Old Friends. "A Guest Post by Rich Wallace. (An Old Friend.)

RichWallace and I have been friends for a long time, at least by advertising standards. We sat next to each other and worked alongside each other for five years while at Ogilvy on IBM. Here's a link to Rich's site.

 

Since that agency went ersatz belly-up, Rich and I have gone our separate ways. Making our livings doing what we do. For the last five years for a variety of agencies and a variety of clients--without the long halls of Kafkaesque holding company parsimony. We've even gotten a couple of chances during that time to work together. It's nice to work with a pro--especially a pro like Rich, who has a work ethic like a sodbuster.

Last week, I sent Rich a note. I had an in-design question and I knew Rich could help. Within seconds, he and I were talking on the phone and in just a few more seconds, Rich sent me the ads below and told me the story of how they came to be.

 

Wow.

 

Here's the story in Rich's own words. The thing about work that so many people miss--not just people in what used to be the ad business--is that there are some practitioners, like Rich, who love it.

They love the stresses. The challenges. The entirety of the mishegoss. I think above and beyond that, they love winning. Taking something--a lump of clay in Biblical parlance--and molding something wonderful and inspiring out of it.

 

That's what the best ad people do. And when advertising works, that passion is reflected in the brands we work for. That passion attracts views, customers, advocates for our clients. 

 

All that is pretty basic. But I think too easily forgotten by too many people who are allegedly in the ad business. Too many are complying with a checklist of demands--not trying to do something they can be proud of, and their clients, too. 

Pride matters.
That's why people like Rich matter.

Here's Rich's post:

Old Friends.

I’ve been friends with Edward Boches for around 25 years. I worked with him when we were both at Mullen together. Okay fine, he was the CCO and I worked for him. But over the years we have become friends. And while this is advertising and relationships are fleeting, Edward and I have stayed in touch. I’ve even stayed in touch with George. Which shows you, I’m not discriminating.

Now among many other things, Edward is a prolific documentary photographer and seeing as I've always vacationed with my family in Brewster and Wellfleet on Cape Cod, I am a huge fan of the series he's been shooting on the Wellfleet Oyster fishermen and women. I just loved the shots. The feeling that he captured is part of what I’ve always loved about the Cape. So much in fact, that I reached out and asked if he would mind if I played with his images.

He told me he had no problem with me playing with the photos. But I couldn’t put them online or in a portfolio without approval. He also told me, if I ended up with something that we both liked, maybe they could be used on social media or as posters to promote events for the Wellfleet Oyster Alliance. 

So I went to work, tapped into my blue collar brain (which is the only brain I have) and tried to write what it must be like to be a passionate, hard working Oysterman or woman. What it must be like to have your life dictated by the tide, the lashing wind, blistering cold or blazing heat. Eventually, I had a nice collection of lines that seemed like they’d resonate with those that grow oysters, those that eat the oysters and everyone else that chooses to visit this magical place, on the bay-side of the Cape.

Once I had the headlines I liked I shared them with Edward. We ended up settling on several, one of which he wrote. Which is admittedly, a parody of an old Perdue ad. That ad might be a little "inside-baseball," or "inside oyster," but it might also be a pearl.

 

Soon, Edward and I had some ads that we were both liking. 

 

Initially the ads featured Edward's black and white photos on paper texture and a ghosted tidal chart of the bayside in the background.

 

We both thought the ads looked great, but I still felt like something was missing. So I fiddled with the ads some more, adding patina and a weathered-distressed look. I wanted the work to look as rough and weather-beaten as the people and environment that they were depicting. The photos already had a look. I wanted them to have a feel.

Editor's note: "The ads already had a look. I wanted them to have a feel." That might be the best description of "craft" that I've ever heard.

When I finished, I absolutely loved how they turned out, but to be honest, I didn’t know how Edward would feel. Would he think I pushed them too far and denigrated his beautiful photos?

 

I shared the revision with Edward and he said “They looked fucking awesome!”. Which is what I hoped he’d say.

Edward shared them with the Wellfleet Oyster Alliance, they loved the work. The ads were used on social media to promote Oysterfest, as out of home at the event, as well as posters that were sold and auctioned off.

 

Yesterday I saw one roughly the size of a movie-theater screen. You know, huge. I've been in the business a long time--but seeing my work in situ always excites me.

