Customer Journeys, Odysseus and Intoxication

I haven't yet seen Christopher Nolan's new movie rendition of the Odyssey, so I don't know when or if the island of the Lotus-Eaters made the final cut, or if, because falling asleep and being afflicted with ennui ain't necessarily cinematic, it wound up on the rosy-fingered cutting-room floor.

Even when you read the Odyssey, and I've read it two dozen times or more (counting reading kids' versions to my daughters when they were knee-high to a Cyclops) the Lotus-Eaters don't make much of an impression. If the adventures of the Odyssey were a football game, the island of the Lotus-Eaters would be as inconsequential as a huddle.

Lotus-Eating anyone?

Nevertheless, I often feel like much of the ad industry has checked onto the island and never checked out. By that I mean much of the industry is drunk and like those on the island of the Lotus-Eaters don't realize--not a bit--how lost at sea they are. In addition to eating Lotus, humankind has been intoxicating itself since about the time we decided to do that bipedal thang. Fermented beverages have been all the rage since probably before fire, and chewing leave like the coca or the eucalyptus was no rare affectation. 

Most of humanity has been high for most of humanity.

My point is, the more you look at the world, the more you realize it's been shaved by a drunken barber. If 'he' has the whole world in his hands, chances are is hands are attached to a body that's three, four or fourteen sheets to the wind.

Without naming names or mentioning holding companies (this is a family blog, after all) not too long ago, I was given a brief in the form of a 72-page deck that had in it a "customer journey" that looked like this. I think they too must be drunk on Lotus or wine of their own incestuous ferment:

I've often said that the definition of a customer journey is a journey no customer has ever been on. Just as I've often said that every content strategy is essentially the same, 'make more content.' But outside of the island of the Lotus-Eaters, I cannot imagine a reality where anything anywhere is nearly as orderly and sequential as this folderol.

I think the same people who draw powerpoint like this also design IKEA instructions. They make sense in a perfect universe that exists nowhere but a conference room that doesn't exist anywhere.

However as denizens of the island of Lotus-Eaters, we're all obeisant to flow charts like the one I scribbled above.

There's a reason design like this has adorned buildings practically since buildings were built. They're there to remind us that straight lines are a chimera.

Now, back to Homer's Odyssey.

The reason smart people read things that are more than a news item-or a tweet -old, is simple. Things that have lasted have perspective. They've seen things and experienced things you might have been too caught up in to notice. That allows literature or history to give us a perspective we wouldn't otherwise have. Like mike tyson is said to have said, 'everyone has a strategy until they get punched in the schnozz.'

If you're in the middle of fighting a battle, it's hard to consider precedent. It's hard to maneuver. You're too busy staying alive. Life and literature can give you intelligence and proportion that the frenzy and danger of actual living wrest from you.

We forget about Bernbach's simple, timeless, human truths because we're too busy making page 109 of our powerpoint beautiful and the meeting's tomorrow and there are 88 comments from 23 account people, planners, and CCOs that haven't been addressed.

So we pretend there are straight-lines in customer journeys. We Lotus-Eat ourselves into believing in clockwork causality when ever since the Big Bang we've been entropying our way through Heidegger's "thrown-ness" universe.

Dr. Heidegger.

And BTW, in case you're wondering what a journey looks like, here's a map of Odysseus', simplified and with the real terrors of life and man eating monsters removed. 

This is what customer journeys look like. Marketers 3,000 years ago knew more than we know today. Even if the "home sweet home" bit is over-sell.

A real 'customer journey.'

Some more, just to beat a Trojan horse:

Indian Spice Journeys.

All this for a tie.

Ca

Captain James Cook's three voyages.

I just wanted to type Frontenac.





I can see my house from here.

Happy Exploitation Day. (A repost.)

(Today is an amerikkkan holiday called Labor Day.  And this is a Labor Day repost. Most of the numbers below have gotten worse. The trend is still the same.)

