George Tannenbaum on the future of advertising,
the decline of the English Language and other frivolities. 100% jargon free.
A Business Insider "Most Influential" blog.
In a highly-unusual move, The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet has decided to award the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to:
KATALIN KARIKÓ DREW WEISSMANAND 100 OTHER WINNERS.
Because some worthy entrants would have been disappointed, even saddened, by not winning an award, the Nobel Assembly chose to follow the lead of the Advertising Industry.
Sven Svenson, a Nobel Spokesbot said in a statement, "Why should we give one award for medicine? There are so many doctors, so much medicine and so many worthy people, this year we decided to give not just one award, but one-hundred.
Plus, in lieu of raises and a rational set of standards, trophies represent a viable alternative.
"Every piece of artwork deserves a place on the fridge, even if we don't own a fridge," said one recipient.
Herewith, a partial listing of winners for the Nobel Prize in Medicine:
Dr. David Blumenthal, a Bridge Mix, New Jersey pediatrician, won his first Nobel, for giving lollipops to children who had to get shots and vaccinations.
Dr. Liza Natale, a New York, Ear, Nose and Throat specialist received her first Nobel for "meritorious use of tongue depressors."
Dr. Sarah Clary, a Boston psychologist, was awarded her first Nobel Prize for say, "Um hmm. How did that make you feel?" a record 27-times in just one 45-minute session.
Dr. Donna Olmstead, a Montgomery, Mississippi veterinarian won her Nobel and a prize of $262,000 for asking Marvel, an eight-year-dachsund, "Who's a good dog?" and rubbing Marvel's tummy.
Mrs. Laszlo Kowalckek, a registered nurse from Crystal Lake, Illinois won a special Nobel for putting salve on her daughter's scraped knee.
It's early Saturday morning as I write this. The City has just endured its fourth 500-year-storm of the decade and the rats, climate-change deniers and marzipan-complected politicians are looking for places to dry off and for malign outside forces to blame. In other words, it’s a typical day in Systems-Collapse-Amerika.
Early as it is, the apatosaurus-sized, mob-controlled garbage trucks are roaring through the city, collecting their nightly-haul--the better to hide dead bodies in--prelude to trucking it out to Staten Island and piling it higher than the Pyramids, or at least one of those inflatable arm-waving salesmen so favored by used car-lots on route 22 out in Jersey. In other words, it’s a typical day in Systems-Collapse-Amerika.
I read two items this morning and I wonder--if there's a way back from the brink of Anthropocene demise--if there might be hints, or even instructions within.
The first was a book review in the cheery, neo-fascist "Wall Street Journal," that had me quickly sending $14.95 to the monopoly, anti-competition trillionaire-despoiler who rules a portion of our lives. That's a long-winded way of saying Amazon.
In the modren world, we often use the word Luddite, but very few of us know of the apocryphal Ned Ludd, after whom the movement was named.
The wonderfully named reviewer in the Journal, Katrina Gulliver writes: "In Britain in the early 19th century, the industrial revolution was underway, but there was also an economic crunch. Workers faced inflation and reduced wages. And for those in the textile industry, there was another challenge: automation. In 'Blood in the Machine,' Brian Merchant describes the moment as 'the first time that technology was used to replace human jobs en masse.'"
Further, “If the Luddites have taught us anything, it’s that robots aren’t taking our jobs. Our bosses are. Robots are not sentient—they do not have the capacity to be coming for or stealing or killing or threatening to take away our jobs. Management does.”
Finally, and most-important for this dopey post, "Less-expensive products produced by automation (or off-shoring) find a market. As we’ve seen in the era of the big-box store, nobody wants to pay for quality when they can get cheap. Consumers vote with their wallets."
This, of course, is what's happening as well in the industry formerly known as advertising. Clients, holding-companies, agencies, nobody wants to pay for quality when they can get cheap. Today, TV advertising, part of what Newton Minnow called a 'vast-wasteland' back in the early 60s, is all virtually indistinguishable, soul-less, and insulting. Any commercial, it seems to my old eyes, can be for any product from any brand and every attempt at a joke is an attempt at the same old joke and it wasn't funny when it was new, 50 years ago.
All the intelligence of our craft, mnemonics, repetition, even branding itself, have vaporized like civility in political discourse, or courtesy in the coach section of a budget airline.
