Disinformation X 2.

Disinformation has a Soviet ring to it. With a sprinkling of Kafka. Wrapped in corporate PR. And shrouded in military-industrial complex.

Such is the prevalence of disinformation today—in every walk of life—and the success of disinformation today, that we seldom even hear the word anymore. 

People are too busy being “transparent” and “authentic.” 

That said, Google Ngram disagrees with me. (Ngram is a useful though flawed tool. It determines the frequency of a word, name or term’s usage in millions of books and articles.)

In any event, during my reading last night, I tripped over a nice, succinct definition of disinformation. It seemed precise and not loaded with its own politics. (I spend an hour a day with a genius. It not only helps my brain, it helps restore me after a day so elbow deep in contemporary reference-less dopeyness. And sports.) 

When your agency has lost its biggest accounts, about 80-percent of its revenue, and first over the last five years about 80-percent of its people and your website features this, that’s disinformation.

BTW, In 2017, Ogilvy/WPP had 203,000 employees.

An action by a state or 

non-state actor designed 

to mask or reshape the 

truth about an event.

Disinformation, of course, is everywhere. 

It’s all that bullshit about you being powerful. 

About companies that care.

About the investments they make to heal the planet.

It’s everything ever uttered by the cranial-merkin-wearing felon-in-chief and his persilschien willing-executioners. It’s every word you’ve heard about healthcare, taxes, elections and whatever number of wars we are or are not fighting.

But Disinformation has an equally pernicious döppleganger.

Dis-Information.

You might want to take a look at this to see what I mean. (It’s 2:06 long. And of course, you have no time.) It’s about the power of information—even if no one actually reads it.

As Sammy Glick asked in Budd Schulberg’s great novel “What Makes Sammy Run?” "Why tell the truth when you can lie?”

Why provide ballast when you can show generic pictures?

So 99.99% of advertising, of conversation, of intercourse is empty of meaning and promise. It’s lip service. Without the spurious pleasure of actual lips.

So we don’t create brands. We create un-meaning. Which destroys brands.

Then we pay for awards for it. And publicize the awards. All while creating more un-meaning.

Diff. Er. Ent.

Does work like this matter anymore?

Almost forty years ago, I developed a test. 

A test of people.

(As my daughters might say, I’m a judgey sonofa.)

Around that time, even though I was young, often clients and others would ask me if I would talk to their niece or nephew, or a friend of a cousin’s tennis coach, because they wanted to get a job in advertising.

When I started in 1993 or so teaching a course or two in advertising at the School of Visual Arts, I quickly realized something.

A lot of people want to go into advertising.

They think it’s easy.

They think it’s fun.

They think it’s rich.

They think ideas pop into your head and the next thing you know you’re off shooting with gorgeous actors in exotic locales.

And breakfast burritos.

At the School of Visual Arts I realized that if your class started with fifteen people, after four weeks it would be down to ten.

After three more weeks it would be down to seven.

At the end of the twelve or fifteen weeks, three kids would still be working hard on the assignment. Those three would eventually get jobs in the industry.

Even though it’s almost 35 years since then and a lot has changed, I’d imagine those ratios really haven’t.

The test I developed was blunt and binary.

I learned it from my father, actually. 

He was blunt and binary.

I’d ask wannabes a simple question.

When you go into a grocery store, do you get excited? 

That is do you like seeing product design and display?

Do you like seeing how products present themselves?

The monikers attached to them?

Do you like seeing them showing off like a musician during a guitar solo?

If you’re not excited by what we sell and how it’s sold and how others are doing it, I reason, you’re probably not right for the business. 

(Going to the A&P with my father was like watching a ballgame with Branch Rickey or a fashion-show with André Leon Talley. These people see a lot of these things. They zero-in on small specialness.)

My core belief is simple.

There’s a lot of sameness in the world.

In the grocery store.

In politicians. 

In products.

In agencies.

In people trying to break into the job.

I’ll put it very simply.

As simply as I can.

No one gets picked for blending in.

People, products, companies, politicians, butterflies on the wing get picked by standing out.

(Years ago, Steven Spielberg started filming the stories of Holocaust survivors telling their stories. Even these stories, full of emotion, horror, woe and triumph got boring after a while. Some of the world’s most powerful stories didn’t stand out because of their sameness.)

The biggest change I have noticed in advertising is that no longer do we have to have heated arguments about the color green versus yellow, or the word “but” versus “although,” today we argue over un-arguable things.

We actually argue over the need to differentiate.

Many people, maybe the majority, no longer believe you have to.

They have all sorts of plannery-ratiocinations why differentiating is no longer necessary.

I think this started in the early days of advertising and data. 

