Have a Seat.

 

Big Business the Sid Caesar way.

About 35 years ago, for all practical purposes, the internet had no legitimate commercial purpose, outside of its primary purposes today, porn and sex-trafficking. 

eBusiness, a phrase IBM owned, in which you could sell things, take care of customers, track inventory and your supply chain and countless other things hadn't yet been invented. In effect, the internet was around but no one knew what it was good for.

In 1999, I joined Ogilvy for my first stint. At the time, Ogilvy was a behemoth of an agency--occupying maybe ten floors in a gigantic mid-town-ish office tower. 

For whatever turf-war reasons, Ogilvy and Mather creatives sat on a different floor from Ogilvy Direct creatives and stuffed into a corner on that floor were a punch of pocket protectors who worked for Ogilvy Interactive.

The Ogilvy and Mather kids were the cool kids. From a revenue and prestige point of view, they ruled the roost.

However, before long, Ogilvy Interactive began booming. Booming, as in doubling in size every six months or so. Even so, the work done at Ogilvy Interactive was largely pedestrian. 

Ogilvy and Mather shaped brands--found their voice, developed campaigns, was in key meetings. Ogilvy Interactive executed off of Ogilvy and Mather's campaigns and strategies. At their best, Ogilvy Interactive used the strengths of their medium to enhance their message. But there was a lot of digitizing and gimmicking the main agency's work. And not a lot of brand leadership.

At that time if you roamed the halls of Ogilvy Interactive a common plaint was, "we just want a seat at the [client] table." That's a way of saying, I think, how most people feel. They want to have a key role. They want to have a voice and be heard.

That phrase "we just want a seat at the [client] table" always stayed with me. First, it implied that someone else had a better seat at the table and you'd take a less-good seat just to have a chance. 

When I fast-forward to today--when I see an agency like Ogilvy New York which had close to 2,000 employees in 2016 and has probably about one-tenth that number today--it's made me realize something.

The boasting about awards--usually spurious awards for not-real work for not-real clients bolstered by not-real results--is not about what agencies are supposed to be about. Agencies aren't supposed to be about our success. We're supposed to be about clients' success. I'd bet many of the people reading this now can name dozens, even hundreds, of pop stars, athletes, actors. I can't imagine anyone could name a single agent. And, tautologically, agencies are agents. We exist, or used to to do a client's bidding.

What's happened to the industry is simple.

In its zeal to answer procurement, in its eagerness to cut costs and "return shareholder value" (and eight-figure payouts to the c-suite--none of whom have ever created an ad) agencies left the table.

Client leadership is never in a scope. Saying you'll form a closeness--a business intimacy with a client, learning (and caring) about their ways and means is, in fact, out of scope. 

So, the agency business degenerated from having a seat at the client's metaphoric table merely to making the requisite amount of client-scoped rectangles. Like a fast-food chain my increase its profits by using a lesser-grade of hamburger meat, or reducing the size of a patty, the agency business has done the same. 

People with little knowledge and experience make the work. Or algorithms do. And the quicker you can make the work (which usually means giving the client just what they asked for) the more money can be made.

Agencies stopped leading clients. 
Agencies stopped guiding clients.
Agencies stopped being regarded as key to a clients' success.

As scopes and margins decreased, agency ambitions decreased with them. 

When material business success was no longer a possibility, the industry substituted trophyization as a proxy for real accomplishment.

In short, no one has a seat at the table anymore.

When I was living all this at Ogilvy, I often found myself in a slough of despond. One night I received a 1200 word note from Chris Wall, who rose to become Vice Chairman of the joint. Chris sensed my melancholy and sent these words.

What's happened is that as an industry, we no longer know how to make things happen for brands. Because we do ads not for the companies that pay us, not for their success, but for ours. That's why we no longer have a seat at any table.

We've become an industry of low-wage executors. 
About to be replaced by lower-wage executors...AI.

With GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I set out to be the first person a client calls when they need thinking.

Not just the first person they call when they need an ad.

The first person they call when they're up shit's creek.

In other words, I demand a seat not merely at the table, but alongside the CEO. If I'm not on speed-dial, something is wrong.

Around the time I got that note above from Chris Wall, Lou Gerstner, the CEO of IBM retired. I saved Lou's last IBM annual report because in it there was a spread that reminds me of what advertising can be, should be and must be again. I saved this annual report because it is part of my brief as an agency.

Just because I'm an arse, I'll underscore a bit for emphasis.

It's long for a tagline.

But it beats something meaningless like 'moving at the borderless intersection of culture and technology."

When you have a voice, 

you have the right seat at the table.

How New Business Works.

I am a fortunate person.

A fortunate agency owner.

Because of ads I run on LinkedIn, 
because of my reputation in the industry and my network,
because clients recommend me to their client-friends,

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company doesn't pitch for new business.

Clients find me.

Still, and the point of today's post, getting new business is far from easy.

Here's an example.

Prompted by payment I just received for work GeorgeCo., LLC did in April. (They paid quickly!)

They paid quickly but I had been talking to the client's CMO for almost three years. Almost three years ago he started asking about what GeorgeCo., LLC does, how I work, how I charge, etc.

There might have been three-month or six-month gaps between messages, but there was always an ember not yet dead.

I'd send an article I had read, on what I assumed might be of interest to the client. I'd get something back from the client. We might have a ten-part email volley.

Along the way jobs are switched, CEOs change, companies are merged. Even names and offerings change.

Back in January, I saw a decal with the prospective client's logo on a door on a side-street in Boston's North End. I snapped a picture and sent it to the client.

About three weeks later we were talking scope-of-work.

This morning I got my wire-transfer for services, and ideas, rendered.

From an MBA/ROI/KPI/WTF POV, getting this wire transfer took maybe three years.

I suppose that makes no sense.

Except it does.

And it's the way things work.

A lot of the world is smitten by one-nighters.

Or what I call "Tuesday-Wednesday Causality."

That is, you do something on Tuesday, you get paid on Wednesday. 

Not too long ago, I read a capsule book review in The Wall Street Journal of the book pictured above.

Most of the hard-work of forming the universe happened "in the time it might take to boil water in a kettle." Yet here we are, 13.8 billion years later, give or take a billion, and that "seething soup" is still seething.

If you asked my wife or my Business Director to list my strengths, it might be 13.8 billion years, give or take a billion, before they'd say, "Oh, George is patient."

But GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is patient.

And hangs in there.

And gets clients.

And gets paid.

That's how the universe works.

Ten Things that Have Made Me Smile This Week.

Like all weeks in amerikkka as democracy freezes into its dying rictus and work, often thankless no matter how well-paid, clatters around us, I look for smiles wherever I can find them. 

A notepad from a long-gone New York radio host with the adage, "A mind is a terrible thing to have," helps. The seven-year-olds hustling to the all-girls' school down the block from my apartment (the school my daughters attended) stopping to pet Sparkle, my pup. A farewell bit of truth from Colbert, forced off the air by radical right anti-democracy autocrats. And these nine things below:

1.
I noticed this sign watching a clip from "The Public Enemy." Probably the first gangster movie I ever watched. (Around 1967, my father filched a film-projector from his agency. Willoughby-Peerless, across the street from his office, rented 16mm movies in those days, and I got a film education as a pre-teen while friends were stuck watching the Partridge Family.)

The Public Enemy, 1931, Cagney's fourth motion picture and his big break.

Advice for living. 
Never forget the Jamestown flood.

2.
I'm reading a very-readable book by Mike Wallace (not TV's Mike Wallace) called "Gotham at War: A History of New York City from 1933 to 1945." It's nearly 1,000 pages but, still, a page turner. I recommend it without reservations.