Even a tautological phrase like "you get what you pay for," today would be considered Oracle-like wisdom in the sump of crappiness that passes for commentary today.
Next, I jumped over to "The Economist." Remember all those ads writ by David Abbott and company for the magazine? They were under-selling the magazine. It's invariably so-well-written and so-intelligent, if pressed I'd say it's one reason my agency is doubling in size every 18-months while everyone else, besides Mischief, is shrinkerizing, and I'm no Greg Hahn.
I remember reading a book about the origins of the Rothschild's great fortune. It's essentially based on knowing more things sooner than other people. Why would that not apply to advertising?
You can find the article here. But, as a service to those too busy watching the National Brain Damage League (American Football) or the 271-year-old bachelor on TV, I'll pick out a quote or two.
A line of research shows the benefits of an “innovation” that predates computers: handwriting. Studies have found that writing on paper can improve everything from recalling a random series of words to imparting a better conceptual grasp of complicated ideas.
For learning material by rote, from the shapes of letters to the quirks of English spelling, the benefits of using a pen or pencil lie in how the motor and sensory memory of putting words on paper reinforces that material. The arrangement of squiggles on a page feeds into visual memory..
One of the best-demonstrated advantages of writing by hand seems to be in superiornote-taking. In a study from 2014 by Pam Mueller and Danny Oppenheimer, students typing wrote down almost twice as many words and more passages verbatim from lectures, suggesting they were not understanding so much as rapidly copying the material.
Handwriting—which takes longer for nearly all university-level students—forces note-takers to synthesise ideas into their own words.
Let me, now, attempt to combine these two thoughts into my thesis.
Since the beginning of time to the rise of machines about 300 years ago, human labor, effort, accomplishment, achievement, progress, usually involved a fairly cosmic human connection.
Work, at its best, has always seen your hands, your heart and your head aligned.
Since humankind decided to buck the quadruped trend of almost every other animal on our dying planet and become bipedal, almost all successful work, almost all the work that gives our species meaning was the product of the through-line drawn from your heart to your head to your hand.
That through-line is how work works.
The love in your heart, the seeing of your brain, the skill in your hands.
They have to work together, to choreograph like a giant celestial orgy.
The modern world refuses to understand this.
The modern holding company would be baffled by the notion.
This is all stupid and naive, I know. But if we want to take back our lives from the clicks and clacks and whirr and blur of incessant machinery and machinistic thinking, it will take humanity, our hearts, hands and heads to do it.
There's no patented process. There's no Seth Godin book. There's no Hallmark card or Starbuck's drink that can do it for you.
My father, like me, spent the bulk of his life in advertising.
Actually writing ads.
He started back in maybe 1950. He was 22. His brother, Sid, was 37 and had started what became Philadelphia's largest ad agency, Weightman. My father wrote TV commercials. Live ones. TV was the new medium and no one wanted anything to do with it. It wasn't cool, like print.
From Weightman, my father drove his Studebaker over the Ben Franklin Bridge and the Delaware River to the advertising department of RCA. RCA was the Apple of its day. Cool. Innovative. Advanced. He did commercials like this one above.
Then came New York. Where my father rose in twenty years from copywriter to Chairman of a bland agency called Kenyon & Eckhardt. He did commercials like the ones above.
When he was 50, he got exiled to Chicago and moved out there. Eventually, he was shit-canned but got a job teaching advertising. They had to high-falutin' it up so they called it "Marketing Communications," at Northwestern University.
The best ad he ever proposed, however, was one he did for me when I was a senior in high school.
Though I've always hated football, the football coach persuaded me to join the team. I was big in those days, full of muscles and sinew.
I never really followed football and don't even know what position I played, only that I had to line up two over from Klauber. I never understood the names of football positions. Why would you call someone a "tackle." We're all supposed to tackle. I never understood and never cared to take the time to find out.
By the first snap of the season, it was clear our team wasn't just lousy, we were very lousy. That assessment could be verified by me playing both ways, both offense and defense. I think we lost our first game 38-12 or something, in front of a bleacher full of pretty girls I would rather have impressed.
Things didn't get much better during the next week of practice or the next game. Though we stayed close for the first half, I think the other guys pulled ahead in the second half and won going away.
