Part the Eighth of Twelve.

Back during my first stint at Ogilvy, basically before I knew which of the urinals in the men's room didn't squirt water when you flushed it, I was dragooned by then president Steve Hayden to rescue a dot com account that had been all-but "cooled" to death.

1999 was a more naive era. Many people, especially ad people, believed you could shoot gerbils out of a cannon in a commercial on national TV, and that would get you a billion-dollar valuation. 

Today, we are so much wiser, richer and more experienced. Now, all you have to do to win a trillion dollar valuation is lose $80,000,000,000 in half a year. Then, you can cash in like the founders of anthropic or some other 'I'm-not-sure-what-they-do-or-why-it-matters.'

In any event, I was grabbed by Hayden and locked in my nearly-padded office writing scripts twelve hours a day for a weekend for a now defunct dot com, which was riding high at the time, called PeoplePC.

(I still have 6000 shares of their stock. Which is worth as much as a tranche of hegseth-futures.)

The next thing I knew, I had sold a package of scripts and was sitting in a white van with Hayden and my art-director Susan Westre (whom at that point I had never even met) at 7AM one cold morning on our way to location in a small town called Bridge Mix, New Jersey.

I had nothing to do with the previous round of commercials, but you can be sure they followed the universal strategy that every creative team and agency has followed for about the last thirty years. We don't have to tell people what a product does, what makes it different, why someone might need it, we only have to tell people it's cool. This spot below has, since last century, been the universal default commercial for every product--no matter what it does or who the potential target is.

In any event we were out in Jersey shooting a bunch of spots and the dweeb of a client approached Steve Hayden. He was happy with how the shoot was going and happy with the spots.

"It looks like we have a hit on our hands," he blow-harded.

Steve nodded as if he had been listening.

The client continued, "Too bad the first round was such a disaster."

Steve took a step back and, quietly, said "If the first round hadn't been a disaster, we wouldn't be here."

That's the sort of thing you remember for thirty years. And think about every thirty minutes for thirty years.

Which brings me to the point of the eighth of my Humanments: Thou Shalt Get Lost.

Not get lost as I so often hear it, as "go fug yourself," but get lost as in take a risk. Meander. Let your mind wander. Take the longest distance between two points. Think different and differently.

You can read about the institutionalized lack of getting lost in today's world in a dense book I'd recommend called, "Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation," by Bryne Hobart and Tobias Huber. 

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

Boom is the kind of book, BTW, that people in agencies used to read when agencies existed to direct and steward clients' business, not just execute generic commoditized advertising. It's a brand-leadership book--not a mere marketing book. If people running agencies and holding companies still read, I'd call it a "must read." As it stands today and the fact that there's no influencer involved in it, it's a "must ignore." (That is, something not fed to you and everyone else by the reign of 'one algorithm fits all.')

The thesis of "Boom" is simple. 

In other words, all the agile-firsting, AI-tool-enabled, utilization-optimizing, six-sigma-black-belting, timesheet haranguing, briefing-by-eleven-first-tissue-by-three-ing, sprinting, brain-storming, efficiency-shibbolething, horse-hockeying nonsense is just that, nonsense.

More great work was done by people throwing pencils at the ceiling and kibbitz-thinking than all the algorithmic bushwa that the trillion-dollar-valuation sham-companies are spending trillions on forcing us to believe.

Why would anyone buy 'creative' from a company

that puts their name on something like this?

A. Says who?
B. I dunno, 'Think Different,' and 'Just Do It' are decades old and still relevant.
Not to mention Shakesepeare or the Bible. 
C. How has A.I. helped anyone in real-life?

I'd rather have six people from my personal ad group-chat take two hours and solve a brand issue than have AI do it. What's more, it would be funnier, more memorable, faster and cheaper. And we'd eat better, too. Pass the lo mein.

More and more we are following orders--the protocols edicted by McKinsey-inspired holding-company technocrats--telling us how to do things that they've never done and never will.

I'd rather get lost.

Good and lost.

And then come back with something I may get fired for.

Hopefully something that doesn't test well.

As opposed to that Miracle Whip spot. 

Which tested well above Norms.

Norm. Singular.

 

Part the Seventh, of Twelve.

In my subterranean office I have about a dozen replicas of notebooks of famous thinkers from years past.

A small publisher in Barcelona, Knonecker Wallis, publishes reprints some of these notebooks and charges handsomely for them. In about a year, they go out of print, and I wish I had bought two copies.

Here are a few pages and the cover from Isaac Newton's college notebooks. You can browse them on this site from Cambridge University. 