 

Like so much of the work I’ve tried to do over my three decades in advertising, the best work is work that has your heart in it. Work that comes not just from your brain but from your heart. That’s what the best work always does.

That’s why I love advertising.

And why I’m not afraid of being replaced by AI.

Or a crew of oystermen or women.

By the way, this next part might be TMI, but since George asked, this is why I did what I did--design-wise:

One thing I struggled with was that I didn’t want the headlines to overpower the photography. I wanted the viewer to see Edward's shots and absorb them first. Then I wanted viewers to read the headlines and, I hoped, feel something.

 

I tried the layouts sixty ways to Sunday. Bigger type. Smaller type. Flush this way and that. But always I wanted the lines to take a back seat to the photography. Finally, I added a patina--almost water seeping through a ceiling. I felt it added to the sweat and the sinew of the overall effect. Edward agreed. I hope you do too.

 

In real life, you don't always get to work on projects as inherently cool and emotional as this one. But I think you always have to bring your head and your heart and your fearlessness to them--to try to push them. To try to make something special out of them. To try to make them relatable and visceral--even if you're ten thousand miles from the nearest oyster.

--

Thanks, Rich.

Thanks, Edward.

Thanks, bivalves!

A Good Stretch.

When I was just seventeen, so many sad years ago, and playing my one long summer for the Seraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League (AA), I didn't much think about Grantland Rice, or the one great Scorekeeper coming to pen my name. 

No one thinks about things like that when they're seventeen, even if they were, like me, born under a lugubrious sign. Even though I was born preternaturally old, I was still a young man, living only for my next at bat or next breast I could feel or next beer I could swallow. I wasn't thinking about much else.

Still, with my stern an Old Testament upbringing I heard Granny's words rung like Big Ben from the highest bell tower, ever reverberating, even though they pealed from quite a distance.

For when the One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name,
He writes - not that you won or lost -
But How you played the Game.

I suppose as cornball as all that is, there's something in believing in a world, which I don't, presided over by the One Great Scorer. I suppose as cornball as all that is, it would be nice if it mattered How you played the game. I suppose it would be nice if your You were as important as your Do.

I suppose I'm as starry-eyed and stupid today as I was 50 years ago when I ran away from the deafening noise of an empty home where the only sound was hatred, frozen vegetables, dishes crashing when they were thrown, Miltown bottles being opened and gin being swilled.

I once was lost, but then I was found, by Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla, whom I dubbed Hector Quesadilla, just moments after he transmuted my el Norte moniker into Jorge Navidad--an improvement, I believe, to George Tannenbaum, especially given the mostly beered-up fans who would rain bottles down on any ballplayer, especially an American playing in their stadiums, in their cities, in their league.

During that long summer so long ago I had the longest stretch of good fortune in my already too long life. It was late in the season and late in a game of no-consequence when a pitch came in on my hands, a screw ball, maybe, that jammed me inside but that I was able to smack short over their second baseman and I found myself safe on first.

On the next pitch of this game of no-consequence I ran on their arm. He was not holding me on and I got a Bob Beaman jump and stole second, sliding in for the dust and drama rather than for the necessity.

Perez-Abreu was up and he text-booked an outside fastball down the right field line. I rounded third, and feigned stopping to draw the throw to the cut-off, then put my head down and charged home, while Perez-Abreu, alertly, took second on the dust up at the plate.

Next, Buentello also went to the opposite field and Perez-Abreu scored from second like I did. Then, seconds later, it happened again. Angel Diablo stroked a single to right and brought in Buentello. Now, instead of being down, we were up. Scratching runs with scratch hits and speed and playing ball like it should be played: heads up and aggressive. 

There are those, of course, who will always admire the long ball. But the best baseball is baseball like this. Where little things lead to big innings. In baseball, and yes, in life, it's the little things that make the big things happen.

We won that game that doesn't matter against it doesn't matter who, by doing the little things while playing the game that do matter. Like going with the pitch, like running with your head up, like outthinking the guys living by rote and doing all that at top-speed.

There was no pep-talk that inspired all that. Just, after a season where a hundred and two bad habits had taken over our days and nights, good habits emerged for a brief happenstance and seemed to take over, like a cloudy day, all at once and unexpectedly becoming clear.

Dowson wrote about it 150 years ago. In a poem, I knew even then, as a 17-year-old,

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

And that's what happen to us Los Seraperos de Saltillo late in the season, playing a stretch of games under the blister of the sun in El Estadio de Beisbol Francesco I. Madura. 