One night I talked to my father about it.
It was the team-sport equivalent of getting beaten up by a gang of schoolyard ruffians.
"A steel cage and a gorilla costume," I straight-manned. I spent a lot of my youth George Burns to his Gracie Allen. The only thing I was missing was a cigar.
"You dress someone up--a big kid--in the gorilla costume and put him in the cage. Put a football jersey on him and have him hold a helmet. Then have him pace around in the cage like an angry ape. Think King Kong."
"OK," I tremuloed. "What's the point?" Just because I was only 16 doesn't mean I hadn't acquired a lifetime-supply of bitter cynicism.
"When you're getting your asses kicked, point to the angry ape in the cage, and say to the guys on the other team, 'You keep beating on us and we're going to put Labunski in.'"
"The ape is Labunski, I assume."
"If that doesn't scare them into laying off a bit, nothing will."
There was so much I never got around to thanking my father for.
There's a lot to dislike about the "contemporary ad agency ecosystem."
First, not everyone realized I was being an asshole when I called it an ecosystem.
But worse, is sitting out in the open at your ugly linoleum board laying on ugly Herman Miller sawhorses and having someone you barely know come up to you and say, "Can I pick your brain?"
Somehow, in our oh-so-politically-correct world, it's fine to ask someone if you can pick their brain.
An essential organ is fair-game.
Imagine.
Can I pick your pancreas? Can I pick your duodenum? Can I pick your pupik?
Pickable.
I was thinking about how many people used to ask to pick my brain when I worked at Ogilvy. You'd have thunk my synapses were like free after-dinner mints as a New York diner.
Here! Grab a handful! They're free!
Essentially, something shitty is behind that pick-your-brain request. Here are a few of the shitty-isms I've come up with.
1. The holding company has fired all experienced people and so as one of the few remaining, we're asking you questions.
We're asking you questions because training in an ad agency now consists of resizing mobile ads from small to microscopic.
2. We want the benefit of your intelligence, ideas and experience, but we aren't willing to charge clients for it. They don't want to pay for wisdom--procurement doesn't like wisdom.
3. We're asking you to think and work, and take time away from the job you're paid to do, and work for us for free. Because we don't own you for eight hours, though we pay you for eight hours. We own you in-perpetuity. Accent on the toooooey.
4. You're supposed to help others out of the goodness of your heart (and brain.) Just because no one else does doesn't mean you shouldn't.
5. When your brain is done being picked, or all picked out, or we decide we want a younger brain to pick, you and your brain will be kicked to the curb with no recompense whatsoever, even though you allowed free brain-picking.
Reading The Wall Street Journal about a week ago, I read this about one of the industry's prime brain-pickers.
As WPP was reducing its workforce from 2015-2021 from 200,000 people to 100,000 people, Martin Sorrell earned something like $200 million. He was fired from WPP half-a-decade ago, and is still being paid $500,000/year. (This data is true, btw. But no one knows about the halving of the holding companies. Because no one's left to report upon it except unpaid bloggers like me.)
$500K. That probably pays for his dry-cleaning.
He, and the legions of people like him, are perfect examples of "socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor." They pick brains and never pay. They pick brains then kick them to the curb like an old tin can. We support them. They pick our brains.
I saw this this morning. His math didn't work out. So he's firing 500 brains.
The article says, "we have continued to maintain a disciplined approach to cost management."
The article should say, "we have continued to maintain a disciplined approach to cost management, except the costs of paying management. "
I read so much, in fact, that I have almost no time for popular culture or television. I get criticized for that. By people in advertising. By my daughters. By friends who ask me "if I've seen..."
The answer is invariably no.
I haven't. And I don't want to.
Like I said.
I read a lot. It's my escape from a world that is too much with us. And reading allows me to exercise my brain. It makes me a better writer and a better advertising person. And I like reading. So I shouldn't have to explain.
I always figured there are a lot of people who could make things cool and contemporary. But, as Bernbach instructed, I'm looking for simple, timeless, human truths and reading is where I often find them.
There's a lot of killing in the book. After all, it's a history of the world. A lot of religious wars. A lot of conquering. A lot of regicide. A lot of plagues. A lot of decapitation and burying enemies alive.
