Traveling in Place.

Not too many weeks ago, I wrote a piece in this space about the myopia, or the bubble, or the solipsistic cocoon we so often find ourselves in.

In modern advertising, we look at the same commercials, covet the same agencies and awards and seldom get out of our closed-looped world to see how others imbibe. That and the elimination of visiting factories, talking to customers, doing road trips, etc. contributes to making the work we do very in-bred. I don't know if, like the Romanov's in Tsarist Russia is there is a creative equivalency of hemophilia, but that ain't a bad metaphor. In-breeding in real life or in advertising, is bad for the gene pool.

Or as Slim Pickens, playing Major Kong in Stanley Kubrick's all-too-real Dr. Strangelove, said "Stay on the bomb run, boys! I’m gonna get them doors open even if it harelips ever’body on Bear Creek!”

Today, we have a lot of creative harelipping.

My point today, as it is almost every day, is about broadening our horizons--or doing something different and turning things upside down. 

Sameness doesn't deliver stopping power. And stopping power is Part One of any successful advertising work. If no one sees it, I don't care how the fuck well-crafted it is, or that the director used the lenses used at David Lean's nephew's Bar Mitzvah.I don’t even care if it’s dead solid perfect strategically, if no one sees it, it’s plastic sushi. 

The other day, I stumbled upon this item in the New York Times, about "the last living number painter in Naples." You can read the article here. I suppose Mr. De Stefano is being replaced by computer generated comic sans, and the world suffers yet another unkind cut as another breath of life expires.

In the article, they mention that Mr. De Stefano has an Instagram site. Given that Meta (which owns facebook and instagram) are two of the three biggest child-trafficking sites in the world, I closed my accounts about three years ago. I can't. We have to start unaccepting the horrible acceptingness we are forced to accept. We have to be rigid and binary. We have to be "This will not stand." 

I know I have an Old Testament mien, and I don't even have a beard. But I ain’t supporting child rape. I’m funny that way.

My wife, however--no child-trafficker, mind you--is still on both. She sent me much of Mr. De Stefano's art below, so I could post this.

In this vein, and for whatever reason, I ordered a book from abebooks.com last week that arrived at my fuking bucolic doorstep on the Gingham Coast just last night. Just owning a book of Cuban Revolución art will be enough to get me kicked out of the Gingham Coast Uplift Society, but so be it. Besides, I had pecuniary reasons for getting the book. That is, an idea that could make me some money.

Owing to my particular manual ineptitude, whenever I photograph something from a book it comes out all lopsided. That's ok. There are still many things here, lopsided or not, to marvel over. I particularly like the beisbol umpire poster.

My assertion is simple.

You can if you want find a way to see the world from your favorite chair. 

Just try opening your eyes.

A Tear Down.

Looking back on my long life, I might say that the best job, and the best metaphor, I ever had was one of my early ones. 

Back fifty years ago, summer jobs were not easy to get. You had to comb the want ads just about every night when the local paper arrived if you wanted to snag one. If you couldn't get your local paper at your college, you had to wait until you got home for the summer to get a summer job. Usually by that time, only slim pickings were left.

One summer, I think it was my last summer in New York and living with my parents, I got a job helping two brothers who had a rusty Chevrolet pick-up, a metal-bending brake and some small success doing aluminum siding. Aluminum siding was a relatively new idea back in the 70s, and it hadn't yet gained its subsequent tarnished reputation.

As far as manual skills go, I have none. The only thing I can rightfully do with a hammer is bang my thumb, but I was a big strong boy, and when the brothers Frankie and Olindo Nocito saw me, they hired me on the spot for the then staggering sum of $125/week. Cash.

Because I had no skills, and the brothers had no intention of teaching me any, my tasks were confined within a very narrow range. 

We would arrive at the house to be re-sided and the brothers Nocito would leave me a hammer, a crowbar, a ladder and an assortment of large black garbage bags. My job was to remove all the shingles I could off the house. And keep the shingle droppings off of my head and out of the bushes.

If I could strip a house clean by the time the brothers were ready to pick me up at the end of the day, if I collected all the shingly detritus and had it all swept into large garbage bags, the brothers were happy. More often, if I missed a spot--say something up by an eave too high for me to get to with my ladder, I would hear a torrent of Italian curses like an outtake from some movie by Francis Ford Coppola, and only a bit more threatening.