Our path emerged for a while and we won games like we had never won before. Playing smart, running fast and heads-up.

Our path emerged for a while and then closed. 

That's so many things. So many green lights that turn red just as you step on the accelerator.

Just as we as a team started doing everything right, we started again, doing everything wrong. The boneheadedness of mediocrity reinvigorated itself and had its way with us.

As a manager, three or thirteen things pissed Hector off. One was taking a called third strike--especially if there are men on. Second is missing a cut-off with a throw, or failing to back someone up on a play. And last was bunting one straight up so it would be an easy out.

Those things and a dozen more were back. And so was our griping and our grumbling and all the things bad teams do to make themselves worse.

In the forty-nine years since that summer when I had four games or five where my path emerged for a while before it closed, I'm not sure I ever had a longer skein of things going just right. That bad fortune wasn't for lack of effort or my bovine stupidity. It's just the cosmic law of entropy that rules what's left of a disordered, decaying and entropic universe.

There's a belief in history, that about 4000 years ago, the great ancient civilizations of Crete, Assyria, Knossos, Babylonia and one-hundred more were destroyed by the sudden and unexpected descent of an unknown people called the Sea People. 

Where they came from, how they came, and why they came, no one knows. But they did come, the theory goes, and they destroyed all civilization, society and progress in their way. And then, just as abruptly as they arrived, they vanished. Leaving not a shred of papyrus, a broken shard of pottery or the hull of an ancient ship.

For me, all those years ago, it might have been in Saltillo a season under the spell of the Sea People. Except for one week when, for no reason at all, they left the benighted land I had arrived in, and for that one week, the seas without the Sea People were flat and calm and the fish abundant and easy to spear.

Or as Porfirio Diaz, dictator/president of Mexico for nearly thirty years is said to have said, “Pobre México! Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos.” Poor Mexico. So far from God. So close to the United States.

Maybe the One Great Scorer sent the Sea People aweigh and away. Or maybe the Sea People and the Scorer are one and the same. 

Either way, that misty dream was all too short. And it all too easily slipped through my fingers.

Shorthand.

For the first twenty years of my forty year-career we didn't worry about what decks looked like. In part, because we didn't have decks.

We had foam core boards.

We'd arrange the foam core in order and present our work that way. Some people of my vintage learned to read upside down as they stood and flipped through ads and TV spots and even the occasional radio spot all enlarged and mounted on foam core.

A funny thing happened when you presented on foam core. The clients looked at you. And not the screen. You could look up and look in their eyes and actually talk directly to them.

We never designed presentations in those days. We designed work. Designing a presentation? That's like designing the rags you use to wax your car. How the rags look ain't important. How they treat your car is.

Today, we design presentations. 

As if the presentation is the communication, not the work in the presentation. And there are myriad online tools to have dissolves, reveals and sweeps to make your presentation cooler.

To my mind that's diametrically opposed to the line I've heard attributed to the recently-deceased legend, Sal DeVito. "Make the logo smaller and the idea bigger."

Today we make the presentation prettier and the ideas scarcely matter. 

See above. 

Vomit. 

Continue reading.

Back in my Ogilvy days I was chastised for not knowing keynote or powerpoint. I was told knowing them was the key to getting ahead.

Oh. 

Presumably that would allow me to put a slide in a deck that reads "We're on a Journey," as my boss once did while I was at Ogilvy. No. Magellan was on a journey. You're a brain-worm infested dweeb.

Late last week because they're spread around the globe, I had a client presentation at 5PM on a Friday. I don't like to work that late on Fridays. A) I'm tired. B) Most everyone else is too.

But in an effort to be gracious and accommodating, and because I wanted to sell some work and get my money, my Account Director and I agreed. From 5PM to 6PM on a Friday.

Here's the first page of my presentation. 

As ugly as the bottom of my shoe.

My client didn't care. My client didn't say anything. Nor did my Account Director. Nor I.

Here's a bit of the last page of my presentation:

What's salient here is the page number: 38.

Outside of the cover sheet, we had 37 pages of ideas. Of ads. Of lines. Taglines. Strategically based. Intrusive. Assertive. Bold.

Loud. PATW. (Punching above their weight.)

Yes.

I showed 37 ads.