It's worse than the nightly news.
These aren't the worst of times or the best of times. They're just times. The world isn't spinning off its axis, it was never on an axis.
The World was not an easy read. Harder than a 163-page powerpoint on the new media ecosystem and the changing media landscape of Generation R--or whatever letter we're on.
But I hung in there.
About 1,390 pages in I got to the quotation above by Edward O. Wilson.
Wow.
Then I substituted for the word humanity the word advertising. And suddenly I had today's entire holding company miasma figured out.
The real problem of advertising
is that we have palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and
godlike technology.
In other words,
people haven't changed in 200,000 years.
Yet we allow ourselves to be ruled by corporations
that believe in serfdom,
and further we believe that flawed,
often malevolent technology
will solve our problems when, really,
only we can.
Here are next 160 words of Montefiore's book. The last 160 words of his book.
Before you rush off to your next meeting or write your next banner ad, maybe you can take five minutes and think about what they might mean. Even to us in advertising who are often so crass and commercial.
Think about humans.
Doing so might be more important than thinking about KPIs, ROAS, and any other banality the non-humans can concoct.
Think about these two lines from a short poem by Arthur Miller, Lines from California. Then read.
"They know they are the Future. They are exceedingly well-armed."
I'm just a shitty copywriter in an even shittier world. But that's also why I started to write. Or think. Or tell a joke. Or hold a hand. Or smile at a loved one.
About 30 years ago, in the early days of the internet, I was in the benighted offices of an agency called Foote Cone and Belding, which most people called Foot Cut and Bleeding, mostly because the place made their souls bleed, if not their soles.
A bunch of creatives were having an argument about something and I said something like, "I can find that out by calling the information desk of the New York Public Library."
The information desk was famous for answering even the most obscure and difficult of questions.
So a race began. Me and my ancient sources. And someone else with a rudimentary Netscape browser.
I don't remember who won. Except today, we face a similar John Henry vs. Steam shovel competition. Who's smarter? Humankind and our talents, abilities, serendipities and synapses. Or powerful computer programs that can process massive amounts of information at interplanetary speed?
If you owned a company, who would you rather have writing your ads and website? Me or Chat GPT?
Just now I ran across an article about the sorts of questions the Information Desk at the New York Public Library used to receive. About twenty of those questions are pasted below.
I can't imagine any machine, or any human for that matter could manage to unravel many of these. And that's what makes me favor humans. At least we can have a laugh about things. Or a cry.
Even more than that.
We can be stupid, curious, absurd and nonsensical.
You might say, those are the four cornerstones of what makes life worth living.
It is an affect of New York, maybe because it is such a challenging and exciting place to live that many people assign it so many epigrams.
It seems like half of New Yorkers call New York, with a great deal of New Yorkian arrogance, "The Greatest City in the World." Or the "Culture Capital of the World." Or the "Fashion Capital of the World." Or the "Finance Capital of the World."
Conversely and therefore negatively, you could call New York, the "Garbage Capital of the World," the "Income-Inequality Capital of the Year," the "Dog Shit Capital of the World," "the Vermin Capital of the World."
Or in homage to the great Sinatra anthem, "The City that Never Sweeps."
Amid this monikering-cacophony, one thing is certain, New York, without question is the "Kibbitz Capital of the World."
Everybody in New York is funny. It's the only way to survive the place, and it's why eight-million New Yorkers strong exiled our ex-president to the mosquitos of LandFill, Florida where, I hope, he'll live out his days in gilded linoleum squalor.
While some might say New Yorkers walk faster, or as Thomas Wolfe, not the white suit guy, wrote that the electricity of New York travels by subway, or that taxis keep the city's life circulating, more than anything else, the current and the currency of the great metropolis is the twisted bon mot. Everyone has something to say, and everyone can be a recipient of those somethings if you're smart enough, aware enough and New York enough to hear them.
Of course, it also makes sense to cross that bridge too far for most inhabitants of the modern world. If you really want to live a lively life in New York, you should look up from your phone. That's the modern equivalent, I suppose, of wearing sackcloth and ashes, or a hairshirt. It's too much to even imagine.