The metaphor here is simple. 

I was a big dumb unskilled kid doing big dumb unskilled work. Ripping shingles off a split-level.

Anything that required skill, taste, experience or artistry, Frankie and Olindo would do. For the "value-add" part of their business,  wasn't even allowed to bend the aluminum. I would cost them more in misshapen metal than I would save them by doing it myself.

The more I see of the so-called AI revolution, at least as it pertains to advertising, the more I see no one buying, selling or promoting the splendors of AI acknowledges how much of a blunt instrument AI is.

AI is great at producing the 765 different rectangles in 8634 different sizes and swapping in a matrix of offers, calls to action and ethnicity of stock photos so clients and their agencies can produce a broad spectrum of ubiquitously annoying ads that no one will ever notice because they have no oomph of stopping power. AI is great at checking off boxes, at saying we have an 300x250 ad for the site "Mayonnaise Today." We'll be able to test four headline variants, six offers and a dozen calls to action. We'll learn so much we can optimize and improve our results from 12 clicks per 100,000 impressions to 12.375/100,000 clicks.

Doing such work has tremendous value. And AI is made for such tasks.

However, I'd doubt that anyone can tell me the difference between a Nissan or a Toyota or a Hyundai or a Kia or a Ford or a Chrysler or a Mazda or a Mitsubishi. Knowing the difference might do more for a brand than knowing well-qualified buyers can lease a new _______ for a little as $599/month.

That sameness applies to nearly every category from Caribbean islands to car insurance to quick serve restaurants to airlines to political candidates. 

In fact, as skilled as the ad industry has become in creating ads that are indistinguishable from any other ad, on the client side, clients are equally skilled at deriving almost identical offers. 

BTW, just as no brand being advertised today has a unique selling proposition, just as no brand being advertised today stands for something or promises, the same holds true for about 99.79-percent of all agencies. They all seem to work at the intersection of verbal flatulence and acid reflux.

AI is great in a world where it's a given that everything 
looks the same
sounds the same
is priced the same
and has the same legal copy.

AI is not great, as I was not great when I was in aluminum siding, at adding value. At differentiating. At getting noticed.

I don't see anyone on either the client or agency side who's really thinking about "using the right tool for the job." 

There's a place for AI, just as there was a place for me as an aluminum sider.

But what smart brands do--find a voice, find their confidence, and articulate what they believe, it might be worthwhile not having a blunt instrument. Instead, working with someone who can help a brand discover its sense of direction and double-down, not on programmatic legerdemain, but on the courage to stand apart from everyone else.

That's the kind of shit you learn from the aluminum siding business.

Shred Up.

When I started GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company over six years ago, one of the first things I bought for my office was a paper-shredder. I suppose because I had to open a business bank account, get a tax ID number, and incorporate my LLC, my data and privacy were sold more often than a ride on melania's ass, back when she was a cheap hooker. Of course, the melanoma-hooker claims are un-proven, so allow me to clarify.  my data and privacy were sold more often than a ride on melania's ass, back when she was an alleged cheap hooker.

With all that horrid direct mail coming in, all those offers of $700 bonuses and 100,000 points and free checking as well as offers for solar power, wind power and lunar power, as well as free roof inspection, lawn-service, tick eradication, security services and various unreliable cable systems offering equally spotty internet connectivity, I decided to work "stupidity shredding" or "annoyance shredding" into my daily routine. 

My shredder has a lovely aggressive mechanical whirl--like a well-oiled Sten gun chopping down Nazis as the Allies try to take Remagen.

I just shredded something in a bright silver envelope from Capital One bank, something else bidding me to open now from the local bank who robs me with their fees, and a fake telegram looking thing from a "financial advisor" offering me $50 to attend an estate planning luncheon. Call me cynical, I am more likely to win the entire IBM ad business than ever collect that $50. 

About 99.676899-percent of advertisements have the ethical standards of a carnival barker. You can win a kewpie doll if you pay $1 and throw three balls and knock over the weighted bottles. But you damn well know that the kewpie doll is worth significantly less than what you paid to win in. I worked at a carnival one summer--exactly 50 years ago. I know whereof I kewpie.

