What's In a Name?

I ran into the kitchen not too many minutes ago and saw a half-used bottle of the Stop-N-Shop brand dishwashing liquid leaning against a new bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid that I bought at the store just a few hours ago. 

My wife and I both grew up with Depression (and depressing) parents and try as we might, neither she nor I can 100% get over the "re-using ziplock bags," "saving bakery string," and buying store-brand soap. A few weeks ago, I was in the city. Some friends and I were going to dinner at a place in midtown--a place I'd never heard of. But nonetheless, when I opened the menu, there was a steak listed on it for $87. 

When your first apartment cost you $90/month in rent, I don't think--even if Mackenzie Scott for whatever reason decided to give me billions, I don't think I could ever spend a rentsworth on dinner. Even if the agency or the client was paying.

Despite my impecunious side, I'll tellya something about Stop-N-Shop brand dishwashing liquid.

It sucks.

It comes out like bubble soap, thin and watery. It doesn't foam. It doesn't clean. It doesn't even smell good.

I don't really give a hoot or a holler about it, but it sent me down a spiral. You've heard me rant and rave about how major advertisers stopped advertising. They stopped telling people why their dishwashing soap was better than the store brand. They stopped letting people know about the R&D they do, and the secret ingredients they add that cut washing time by 22%. They stopped all that in favor of meaningless garbage. Now when you see their brand in the store for $7 and the store brand for $4, you buy the store brand. The georgesurvey estimates one trillion dollars of brand-equity has been destroyed over the last thirty digital years--all in the name of saving on advertising expenditure.

The thing I did notice on the Stop-N-Shop brand dishwashing liquid was how they named the scent of their blue SLO (soap-like-object.) 

I silently applauded the copywriter, or the committee, or the "naming team" that came up with "Waterfall Mist." What a perfectly evocative aerosol of verbal nothingness.

When I was a boy, still in college, I worked as a writer for the Montgomery Ward catalog, specifically in the shoe department. The worst part of that horrid $225/week job was when the featured photograph on a catalog page showed a pair of women's pumps, or a slingback or something, that came in a variety of colors.

Because the type had to be "dropped out" (white over a color photo) you were in a lot of trouble if you got one of the colors wrong or left one out. It cost a lot of money to fix that sort of printing bollocks.

One catalog season, the task of demarcating color names fell to me. It usually went to the women in the department. They wrote more of the women's pages. But I was either "moving up," or being punished and it became my job.

I've had a career full of pressure. I've been towered over by 6'10" Chris Wall. Growled at by Pytka. And maniacked at by Tony Kaye.

Nothing came close to being on the wrong side of Rocco Imbriale, the catalog's Joe-Pesci-like production manager. 

I quickly figured a way out of ever being asked to write the colors again.

I typed

Black
Navy
Red
Yellow
Pink
Green

And then I thought and rewrote.

Black power
Navy bean
Red scab
Yellow jaundice
Pink elephant
Green mucus

I handed the copy in to Rocco and left for the day.

He never said anything, but they never gave me the color job again.

I missed my chance at Waterfall Mist.

The Four Hs.

When I started GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company nearly six-and-a-half years ago, though I was somewhat in the grip-of-unemployment panic, I was methodical about what I was doing.

First, I posited what I had heard from so many clients over so many decades in the advertising business. "We love working with you. We despise working with agency name goes here." With that bit of direction, I tried to think like Richard Branson when he started Virgin Air or Steve Jobs when he started Apple.

You might say, I used this ad as my brief.

I found everything that makes and agency hurt and threw it a way. Or how could I open a new that acts nothing like the old? Put another way, what sucks about ad agencies (or airlines or computers) that I can do something about?

So, while agencies decked, I would ad.
While agencies bloated, I would streamline.
While agencies complicated, I would simple. 
While agencies jargonned, I would English.
While agencies talked, I would listen.