37 different ways to do what I do for brands.

Define who they are.
Differentiate them from everyone else.
Demonstrate to readers so they can feel it not just learn in.

Often, I don't even think in terms of ads in the Wall Street Journal. I think about a deck that lands in front of an investor at Andreessen Horowitz. Or in front of a customer who for whatever reason gave my client a minute for a meeting.

What will make those targets salivate. Literally, salivate. And say "I need me some of that." Or "that's a great idea." Not, "that's a great ad." But "that's a great product."

I think advertising today is like established religion. Interested in dogma and minutia and monetary enrichment. Not improving lives and fulfillment. 

We're interested in aesthetics for aesthetics' sake. Not for functionality's sake.

Our industry has become deeply masturbatory. We're self-gratifying seed spillers. (SGSS. Not a bad name for an agency, right?)

Occasionally, I bring a little theory to a deck. But it's never more complicated than this. 

And then I jump into the work that does all that.

I couldn't give a rat's ass that I'm not A) on a journey. B) going to Cannes. or C) cool.

The only journeys I'm interested in are the ones my clients, and eventually me, take to the bank.

Escalation of Dumb.

A lot of our modern world, from discourse online, to advertising, to politics can be explained by a scene from the 1950s Broadway musical then movie, "West Side Story."

In the prelude to the rumble between the Jets and the Sharks, the weapons of choice keep escalating. 

Fists. Bricks. Hoses. Belts. Bottles. Chains. Knives. Guns.

The same madness is happening in politics and in advertising.

In just eight years we've gone from a Brick like Sarah Palin to an Automatic Weapon like Donald Trump. The darkness, ignorance and hate get more and more powerful. 

Because the only way to get attention in the outlandish dopamine-driven world we live in is to do something absolutely mad.

Trump, IMO, isn't competing with Harris for attention.

He's competing with the Dark Web. 

Whatever crazy-ass rumor starts there, he has to build on. Lest someone else get more attention than he does. 

This is truly truly frightening.

And dangerous.

And there's no turning back.

Meanwhile the same descent is happening over on what used to be called "Madison Avenue." It was called Madison Avenue before the entire, hugely profitable industry was bought up, eviscerated and relegated to the fringes (the ad industry is no longer located near its clients, because the ad industry is no longer important to its clients).

Now, we do handbags that hold mayonnaise jars. And every agency that pays an electric bill blathers on about the myriad awards they've won when viewers like you and I can literally go months (if not years) without seeing a spot or an ad we actually notice and like.

Seriously, when was the last time you said, "I wish I did that?" About an ad that actually ran. Not a stunted stunt that twelve people outside of the agency bubble will ever see.

The post above, er, the inscrutable post above is a good example of sludge swirling down a clogged drain. 

A couple days ago I saw on Linked In the promotion I pasted above. I've shared it with friends. Friends 30 years younger than I and friends who used to lead large New York agencies.

This isn't more Ogilvy bashing on my part.

I literally can make no sense of the (long) sentence above. Part of that might because they decided not to punctuate it. But a larger part is that it's just plain-old baffling. And now, someone will have to say something more absurd to knock that absurdity off its pinnacle.

[As always, if anyone at Ogilvy would like to explain this, this space, and my 85K weekly readers are all yours. I won't even edit.]

Bringing this back to my West Side Story example above, this is an escalation not of street weapons but of a dangerous grasping at what's momentary, while ignoring (because you're social first) the millions of people who aren't social first and who don't understand what you're saying or who want something very different from the marketing they get.

We live in a world where it seems the majority can no longer discern the difference between truth and falsehood. You see examples of that every day. And not just if you read Orwell.

You see it in advertising, too.

No one anymore knows what's good. What works. Or how to reach people.

I'll wait for the definitive white paper on the topic.

Vout-o-Roonee.

This fell into my feed late last week and made me laugh.

Then cry.

Because if you think about it, it's exactly what's gone wrong with modern amerika mass-production assembly-line advertising. 

We no longer strive to make creative good so people notice it. We make it ubiquitous so people run away from it at top speed and it keeps chasing.

It's Stalkertising. Not Advertising. 

Everything sucks. But damn, we're efficient.