We somehow believed that our targeting would be so good we’d get our message to an eager buyer and it would be perfectly adroit and convincing. You’ve heard the hype. 

The right message to the right person at the right time. (That seldom happens even with the most ardent lovers. What are the chances it will happen with mayonnaise?)

Its mere arrival would lead to sales.

No idea was actually necessary.

That thinking spilled into direct marketing's adjunct, digital.

And from digital it went on to sully every other sphere.

What’s more, maybe the people in advertising today no longer actually go to the grocery store. 

They no longer make a decision about what they buy.

Or they no longer think about it.

About once-a-week someone over 50 calls me.

They’ve just lost their job.

They have a great site.

And won two lions at Cannes a couple years back.

“What makes you different,” I ask.

They funfer. That’s Yiddish for er-ing and um-ing and not answering.

Finally they ask indignantly, “what do you mean?”

“I mean everyone has a great book. Everyone’s won two lions. Everyone has great recommendations and something shot by Brian or Lance.

“What makes you different?”

Funfer.

What makes you different is from an ontological point of view about the world’s hardest question to answer. 

It’s what makes you you?

Or as they sang in The Chorus Line, “Who Am I Anyway? Am I My Resume?"

Most people prefer not to answer it.

So they meander from one shit-hole to the next.

Never more than a post-nasal-drip away from being again fired.

Because ‘what makes you different’ is hard.

Too hard for most people to bother with.

Here are some differences.

There’s not a soul alive who could convince me these ads would not work today.

But we’ll never know.

They’re different.

And different is too hard.

Boney Tenant.

 

Every once in a while, you read something or stumble across a story that is so profound that you feel obliged to check if it were written by Sophocles or Plutarch. This story here from Wednesday’s “Wall Street Journal” is an example of what I mean. You can read it here.

I was never much of a Tony Bennett fan until 2001 when my father died. Around that time there was New York’s last jazz station broadcasting out of Newark, New Jersey, WBGO. They played an old “V-Disc” recording of Tony Bennett singing one of the saddest songs ever, “St. James Infirmary.” V-Discs were made during World War II or directly after. They were made to be sent to soldiers overseas. Bennett was born in 1926. The war ended in 1945, so he was a young man when he cut the wax. 

When my father died I called the station and they played it for me. Here’s a link to a version. I can't seem to download it. Life today means every time something is improved, it gets worse.

Hearing this was really when I fell in love with Bennett. 

I told a friend of mine about it and she sent me a ten-CD set, that though it had a lot of great music on it, it didn’t have the V-Disc recording. 

The article linked to above on Bennett is one I wish everyone would read. I especially wish the award-jockeys, financiers and accountants that have taken over the ad business would read it.

Not because of Bennett. But because it’s about integrity. Because Bennett is about “To thine own self be true.”

By the early 1970s, to quote the Journal “reinvention seemed to signify relevance….With several No. 1 hits and a Carnegie Hall triumph under his belt…Bennett was already a major star.”

Clive Davis—the legendary executive at Columbia Records said to Bennett, "adapt to contemporary tastes or the label will move on without him."

Davis handed Bennett a list of contemporary rock songs to cover, including Eleanor Rigby and MacArthur Park. Bennett went into the studio and "vomited from the strain of artistic compromise. The resulting album—“Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today!”—remains a musical and commercial debacle."

Why this in a blog on advertising?

Because  who hasn’t been told essentially, "adapt to contemporary tastes or the label will move on without him."

Who hasn’t been told to be digital first, or social first, or :06 first, or Tik-Tok first. Who hasn’t been told it’s not the message, it’s the medium? 

When Ogilvy was still in business and I was still there, I was told by the president and the CCO that Ogilvy was “no longer in the platform business. Clients are no longer buying platforms.”

Oh. 

I’ve been told rational thought is dead.

Information is dead.

Product differentiation is dead.

I’ve been told no one cares about benefits and features.

I’ve been told every tool in the persuasion and selling toolbox is dead.

I’ve been told today’s consumer is so radically different that everything I know and believe in is dead. 

Heaven forfend, if my dog ran away, I’d put up signs with her picture that says “Lost Dog.” The same way people would have in 1926, 1826, 1726 and plain-old 26. 

I wouldn’t plot an influential strategy or do something brand-y that obscured the message. I’d say “Lost Dog,” and have a picture, her name and my phone number.

Has the world really changed that much?

When I’m pitching a piece of business, it feels like I’m hoping to get picked by some baseball team. You have to stand-out to get in.

Here’s where Bennett might have served as an example to an industry still engaged in Ponzi-inflected Seppuku.

The Journal continues:

Bennett’s son Danny became his manager. He felt “The product was fine; only the distribution needed fixing.” Soon Bennet was on late-night television, alternative rock clubs, and eventually on MTV. His album 'MTV Unplugged' won the Grammy album of the year and went platinum. 

