The Carve Up.

Carve up today has nothing to do with your Thanksgiving turkey.

It's about history.

And how if you read history, you can learn a lot about the present.

That's the reason to learn history.

None of that Santayana bushwa, just common-sense.

While a lot of industry doyens send me their books on marketing--they usually want a blurb, and I'm happy to help--I don't read marketing books to learn about marketing.

I read books about the world to learn about the world.

I apply what I learn to marketing.

Ever since the beginning of time--or at least since about 12,000 years ago when many humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to agriculture and urban settlements, humans have claimed different territories.

They've moved into lands that weren't 'theirs.'

And via superior strategy, tactics, technologies or numbers they took that land as their own. 

Along the way they enslaved and looted.

And made themselves richer.

That's what humans do.

The Mongols, because of the stirrup, were steadier on their horses. That technology gave them an edge. They conquered and ruled the largest empire ever.

It's been estimated that today, one-in-two hundred men have the C3* cluster of genes. That is they are related, somehow, to the Mongols.

The Parthians or Achaemenids or the Sassanians or Persians did more than a little carving up too. If you ever heard the phrase "parting shot," it was originally "Parthian shot." The Parthians were such skilled fighters that could gallop north while shooting south. From such skills, empires are carved.

One of the issues with empires (and with not reading history) is that people assume the national or even the corporate divisions we're used to were ever thus. When they break down or collapse, we think that that signifies the end of the world, not the normal entropy of world events.

Here are a few historical snapshots of what today we call the Middle East.

Below, in color, is the Middle East most of us grew up with.

So we thought it was "right." Natural somehow.

It wasn't. Isn't.

It was a carve up designed by two men, Sykes and Picot.

And it never made much sense.

Today, there is so much tumult in the region, the current map might look like this:

Or like this.

With conflicts exploding everywhere all the time.

The essential point here is simple. And one you won't find in marketing books.

Carve-ups are ongoing.

And flux is ongoing.

Whether it's Coke versus Pepsi, Omnicom versus Publicis, or Blue versus Red. Assuming one's "right" to a certain domain as ordained or god-given is as dopey as expecting truth from a press-release or an agency 'town-hall.'

Right now, there's another world carve-up unfolding before our very eyes.

We don't even realize it's happening.

We don't even realize it's not artificial.

We don't even realize it ain't natural.

Four or five men, or ten or twelve men are carving up the world.

They're saying this belongs to me.

They're saying you belong to me.

They're saying you will make me richer.

They're saying you will accept my reality.

That's what the nazis did.

The romans.

The soviets.

The aforementioned mongols, parthians and more.

These companies have carved up your brain.

Your shopping habits.

Your contact with the outside world.

They've staked their claim to you.

Via a complicit press and corporate-enablers they tell you they're hegemons, and unassailable, about seventy-seven times a minute.

They pretend they're ordained and inevitable.

And that they'll last forever.

Ozymandias.

Ozymandias is a reminder.

I urge you to make either of these your ring tone.

I prefer the Gielgud over the Cranston.

But I'm old as basalt.

No, older.

Part the Eighth of Twelve.

Back during my first stint at Ogilvy, basically before I knew which of the urinals in the men's room didn't squirt water when you flushed it, I was dragooned by then president Steve Hayden to rescue a dot com account that had been all-but "cooled" to death.

1999 was a more naive era. Many people, especially ad people, believed you could shoot gerbils out of a cannon in a commercial on national TV, and that would get you a billion-dollar valuation. 

Today, we are so much wiser, richer and more experienced. Now, all you have to do to win a trillion dollar valuation is lose $80,000,000,000 in half a year. Then, you can cash in like the founders of anthropic or some other 'I'm-not-sure-what-they-do-or-why-it-matters.'

In any event, I was grabbed by Hayden and locked in my nearly-padded office writing scripts twelve hours a day for a weekend for a now defunct dot com, which was riding high at the time, called PeoplePC.

(I still have 6000 shares of their stock. Which is worth as much as a tranche of hegseth-futures.)

The next thing I knew, I had sold a package of scripts and was sitting in a white van with Hayden and my art-director Susan Westre (whom at that point I had never even met) at 7AM one cold morning on our way to location in a small town called Bridge Mix, New Jersey.

I had nothing to do with the previous round of commercials, but you can be sure they followed the universal strategy that every creative team and agency has followed for about the last thirty years. We don't have to tell people what a product does, what makes it different, why someone might need it, we only have to tell people it's cool. This spot below has, since last century, been the universal default commercial for every product--no matter what it does or who the potential target is.