Second, like a good ball club, I did my scouting. I went to every website of every agency. I looked at their "about" sections. I looked at their "leadership" sections. I looked at the way they spoke to viewers and about themselves.

I didn't come up with a 164-page white-paper on the state of agency marketing. But as I used to say to my older brother, Fred, about the neglectful/abusive parents we shared, "No one is totally useless. They can always serve as a bad example."

The website carnage of 2020 was a great bad example.

Today, so many newly-freed senior ex-agency people come to me and ask how they can start their own business. They sometimes ask how I established (seemingly with such felicity) GeorgeCo.

Looking at your competition is always a good place to start. 

I'm always surprised how few people see that the right fielder sucks, but still pull the ball to left. For my entire baseball career I was guilty of same.

I've learned.

In any event, late last week as the cacophony of my client roster had begun to quieten, I began another round of competitive research.

First I looked at Omincom's site.

I could find nothing either semantically or aesthetically that indicated they deal with creativity and ideas and stopping power. What someone smarter than I (Bernbach?) called the "last unfair advantage in business."

Not only was there no mention or way to link to any of the storied creative agencies Omnicom had subsumed, there wasn't a smile within one-hundred miles of any of their expensiveized corporated pixeljargonization. 

Their site, under headings "corporate leadership" and "capability leadership" showed about 30 or 40 headshots. Not one ever sweated over finding the right word, looking at a cut for the hundredth time, finding an insight on page 99 of an annual report. Their site is the intellectual equivalent of learning to fuck by reading instructions from a nunnery.

I will only say that WPP's site was worse, like the East Germany's Stasi might have been worse than the Soviet's KGB. Levrentiy Beria not withstanding.

Mostly because WPP's site started with a lie so big and Orwellian that it made me even more nauseous than lunch in the WPP cafeteria (which for a time was their number-two source of profit, behind expense-padding.)

How can a company that by about 27-different measures has shrunk between 75% and 89% over the last ten years, lead with this mendacity? I think the sine non qua of the words "growth partner" should be growth. And WPP are in free-fall in a coyote- off-a-cliff-chuck-jones kinda way.

WPP's market cap has reverse-grown from £23B to £2.5B in ten years.

(That's like losing 89-cents out of every dollar.)
But they want to be your "trusted growth partner."

Maybe Daniel Lambert (13 March 1770 – 21 June 1809) an English jail-keeper
and at 700lbs the heaviest man on record, should be your dietician.

In their leadership section, WPP featured one creative. And you could see some work they had purportedly produced for clients. So their site was slightly less of an SEC filing than Omnicom's, in the way that stomach cancer might be less bad than brain cancer.

Years and years ago, I was at the "Digital Agency of the Decade" when Sheryl Sandburg's book title was on everyone's lips (and no one's night-table.) 

I got into a row with the head of trend-parroting aka the agency's "head of planning." She said two things that were so painfully au courant that they still twist my duodenum.  She said:

1. No one watches TV anymore.
2. When people get home from work they want to 'lean in.'

I replied with some asperity--not unusual for me when my politesse levels are running low, as they so often are.

"Andrea, when I get home from work, I'm exhausted. I had a long day of corporate nonsense and too many things to do. I had to avoid four drunks and six puddles of urine on the C-train. The kids are screaming and my wife is pissed. And I see their point. I hate me, too--who doesn't. All I wanna do is lean back and watch the Knicks lose by fewer than 18 points."

What I meant by that I mean in light of the mean financial-services takeover of the ad industry.

When I turn on the TV, or the radio, or go to a site, or hear something on ferstunkeneh Gas-Station TV, dammit, I want something that makes me laugh and/or smile. Something that welcomes me, comforts me, appreciates me by showing a little care. I don't want to hear about a free something I don't want when I buy something I don't want.

I don't want to be screamed at and mouse-typed. I don't want to be bad-joked. I don't want to be actor-grin-fucked. I don't want a piece of crap badly produced that shows the efficacy of "world-class production at scale for the always-on world." 

