be brands might well be the worst offenders.

Yes.

They all have a be-fukkin-spoke font. A system of colors. Some ratiocinated logo treatment. A way to get in and out of videos. A look and feel. And an about section that means about as much as a politician's promises. As Alban Barkley said about the vice-presidency, "It ain't worth a bucket of warm shit." You can say that about most of the words below.

This isn't just a case of the cobbler's children having no shoes. This is an entire industry not even knowing what shoes are. Or even feet.

This is Shoelessness writ large. Not knowing what they're for, or why we're better off with them than without them.

This is like designing graphic guidelines for a human heart but forgetting that it first has to work as a pump.

[advertisement.]

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is a one-person agency that helps companies figure out who they are, why they're different, why they matter, what they do, why they exist and what they sell.

I don't have a patented process to get to the nub.

You'll never see me employing the "Trapezoid of Truth" or the "Helix of Heuristics" or the "Polyhedron of Personality."

Yet, I employ the oldest and most effective discovery process known to our species. 

I talk.

I listen.

I question.

I think.

To founders, progenitors, scientists, practitioners. People who love you. And people who hate you.

Then we write it all down.

Simply.

Memorably.

With indelible ink.

A set of beliefs. Behaviors. 

A way of being you.

And no one else.

Condensed for legibility and memorability.

It's not for everyone.

But it might be for you.

And no one else.

Dig?

“For a first-class shoveler there is a given shovel load at which he will do his biggest day’s work. What is this shovel load? Will a first-class man do more work per day with a shovel load of 5 pounds, 10 pounds, 15 pounds, 20, 25, 30, or 40 pounds?”
--Frederick Winslow Taylor.

When I was a relatively young man in the business, I was quickly hailed as very smart and very good. My boss was very good but very cantankerous.

As these things go in times of pinched-pennies, agency management decided to let go of E, my boss and promote me. 

I was easier to work with, almost as good and I cost $100,000 less.

At a very young age--just about 30--I was partnered with M, a man twenty years older than I and an executive vice president executive creative director.

We worked together, shoulder to shoulder for three years. M and I respected each other but we never became friends. We were too far apart in too many ways.

M and I were on a very busy account--a retail account where we often had to conceive and sell and then produce a couple of ads a week. That meant there wasn't a great deal of time for nonsense in the office. We'd get in in the morning and work. We'd come up with ads, call a meeting with the account people, and sell them internally. A day or two later, we'd be down at the client selling them to the client. A day or two after that, M would be shooting and I would be writing copy.

Along with that workaday life, we also had new business tasks to get to. Leading pitches and whatnot so hopefully, we could escape the tedium and the pressure of creating two ads a week.

By the way, these ads weren't what we aggrandizingly call ads today. They weren't 3-inches by 5-inches and smaller. They were usually just short of a full-page in The New York Times. 

M and I were both old school about work. We weren't thrilled with the assignments we got, but we respected the client and the space they were buying. What's more our friends in the industry knew we were doing those ads. Lest we would be accused of being hacks, we worked hard to do a good job. We worked hard, in short, to have 'the best ad in the paper,' on any given day.

When I go online today--particularly on LinkedIn which is the only social site I use--it seems to me that about 97.968-percent of the posts from your connections, from companies or from brands is about some technology or some magical shortcut that will make the things you have to do easy and take the tedium out of life.

AI, in short, is essential microwave cooking.
It's really fast.
And usually leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
They leave off the bad taste part, 
and keep emphasizing the three-minute potato part.

M, as I said, was about 20 years older than I. He grew up working class in England just after World War II ended. As such he grew up with an austerity and a lack many people can't even imagine today. I guess M was a bit like my father. Metaphorically, he packed a lunch every day and went to work. Work meant sweat and worry and hours of toil.

There was no waiting for a lightning bolt to strike or some deus ex machina to hand you a glorious something on a silver platter.

In all the years I worked with M, all the ads we did together, I don't think we ever had a lunch out together or a drink after work. We were at work to work. While we might talk about a movie we'd seen or something we were reading or something with our kids or wives, most often those extraneous conversations related back to work somehow. 

I'd be thinking of a visual and bring up a Buster Keaton movie. Then I'd find the VHS and show it to M. Then we'd talk about the ad we were doing and if this sort of thing captured the idea we were trying to convey.

Along the way, M would strengthen the visual idea and I'd find a headline somehow that related to home-equity lines of credit.

M often annoyed me. He often compared work to digging ditches. He embraced the orderly work that went into work. He kept his head down and kept at it.

So often today as my docket of work gets longer and longer makes me think of M. Especially when I am overwhelmed, feeling out of my depth and don't know how I'm going to get it all done.

When I was the night cashier in a Rush Street, Chicago liquor store, Bragno's, and the line was 12 deep with impatient drunks, I was worried how I was going to get it all done. When I played ball and someone had rising heat or a sneaky slider, I wondered how I'd not embarrass myself swinging like a rusty gate. Later when I worked on big accounts with giant budgets and was competing against six or nine other teams--sometimes even against the very people deciding which work would move forward, I leaned on what I learned from M.

Often I'd get in at seven. I'd have a pile of work puzzles on my desk that I had to figured out. Manifestos to be written. Spots. Print ads. Even strategy decks, which all too often would fall to me, usually after someone else came up fallow. I'd dread the pile on my way in, hating and resenting it. It would be impossible to get through it all. And I'd curse it.