In any event we were out in Jersey shooting a bunch of spots and the dweeb of a client approached Steve Hayden. He was happy with how the shoot was going and happy with the spots.

"It looks like we have a hit on our hands," he blow-harded.

Steve nodded as if he had been listening.

The client continued, "Too bad the first round was such a disaster."

Steve took a step back and, quietly, said "If the first round hadn't been a disaster, we wouldn't be here."

That's the sort of thing you remember for thirty years. And think about every thirty minutes for thirty years.

Which brings me to the point of the eighth of my Humanments: Thou Shalt Get Lost.

Not get lost as I so often hear it, as "go fug yourself," but get lost as in take a risk. Meander. Let your mind wander. Take the longest distance between two points. Think different and differently.

You can read about the institutionalized lack of getting lost in today's world in a dense book I'd recommend called, "Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation," by Bryne Hobart and Tobias Huber. 

You can buy it here, buy a machete here to cut your way through it, and read The Wall Street Journal review here. 

Boom is the kind of book, BTW, that people in agencies used to read when agencies existed to direct and steward clients' business, not just execute generic commoditized advertising. It's a brand-leadership book--not a mere marketing book. If people running agencies and holding companies still read, I'd call it a "must read." As it stands today and the fact that there's no influencer involved in it, it's a "must ignore." (That is, something not fed to you and everyone else by the reign of 'one algorithm fits all.')

The thesis of "Boom" is simple. 

In other words, all the agile-firsting, AI-tool-enabled, utilization-optimizing, six-sigma-black-belting, timesheet haranguing, briefing-by-eleven-first-tissue-by-three-ing, sprinting, brain-storming, efficiency-shibbolething, horse-hockeying nonsense is just that, nonsense.

More great work was done by people throwing pencils at the ceiling and kibbitz-thinking than all the algorithmic bushwa that the trillion-dollar-valuation sham-companies are spending trillions on forcing us to believe.

Why would anyone buy 'creative' from a company

that puts their name on something like this?

A. Says who?
B. I dunno, 'Think Different,' and 'Just Do It' are decades old and still relevant.
Not to mention Shakesepeare or the Bible. 
C. How has A.I. helped anyone in real-life?

I'd rather have six people from my personal ad group-chat take two hours and solve a brand issue than have AI do it. What's more, it would be funnier, more memorable, faster and cheaper. And we'd eat better, too. Pass the lo mein.

More and more we are following orders--the protocols edicted by McKinsey-inspired holding-company technocrats--telling us how to do things that they've never done and never will.

I'd rather get lost.

Good and lost.

And then come back with something I may get fired for.

Hopefully something that doesn't test well.

As opposed to that Miracle Whip spot. 

Which tested well above Norms.

Norm. Singular.

 

Part the Seventh, of Twelve.

In my subterranean office I have about a dozen replicas of notebooks of famous thinkers from years past.

A small publisher in Barcelona, Knonecker Wallis, publishes reprints some of these notebooks and charges handsomely for them. In about a year, they go out of print, and I wish I had bought two copies.

Here are a few pages and the cover from Isaac Newton's college notebooks. You can browse them on this site from Cambridge University. 

I can't say I understand anything here but that doesn't matter. They show the flow of ideas, the cross-outs, the hard-work of actual thought. All that is marked down so it can be thought about, remembered, re-worked like a tough Saturday crossword. That's the point.

Thinking.

Here are a few other examples.

Just like in real-life the Turing one is clipped together with the kind of clips I last used in seventh grade. They didn't work for Turing. They didn't work for twelve-year-old me, they don't work any better now. Open the Turing a few pages and the things breaks apart.

That's part of its charm.

Johnnie von Neumann was the genius who intimidated all the other geniuses. By the age of six he could divide eight-digit numbers in his head. By eight he had mastered calculus. He even knew the word dumb had a b in it.

This is von Neumann's blueprint for an early computer.

I like note books like these--and I have half a dozen more--because while I don't understand what's being deciphered in them, it helps me to see the very act of deciphering.

Too many people, especially those who grew up with sophisticated digital tools like those we use so readily today, think work springs fully formed like Athena from Zeus' head. 

They start designing and 'word smithing' before they have the vaguest idea down. They refuse to acknowledge that many of the greatest discoveries of human-kind--from the very beginnings of human-kind--radiated from the simple human act of making a mistake, taking a wrong turn, talking your way out of a jam, or getting lost.