I don't want gyrating teens showing me their cell-phones and orgasming over some Famous Footware BOGO deal. I don't want to hear about the $49.99/month Verizon deal which I know winds up costing me $89.99/month by the time all the hidden charges are un-hidden. Likewise I don't want to hear about your network reliability when it's been ten years since I've been able to have a phone conversation without one side of the call dropping at least once.

I want empathy.
Not oligopoly.
I want truth.
Not press release.
I want humanity.
Not legalese.
I want common-sense.
Not ratiocination.

Back to the friends who call me for advice in setting something up for themselves.

I usually go on a tirade like I just have. And conclude by saying, "I think there's a need for what we do.

"A need for the Four Hs.
Honesty.
Humanness.
Humor."

"What's the fourth H?" they ask.

"How much do I owe you?"

Sold. Out.

If you've ever had a mortgage, one of the felicities of having one is getting an envelope in the mail with an unknown letterhead. I'm usually loathe to open things I don't recognize. I figure it's flaked with some kind of anthrax or ricin or actual physical spam. Why are you, you unknown letterhead, mailing me something.

(The fact is, I don't even put phone numbers with names into my phone until I've known someone for ten years. As Paul Simon sang, "It took a little time to get next to me.")

Once, not long ago, I got something with a logo that said "Mr. Cooper" on it. What I found inside was a bill for my monthly mortgage payment.

I said to my wife, "I thought we had our mortgage from Citibank." She answered, "We did. They must have sold our mortgage." 

That doesn't seem right to me. 

I paid Citibank for something--ostensibly a loan and service surrounding that loan. How can you sell it?

But they did.

Without telling me.

Fortunately they sold it to Mr. Cooper, "my home loans & refinance partner." Like Adolf Eichmann was my ZyklonB and Crematoria partner.

A similar thing happens at times when you book a flight on, say, American Airlines to Phoenix. You'll notice when you print your boarding pass type that reads "this flight operated by Such&Such Airlines."

It doesn't do any good to bark about any of this. There's no one to complain to and no good answer for any of this except that someone figured out there was more money to be gained buying and selling customers than actually serving them. 

What's more, the people in various organizations doing this slicing and dicing aren't really in any business--not mortgages, not airlines. They're in the arbitraging business. They don't really give a rat's ass about mortgages or airlines. That's not where the money is.

The other day while on LinkedIn, I saw an ad for an agency called BBDO MW. Quaintly, I figured the MW stood for Midwest. I assumed BBDO had consolidated their Chicago and Minneapolis offices. 

I clicked on the ad and saw this sleight-of-hand and slight-of-management.

MW had been founded in 1947 was sold to Omnicom in 1998. It's now been eaten by Omnicom and reduced to two letters. 

I'd imagine there are clients who chose to work with Martin Williams. Creatives, too. But their career mortgages have subsumed their careers. Their "home" has been sold. 

The cynicism. A name means nothing. It's just an expense. A heritage means nothing. Memory is just an expense. As is tradition, the past, even values.

All this happens because amerikan business is no longer about the business it's in. It's about selling, ginning up and getting out of town before they catch you.

amerika is take the money and run.
And if you take enough you can avoid paying taxes.

The names mean nothing.
The traditions and legacies and histories have been destroyed.
Customer preferences are ignored.
What they "bought" and what they get aren't related.
All for something more important.
Fifteen or so very wealthy old white men getting very-wealthier.

When I was in Cairo, Egypt with my family about 20 years ago, we went to the famed and ancient Bazaar, Khan el-Khalili. You can probably learn more about marketing and advertising from a few hours in Khan el-Khalili than you can from one-thousand years in MBA school. 

There are no chain stores. No flashing neon. Every shop is owned by the owner and worked by the owner. Most shops have a picture of the current owner's father or grand father framed and in a place of honor. If you're smart, you say to the current owner, "That's your father? What a handsome man. And you look just like him." That's the equivalent of breaking bread with someone before arguing or negotiating. It's the stuff of humanity--and has been for thousands of years. 