On September 22, a client sent me a document on a platform I'd never heard of called "Loom." I might have had to register to get the document but I certainly didn't want or need another messaging platform. Since September 22, I've gotten a dozen emails from Loom. Reminding me to upgrade. Beckoning me to take a tour of my workspace. Warning me that I'd be downgraded if I didn't upgrade and upgraded if I didn't downgrade.

Not one email was remotely interesting, informative or otherwise noticeable. They were merely stalkers. Chasing me. Following me.

Not givers. Takers. Urging me to engage the way a drug pusher might.

Wednesday night, I had a facetime call with my elder daughter, S, and my two-year-old grandson, J. Facetime is a marvelous thing. It doesn't equal in-person contact, but it beats dipping my quill pen in an ink pot and writing a letter.

J, like many two-year-old boys, is heavily into cars. He can identify many different sorts of vehicles and every construction vehicle this side of a major government infrastructure boondoggle project. 

While we were speaking, J showed me various diggers and pushers and lifters and was thrilled by them all.

While J and I were talking, I remembered an old r&b song called "Cement Mixer" by the great and today unknown, Slim Gaillard. I quickly found six-minutes of Slim performing the number from a 1962 appearance on the old Steve Allen Show.

For whatever reason the YouTube downloader I usually use to remove a clip from YouTube to my hard-drive won't let me download this clip of Slim. But you really owe it to yourself to take the time to watch it. Maybe more than once.

In fact, if god forbid, I still worked with the creaking edifice of some decrepit holding company agency (count the redundancies in that single sentence) I think I'd make the video required watching.

Because Slim Gaillard is creative.

Creative.

He does what everyone else does. But makes it unique. Ownable. His.

You've seen a thousand people play keyboard before. You've never seen anyone play like Gaillard. 

Never.

Gaillard is the pithy core of what creativity and creatives are supposed to be.

Original. Funny. Unexpected. Spontaneous. Irreverent. Joyous.

Every agency in the world every three months wins a "Best Place to Work" Award as paid for and pronounced by some website you've never heard of and never read. Not a single one of them has any elements of any of the adjectives I used above.

Think about Gaillard when you check your email today and when you see 47 different subject lines from 47 different companies that read, "Spooktacular Savings," or "Our $49.99 Triple Play is all Treats, No Tricks!!!"

All the originality of asphalt in a pothole.

BTW, the world in real life wasn't big enough for Slim Gaillard. He couldn't in fact be constrained by the limits of the English Language. So he invented his own language. And as much as I love the magic of the English language, Gaillard improved it.

If you look hard enough online, you can find his Vout-o-Reenee Dictionary. You can find your own copy. You'll never use English the same way again.

A Guest Post from an Ex-Marine.

Some weeks ago, I got a message on LinkedIn from a connection I don't really know, though we've been "linked" for over five years and we, apparently, worked at Ogilvy during the same time.

Brett Jones.

Brett asked if he could write a guest post in this space. A lot of people ask--and I almost always say yes. Partly because most people intend to write and then lethargy-out when they realize it's hard.

Brett, however, sent me this and I was sold.

Like 97-percent of the cognitive world, I love a good origin story, and Brett's seem interesting and off the beaten bivouac. In just a few days, Brett was back in my mailbox with the post below. It's good.

Read it, Maggot.

Fire and Maneuver: 

Becoming a Caddy and Rediscovering the Art of Client Service

By Brett Jones, a MadMan/Caddy for hire

Growing up I watched my father do very well for himself working in advertising. As a rebellious teenaged youth I wanted no part of corporate America but after some reflection I decided to follow in his footsteps, both into the United States Marine Corps and then into Advertising. After swinging with the Air Wing for almost 5 years I spent the better part of a decade working at places like McCann and Ogilvy learning the ins and outs of client service. 

I’ve met a lot of smart people and studied the art of client service next to some of the best in the business. I take notes from great account leaders like Adam Tucker who says, “Clients don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” and creative leaders like George Tannenbaum who has 15 great pearls of wisdom on how to be a good account person like number three, “Be curious. Question everything and everyone. Get out of the office and look around. Learn from others.” 

I’m constantly on the lookout for how to transfer knowledge from one domain to another. See my book, “Shock and Awe, RECRUIT! (or how I learned the fundamentals of advertising in Marine Corps Basic Training) for more on that front. Advertising has a lot of similarities to the military, filled with challenging campaigns, exciting projects or missions, and glimpse of top brass like the Secretary of the Navy or the occasional A-list celebrity. 