From an evolutionary point of view, finding yourself in a fix has always lead to ingenuity, risk taking, rolling the dice and finding something magical.

As Ogden Nash wrote...

In other words, the termite got where she got by mistake. Most living things do.

The Shibboleths of our era prize speed and efficiency. They'll put up with a Library of Congress' -worth of AI slop from a NASA's-worth of computer brains so long as it's fast and cheap and meaningless, and for the most part, insulting. 99.78-percent of everything we read and heard uttered, regardless of the medium or the speaker, is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." 99.78-percent of what we read today makes the Gilligan's Island Christmas Special look like "Hamlet."

There's no guarantee that pencil and pad will reduce the amount of crap in the world. I'd guess Bulwer-Lytton wrote this archetypical drivel with pen in hand. So hand-work is not guarantor of quality.

Robert Caro, two-time winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer-Prize, told a story about slowing down his writing. While at Princeton, he would wait till the last moment to write for his fiction class.

Though Caro always got A's, his professor R.P. Blackmur, encouraged Caro to slow down.

Writing, drawing, doodling by hand forced Caro to slow down--to not think with his fingers.

When Caro interviews people, he follows similar "slow down" guidance. 

Much of the decline of nearly everything is because we have so much to do we believe nothing is worth our time. 

The truth is, however, whether or not people know for sure whether the messages you or brands send to them are made by humans or machines, they may very well sense how they are being treated.

Very few people are gulled by a dirty carpet at 
an understaffed hotel front desk that says "elite" on it.

Most people, most creatives, most agencies, most of the world are treated like a pothole on the way to enormous profits. Caring, craft, time, pencilling get in the way of ever-more Mammon.

I remember years ago a story I read about Bill Bernbach. It's said a client said to him, "Why do you spend so much time on copy? Nobody reads it."

Bernbach is said to have answered, "Ten percent of people read copy. That's who I write it for."

The best way to be a human is to care about other humans who care.

                            Photos by Christopher Payne.

Part the Sixth, of Twelve.

Last week, I was sent two decks by two different agencies. One was twelve pages long. The other was fifty-five pages long.

In each case I would have been better off with a single sentence type-written on a page, preferably in Courier, with no codicils or subordinate clauses, or even commas.

Recently I did fourteen days of day-rate for a giant agency recently subsumed by an even gianter agency. Part One of their brief was forty-one pages. Part Two was eighty-one pages.

Semiotically, this is the world today.

We have so much to tell people to do, we have no time to listen, or think, or even discuss.

If a brief is a set of instructions, 

simply,

a set of instructions shouldn't be more than a few dozen words.  Maybe, at most, six or twelve steps.

I'm not one-hundred percent sure why briefs can't be as simple as recipes. Even a recipe by an old-school chef/writer like Craig Claiborne. When cooking was an all-day affair, not a sixty-minute sprint.

Whenever I meet with a client, especially a new client, I am wary when they schedule a thirty-minute meeting.

Very often a thirty-minute meeting means they expect nothing but them giving you orders. Thirty-minutes is not really enough time to question something you don't understand, share a joke, much less have a discussion. Semiotically, a thirty-minute meeting says, "You must do this. End of meeting." It's basically, I'll talk, I'll order, you'll do.

Also, it's ostrich-y. A thirty-minute brief ignores the fact that most often people are two minutes late and have to leave three minutes early. Thirty minute meetings rarely have more than twenty-five minutes of meaning. There is usually at least five minutes of fonfer.

Another example of this sort of talking-not-listening semiotic malfeasance is the "no reply" email or text message. Basically, those mean: do this and shut up. Take it or leave it. But no push-back or questions are permitted.

In so many cases, in work, in life and in our world, listening has been removed from the human equation. As Fran Lebowitz once is said to have said, "the opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting."

What's more, the famous I'm not really listening dodge, aka "I'll get back to you," is more and more widespread. No one ever gets back to you ever. If they do, they didn't understand the question you asked (because they weren't listening) and more than likely their answer raises more questions which you can't get answered.

Humanments are things people should do to act like decent humans. That is, accord people with honor, respect, equality. Listening--like a close read in literature--accords people that respect.

Instead we live in a TL,DR world.

That's both Too Long, Didn't Read

and Tain't Listening, Disrespect Rules.

If you care about your fellow humans listen. Think. Listen. Think. Listen. Speak. Listen.

Can you imagine if this were posted within an agency. Or if a deck started with this as a slide?