Names and legacies aren't erased. Scaling isn't the topic 24/7. Nor are agentic bots. 

In a world where names mean nothing, nothing means anything.

That's the modern ad business today.

Audience Participation.

As my legion of readers know, I'm as prolific as Typhoid Mary (and about as popular.) 

Not only do I write this blog every day, I also usually post a "GeorgeCo" ad for my business almost every day. These ads get me probably one-third of my business, which is nothing to sneeze at--assuming sneezing is still allowed now that a madman is our dying nation's doyen of health.

Also, ensconced as I am with a slate of clients (touch wood) as long as the menu in an old Greek diner, I prolific-ize for them as well. 

If the way you boiled down the brief or the positioning or their attitude is good, rich and fecund, coming up for clients with fifty ads is as practicable and doable as coming up with the holding-company anachronistic belief that three ads is an adequate amount.

There's a little bit of the bible that Forbes magazine had stolen and used to use on their backpage--a page on which they'd print timely and wise quotations. Here's the whole thing, from Proverbs 4:7-9, with the part Forbes used as their page header highlighted. 

"Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: And with all thy getting get understanding."

Often when I am writing something, whether for this blog, my business of for a paying client--or to get a paying client--I have another writer look over what I've written.

That's how I get understanding.

In the early 1960s, the Chicago Cubs--the woeful Chicago Cubs fired their manager and replaced him with a "College of Coaches." After almost a decade-and-a-half of second-division finishes, they decided to try something different to see if it would reverse their fortunes. The Cubs would no-longer have a single manager, instead they'd be guided by an eight-man committee.

I have something of the same scrutinizing every bit of copy I write. Even if the people involved don't know it. Some of them are even dead.

Call it the College of Crotchety.

I always have my friend Rob Schwartz read my copy. By that I mean, I look at it through what I perceive is his perception. His quick, wise and astute view of the world. I always have Steve Hayden look over everything. Is it "correct"? Is it smart? Is it bigger than the assignment? Chris Wall reads what I write too. But that might just be me being mean to myself--in trying to live up to his nearly impossible standards.

My friend Debra Fried looks at things, too. I find her judgment especially important if I am using, as I do rarely, a writing scalpel as opposed to my usual bludgeon. Debra is a craftsperson and her taste is refined and adroit and, yes, demanding. She wields a sharp pencil. My wife, Laura, too, is a fine barometer. She often warns me when my words could cause some rough weather. 

Ed Butler and Harold Karp, bosses from the 1980s and 1990s read too. They were both "writers" who happened to be in advertising. Theirs are standards that cannot be ignored.

I'm not sure today that such super-ego-ism exists in advertising. Maybe this is an old man talking, but today people praise work not for its essential quality but just because it's made it out into the world. The standard has changed, from producing something notable to producing period.

The modern agency structure has something to do with that lowering. As does the predilection of our age, where everything cruddy piece of art deserves a place of honor on the refrigerator. To see the decay of taste and standards, you need look no further than the vomit of gold filigree puked onto every wall within 32-miles of the white house. You can put a laurel wreath on a donkey's ass, it's still a donkey's ass.

When I was young and working for the aforementioned Ed Butler, one of advertising's best writers in the 1970s and 1980s, Ed would, about four times a year see a print ad or a commercial he'd like. He'd drop everything at that point and find out who wrote it. Once he did, he'd write a hand-written note to the person. He wasn't after any quid pro quo--he looked for no recompense.

It was just a cosmic reminder that someone's watching. And pleasing that someone--and yourself--counts.

We lost something when we lost that.

Eight-Thousand Vs. Eight.

I recommend this.  

If amerika had a president who could read, I recommend it to it.

I read a lot.

A lot of history.

And a lot of history involves wars.

A lot of history involves firsts.

I am sad for a world where no one, especially our so-called leaders and our military so-called leaders don't know history.