And then one after another, I'd did what M showed me how to do. I dug the ditch and moved onto start another one.

I believe that you can get faster at work.

But there are no short-cuts. 

You can't skip steps or logic leap your way to completion.

You put another shovel in the dirt. You fill it. You toss the slag away.

I'm sure there are robotic agents who, it is claimed, can do all that for you.

I'm sure the savvy-Egyptians probably toted around "The Dummies Guide to Building Pyramids." But the truth is, it's one rock on top of the next, or one shovel then the next.

There ain't no shortcuts.
Even employing slaves will wind up biting you in the arse.

Work, M taught me, is work.

With all the joy, pain, frustration and exhilaration that comes with toil.

Enjoy. 

That's the point.

Enjoy.

I Don't Care.

Since the rise of trumpism aka the descent of decency I've been quick to notice how the corruption of amerikkka and the corruption of the holding-company dominated ad industry look shockingly similar.

I can sum up their similarities in a simple sentence.

Neither amerikkka nor the ad industry are any long reality-based.

All the numbers are false.

Everything is a lie.

All accolades and measurement are falsehoods.

The entire system is reverse robin hood. Steal from the poor and give to the rich.

Don't believe anything you read.

The only ones who will get out alive from either entity are the ones at the top who will likely die with billions or hundreds of millions before any regulatory body or investigative organ (they've all been destroyed) ever catches up with them.

A perfect example of this macro-cosmic deceit is trump, for instance, proclaiming amerikkka the hottest nation ever, when hundreds of millions of people are living paycheck to paycheck. Or the ad industry selling itself to the ad industry and then firing everyone in the ad industry while accepting a trophy and a nine-digit payout and calling yourself network of the year in an industry that is no longer viable.

We are living in an empire of illusion.

When we unbleary our eyes, what we see won't be pretty.

Here's what got this post going.

Again, this is reductive.

Boiled down.

Clear.

The 97 text messages I get every day from political candidates or their "party," asking me for money. Pretending to be my friend and asking me for money. Using my phone number without my permission to ask me for money.

Ask not what politicians can do for you. Ask where to send them your money.

This morning I read a very sad article in The New York Times about poor people.

It seemed like something John Dos Passos or John Steinbeck might have written 90 years ago as the great depression unfurled.

Read the whole article here.

Part of my strength as a human (if that's what I am) is my naïveté. I believe politics can make things better. I believe advertising can make things better. I believe they're each supposed to be a force for good. For hearing people and responding to their needs.

I don't see companies telling people how they're helping them. How 

they're making middle seats larger, customer service better, and providing an alternative to "shrinkflation."

There's very little in advertising of what a company does for you any more. It's all about companies working to get your money and more and more of it for less and less in return.

In politics too.

There's nothing about helping people.

It's all what I can do for them.

And do it now.

Or else.

There's no empathy anywhere.

That's another similarity.

And you're left with the feeling that in an entire country and an entire industry, there's not one decent human being left.

Just brands and politicians trying to bogo you to death.

We used to care. And then say, here's how we'll help.

Now we beg. And then say, here's what you can do for us.

We can should must do better.

We can should must at least try.

In a time of universal selfishness, caring is a revolutionary act.

Two Georges.

During the darkest days of Covid, my wife and I had National Public Radio on for hours a day. 

To listen to the news, we'd follow the feed through different cities. Tuning into Boston public radio, New York, Philadelphia. We'd follow the sun to Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles. We were trying our damndest to stay informed. To know what was going on. 

I realized after about a month of this rather than becoming better informed, we were being driven crazy.

When the news is always on, it's always on repeat. 

And as far as reporting on Covid went, the same stories, with the same bifurcations were played over and over again. Half the reports were about deaths and crowded hospitals. Half the reports were about Covid being nothing more than a bad cold.

The sides were drawn.

The stories on repeat.

Minds were made up.

The news was no longer providing information. It was just reinforcing adamantine points of view.

It was then I turned off NPR, and in fact, all broadcast news. 

Since then, judging by my social media feeds, the propensity of the news not to be 'new' has only gotten worse.

Every day there are 27 or 39 or 76 outrages. 

Every day there the sides get further and further apart.

The tone gets shriller.

The scorn and disdain angrier.

And every day it's on repeat.

We learn nothing, we improve not a lick, and we're no better able to entertain empathy or learn about the other "side."

I suppose I could sum my thesis up in just give words.

There's no news in news.

That's probably not quite accurate. But because the news has to fill so much time, because it has to always be on, much of it is repeated to the point of meaninglessness.

I think the same has happened to advertising.

I grew up in a world where most marketing people understood that "the best advertising is news." But when brands decide to release literally thousands of ads a day, much of those ads are far from news. They're merely repetitions. 

Many times I've reprinted six rules for better writing from Orwell's seminal 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language." Over my 42-year career, I've probably shared it with one-hundred agency people and fifty clients. 

Here it is, one more time.

And because maybe it can stand some freshening after 80 years of being ignored, I took a hand and adapting Orwell's tips for our era of messaging inundation. (Current media practices say, impact doesn't matter--repetition does. That being the case, my rules--and I'm no Orwell--might be of nominal value.)

My Six rules, which no one will read, might be worth following.