On a rainy Sunday before the Holiest Day of the Jewish year--the year Agency "DEI" people don't recognize because though Jews are only 1.5% of the population and are victims of over 50% of the rising wave of American hate crimes, we are not considered minorities or diverse. That that in and of itself is anti-semitic in my eyes will earn me rebuke. But WTF, it's Yom Kippur and rebuke and hate are as Jewish as a circumcision. And less painful.
In any event, my wife and I walked through the drizzle to the world's greatest food store, Zabar's.
You go to Zabar's for the food. And for the laughter. And to see that this 11 billion-year-old planet keeps spinning. There's something life-affirming about that much life in one place.
I've been going there since I was a little boy, watching my father kibbitz with the best of them as he ordered our Sunday schools of smoked fish and grabbed a handful of pistachios on the way out that would stain his fingers pink and with shells and a nut or two flying every which way like Soviet Katyusha missiles, behind the cushions of every seat within two-hundred miles of his slim Jewish ass.
Going to Zabar's just before Yom Kippur is like going to St. Peter's on Easter or Mecca during Ramadan. The whole world is there. The difference is at Zabar's they're waiting in line for lox. A salty absolution that ends in cosmic infarction.
Once there, I avoided the fish counter, and on the fiat of my wife got a ticket at the meats and prepared foods counter. They were on 36 when I got my ticket, which was 62, the number of home runs Aaron Judge hit last season, breaking Roger Maris' 1961 record of 61 and the Babe's 1927 record of 60.
By the time my number was called, John Glenn could have orbited the earth 12 times, or you could have gotten cross-town on the M79, but it was called, finally, and you take your victories how they come.
"62," Candido called.
"62," I responded waving my ticket like it was the starter's flag at the Indy 500. "D'ya wanna see it?" I asked Candido. "I had it notarized."
He waved me off like I was a fruit fly on a pastrami and began filling my order.
"This must be your worst day of the year," I said.
"It's bad for the fish guys," Candido answered.
I had heard the line at the fish counter was over an hour-and-a-half long and someone had contacted MIT in an attempt to discover more numbers they could use on their paper tickets.
"It's bad for the fish guys," Candido repeated. "But they only work two days a year."
That's another thing about New York. We love a good internecine rivalry. Yankees vs. Met. Giants vs. Jets. West Side vs. East Side. Uptown vs. Downtown. Seeded vs. Plain. Fists vs. Chains. Chains vs. Knives. Knives vs. Guns. Jets vs. Sharks.
Finally done at the meat counter, I made my way through the burning lake of shoppers to the brusquely-efficient phalanx of cashiers. Along the way, I heard a snippet between a 40-something man and a 70-something woman, adjacent to the fish-counter.
"You have lox," the lady asked.
"Not yet," said the 40-something. "I have a pound of lox in my freezer. But that's not Yom Kippur lox. That's rainy day lox."
Over at the checkout, I told the cashier that I'd have to buy two bags, since we don't use plastic anymore in New York.
"I must have 30,000 bags," I said to the cashier.
"Then I have 30,001," she answered. "My husband always forgets."
"When I die, we'll have a giant sale," I offered.
"What's your address--I'll be there. I could use a few."
Spending half a week's salary, we walked our goods uptown to 86th Street to wait for the M86 crosstown bus. The crosstown bus is one of the last institutions in New York where, in the words of the great Louis Jordan, you can pal around with Democratic fellows named Mac.
It's one of the last places that isn't festooned with corporate logos from extortionists, climate terrorist petroleum companies, or the 1/10% who have cordoned off for themselves, their wives and their girl-friends what were formerly institutions and places open to all.
A white Cadillac SUV took a right turn, running a light and cutting off my bus in the center of an intersection.
The young bus driver screamed at the Caddy driver.
"Dontcha see the light? Whattaya doing? Dontcha see the light?"
"Maybe he's color-blind," I offered.
"He's brain-blind," she one-upped.
"Well, he doesn't have to worry about a cop stopping him," I said. "There are no more cops."
"I see people running lights in front of cops. Nothing."
The bus finally stopped beside the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the east side.
"The museum!" She shouted with pride. "The world's greatest museum."
About half the bus exited. Only my wife and I kept traveling east. Us and a young Hispanic man with a blunt the size of a telephone pole.
"Happy Yom Kippur, everyone," he said, pushing through the rear doors. "The High Holy Days are here."