I can't say I understand anything here but that doesn't matter. They show the flow of ideas, the cross-outs, the hard-work of actual thought. All that is marked down so it can be thought about, remembered, re-worked like a tough Saturday crossword. That's the point.

Thinking.

Here are a few other examples.

Just like in real-life the Turing one is clipped together with the kind of clips I last used in seventh grade. They didn't work for Turing. They didn't work for twelve-year-old me, they don't work any better now. Open the Turing a few pages and the things breaks apart.

That's part of its charm.

Johnnie von Neumann was the genius who intimidated all the other geniuses. By the age of six he could divide eight-digit numbers in his head. By eight he had mastered calculus. He even knew the word dumb had a b in it.

This is von Neumann's blueprint for an early computer.

I like note books like these--and I have half a dozen more--because while I don't understand what's being deciphered in them, it helps me to see the very act of deciphering.

Too many people, especially those who grew up with sophisticated digital tools like those we use so readily today, think work springs fully formed like Athena from Zeus' head. 

They start designing and 'word smithing' before they have the vaguest idea down. They refuse to acknowledge that many of the greatest discoveries of human-kind--from the very beginnings of human-kind--radiated from the simple human act of making a mistake, taking a wrong turn, talking your way out of a jam, or getting lost.

From an evolutionary point of view, finding yourself in a fix has always lead to ingenuity, risk taking, rolling the dice and finding something magical.

As Ogden Nash wrote...

In other words, the termite got where she got by mistake. Most living things do.

The Shibboleths of our era prize speed and efficiency. They'll put up with a Library of Congress' -worth of AI slop from a NASA's-worth of computer brains so long as it's fast and cheap and meaningless, and for the most part, insulting. 99.78-percent of everything we read and heard uttered, regardless of the medium or the speaker, is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." 99.78-percent of what we read today makes the Gilligan's Island Christmas Special look like "Hamlet."

There's no guarantee that pencil and pad will reduce the amount of crap in the world. I'd guess Bulwer-Lytton wrote this archetypical drivel with pen in hand. So hand-work is not guarantor of quality.

Robert Caro, two-time winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer-Prize, told a story about slowing down his writing. While at Princeton, he would wait till the last moment to write for his fiction class.

Though Caro always got A's, his professor R.P. Blackmur, encouraged Caro to slow down.

Writing, drawing, doodling by hand forced Caro to slow down--to not think with his fingers.

When Caro interviews people, he follows similar "slow down" guidance. 

Much of the decline of nearly everything is because we have so much to do we believe nothing is worth our time. 

The truth is, however, whether or not people know for sure whether the messages you or brands send to them are made by humans or machines, they may very well sense how they are being treated.

Very few people are gulled by a dirty carpet at 
an understaffed hotel front desk that says "elite" on it.

Most people, most creatives, most agencies, most of the world are treated like a pothole on the way to enormous profits. Caring, craft, time, pencilling get in the way of ever-more Mammon.

I remember years ago a story I read about Bill Bernbach. It's said a client said to him, "Why do you spend so much time on copy? Nobody reads it."

Bernbach is said to have answered, "Ten percent of people read copy. That's who I write it for."

The best way to be a human is to care about other humans who care.

                            Photos by Christopher Payne.

Part the Sixth, of Twelve.

Last week, I was sent two decks by two different agencies. One was twelve pages long. The other was fifty-five pages long.

In each case I would have been better off with a single sentence type-written on a page, preferably in Courier, with no codicils or subordinate clauses, or even commas.

Recently I did fourteen days of day-rate for a giant agency recently subsumed by an even gianter agency. Part One of their brief was forty-one pages. Part Two was eighty-one pages.

Semiotically, this is the world today.

We have so much to tell people to do, we have no time to listen, or think, or even discuss.

If a brief is a set of instructions, 

simply,

a set of instructions shouldn't be more than a few dozen words.  Maybe, at most, six or twelve steps.

I'm not one-hundred percent sure why briefs can't be as simple as recipes. Even a recipe by an old-school chef/writer like Craig Claiborne. When cooking was an all-day affair, not a sixty-minute sprint.

Whenever I meet with a client, especially a new client, I am wary when they schedule a thirty-minute meeting.

Very often a thirty-minute meeting means they expect nothing but them giving you orders. Thirty-minutes is not really enough time to question something you don't understand, share a joke, much less have a discussion. Semiotically, a thirty-minute meeting says, "You must do this. End of meeting." It's basically, I'll talk, I'll order, you'll do.

Also, it's ostrich-y. A thirty-minute brief ignores the fact that most often people are two minutes late and have to leave three minutes early. Thirty minute meetings rarely have more than twenty-five minutes of meaning. There is usually at least five minutes of fonfer.