3.
This headline from Tuesday's Times gives me pause (and my dog, paws.) A cautionary tale. And tail.

4.
I ran across a mention of a book called "How to Be Topp." The cover art is by Ronald Searle. Searle is national treasure, no matter what nation you're from. 

Of course, for all Searle's "Belles of St. Trinian's" fame, it's his POW work (and the stories behind it) that are seared in what's left of my dessicating grey matter.

Searle survived a Japanese POW camp and also helped build the bridge over the River Kwai. A Japanese captain, Captain Takahashi, a seemingly kindred spirit, allowed him to draw some of his experiences. You can read a Times' book review of Searle's "Kwai" book (above) here.

-------

5.
Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary, is also referenced in Wallace's "Gotham." You can find the entire thing online if you look for a moment. Here's an ample and amiable head-start.

6.
Pursuant to number 5, anything by Babs Gonzales, which is essentially Mr. Calloway's Hep Talk in motion. (You Tube won't let me download, so these self-shot videos will have to do.)

BTW, here's a snippet from Babs' wikipedia page. It might give you a hint as to why I love him.

7.

Next to next to last, or penultimately penultimate, accent on the diphthonic, the song they'll play at my funeral. Watch the wisdom of Count Basie's hands at :18 and :38--they know when not to speak. And the pain of 200,000 years of human existence is contained in Joe Williams' ululations.

8.

Now, the greatest line in movie history. Especially for those of us oft-visited by Dame Insomnia.

and a bonus from Stan and Ollie.

9.

I've written this entire post without AI. Without gushing about AI. Without mentioning the trillions of dollars AI algorinaires are ginning up or the hundreds of thousands of people they are firing. Also nothing about fake awards, fake agencies, or photos of people smiling. Back to basics make me happy.

10. 
Finally Sparkle, my two-years and eight-month-old golden retriever. Unlike humans who are too stupid, when Sparks is tired and the sun is shining, she lays down and just is. That's called pure joy. And I wish I could. I wish we all could.

O Tempore! O Mores!

A friend of mine, though she's even older than I am, is still ensconced in the holding-company miasma of what hasn't been bled dry of what had been the ad industry. Not that many years ago, the ad industry had glamor, a modicum of prestige and was considered a good way to make a living.

That "remember-when" is about as antiquated and archaic as the notion of justice in amerika. When the income of an entire holding company is, say, 10X, and just five or ten chieftains take 5X for themselves, it doesn't matter how many awards the holding company buys, how agile they are, how data-bricked their AI or how borderless their creativity. The ship of state has been torpedoed by the plutocrat class and there are life boats for no one but them.

This friend is a veteran freelancer.

Very much in demand.

And after six months or twelve or eighteen at one holding company, though she's learned the business she's on and built important relationships with clients, they have to let her go. 

They don't offer her a full time job--even though they need her. In the holding company schema, it's better to give less-good work to clients, and endanger their hold on an account than it is to have an FTE on their books. The money people don't like FTEs, especially FTEs who are creative--and they can't understand creative, so why pay.

Besides, they don't want to give benefits or pay for healthcare. (My guess is that much of this is illegal. But since crimes by big against small are no longer punished, illegal doesn't much matter.)

In any event, my friend called me the other day, she just switched from a running-out-of-time holding company job to another, soon-to-be-running-out-of-time holding company job and she therefore has to be set up with a new Mac.

Getting a new Mac when there were tech people working at the agency that paid you used to be a simple affair. No more. Now tech help is consolidated. That's a modern way of saying sent somewhere where you can't reach anyone and no one is accountable and there's no one to complain to if the job isn't done well.

My friend's Mac arrives a week after she's started working, and the "streamlined" and "consolidated" and "newly-efficient" systems that are more streamlined, consolidated and newly-newly efficient thanks to the recent subsuming of IPG by OMC, but after a week, a Mac arrives, but no email as yet and she has to call the Philippines to get an appointment with a tech-person somewhere to set up her computer.