Switching media gears for a minute, when you're on a social platform and you see what are allegedly targeted ads (and almost never are) you quickly get to a drop-down menu that asks you why you hate the bullshit you're being sent with such avidness. The linked in screen shot above has ten ovular choices, but they've left off most of the most egregious reasons, see below.

So much of what I see online in my very-advertising-centric feed is theoretical posturing about what makes an ad or an ad campaign successful. Is the client and/or agency spending too much on performance and not enough of fame? Is the ad reaching people when they're ready to buy? Is the ad contributing to that remarkable American quilt we call culture?

About twenty five years ago there was an agency you might have heard of that handled much of the American Express account. It was called Ogilvy.

One year, the defunct agency had shot some commercials with Jerry Seinfeld and had persuaded Seinfeld to entertain at the agency Christmas party.

He probably did about five minutes. And was very good. Because he cut through the bs with truth. Seinfeld said something like, "The great thing about advertising is that you can only really say two things about it. You see a commercial you can say, 

1. "It's good." or
2. "It sucks.'

Trillions of dollars and quadrillions of hours are spent in advertising rationalizing the efficacy of the 99.676899-percent of advertisements that suck.

We'll heat map them, and eye-graph them and come up with about 14-million reasons why a dog's breakfast might be deemed Le Bernardin-esque--research said so. The research and data will pour in, as will the case studies proving incontrovertibly that the $42 million spent on the totality was worth it.

Into the shredder it goes.

That's what real people do.

Finding a Voice.

Last week it was announced that after 32 years, the advertising relationship between IBM and Ogilvy had ended. I knew the news beforehand, as you'd expect. And to be real, the vibrancy of the relationship had ended probably ten, or even fifteen years earlier.

The two former behemoths were like long-married billionaires. They no longer cared for each other, but it would be too expensive to leave. So they tolerated each other's presence.

I worked for Ogilvy and on IBM for over a dozen years--for parts of four decades. I'd be lying if I pretended I was anything but a cog in a Steve Hayden, Chris Wall, Matt Ross (account guy)-built machine. I wasn't a power-hitter. But I could do the little, important things that help teams win. 

I could make a timely hit, I could advance a runner, I could come through in the clutch, and I could while away the hours--that is put in the work that makes work work.

Yes, over those dozen years I produced hundreds of TV commercials, hundreds of print ads, banner ads, websites, direct mail pieces, radio spots and, even, strategy decks thanks to my adroit ability to boil 97-page decks and 34 contributing voices down into TV-Guide length-blurbs. I also wrote speeches, jokes and emails that helped the troops.

Those dozen years were the best dozen years of my long "working-for-others" career. They made the last almost seven years of working for myself possible. They gave me confidence. More important, they gave me the skill that justified that confidence. 

I am smart enough, and my hard drive is organized enough, to have saved certain documents from those years that can remind me of much of what I learned along the way. One of those documents was IBM's 2001 Annual Report. It was IBM CEO Lou Gerstner's last annual report since he led IBM's turn around. I sensed that it might appreciate in value like a Honus Wagner baseball card.

There was a time in our business, at least at Ogilvy, where creative people weren't just designers and writers. They cared about design and writing, but more than that, they were business people who could use creativity to advance a client and agency's prospects, and therefore their career. That amalgam of business-sense and creativity seems to have been wrung out of modern advertising. Creatives aren't supposed to worry their little heads about business issues. It's almost bad for your career to be too pragmatic or mercantile.

So, yes, in those days, some of us read annual reports.

In this annual report, which I have in front of me, there was this beautifully designed and written section, right at the beginning before the rows and rows of SEC reporting. I suppose to most people reading annual reports, the numbers are the most important things. Like they seem to be most salient to the holding companies today. However in this IBM annual report, the "Sixteen decisions..." section was more valuable than a B-school degree.

There as a spread in that section that does more to sum up the relationship between IBM and Ogilvy and how instrumental Ogilvy was to IBM's turnaround and ascent. I suppose in the long history of advertising, not too many people make it to pages 36 and 37 of an annual report, but I did. And I learned from it.