Another example of this sort of talking-not-listening semiotic malfeasance is the "no reply" email or text message. Basically, those mean: do this and shut up. Take it or leave it. But no push-back or questions are permitted.

In so many cases, in work, in life and in our world, listening has been removed from the human equation. As Fran Lebowitz once is said to have said, "the opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting."

What's more, the famous I'm not really listening dodge, aka "I'll get back to you," is more and more widespread. No one ever gets back to you ever. If they do, they didn't understand the question you asked (because they weren't listening) and more than likely their answer raises more questions which you can't get answered.

Humanments are things people should do to act like decent humans. That is, accord people with honor, respect, equality. Listening--like a close read in literature--accords people that respect.

Instead we live in a TL,DR world.

That's both Too Long, Didn't Read

and Tain't Listening, Disrespect Rules.

If you care about your fellow humans listen. Think. Listen. Think. Listen. Speak. Listen.

Can you imagine if this were posted within an agency. Or if a deck started with this as a slide?

 

Part the Fifth, of Twelve.

Years ago I read something in a book called "The Upswing," by Robert D. Putnam. The book is subtitled, "How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do it Again."

Putnam laid out two ways of living. (This is something I constantly talk to clients about, BTW.) One way is YOYO. The other choice is WITT. The world can essentially be divided between YOYOs and WITTs.

YOYO stands for You're On Your Own.

Think of modern life in amerikkka.

It is a zero-sum game. 

Helping someone else impoverishes me.

You have no safety net.

You have no essential services. 

Public schools, public parks, our roads, our systems suck. 

There are a lot of politicians but no one who helps you.

No one who tries to right wrongs.

A lot of advertising is YOYO now, too. 

(After all, the microcosm of advertising reflects the macrocosm of the world.)

You have no job security.

You have no raises.

You have no training.

You have no time.

You have no pride in what you make. Or say.

YOYO is growling, sneering, ignoring.

WITT is the underdog alternative.

It stands for We're In This Together.

It's loving thy neighbor.

It's believing that a rising tide lifts all ships.

It's altruism, respect, welcoming, kindness.

WITT is smiling, laughing, having a beer.

H, my friend and Account Director wrote this to D, a photographer and ex-O colleague who is doing a shoot for a client with GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company.

This sort of thing is rare today.

People appreciating and expressing appreciation.

It's a smile.

It's important.

L, my wife sent me something important this morning from Heather Cox Richardson's newsletter. She sent me James Talerico's victory speech. Talerico, in a huge upset, was just elected senator from Texas over a hugely favored and trillionaire-funded corrupt repugnant candidate, ken paxton.

Take a minute here and read this with the YOYO/WITT dichotomy in your mind.

But the billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens, they want us at each other’s throats. They want us focused on how we’re different instead of on how we’re the same. They want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them. The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom.

All these words can, I believe, also be applied not just to the political, non-tax-paying elites but to those who have taken over the ash-heap of the advertising industry and have strip-mined it so they can earn nine-figure pay-outs. 

Talerico continues,

The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power. We saw it in this race. We saw it in every billionaire-funded attack ad. The people at the top divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, by culture, so we don’t notice that they are picking our pockets, that they are defunding our schools, that they are gutting our healthcare, that they are raising taxes on all of us while they cut taxes for themselves. It is the oldest strategy in the world, divide and conquer. But tonight we sent a crystal clear message to the people at the top. We will not be conquered.

Back around 1963, president lyndon johnson said essentially the same to his press-secretary Bill Moyers (if you want to consider amerikkkan decline just chart the descent from Moyers as press-secretary to trump's: sean spicer, sarah sanders, kellyanne conway, karoline leavitt to katie zacharia, who lasted just over 100 hours in the job.) 

Moyers reported:

Rebellion against being cajoled to look down on someone, to fear, hate, beat, kill, demonize and other is simple.

Smile. 

Help.

Trust.

Smile.

Help.

Trust.

Repeat.

This is YOYO:

"They're eating the dogs! The people that came in. They're eating the cats! They're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there...They are taking over the towns. They're taking over buildings. They're going in violently." --donald trump

This is WITT:

We must heal the deep spiritual corruption at the root of all of these crises. We must bridge the divides between us and repair the ties that bind us... We showed that when working people come together across every dividing line, we can do extraordinary things. We won this race because people who are desperate for change now are going to get change." --James Talerico

In an age of universal deceit, division, selfishness and corruption, a smile, a simple smile, is a revolutionary act.

Revolt.

 

 

The Demon-crats. And Modern Marketing.