"Help Desk" is an overpromise. Like "good ad."

It takes a good twenty-minutes of holding for the "support" person in the Philippines to pick up the phone and another ten minutes for her to understand an alien-sounding Anglo-ish name. My friend claims she was patient and finally she's offered an appointment time on Monday, May 24th, because the person making the appointments in the Philippines doesn't understand that you can't get emails, get invited to meetings, download docs if you aren't on the network, but they can't get you on the network for a good ten days, because of the consolidated and streamlined efficiency that comes from their consolidated and streamlined efficient subsumation of fifteen billion dollars of agencies.

There's no immediacy in any of this. No one really gives a shit. In fact I'd imagine holding company agencies earn more money for not doing work than they do for doing it. 

The whole of the last fifteen years of amerikkkan business has been about buying and selling businesses to other businesses for the benefit of a few rarefied shareholders. Employees and customers be damned. The only thing that matters, really, is that you have another 100,000 people reporting to you and if from each one you get a dollar a day, you're ok, that way you've earned your $25,000,000 per annum.

No one on the client side ever questions the dumb and monopolistic practices of their agencies. They realize, or they're don't question, that they have no choice, and advertising doesn't really work or matter anyway, so things will continue this way till the whole thing expires like an alewife in Lake Erie, unable to get the oxygen it needs to survive and laying bleached by the sun amid old beer cans, used condoms and cigarette butts belly-up and stinking.

Madison Avenue in its consolidated and efficiencized and holding-ized permutation is a dying alewife. There ain't enough oxygen to keep anything alive but one-celled species like cost-accounters, technocrats and holding company doyens. The creatures that used to keep the eco-system healthy are extinct or nearly so.

Every once in a while, someone might spot one such being somewhere, but it too will suffer before long. No one will hear of its death.

There will be no one to write the story.

They'll be waiting for IT to give them and their computer "permissions."

But there are no more permissions.

The Greatest Pep Talk in the History of Art.

 

I don't usually turn this space over entirely to something I've read somewhere. In this 8,000-post play that is a portrait of my life, I've assumed a central role. Most of my posts, in one form or another, are about me. What I think, what I do, how I feel about something.

In fact, my agency is called GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company because like this blog, my agency is about me. It's about how I think advertising works. What I think good is. How I think clients should be won and treated and served. I could have called my business "Purple Tangerine," or "Glia" and subsumed myself, my drive, my humor, my subversive intelligence as I have through most of my life. But setting out on my own, I decided--painfully--to be my own self.

All that having been said, an ablative absolute Latin construction, I just came across this letter written by Sol LeWitt to his student Eva Hesse. Hesse was having, as we all have about fifty-seven minutes out of every sixty, a crisis of confidence. LeWitt's letter is considered "The Greatest Pep Talk in the History of Art."

I guess to be reductive and to keep my typical role as the reliable and active narrator of this space, I can reduce all this to a few words.

As my therapist Owen said to me thirty years ago as I was hesitating sending 50 TV scripts to Steve Hayden who had just hired me only a few weeks earlier, "push the send button."

Or even briefer, dear brief candle, and in the words of LeWitt:

Do.

----

Dear Eva,

It will be almost a month since you wrote to me and you have possibly forgotten your state of mind (I doubt it, though). You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it. Don’t! Learn to say “Fuck you” to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, learning, hunting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, rumbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO.

From your description, and from what I know of your previous work and your ability, the work you are doing sounds very good. “Drawings—clean-clear but crazy like machines, larger, bolder, real nonsense.” That sounds fine, wonderful—real nonsense. Do more. More nonsensical, more crazy, more machines, more breasts, penises, cunts, whatever—make them abound with nonsense. Try and tickle something inside you, your “weird humor.” You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world. If you fear, make it work for you—draw and paint your fear and anxiety. And stop worrying about big, deep things such as “to decide on a purpose and way of life, a consistent approach to even some impossible end or even an imagined end.” You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO.