When an agency helps a brand "recapture something we'd lost--our ability to engage our customers and our industry in a meaningful conversation about what matters to us, and to them," that is something that is worth more than any number of trumped up and largely specious awards and self-aggrandizements. As is this, "When we rediscovered our voice, we discovered something else: our sense of direction, the courage to stand apart from the crowd and, ultimately, what it means to speak like a leader again."

Man, if I were John Wren or Arthur Sadoun or Cindy Rose, I'd hire a good stone-cutter and etch those in my executive suite. I'd then call in everyone of my remaining 109, no, make that 81, cancel that, 68 employees and have them memorize it. That's every new business pitch in just 57 words. (Not one of them 'intersection.)

In my life in advertising, this used to be what we did. Engage people in what a brand does and why they need it. Stand out from a crowd. Speak like a leader.

We didn't have these silly demarcations, like brand, performance, social, digital. We didn't have cuneiform funnels and bow-ties and ecosystems.

We had words that mattered.
Working to make brands matter.

Work that matters not merely to juries in cerise-colored espadrilles in southern France. But to people in supermarkets, on Amazon, in car dealers, when they're booking a vacation.

That is the road back.
For clients.
For agencies.

Find our power.
Find our meaning.
Find our purpose.
Find our voice.

This Will be Complicated.

This post is about two books I've read over the past eighteen months or so. I wish more people would read them for two reasons.
a) I'd like to have someone in this stupid world to talk to. And
b) I think our industry (and our world) would be a better, more prosperous place if more people took the time to think not about the day-to-day of our business, but about some larger happenings.

I read "Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation," by Bryne Hobart and Tobias Huber back in December, 2024. It's a complicated book, that I'll try to condense to a few sentences. (That's what I do best.)

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

The thesis of "Boom" is simple. 

All the things modern social organizations, enterprises, laboratories, research centers, universities and even ad agencies do to increase their bottom lines run counter to their need to create something great.

Cost-accounting will never produce the first lightbulb, cheese in a can, or great ad.

Yet, in every sphere of our lives, cost-accounting is our sine non qua. That's Latin for "our scrotum in a vise."

Huber and Hobart talk about how in academic research roughly 47 out of 100 hours is spent on writing grants. And probably another 20 to 30 hours is spent looking for citations and precedents. Leaving about one-hour-in-five to actual thinking.

That's not counting meetings, meetings about meetings and the meetings we have to complain about having too many meetings.

The advertising parallel is there for all to see. We probably spend 47-percent of our time on award entries. 30-percent of our time studying previous award-winners for tips, and 20-percent of our time watching HR's "handy" videos. I call them handy because they're usually about not touching anyone and not greasing any palms.

In both scenarios, the dynamic leads to something very dire. Work that is only incrementally different from work that went before, that is work that is "stagnant," not "inventive." Our work doesn't go from the Wright Brothers to Lockheed's Skunk Works. It goes from a 20-watt bulb to a 20.5-watt bulb. That we get awards for.

If you want to think about it, most everything today operates under these strictures. It's why almost everything sucks. From your expensive meal to your cheap one, from your government to your subway ride to work.

What's The Least We Can Do and Get Away With It?

Huber and Hobart believe in the lack-of-common-sense-ness of bubbles. Massive expenditure of things that could change everything--that might never happen.

Those bubbles--whether they burst to build--create standards, enthusiasm, opportunity, competition and spillover effects. 

For instance, if an agency has one real account where good work is done, the entire agency improves. Everyone competes to do the good work. And people who can't get into that account get angry and work to make their business great.

That's how Boom businesses, Boom agencies and Boom careers are made.

"How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation and the Fate of Nations" by Carl Benedikt Frey is infinitely more accessible. You can buy the book here. And read the Wall Street Journal review here.

This is a simplification, but I think not a bad one:

Frey divides the world (nations, economies, businesses, etc) into two types.

There are the risk takers.
There are the efficiency-ers.

Think about those two classifications in agencies.

Risk-takers say "yes, we can do that." Great work and success often happens from those risks. Splashes are made. Victories, awards and accounts are won. Because the business, or nation, thought big and did something bold.

At this point, something happens.
The "winners," don't want to lose what they gained. They don't, in short, want to risk things. 