To my readers outside of the be-nighted states of amerika, today is Labor Day in amerika. We celebrate Labor Day in September in this nation to remove from a day celebrating workers any possible association with May 1st, or May Day, or International Workers Day, which to the recidivists in the be-nighted states has an association with Communism or Socialism, or equally rancid in the eyes of so many powerful amerikans, any semblance of workers' rights.

Over the last fifteen years or so as the giant advertising agencies and holding companies have massively consolidated and, along the way, shed tens of billions of dollars in market value, many in our industry and its periphery have assigned blame for the industry's collapse to a variety of forces, as if those forces, and not their behavior is responsible for that sucking sound.

Divestiture of media is blamed, as is media's fragmentation. AI is blamed, as are FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) and lately, MANGO (Meta, Apple, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI.) Or even MANGOT (all of the above, plus tesler.)

Others cite silly ideas like "the big idea is dead," or today "people are post-consumer."

The point no one seems to bring up is the pillaging of the advertising industry by the very people who are meant to be running the advertising industry, nominally protecting and promoting the industry.

CEO pay in all of industry is out of whack in relation to that of typical workers. The ratio was about 20:1 when I was a teenager. If a worker made $10,000, his boss made $200,000. Now it's almost 350:1. If a worker makes $100,000, his boss makes $35,000,000.

No one points out, for instance, that Mark Read's compensation has increased as the holding company he used as his personal ATM decreased in value from roughly $31Billion to $5.5Billion, an almost 84-percent decrease in value in just a decade.

4 Sep 2026

What Read and his ilk have done is increase their pay vis a vis their workers while decimating the number of workers (the people actually doing the work clients nominally pay for) and therefore the market cap of the companies they're supposed to be running. They're selling the milk from the cow while they're selling off the meat. Cindy Rose, WPP's new CEO (though a WPP board member for a dozen years) has slowed the shrink and has been eight-figures rewarded for that. She's done that in large measure by firing five-figures of workers.

Imagine if you did this to your family. 
Fired people and shrank.

In sports, if the owners sold all the best players, saw the team get worse season after season, and saw attendance and broadcast revenues plummet accordingly, sooner or later, people would blame the greed of ownership for destroying that which yesterday was strong.

Somehow in advertising, we blame exogenous conditions and excuse the malfeasance and bad faith of management. I'd betcha, for instance, Read will be paid by WPP for the next 25 years. Martin Sorrell, Read disgraced predecessor after all, is still being paid by that company.

And as anyone who's watching knows, Mark Read is no Bobby Bonilla.

He's worse.

Or as Eugene O'Neill wrote in "The Emperor Jones," “They's two kind's of stealing. They's the small kind, like what you does, and the big kind, like I does. Fo' de small stealing dey put you in jail soon or late. But fo' de big stealin' dey puts your picture in de paper and yo' statue in de Hall of Fame when you croak."

 

Columns.

I only ever took one writing class in my life, and that one was only sixty minutes long, and I was fifteen at the time. Nevertheless, my teacher, Mr. Bockius, a mad-man with patched elbows taught me something I think about with some regularity. It especially pertains to when you feel stuck. Or when you need to hone in on something.

Mr. Bockius taught me to fold a piece of looseleaf paper in half the long-way, leaving you with two roughly ten-inch columns. On the top of the left-hand column, write "I LOVE." On top of the right-hand column, write "I HATE."

Then, with your topic in full frontal-lobe fury, let your pen go to work.

You'll find yourself moving pretty quickly down the columns. You'll find yourself thinking faster than you can write. You'll find yourself actually thinking. Thinking about whatever it is you love or hate and why, and best, how sometimes those two antipodes actually over-lap.

If you do this exercise--even if you just do it in your head--about the things you like to read, watch or listen to, it's a pretty easy exercise.

Here's one I just did in medias res, so to speak, while writing this post.