Now that amerikkka's mid-term elections are over, or nearly so, it's time to think about what we can learn from them. Not from a political point of view, not because of the so-called "blue wave," but from a marketing point of view.

I'm a liberal and democratic. I don't make a lot of political donations. But I do, on occasion, make one. I did send money to Senator Raphael Warnock's campaign back in 2022 when Warnock was running for Georgia senator against the supremely unqualified Herschel Walker. 

That donation, which was not huge btw, was like meat to the democratic party. My name was parsed and distributed by literally hundreds of candidates and hundreds more PACs and likely hundreds more left-leaning companies, periodicals and causes.

I was treated like a guy shopping at the Gap who need a whole new wardrobe. Suddenly my data was sold to every company around the world that's ever made any kind of apparel whether for male, female, human, dog or mackerel. 

Again, this isn't about politics or the way the political parties behave. This is about how marketers of everything from senators to hemorrhoid cream think they own you because they have your name, your phone number and other data on you that convinces them you are a viable prospect. (For about 99.99998-percent of companies, anyone who's breathed in the last three decades is worth marketing to.)

This is about how marketers treat you, not as a human-being, but as an asset to be squeezed and besieged until they annoy you into actually hating a person or brand you once had the propensity to like. This is about marketers who have convinced themselves that it's ok to market to you ceaselessly, it's ok to call you by your first name, it's ok to shill and shill and shill and cloy and cloy and cloy to the point where they're creating more disdain than sales.

Over-saturation creating more brand-disdain than sales is, today, a marketing best practice. 

Marketing no longer informs--we're told people make decisions based on emotions not product features. 

Marketing no longer entertains--that's expensive and sometimes the humor falls flat.

Marketing no longer helps people decide--that's what SEO and AI are for.

Marketing today exists only to chase after people. It's more harassment than helpful. It's more ugly than useful. Marketers they can bludgeon you into buying.

I'm sure in some marketing algorithm, democratic marketers said about my data, "oh we've got a liberal jew here, a two-fer. Let's go get 'em."

This is not just AI. This is the prevailing behavior of most marketers, not just political marketers, today. 

Speaking of politics, John F Kennedy said in his inaugural address in 1961, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Today, that would be articulated as, "If you want to do for your country, give me your money, and more more more more more. And then once you've give and we know you have a propensity for giving, give even more."

So, speaking of "liberal jew," they sent a liberal jew after me. Assuming our mutual liberal jewness would be remunerative.

Further, when Tuesday night's results were just about all in, the Senatorial race in Mississippi still hadn't be called. Surprisingly a democrat--an African-American democrat--was a few hundred votes ahead of his republican opponent. 

That's when these text messages started.

Two in four minutes from two different numbers.

Here's what I mean, down to the nubbiest of nubs.

Years ago while at Ogilvy on IBM, IBM was trying to differentiate by saying they believed in data integrity and privacy and that they wouldn't surveil their customers. (Common practice.)

I said, "IBM should stop retargeting people. Everybody hates retargeting, it's unethical and IBM can take a stand here."

A planner barked me down. 

"We get seven-percent uplift on re-targeting," she data'd.

"Margaret," I countered, "if we get two clicks per thousand views--or fourteen clicks per seven thousand views, you're willing to retarget and do something people hate in order to get fifteen clicks per seven thousand views rather than fourteen clicks per thousand views? 

For one extra click per seven thousand views you're willing annoy people. For .00014286-percent lift, you'll piss people off."

Conclusion: Best practices say 2.14/1,000 with customer hate is better than 2/1000 without hate.

IBM kept retargeting.

My point here isn't about politics.

It's about how marketers see us.

We are to be used and squeezed and bled dry. 

Squeeze everything out.

Distance, respect, permission, moderation, courtesy, respect are no longer attributes of a brand's behavior.

There's a term I read about a decade ago that I liked, though it never caught on. 

That term was "bionic monopoly."

The way I understand the term is straightforward. 

Old time monopolists, like Frick, Schwab, Rockefeller and Carnegie, dominated markets. You went to them or you went without.

Frick, Schwab and Carnegie sold 95% of the steel in the US--but they could only sell it once. Rockefeller sold 90% of the oil--but only once. Swift and Armour, 90% of the meat--but only once.

Moo.™ A wholly-owned subsidiary of trillionaire.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, CVS, Walmart, dimmycrats and repugnants and their ilk sell you products, but they believe they also own your data identity. They sell it and sell it and sell it and sell it. You and your endless stream of data are their product. You are not a human. You are a revenue stream.

They sell to you endlessly because they own you and your attention (and thereby your wallet) completely.

We are no longer people.

We are no longer customers.

We aren't even that horrible term: targets.

We are victims.