It’s not all ponies and rainbows though. Life threw me and my family a curveball when I was laid off from Comcast in March of last year. It felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. I had never been laid off before. I knew I could bounce back. 

I had already done a stint as an entrepreneur when I helped an A-lister launch a global lifestyle brand just before COVID broke. After going through the turmoil of being a business owner and living through COVID with two young kids my wife and I both agreed a steady W-2 for my next gig was the right path. So I hit the job boards and applied to scores of agency account gigs and marketing roles on the ‘client side.’ I got a few looks from HR and even a handful of first and second round interviews, but no offers were coming. 

It seemed the entrepreneurial path beckoned once again. I launched my own agency last summer when I met a prospective client sitting across the aisle on a plane back from a family reunion in Utah. Semper Ads came about later that week and before I knew it I was sitting in rooms with futurists and AI luminaries by helping promote the NYU Intellibus AI Masterclass and filming content for an AI initiative concerning World Digital Governance.

From there I built out a client base and have been helping with building websites, helping with SEO, and developing go-to-market strategies whenever the opportunity comes up. The work is rewarding, but also stressful. Running your own business, you quickly learn it’s a feast-or-famine lifestyle. Some months are amazing; others leave you wondering if you’re in the right game. That’s when I realized I needed another stream of income to steady the ship.

Enter caddying, a gig where you carry a golfer's clubs, read their putts, and polish their balls. 

Yeah, I became a caddy—a move I never would have imagined for myself back when I was leading big advertising campaigns. At first glance, it might seem like a drastic step down. But trust me, the job’s not just about lugging clubs and cleaning balls for a tip. It’s about reading the course, analyzing the situation, and giving real-time guidance—skills I honed in the Marines and in the world of client-service. 

Just like in advertising, being a caddy is all about strategy and support. You’re there to make the client (or golfer) look good, help them achieve their goals, and manage expectations. There’s a lot of prep work involved. Before a round, I study the course, think through the conditions of the day, and figure out where the traps are. Just like pitching a campaign, you’ve got to know the landscape before you offer guidance. On the green, when reading a putt, I have to size up the terrain, think about the speed, and give my golfer the best advice I can. And it’s not always perfect, but it’s my job to help them navigate and improve their game, just like it was my job to help clients improve their business.

Yes, Indeed. I'm Walking.

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is more than just me. GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is also the books I read and the thinking, the information, the ideas and the inspiration I get from them.

The single TV in my small assemblage of sticks and bricks on the Gingham Coast has more and more fallen out of use. I rarely watch anything--since anything I watch seems increasingly insulting or barbarous or just plain dumb. 

Though many people tell me about this series or that, and though the men I meet with in the evenings so our dogs can play tell me about slow horses and fast women, I've never watched a single minute of Netflix, or Hulu, or Paramount, or Apple TV. It's all too much work for me and I have too little time.

I find the world of reading much richer.  

(BTW, when I bring up what's been called "the greatest narrative film ever made, Werner Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz," I get nothing but blank looks back. I'll watch what I like. You do the same. And please don't judge me.)

I've always been a reader, but Owen, my wise therapist of almost half-a-century has pushed me deeper into the literary abyss. He started calling my nightly two hours of reading "My restorative niche." I like that, and I hold both the place and the practice as sacrosanct. That is, I scarcely ever miss an evening.

To friends, I call my reading "spending an hour or two with a genius." And even when I read books that are over my head--about one-book-in-three baffles me, I gain value from the very act of reading. 

The other day while on vacation, I stumbled on a neat little bit of Latin, "Solvitur Ambulando." It means, simply, "it is solved by walking," and the fifty or so miles a week I walk along the Connecticut coast, either with Sparks, my one-year-old golden retriever, or solo, help me immensely.

Over the past week, I've gotten a dozen inscrutable emails from a new client. They remind me a bit of notes smuggled out of solitary confinement, written in a minuscule hand on the tiniest scraps of paper. 

To be blunt, I can barely make sense of what my client is trying to say other than, "I need you, George."

I think a lot of people in advertising spend their entire careers not feeling needed by clients. It's a pretty potent feeling when it happens. And it's a lot of pressure.

Remember when agencies were needed? When they were vital to success--which was their purpose, not what it's been replaced by, "always-on content."

My account director, H, was cavalier about these notes. "You'll figure them out, G," she blithed. "You always do."