So, they start incrementalizing.
They start talking about processes and how to cut costs.
Before long they've cut the very verve and elan that made them successful in the first place.

"Boom" and "How Progress Ends" share this idea.

They both tell of entities that use sparks to advance.

Then they get afraid that subsequent sparks will lead to wildfires and destroy everything in their way.

The inventors--the nuts--are cast out.
The "don't make wave-people" are ascendant.

If you'd have the mind for it, you can squeeze nearly any entity and even any relationship into these binary structures.

People want Booms--but don't want to accept the Busts that make Booms possible.

People want Risk but limit it by demanding incremental risk, that is efficiency.

Risks and Busts are pre-conditions for Progress and Booms.

I read something from yet another book not too many months ago, about the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, operation Barbarosa. 

A German tank commander observed at the time that the Wehrmacht needed to stop its bloodletting at the hands of the Soviets “if we do not intend to win ourselves to death.”

Write those words down somewhere.

If we do not intend to win ourselves to death.

You can swap out "win" and replace it with "efficiency." Or "agile" or "downsize" or "cost-cut" or "get rid of the trouble-makers."

The entirety of the ad industry and/or Western Civilization has won itself to death.

 

Clarity.

Branch Rickey in his playing days.

When I was a boy, baseball was about 107-percent of my life and a full 134-percent of my happiness. Even though the sport was already in decline in the '60s, and both New York nines were or were teetering on the edge of abysmal, despite all that, baseball consumed me.

In fact, I learned a lot about people from baseball. And a lot about laughter.

First, when I was about five and playing in some kiddie game, I heard someone, maybe an older brother, scream out, "Aunt Jemima makes a better batter." (Aunt Jemima was a pancake mix--since renamed for racial sensitivity.) 

Aunt Jemima makes a better batter was an order of humor and wit on par, to my young ears, with anything Oscar Wilde could have said, or Dorothy Parker. 

"You swing like a rusty gate," was pretty high up on the Pantheon as well. Nice metaphor. Nice picture drawn in my mind, complete with audio.

There were two other barbs that persisted through my youth, both for ragging pitchers.

One was, "We want a pitcher not a belly-itcher." From the moment I heard that I put the speaker in the 'not worth talking to category.' That's no kind of a putdown, I judged. Especially in comparison to my favorite, "We want a pitcher, not a glass of water." To my tender ears, that was the apotheosis of wit. The guy is not a pitcher...he's merely a weak component of that--a glass of water. Loser.

All this, believe it or not has a semantic point and given that this is a blog nominally on advertising, an advertising point.

We were taught growing up to make words a vector. Spears with points. We were taught--indirectly at least of their power.

Some time ago, something crossed my eye, something I hadn't seen before. They were digitizations of typewritten scouting reports by the great baseball general manager, Branch Rickey. Rickey was the man who signed Jackie Robinson for the Brooklyn Dodger--to his major league contact. 

He's in the Hall of Fame, Rickey is. And with the signing of Robinson probably did as much to change the game as Babe Ruth, or more.

During his over 50 years in the game, Rickey played for three teams, managed two and was the general manager of four more.

Rickey's scouting reports were little works of art--like fine caricatures. In just a few lines, a facsimile of a player was created.

Before I get to a selection of Rickey's reports, a counter-point. Late last week I read an article in the horrible sports section of the New York Times--a separate website they call the Athletic. 

I found these two scouting reports in the above. And these two underscored assaults on the English language and communication itself.

Those words I've underlined stopped me. Because they annoyed the pine-tar out of me.

Back when I was five, we'd have said "good stick" to say someone could hit. Or "he gets good wood on the ball." Never in one trillion years would I have thought something as dumb and pure as baseball would resort to "very strong bat-to-ball skills," or "ability to impact the ball for damage." Be careful out there, mbas are everywhere.

As my friend Rob wrote when I shared these clips above:

In any event think about the writing above and below when you're looking at work. Or evaluating people you work with. 

Think about the difference between very strong bat-to-ball skills and good wood. One's bs. One's real.

CAVEAT:
You must forgive certain words in Rickey's reports. He calls African Americans "coloreds," and "boys." Those are marks of the time. They are not redolent of white supremacy or racism.

Fake news.