If you love history (and I could argue that loving history is about loving humankind--since history is an aid to understanding, people, situations, life, planets and their movements and actions) you eventually wind up reading about the civilizations that occupied the area the Greeks called Mesopotamia. In Greek, roughly that means "between the rivers." The rivers in question being the Tigris and Euphrates. Some people call Mesopotamia "the Fertile Crescent." I like it with a drizzle of tahini.

It was the original home of the Sumerians, the Babylonians and the Assyrians. It's currently one of America's favorite places to bomb the shit out of.

The equivalent of each and every amerikan dropping about $20 worth of bombs.

When our current round of bombing the shit out of Mesopotamia started about two weeks ago, I found myself saying to myself something that might pass for profound. That is if anyone listened to me outside of people I have to pay to listen to me. (BTW, today, a "Yikes!" uttered by Bazooka Joe passes for profound.)

I said aloud to myself, "A culture led by a man with an eight-second attention span should never go to war with a culture with an 8000-year attention span."

Here's a brief niblet on what I mean by 8000-year attention span. "The cuneiform sources for [Mesopotamian] culture span from c. 3400 BC up until c. AD 80...This culture endured for more than three millennia, meaning that from the Middle East to the West more than half of human history is written in cuneiform."

English has lasted roughly 1000 years. I can't imagine it lasting so that it's legible to current practitioners 2500 years from now. I don't even remember what on fleek means anymore, or 23-skidoo. Half of the things I say to people render them as crazy-eyed as Marty Feldman navel gazing.

Further, Wisnom, the author of the book shown above writes, “Writing is not the only legacy of Mesopotamia. Many concepts indispensable to civilisation originated here, including the city, banking, and law. Our division of hours into sixty minutes is based on the Mesopotamian mathematical system, and the constellations we look for in the sky were first grouped and named by the Babylonians. The Assyrians had aqueducts before the Romans, and the Babylonians had a version of Pythagoras’ theorem a thousand years before Pythagoras.”

Yes, but no trump meme-coins.

By the way, Hammurabi's Code, composed around 1750 BC (and stolen by the French for a display in the Louvre about 200 years ago) pre-dates the Magna Carte by about 2800 years. It predates the us constitution by about 3600 years. Its precepts from back then are currently being ignored and violated by our leaders today. (Admittedly, the code is a bit harsh for my taste. A lot of ears cut off. A lot of putting to death. But at least they punished serial child-rape.)

But this is a blog on advertising, remember?

What does any of this have to do with advertising?

Well, the same f-upped-ness that leads us to think we could subdue Mesopotamia today has led our industry--especially the rose-tinted "performance" and "measurement" sides of it down a similar poison-ivied garden path.

We have forgotten time.
We have succumbed to the illusion of quick wins.
We have fallen prey to magical thinking.
We tactic-ize and hope for quarterly success.
We work so we can cash in and cash out.
We willingly forget that brands, relationships, life are built over time, not over spreadsheets.

We forget that the only things that work are:
-work
-repetition
-time

Our eight-second attention span will lead to untold amerikan and iranian deaths. Our eight-second attention span will cost us trillions of dollars in brand-equity. Our eight-second attention span will accomplish nothing while costing everything.

We worry about immediate returns for things that take decades to pay off. Or we think hard can be done easily.

Check back with me in 8000 years.

I'll still be writing.

There Is a Season.

I wrote earlier this week about a precept from my favorite living author, Robert Caro. Caro is a two-timer. Two times he won the Pulitzer Prize. Two times he won the National Book Award. As Sullivan, Preston Sturges' directorial alter-ego said in "Sullivan's Travels" (one of the greatest movies ever) about a movie he wanted to shoot, "It'll put Shakespeare back with the shipping news."

Caro is an historian who believes history writing should be held to the same literary-standards as literature itself. He not only writes of his topic, he writes beautifully. He writes with style good enough to subdue the bushwa about disappearing attention spans. In fact, of Caro Mr. Gossage might have said, "People don't read history. They read what interests them and sometimes it's history."