I have much confidence in you and even though you are tormenting yourself, the work you do is very good. Try to do some BAD work—the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell—you are not responsible for the world—you are only responsible for your work—so DO IT. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any preconceived form, idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be. But if life would be easier for you if you stopped working—then stop. Don’t punish yourself. However, I think that it is so deeply engrained in you that it would be easier to DO.

Darkening. Harkening.

When I was fired from Ogilvy, though I was making the agency a shit-ton of money and almost single-handedly doing much of the creative on a large account, Mark Read, the then CEO of Ogilvy's Holding Company WPP said in the press that the senior (mostly creatives who were fired) "harkened back to the 80s."

He posited that thinking and learning from a time when the industry was more creative, more vital and more prosperous was a bad thing.

Harkening back to such a time was a pejorative. 

Mark Read has since left WPP with a gigantic severance package (about 50 times what a 20-year employee would get) and he's gotten a job from a company he bought while running WPP that WPP has since sold. That's about as gangster as capitalism gets.  [BTW, when Read was forced out of WPP, the feckless trade press allowed him to claim he left WPP in a secure financial position. 

The holding company's market cap has plummeted from $32,000,000,000 when Read joined the firm to about 1/10 that today. Saying WPP has a secure financial position is like Eichmann saying Auschwitz had great showers. Many people believe our current economic systems is capitalism for the poor--we live day to day. And socialism for the rich--they get more help than we can even imagine.]

Since leaving WPP in a 'secure financial position' 12 months ago,

WPP's 'secure' stock has fallen from 39.77 to 17.46.

(Imagine if a baseball team went from winning 40 games to winning 18.)

In any event, last week I had a week where client meetings ran into client meetings ran into client meetings. And all of those meetings were GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company pretty much one-on-one with the CEO of one of my clients.

It's tough meeting with CEOs.

They're stern, demanding, usually cheap. And most often they haven't a clue about advertising--what it can do, what it can't and how it actually works. What's more, my current job is at least three jobs. 

1) I'm a FINDER. (I have to find business.)
2) I'm a MINDER. (I have to care for business.)
3) I'm a GRINDER. (I have to do to ads.)

In exhaustion and some exasperation I wrote a note about this to a friend of mine who's had a long and successful advertising career.

What I unwitting put my finger on in the note above is what IMHO, Mark Read and his ilk never knew and the entire industry has abdicated itself from.

The highest order of our job is not just creating ads or "culture." It's shaping who a company is, how it comports itself, what and how it sells what it does.

That's how we create real brand value.
That's how we earn our keep

However, today,
In our race to create a better BOGO,
in our race to kerpow of KPIs
in our race to make our ROI roar,

We've forgotten our true power.
Defining.
Differentiating.
Demonstrating the
who
what
why and
how

a business exists.
And making it 
lust-after-able.

Come.
Harken back with me.

A.I. Set to Music.

There's a great bit from one of Robert Frost's greatest poems, "The Mending Wall," that I wish more people would consider and think about. It ain't about mending and it ain't about walls. 

It's about life itself. About thinking about what you're doing before you do it.

Here's the entirety of the poem, with the passage I'm writing about today highlighted. If you aren't running to yet another meaningless meeting, you can take one-hundred and fifty-two seconds and hear Frost himself recite this masterpiece. It's a long way from O-O-O-Ozempic!

I bring up the highlighted lines above, "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out," because as the entire world blindly gushes about and embraces the trillion-dollar propaganda of the cocksure AI-future, no one is asking what we are keeping in or keeping out. No one's asking what we're giving up.

I had a email conversation with my friend, the Soul Captain, Karl Westman, early last week. In addition to being a mensch, Karl is the best music guy I ever worked with. He's probably scored more commercials than Carter has little liver pills, and elevated every one of them. He's also a recording artist in his own right. You can find Karl on Spotify, if you look.