There's nothing profound about my list, or even especially individual. I think for the most part most people would agree with most of what I scribbled.

But here's the thing that gets me.

Think about the things you voluntarily watch on TV, or youtube, or the things you read, or listen to, podcasts, music, the original cast album of Cats.

Then think about the things you're forced to watch. TV commercials. HR compliance videos. 'Explainers.' Gas-Station TV commercials. In-flight spots featuring bonus miles.

It seems to me the modern world treats people in a 'mis-treating' way. If you consider how creative assignments start and then what gets on the air, most of them start with some adherence to my 'LOVE' column, and wind up resembling almost-wholly my 'HATE' column.

In fact, I'd argue that the "process" we're supposed to trust involves the expeditious turning of the things we love into almost everything we hate.

I think it goes something like this. With the YES, BUT column essentially the process column.

My experience, which is not inconsiderable, tells me that the more people involved in a process, the more process becomes the very point of the process. 

What do I love is processed into O O O Ozempic.

Or someone sitting on a logo and smarming.

Or kids having a veritable conniption because they're out of Tontonno's pizza rolls. 

Or 'soccer moms' saying 'my Buick got me here.'

Counting places I've done time as a freelancer, I've likely worked at about 50 agencies. They all essentially have these three columns. And each column has a slider beneath it.

Good agencies are 80:10:10

Bad agencies are 10:50:40

This post. 10:90.

Today's Todayisms.

At Jewell Ridge you got paid in scrip.
Company issued-money good only in company stores.

Early Monday morning while most everyone else in my time zone was hitting their snooze button for the eleventh or ninth time, I popped out of bed and got an earlier-than-usual start to my day. Since L, my wife, and I spend about 82-percent of our time up here on the Gingham Coast, it's been decided that it's high-time to find doctors up here. The idea of taking Amtrak to a doctor if you're sick, is like taking strychnine to counteract the affects of arsenic.

We decided to start small--not with a cardiologist or even a orthopedist, but with something resolutely non-life-threatening, or life-saving or life-lengthening, our dentist.

A neighbor and retired doctor recommended someone in town and we decided to overbite the bullet. Our New York dentist had sold his practice to Private Equity sharpies and each visit came with an incomplete check-up but a complete fleecing. 

"You mouth looks good. But you really should have rust-proofing."

"Rust-proofing?"

"Yes, your mouth needs it, just like your car."

Or, 

"Open wide."

"Ahhhh."

"I meant your wallet."

That's health-care today. The only health improved is that of the MBAs who have bought the practice.

In any event, I was up at the crack of crack because I decided to walk the three miles to the dentist's office. I walk three miles every day, anyway. I figured I might as well kill two fillings with one bicuspid.

There's so much in the world that makes concessions for other people's feeling as long as those other people are in "acceptable groups," of which I am not a member. Everybody matters except you. That is today's today-ism. 

They matter, you get battered.

Now, back to my new dentist.

I walked into his office and the 1970s equivalent of the Ray Conniff singers were playing, loudly, over the speakers. In every room. 

I didn't much like processed cheese-food music when it was original. The Eagles, Seals & Crofts, America. I like it even much less now that it's fifty years older, played in dentist's offices and played at about twice the decibels it should be played at.

Just like we undervalue things that used to be givens, like freshly-made rye bread with caraway seeds, or people actually stopping at stop signs, or teaching basic civics in school, or the golden rule, most of all, cosmologically, we undervalue quiet. Quiet is a gift and we decided to return it.

I wonder if now that private equity owns every medical office in amerikkka, and probably every song ever recorded, if they bill the offices they own for the music they play. I wonder if my bill, which is three-times higher after private equity takes over than it was before will also soon include line items like these....

Diamond Girl.........Seals and Crofts.......................17¢

Billy (Don't Be a Hero)....Paper Lace......................12¢

Muskrat Love ....Capt. & Tennille............................24¢

As Ogden might have gnashed:

If I ever see a single muskrat
I'll hit it with a baseball bat.
I'll knock its head to smithereens,
And splatter blood on my blue jeans.