The precept I previously wrote about was Caro's dicta, "find out how things work and explain them to people." I think that's a good policy whether you're working on a car, a burger joint, a perfume or a technology. Or even a politician you're trying to get elected. Dissection might be the best form of inspection and introspection.

The Caro-ism I'd like to underscore today might be a codicil of what's above. It's about a doggedness of approach. A relentless belief that the truth sells, but that finding the truth (which sells) takes work.

That bon mot (or bone mot as Sparkle, my 2 1/2 year old golden retriever might joke) is "turn every page."

Turning every page--as a modus operandi has been MBA'd out of the advertising business today. 

We no longer talk to customers. 
We no longer go to the grocery story and look at products.
We no longer try things or use things ourselves.
We no longer talk to engineers or visit factories.
We seldom even read the volumes of pixelated prolix emauled to us late at night.

Today our dogma might well be rendered "turn every page you can in the 90 minutes you were scoped assuming you don't have seven 12 minute minutes before the initial tissue session that demands, no tissues, but snotty tissue detritus we call "work" with a level of finish that would make Reubens look like a slacker.

Turning every page is no longer, in short, allowed. Not after 35 years of MBA-Holding Company hegemon.

Turning every page is the single essential of good work. And, I suppose, because the aforementioned hegemons can't figure out how to "monetize" it, they ignore it. They default instead to an array of insipidities, like "being part of culture," or something on the order of a "shorty" award, or even a Cannes award. 

So much of so called communications today reminds me of Macbeth's "Tomorrow" soliloquy from that little number called Macbeth. I started to highlight the portion I usually recite--the bit Faulkner pinched--but then I read the whole thing and realized Billy Boy turned every page.

And wrote every phrase.

Coming Up Short.

There was an article in Saturday's New York Times about the Los Angeles Marathon. Apparently it's especially warm in LA--and though the 26.2-mile run started at 7AM, the weathertariat was predicting no cloud cover and temperatures approaching 90-degrees.

From 1981 to 1995, a younger, thinner George ran a dozen marathons. Eleven in New York and one in Philadelphia. My fastest time was 3:10:15 and my slowest was 3:57:20. I dropped out of one with severe leg cramps. During those dozen marathons, I ran through snow, torrential rain, adverse winds and an extremely humid day where the temperature and humidity in New York hit the mid-80s. 

It was no picnic. Marathons never are. 

This year in LA, race organizers are worried about the heat and its effect on entrants.

They're allowing runners to get a "finisher's medal" after just 18 miles. In other words, you can complete 68.702-percent of the race (in my grade-book that's a D+) and still get credit for finishing.

If I finished the whole thing, and someone else finished under 70-percent of it and got the same medal I got, I'd be pissed. I'd be equally-pissed if I were wearing the medal (you're allowed to wear it on your way home without looking like a dickweed) and someone asked me how far I ran.

Finish for the entirety of the existence of the word has meant "completion." Etymology online, above, defines the verb as to come to an end, to stop, die, a close, a conclusion, the greatest degree. 

Finish, as a word is like "unique." It either is or isn't. It can't be modified. You've either finished or not. Like you're either unique or not. You can't even be very. You just are or have. It's on or off. Dead or living. Erwin Shrödinger need not apply.

There's no question in my mind why Schubert's Symphony Number 8 is called his "Unfinished Symphony." It's not finished.

What bothers me about this, of course, is that calling people who don't finish finishers is the sort of practice that has done so much to denigrate our industry and, yes, our world.

Some of the supporters of the 68.702-percent-finish-standard sound like so many apologists in our business. The ones that applaud awards for ads that never ran, and clients that never paid for those ads. The ones that herald a CCO as "most awarded" though her agency's revenue, client list and number of employees has decreased by 80-percent or 90-percent.

The Times reports, that Steph Dunlap, a "pacer" said, "marathon medals represent the memories, not the distance." I suppose that would allow me, who cut myself shaving this morning, to qualify for the Purple Heart. My blood represents trauma not a war-wound.