Bennett’s story is also a study in brand discipline, though he would never have used the phrase. Instead of gravitating to rock or its offshoots, he preserved the product and trusted that quality would eventually become a competitive advantage….

In a marketplace saturated with manufactured novelty, that made him rare.

Bennett spent seven decades betting that a superb song, sung with conviction, would outlast every fashion built to bury it…. 

His real innovation was patience—an asset that never depreciates.

I like the line above, a superb song, sung with conviction, would outlast every fashion built to bury it.

You can cross out the word song and substitute “headline,” or “joke,” or “essay,” or “drawing,” or “blueberry cobbler.” There’s a lot of money to be made in riding to FOMO Ferrari, in convincing clients and customers and everyone else within spitting distance that the world has changed irrevocably, and we better get with the latest trend.

In fact, I’d suggest that’s why everyone and his sister are accepting the sloppiness of AI. Forget its dearth of verve and originality, it’s cheap and everywhere.

I’d suggest that “superb” work is not based on trends. And conviction—by definition—can’t be faked. Real feelings and real emotions expressed with integrity is what the industry should once again be about. That’s why, almost seven years since being kicked to the curb by Ogilvy/WPP, they’ve lost 80% of their value and I’ve gained 80% more wherewithal.

I suppose it’s weird to flit from Tony Bennett to William Faulkner—but they’re both people who stuck to their knitting. You wouldn’t find Faulkner partnering with James Patterson or co-writing the Yoknapatawpha cookbook with Martha Stewart or some other atrocity. 

Faulkner concluded his Nobel Prize Acceptance speech with these words. I don’t expect you to read them as often as I do. But try to read them once in a while.

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. 

The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. 

The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Trends are fine. You can make haste quickly with them. But to build something that lasts, you don’t merely chase after trends.

You endure. You consistent. You do you. You prevail. 

 

Worms Matter.

Words matter, about 2,000 pundits a day pompousicate on LinkedIn.

Words matter, says every client in every meeting.

Words matter, say hack-assed creative directors, without every bothering to read the words.

Words matter, as another billboard goes up that hasn’t a soupçon of stopping power, charm or wit.

Or even coherence.

Words matter.

And then we bring on legions of machines that don’t understand words, but merely select them based on a set-of-pattern-matching probabilities that are most likely to give you a set of words that look just like a set of words you saw not long ago.

Words matter.

But not enough so that we select them carefully.

Most of what we read and hear and say has the originality of an in-flight ad for a credit card offering points. You can’t walk out on a plane. But no one can bear to listen.

In fact machines don’t understand words—they don’t think after all—they just predict which one should come next. It’s like looking at Muybridge stills to learn how a horse gallops. 

There’s a lot you can, or a machine can, infer from the above. But as Angus Fletcher points out in his book “Primal Intelligence,” (I’m quoting from the Wall Street Journal review you can read here)

AI can steal datasets from stories and recycle them into plots but, Mr. Fletcher is keen to remind us, the computer is still not reading the story. We are.

We are the ones taking the word scrambles and lacing meaning into them. Mr. Fletcher uses moving pictures to drive the point home: If you ask AI to generate an image of a running horse, it will do so with bits and bytes of data, still images that it pushes together for us to view. 

It’s our brain that sees the horse run; we write action and story over bald data. 

 

The subhead of the WSJ review of Primal Intelligence is something the propagators of trillionaire-backed AIs are hopeful that we’ll ignore or forget. 

In other words, while AI can spit out words, it takes human understanding to select the right ones. Man’s search for meaning is not algorithmically based.

Here’s an example from “1929,” Andrew Ross Sorkin’s great book on “the greatest crash in Wall Street History,” at least until the trump dump, which is (my guess) coming soon.

Until Herbert Hoover, the periodic collapses experienced by the amerikan economy were typically called “panics.” We had:

The Panic of 1837.

The Panic of 1857.

The Panic of 1873.

The Panic of 1893.

The Panic of 1907.

The Panic of 1920.

Hoover was scared that using the word “Panic” would create a panic.

So, though while the NY Stock Market lost 25% of its value in just one day, though unemployment rose to one-person-in-four out of work and industrial output fell by half, Hoover didn’t want people to panic.

Hoover chose to use the word Depression.

Depression.

Here’s Sorkin:

And that didn’t quite work out.

Words matter.

Even more, so does thinking. Which machines cannot do. sam altman’s purported singularity or “super-intelligence” are just marketing hype. 

We’re 30 years into the cellphone era, and about 70% of calls drop and about 2% of people understand their bills. We’re five years into the bot era and we can’t get a problem solved. And merry-izing the tone of voice and employing human-like interjections don’t fool anyone but the bought and paid for.