But, as I also always do, I had my doubts. 

So I threw on an old pair of sneakers, left Sparks sleeping on an expensive sofa, and went out for my second seaside walk of the morning. 

Within the first hundred yards, I started thinking about the old "Supply and Demand" graphs I studied in Econ 101 in that great old textbook I learnt from in the early 1970s. What if, I asked myself, I told their story how Stephen Rattner, the thief and founder of the Quadrangle Group, tells stories in "The New York Times"? What if I told my client's story--their purpose, their solution, their value, not in prose, but in charts?

--

I wondered as I wandered, and before another hundred yards went by, I had drawn in my head two more charts. By the end of half a mile I had an idea, a title, a headline, and five more charts.

When I got home after my 2.2 miles I went right to my office which is girded with books. I found the economics textbook I was looking for. Written by Princetonians Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. 

 

Then I sat down in my second favorite seat and typed out my headlines and the twelve charts I derived while I was out walking.

 

When I was finished, before the pixels were even dry, I sent my document to H. Among H's many talents is her machete-cutdowns of bullshit and ability to take a blowtorch to confusion. Within minutes, H sent me this:

Sometimes the most-important help you can get from a work colleague is a small affirmation that you're not off your rocker. That an idea--even a wisp of one--is worth pursuing, even if it's a little strange.

I suppose there's a lot in this post for a Friday post where I usually try to layoff the deep-dish stuff because I'm tired and my readers are, too. But this all really happened. Just now. Just as I wrote it here.

And that's that.

 

Besides, I'm too tired to go out for another walk.

 

 

Math. Not New.

Years ago I was the co-head of a mediocre independent agency that had a financially-savvy CEO. He was there to gin things up in preparation of selling the agency to one of (it didn't matter which one) the giant advertising holding companies. When I worked there, the place was valued at one-billion dollars. The CEO was hoping to get it to five-billion bucks so he and the other shareholders would be so rich they never again had to pay taxes.

Around that time, or a few moons later, the world was wholesale switching from Blackberries to iPhones. Talk of a game called Angry Birds was dominating my social feeds. There would be ten, twenty, fifty LinkedIn posts a day, "Lessons You Can Learn About Customer Relationship Management from Angry Birds." Or "What Angry Birds (and my teenager) Taught Me About Business Continuity." Hollywood, never one to miss an intelligence-insulting trend made an Angry Birds movie. 

One day, if my memory isn't playing tricks on me, I read two different articles in whatever paper I was reading. 

Rovio, the parent company behind Angry Birds, one article said, had a market cap of $70 billion. (Again, if my memory is right.) While the New York Times, another article said, had a market cap of just $2 billion.

Even if my Rovio numbers are off by a magnitude of 10 and Rovio peaked at a $7B cap, I wondered. How can Angry Birds be worth between 350% and 3,500% of what's arguably the world's most-important newspaper, a paper read by millions of political and business leaders and high net worth people?

It seems to me two things are coming into play here, neither of them good. 

One: We're confusing momentary attention and intrinsic value. One is like a smack across the cheek. The other is a deep, long-lasting effect. One is a bruise. They other is trauma. 

Many in the ad industry are doing the same. They're creating some sensation (usually propagated via unpaid channels) of brief notoriety. While neglecting the more valuable, and more difficult long, tedious slog of brand-building.

The latest Burger King bushwa is a great example of this. As far as I know, their same store sales have been down year over year decade after decade. They've burnt through agencies like trump burns through cranial merkins. For many people, the brand has fallen into complete irrelevance and it's dropped off people's consideration list. 

Pay no attention to that.

Look! A new mother eating a burger. 

Two: As a culture and an industry, we've become card-carrying believers--adherents, even--of the Greater Fool Theory. As long as someone will buy something, it's worth selling it, no matter the long-term effects of the something you're offering. In so many ways, the Greater Fool Theory is peak "something for nothing-ism." Peak short-term thinking.

Ginning up a company's share price to profit from a sale or doing fake ads and getting a gullible company to buy them for the buzz they'll get are two faces of the same coin.

Neither helps bolster or create enduring value.

They're both packaging. 

Wrapping shit in gold leaf and hoping you're out of town by the time the buyer is hit with the stench.

More and more of what I see in our industry is like a politician's promise of a tax break. It might win some votes. 

While bankrupting all of us.