Ms. Dunlap continued "All runners count, even if they don't complete the race. I think they should be incredibly proud of how far they've come. I mean, 18 miles is still nothing to scoff at."

Undoubtedly 18 miles is a long way to run. As stated above, it's almost 70-percent of a marathon. But the medal is question is for finishing a marathon. (Unless they're giving you 70-percent of a medal.) 

When standards plummet, whether in running 18 miles of a 26.2-mile race, or praising work because it gets through the polyp-lined client and agency digestive tracts, what happens is a wholesale denigration of "good."

I've seen too much bushwa like this of late.

This is praising 18-mile marathons. As Ms. Dunlap says, "I think they should be incredibly proud of how far they've come." That's like being incredibly proud of telling jokes and getting no laughs or writing a string of words that make no sense and calling it a story. Or thinking about applying for a job and believing you would have gotten it had you applied.

Great work is what makes something great.  

A sports team.
A Brownie troop.
A nation.
An ad agency.

Sure, effort matters.
But it's effort and results that count.

Life isn't free swim.

As Tennessee Williams wrote in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,"  (the movie)

If everything deserves applause--just because it ran, what do you do with the spots below? Why bother trying for greatness. After all, you get a medal for 68.702-percent?

What Does it Do.

Imagine yourself in one of those incredibly stupid 1960s sitcoms that a lot of people my age grew up with and somehow survived. Almost any sitcom will do. From ones that featured a genie in a bottle. To ones that featured benign blonde witches. To ones that featured talking horses, talking cars, Martians who suddenly appeared on earth or modern-day astronauts who somehow went back to caveman times. (No. I'm not calling them cave-people. Call my cave-lawyer.)

Almost all those sitcoms involved situations where something 99% inexplicable to half the cast had to somehow be explained. How the fuck did Lassie know that kid was in a well? How did Mr. Ed dial a phone.

It's 65 years later now. 

I'm an OFM (old f'in' man) and about 99% of everything I do in advertising--and yes, life is taking something apart, looking at it and explaining to people who either don't know or can't be bothered or who are somehow intimidated by whatever, how something works. 

I bought an indoor clothes line the other day. The instructions that came with it are more complex than anything ever written by John Maynard Keynes. (BTW, Keynes was more than anyone was responsible for the 60-years of post-war stability the world, relatively speaking, enjoyed before trump destroyed it.)

There are even, I'm told, agency or production companies (they're kind of the same thing today) who make a living creating explainer videos. And most of the time if you can't figure out something with your Mac, or your Microwave, or your Mrs., you can find a badly-produced YouTube video that says press this, click this, and voila, marital bliss.

Robert Caro, my favorite living writer, once described his particular facility as "Find out how things work and explain them to people." When I was helping run the IBM account at a now defuct and defuct agency called Ogilvy, when I interviewed writers, I'd tell them, "we were in the translation business. We take things people don't understand and understand-ize them."

About 75% of my current book of business comes from financial companies or technology companies. 

They:
1. Don't know what they do.
2. Can't explain it.
3. Can't say why they're better.
4. Get scared when you ask them--angry even.

I recently had to buy a streaming service. There was no way to evaluate them other than price. No one did anything different, told you anything different, or said anything different.

I'd be damned if anyone anywhere knows the difference between one pubicintercom agency and the next, much less the difference between this award-winning credit glommer and that. Much less this agency that formerly stood for something and that. 

When they're all the same, you buy the cheapest. Cheapest means what they do sucks. And eventually to get you back they have to re-cheaper. Eventually their margins are thinner even than they're ethics and they're out of business.

The same, sadly, has happened to politics. There's no humans. Just regurgitating focus-group tested sloganeering wrapped in a thick paste of meaninglessness. So we buy the emptiness who's the best liar and promises the lowest taxes, not worrying about the debt bill that's well-over due and the collapse of everything government is supposed to help with like health, schools, roads, clean air, defense and access to progress.