In any event, I asked Karl last week about the Coltrane I posted above.

Something important and meaningful happens in those :52 seconds. Coltrane thinks. He asks to know what score he is following and why he should. He alters Rogers' original score and adds to it the trill and the flourish and the spark of unique. The stuff that genius is made of.

In short, and speaking of AI, Coltrane "doesn't follow the prompt." He doesn't play "My Favorite Things" by Richard Rogers, he makes the "standard" un-standard.

Listen.

You might also like to listen to my favorite two-minutes and thirty-two seconds of Thelonious Sphere Monk, his rendition of "Dinah, Take Two."

Monk is also, like 'Trane, defying, not following the prompt. He is asking to know what he is walling in or walling out. Of course, Monk could hit every piano key perfectly. He doesn't. He makes "Dinah" unique, different, his. Worthy of standing out among nineteen trillion other pop songs.

In about two minutes scrolling on LinkedIn, you'll see probably fifty posts on the splendiferousness of AI. Of automation. Of "generative-ness," of whatever the current forces of technology totalitarianism tells us to think. 

What's more, if you find your ChatGPT, or Claude mechanism, you can probably tell it to "write a song like Coltrane or Monk," and it will do a decent job.

But it will be missing the why.
It will be missing the ask.
It will be missing the rule-breaking.
The 'I never would have done that.'
Those are the essence of us.
Or people a human.

We're no longer asking why.
We're following the prompt.

That's not living.
That's not being.
We are being fed, in Latin, "Dronito ergo, sum."

I drone, therefore I am.

For Sale.

Dame Insomnia on her way to my bedside.

About five years ago, I switched from a Kindle to an iPad mini for my daily nightly reading. This week I decided to switch back to Kindle. 

Rightly or wrongly, truly or falsely, I've read enough to believe that the light from a computer, in whatever form it takes, Mac, pod, or phone, interferes with sleep patterns. Over the last few years, Dame Insomnia's grip on me has grown ever-more-potent, and I'm willing to do nearly anything to break that grip and get three straight hours of slumber a night.

About 36-hours after I ordered the Kindle, it arrived on the stone doorstep of my small seaside ramshackle up here on the Gingham Coast. I tore the flimsy packaging open and went to work synching my old Kindle app to my new device.

But first.

But first, I was hit with about seven screens of ads. Do I want to sign up for something called "Good Reads." Since I live between the sea and extensive wetlands (what we used to call a swamp) do I want to sign up for something called "Good Reeds." (joke.)

The ads were all so bland and un-promising, that I clicked them away in a, well, click. But still, I was annoyed. What's more, why does every illustration look exactly the same? Maybe someday someone will realize what's gained when you pay an illustrator and let that illustrator do something that attracts notice--which is why you hired an illustrator in the first place.

Mostly, I'm annoyed that the prevailing winds in our Oligarchic Corporatist state are completely devoid of respect for the consumers who have made that Oligarchic Corporatist state possible.  As above--just send crap their way. Crap messages with crap writing and crap illustrations and crap offers because everything's crap and why bother.

The giant corporations that come into our homes from about one-thousand different angles no longer feel like they are "guests" in our homes--uninvited guests at that. So, they no longer creep in on little mercantile feet, that barge in like the Mongols galloped through Europe not too many years ago. 

There was no Mongol E-Z pass.

Today advertisers act like personal space-invaders and we--that's you and I--are not their customers but rather their victims.

What set this off was deleting un-asked-for emails in my gmail this morning. I do this digital housekeeping every so often. It's a semiotic thing. I'm trying to believe I have some control over my own email boxes.

Under my "promotions" tab, though I had just cleared it ten days ago, I had over 1100 messages to delete. That's over 1100 unasked for slings and arrows corporate amerikkka and other institutional scammers are barraging me with. 

If you ever wonder how the Iranis feel after being bombarded with $40,000,000,000 worth of amerikkkan explosives, just look at your screens. 