It’s the South Sea bubble.

The Tulip bubble.

The Credit Mobilier bubble.

It’s the 1929 Market.

Ponzi-flated for the benefit of a dozen men. 

A dozen men constantly raising more money.

Marketing-hype designed to separate the gullible from their money.

It’s all as real as the word Intelligence in Artificial Intelligence.

Going back to the Journal’s review of Primal Intelligence:

Having defined intelligence as “logic,” we’ve inadvertently turned education into endless data mining. 

Logic, reduced to its basics, is math—it’s a formula that operates only when there is data to plug in. That’s the whole mechanism behind algorithms and computer science. 

We’ve become so accustomed to thinking of logic as the primary good that we miss the obvious problem: Data, by its definition, is information that is known. It already exists. 

You can mix and recycle to make new tweaks, but it cannot lead to innovation—and it can’t tell you what to do when the future is unknown.

We’re using the wrong tools for the wrong job, getting the wrong results, and concluding there’s a 2.0 that will ameliorate that. 

There’s a word for that kind of thinking.

But this is a family blog.

Can I Quote You?

I don’t think people or agencies should quote notable advertising people—like Bernbach or Ogilvy—if they don’t at least take a stab at abiding by their standards of work, or how people are treated or the ethics of business those two men believed in.

You shouldn’t cite someone’s words but ignore their intent. 

I recoil when I see Ogilvy, the entity, co-opting the words of their founder when there’s nothing of David’s ethos and beliefs at all remaining. To my eyes it’s like false patriots who wrap themselves in the flag and then trumpet patently unconstitutional and anti-amerikan beliefs. Or bible-thumpers who cherry-pick phrases from the book while abnegating its essential truths. As rabbi Hillel is said to have said regarding the Jewish Torah, “That which is hateful to you do not do to others. All the rest is commentary. Now go and learn.” 

But most of these people are hateful to anyone who isn’t like them and willing to broadcast their hate.

You can’t hide behind a cross one minute and then next hate and call people illegal because they look different.

To my eyes, perhaps the wisest of the Ogilvy-isms I’ve remembered and inculcated through the decades is this one (which I’ve rewritten slightly to un-genderize it.) 

“The consumer isn’t a moron. The consumer is your partner.”

(Not as good as the original. But this is a family blog.)

Maybe it’s a function of my advancing years, but today—in dozens and dozens of daily interactions—I contend that most marketers treat people as if they’re stupid. As if it’s ok to lie or hyperbolize. As if it’s ok to bait and switch.

One near constant instance of that is the evidence that most advertising is Smilist. It bludgeons us over the head with ridiculous grins telling us how happy we’ll be if we’d only use their product like their plasticene models do.

Never in my life have I grinned like an idiot while working with a friend/lover/co-worker/stranger at my non-branded computer. Have you ever smiled like this?

Likewise have you ever smiled like this while talking to a cable company? Especially one named SpeculumOne.

Unreality like this is the equivalent of treating people like they’re idiots. It’s like the kids coming home from school happy as cultists and screaming “Hot Pockets!!!"

These are three stills from horrible commercials with pretty smiling people gushing over drugs that can be deadly. The top one is about toe fungus. The middle for a weigh-loss drug. And the bottom for severe rheumatoid arthritis.

Smile!

SMILE!!! YOU HAVE CLAY-COLORED STOOLS!!!

We are also besieged with lies like these. Yes, ExxonMobil has transformed thousands of communities. Usually into uninhabitable toxic dumps.

We see ads like this every day.

We don’t throw bricks.

We also get hogwash like these examples. At almost every turn.

Over the weekend I was at an expensive Boston hotel. Their $700 nightly room rate included a “free breakfast buffet.” The free breakfast buffet included an 18% service  charge. Though we served ourselves.

Later on I paid for another meal, for my daughter and her family. I can only imagine how many discussions were had over adding the word “valued” next to the word “customer” on the line I have to sign. Is that how you show people they’re valued?

I’m stupid enough and old enough to hold onto the belief that for a communication to be effective it must be based on some sort of truth.

Today from casting on down, every ad, every commercial, every emotion portrayed feels as false and focused-grouped as a Maine senatorial candidate. Everything is packaged purportedly for maximum marketability but everything is a lie.

The people behind the counter at the QSR aren’t smiling.

The world won’t end because there are no more Doritos.

There are no un-trafficked roads in amerikkka built, it seems expressly for Buick commercials.

There are no phone companies that make things simple and charge the price they advertise.

Every knows these are all lies.

But the truth sucks.

So we tell lies.

Lies no one believes.

But they test well.