There's not an iota of difference (or morality) in anything or anyone, so we vote for the protoplasm we'd most like to 'have a beer with,' though the only ones politicians have beers with are $12,000,000 lobbyists or felons begging for pardons with million dollar checks in tow.

The way around this is to stand for something.
To say something different and back it up with an actual difference.
Different gets more business.
Different can charge more.
Different is liked.

That's the difference.

The Tyranny of Algorithm.

Because I read so widely (at least by my estimation) and get book reviews from a variety of sources (the Times, the Journal and the Economist) I rarely take a reading recommendation from either friends or the amazonian algorithms that have grabbed control over our discretionary spending. (amazon pays a smaller percentage of its revenue in taxes than your neighborhood bodega. You probably pay tax at about a 50% rate. jeff bezos pays less than 1/50th of that, about a 1% rate. See those synthetic breasts below? Your tax dollars at work.)

Taxes aside (if you believe as I do in systems collapse owing to major amounts of money not being taxes, you can't really put taxes aside. So consider that a drf--dumb rhetorical flourish) taxes aside, there's something solipsistic or naval-gazing or creativity destroying about amazon using their sophisticated prediction engines to recommend your next book, blouse or sex toy.

It means you're being guided, in a closing of your mind sort-of-way, by a recency bias without even being aware of it. The restaurant equivalent would be ordering chicken parmesan on Tuesday, then getting recommendations every subsequent meal time for chicken pecorino, chicken granaa padano, chicken asiago and so forth.

In short, a persuasive prediction engine is an imagination-and- try-new-things-limiting mechanism that rewards you (with ease and comfort) for never leaving your ease-and-comfort-zone.

I am amazed about 92 times a month how a word or phrase I've pretty much never used or heard in my entire life becomes just about the only word or phrase we hear in the course of a day. 

I wouldn't be surprised if the first words uttered by my younger grandson who's turning one in a few weeks, were, "this is a deliciously robust, agile and well-curated bottle of apple mush. I'm glad you bought it from a digital-first grocery and received the appropriate loyalty reward points which you can redeem for valuable prizes. Blackout dates and terms and conditions apply. Do not try this at home. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Professional driver closed course. Also use under adult supervision. Do not operate heavy machinery."

This algorithmic hijacking, of course, is a huge detriment to our society and our industry. Orwell's "Newspeak" after all, was conceived as a controlled language that deliberately limited vocabulary size. Fewer words limit the complexity of thought and by eliminating words that can express dissent or complexity you encourage obedience and one of the great words of our modern era: compliance.

In advertising we limit our creative thinking to what we've seen before. If we're ambitious we seek to copy last year's cannes winners. If we're not ambitious, we copy last year's pharma ad or toyotathon. 

2026 award winners look like 2025 award winners look like 2024 award winners. As in the Marvel "universe," the sequels are here.

Not only to we live and breathe unaware of the crushing effects on creativity of the recency bias, the algorithm is so almighty, we can barely escape it. Using book-choice as an example, there's likely no difference between the selections at amazon and barnes and ignoble, and independent stores (like independent thought) have been crushed by our need to save 12-cents and speedy delivery. 

As somewhat of an aside, amazon offers for sale over 600,000,000 items. But I'd imagine if past Pareto is any guarantee of current performance, a couple hundred of those 600,000,000 items make up a good 80% of amazon's sales.

What's happening is bad.

Almost all human flourishing in the roughly 15,000 years of human history came from the free-exchange of ideas, technologies and methods. The Greeks wouldn't have produced Aristotle, Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles if they hadn't swiped wholesale the phonic scribblings of Phoenician merchants. 

I suppose this is a roundabout way of suggesting that you put your phone, computer, tablet, implants, glasses etc. away for a couple hours a day. Take a walk to someplace you've never been. Talk to a stranger. And try something new. 

Or old.

Anything but another recent.