Everywhere you go today something is forced on you. When you freelance for a giant holding company, you'll spend more time working to put your work in their "shared drive" than you will actually working. 

It's called a shared drive because it's proof they own a large share of your pupik.

And as for getting into their "system," that's a good three hours of your life, 21 signatures, 19 initials and retyping your address at least nine times. Even if you worked for that holding company just six months earlier. I just found out now, they are forcing me to buy insurance I don't want and will never use. It's like Delta airlines charging me to use a seat-belt while in the airport men's room.

Eighty-one years ago there was a Supreme Court ruling in a case called Jewell Ridge Coal Corp. v Mine Workers 325 US 161. At that time, the Supreme Court interpreted the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to require compensation for time coal miners spent traveling underground from the mine portal to their working faces and returning.

In other words, if it took you an hour to get down the pit to start digging coal and an hour to get back to the surface, you had to be paid for that time.

Radical.

The coal company claimed "travel times averaged 30-60 minutes per shift, compliance would have raised labor costs by 15-25% without corresponding productivity gains, exacerbating postwar economic pressures and contributing to labor unrest."

For now, no one's charging me for bad music. And nominally, I'm filling out the hours of forms on the holding company's time--I'm being paid for the excruciation, even if it means actual work excruciation will go further into the night..

But so far it's on their dime.

I fully expect this all to change.

That moral arc of the universe that bends toward justice? 

That was written before private equity and holding companies took over.

Now the moral arc doesn't bend anywhere.

It just says, "bend over."

Language and Genocide.

Just now, I noticed something in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times about the Metropolitan Museum in New York canceling its John Galliano-heralding fashion-gala.

There's so much wrong with this. 

First, is the word controversial.

Something is only controversial if both sides have a legitimate point of view, if you can argue for and against. 

You can't call slavery controversial. 

Or wife beating.

Or church-bombing.

They're wrong. Period.

Not controversial.

When a person says something like the statement below and is then 'feted,' that isn't controversial. That's just evil.

Not controversial.

Or, if you need a mini-latke's more evidence:

More?

I can't imagine a similar-level slur directed at any other minority on earth not invalidating the speaker completely. If you said, "I love Bull Conner and Governor Bilbo. You would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers would be f–king lynched and f–king dead.”

That's a translation of what Galliano said re Hitler and Jews. It's not controversial, it doesn't deserve "backlash," it can't be excused by "repentance." 

Flat out when it's against Jews, it's permissible hate.

And I can't think of any other people who are so consistently and acceptably hated.

Don't get me started on the holding-company-wide expulsion of jews which started in the late twenty-tens. "Diversity" became the holding company HR shibboleth, but excluded Jews. Though Jews are just .2-percent of the world's population (two out of every thousand people) they are not regarded as "diverse," or a minority. I have no data to back this up, but I'd imagine in New York agencies, Jewish representation has probably been halved in the last twenty years. Jews were categorized as "old white men," and final-solutionized.

I think race-hate isn’t controversial.

Unless it’s Jew hate.

In today's world, Jew hate is debatable, an open-discussion, controversial.

It's ok, if you were drunk. Or misunderstood. Or you misspoke.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal, a paper with what I regard as the world's-best book section, published this review of a book by the great Dara Horn.

Ms. Horn also wrote this book. (She's good at titles.)

Here are bits from the Journal's review. Sorry for the crappy underlines, it's a Jew thing.

Don't bow to tyrants.

Question language--especially when used nefariously.

Look at who's attacked and by whom. 

Jews are targeted at 750x as other groups.

One more thing.

Fuck anna wintour.

Fuck her Jew-hate.

Fuck her rationalizations.

Fuck her excuses.

Fuck her apologies.

And
Fuck the stupid affected haircut she rode in on.