What's happened in marketing should be thought about if you work with a brand that still strives to be different.

Semiotically, marketing has shifted.

The consumer isn't to be treated with respect. 
Boundaries (your 'property line') is no longer inviolate.
You, as a holder of money, are theirs.
They, as a getter of money, can do anything at anytime at any volume at any frequency with any ugliness and wrapped in unregulated lies, to separate you from what's yours

This is no longer "marketing."

It's "onslaughtering." 

Or slaughtering.

It's slaughtering decency, manners, respect.

No wonder as an industry, a society and a nation we are dying.

Nancy. Face. Laughing.

I'm not at all religious. 

Yes, I'm Jewish. I have fealty toward the Jewish people. I recognize Jewish holidays, but frankly, more for the food, the tradition and the wishes of my wife than any obeisance to a non-existent or largely missing god. 

God and I had a falling out more than half-a-century ago when I started reading about the holocaust. I mean, where the fuck were you--doom-scrolling?

Despite all that, yesterday evening my wife and I lit a Yahrzeit candle for my sister Nancy. 

That's a candle that burns for 24-hours in commemoration of a loved one's death. 

Nancy was a loved one.

She died on Mother's Day, in a motorcycle crack-up on 12th Avenue at 7AM, nineteen years ago. 

The last time I saw Nancy was on a slab in the morgue. They had cleaned her up, but she was mangled and black-and-blue.
When I cab by the City Morgue on First between 31st and 32nd, I have to look out the opposite window. Still.

I don't need the flame of a small candle the size of a Dannon yogurt container to remind me of Nancy. I think about her all the time. Especially when I barbecue up in my little cottage on the Gingham Coast. 

Nancy had a Lucullan appetite. I can practically see her with barbecue sauce on her face, grease on her hands and little pieces of corn in her hair.

Nancy also loved dogs. She would have spent her days up here, if she hadn't died, laying on the floor and hugging Sparkle, my two-and-a-half-year-old golden retriever. That would be a picture of pure happiness. Barbecue and golden retriever fluff. And Nancy's crooked smile.

We lit a candle last night at dinner.

It's a solemn thing, even if you're a non-believer. Jews have been lighting candles for thousands of years. Even though for most of Jewish history, deaths have out-paced paraffin.

I looked at the candle last night as I was moving food around on my Wedgwood. 

Now that I'm old, I don't have much of an appetite anymore.

I looked at the candle and saw a line of five-point type.

"Product of China," it said.

A Yahrzeit candle made in China.

You have to think about that, really.

The economic incongruence of that. 

Somehow even a $1.29 candle in a small glass enclosure that commemorates the death of a Jew must be made in China. This isn't anti-Chinese manufacturing.

It's about how MBAs' and their incessant ROI-ism have determined that everything in our lives and in every business, must cater to efficientism.

Their non-missing god is the god of margin. If you can widen the gap between the cost of making something and the price you can get for something, to their calculus, they've done something holy.

I suppose this is about soul. 

There's nothing materially wrong about a Chinese-sourced candle. But somehow I think things from candles to commercials, from cars to computers, from hamburgers to hula hoops, somehow I think things might mean more when they're made by people who care about them, people who believe in them. 

Of course that includes advertising.
There I go again, harkening back.

You can outsource efficiency.
You shouldn't outsource love.

No matter how efficient the surrogate claims to be.
No matter how prolific that outsourcing is.
No matter how many ducats are saved and no matter how much 'value' is returned to investors.

I ain't buying it.

Sometimes you have to believe, breathe and bleed.

There's more to life, or should be, than "the spread."

Like sisters you miss.

Because they died too young.

Nine Ways to Improve an Advertising Holding Company.

The last of Ad Aged's three-part tribute to Fred Manley and Hal Riney's 1963 classic, "Nine ways to improve and ad." We will return to our regular programming tomorrow. If I live that long.