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.

Part the Fourth of Twelve.

If you go back a few million years to the South African veldt, when our hominid ancestors evolved to stand on two feet, not four, when our evolutionary blueprint was mapped, there was a very simple reason behind the move. A simple reason with an even simpler impetus. We needed to survive.

Our ape ancestors weren't as fast as most species they were competing with for food. And their sense of hearing and smelling wasn't as profound. So to look over the high grass and see either danger or dinner coming, we got up on our haunches and could see over long distances.

Awareness of our surroundings, awareness of those around us has for most of the last 3.2 million years has become an integral part of the survival of most species. 

Fast-forward to today.

Walk down a street in a crowded city.

Look at people driving (at 83 miles per hour) alongside you.

Look at people in important client meetings.

Or in the grocery store.

They're no longer alert to danger or dinner, 

they're only aware of their screens.

Likewise, human contact has been vital to human survival and happiness. Here's an inter-species proof point.

We accept dogs into our homes and lives in part because dogs have something around their irises called sclera. That's the white around the colored part of your eye. 

You have it. Dogs have it. 

But wolves have no visible sclera. 

You can't track their eye movements. You can't look and see what they're looking at, like you can with a dog. You can see your dog paying attention or ignoring you. You can't with wolves. So we don't trust them. Just like we don't trust a cop who keeps his sunglasses on when he's speaking to you. Tracking eye movements is essential to trust. That's one reason, police interrogations often look like this. 

They can see you. 

You can't see them.

There's more that's wrong about putting screens first. It says both overtly and semiotically, anything from the outside--whether it's work, news, a friend, a movie, a newspaper, a video--is more important than who I'm with and what I'm doing now.

This might be too sensitive on my part, but it reminds me of when you're waiting in line in a store, and just as you're about to be helped, the phone rings and the salesperson prioritizes that customer over you, making you wait when it was your turn. That seem line-cutty and wrong. Yet we do this sort of thing in nearly every aspect of our lives.

There's more that's pernicious about prioritizing screens over people.

It means we are prioritizing screens over our own mental well-being, need for quiet, and alone-time. Always on screen means you're always on. And always on is always unhealthy.

We need time to wonder.

We need time to wander.

We need time to be human.

To think.

To read.

To look at the clouds and something not designed for maximum distraction. In fact, we have distracted distraction out of our life. That means we're always focused, and often on the wrong thing.

Finally, looking at screens narrows our vision.

We are confined algorithmically to what's being fed or sent to us. 

Like pre-bi-pedal ancient hominids, our field was abbreviated.

Like pre-bi-pedal ancient hominids, our field was abbreviated, and our other senses, smell, hearing as well as our physical abilities had no way of compensating for our limitations. We stood on two feet, above the field, so we could see more.

When you see more, you think more.

You become more creative. You weigh new thoughts and ideas. You're exposed to new things.

You break the bubble.

You defeat the starvation algorithm called, without irony, a feed.

When you see more, you become more human.

Better than the alternative.

Part the Third, of Twelve.

The best thing, maybe the only good thing about growing up during the Vietnam era--when virtually every country in Asia and Africa--waged endless bloody wars against colonialism, aka amerikka and france and the united kingdom, is you learned to doubt. You learned to question everything. 

You didn't trust anyone over thirty. 

If you were smart, you didn't trust anyone under thirty, either. 

Like Alan Ladd in "Shane," you learned to challenge. You learned "Prove it."

Prove it is powerful.

Next time someone says, "____will save us _____,"  say "show me one instance where that happened. Prove it."

I've done it.

People left the room crying.

In fact, most of what fills corporate conference rooms, what's left of newspapers, politicians' rises and falls, and of course their endless global-warming hot air, would be deflated if people only learned to shout--or even sotto voce--prove it.

Imagine if a decade ago someone said 'prove it' to the current crypto fascists running the currently crypto fascist amerikkka. That sound you hear? Not bombs bursting in air...that's bubbles.

Seeing photographs like the three below, large, indelible, staring back at you, not with pop-ups and marthastewartdistractions, in Life magazine at the kitchen table when you were seven or eight or eleven, teaches you. Hearing nightly the names of the war dead on the radio, teaches you. 

It teaches you to question the oligarchy and political, military and flag-wrapping elite that's selling you hard on their god, their liberty, their right and wrong, their rules, their patriotism. You learn to question accepted wisdom. And you learn the more someone tries to foist something on you, the more toxic it likely is. 

It's most elite. From the holding company scions who have destroyed advertising to almost everything else.

I realized some years ago as more and more of the world is gripped by the promise that technology, like alchemy before it, could turn base metal into gold, that more and more of the world is in the thrall of predictions.

We even have something called "the prediction market." Which is really just a gussied-up guessing game backed by billions of dollars. The better to impoverish you with.

In today's modern schema, if you make a prediction--no matter if it's as false as an impossible burger or a Hollywood pouting lower-lip--you become, almost automatically, a "thought leader," or an SME--a subject-matter expert or a KOL--key opinion leader. Though you're really just, like the rest of us, a dweeb with an inflated sense of self.

It seems like half the "news" is predictions and opinion. There's never any follow-up, mockery when what you said was going to happen doesn't. There's no accountability. Just another scot-free prediction. As Yogi Berra is said to have said, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

But that doesn't stop people from making them.

Through my years, working for people who talked more than did, which is the sine qua non of working for most people, I have heard more guesses posing as truths than there are stars in heaven, twinkling over our flat-earth.

Politicians and corporate leaders talk about change--which is usually about making things worse so they can pocket more money--in the form of a pep rally. From corporate town halls, which have nothing to do with towns or halls, to today's political rallies, no one says what we should all say.

Prove it.

Put your money where your mouth is.

The war is over.

They're eating cats and dogs.

We have to destroy the village to save it.

They want to rape white women.

$2000 checks, or $5000 checks, or gas prices plummeting.

No one says prove it.

(This was written before last night's tumping of the republican party--proof that everything he touches turns toxic.)

We are so accepting--not doubting--that before we can catch our breath another falsehood is posited and believed that unaccountably is once again unaccounted for.

Doubt has been transmogrified in my lifetime from wisdom to veritable an Orwellian thought-crime. Going against the status quo is to be a traitor, an outcast, a "witch" in Salem, Mass in 1692.

If past follows prologue, maybe in a Koestler "Darkness at Noon," way, independent thought and doubt will become real crimes. People will be beaten for it. Noses will be askewed. Eyes blackened. Scrotums electrocuted. And jail cells filled.

Remember, it's operation enduring freedom that we're after.

Our duty as humans is to doubt anyway.

Humanity, in fact, is doubt.

Doubt as in starting with, why does it have to be like this? Why can't it be better? Why can't I do something.

That is humanment number three.

But don't take my word for it.

Doubt.

 

Part the Second, of Twelve.

The most-human of all emotions, more than mating, more than shitting, more than eating, more than fukcing, is laughing.

You can fight me on this.

You can ignore me.

You can try to prove to me that that ain't so.

But I'll just laugh you off.

I'd say, every creature on our planet, and probably atom-sized neutrinos too, mate and shit and eat and so on, but only humans laugh.

Over my nearly half a century in advertising, especially in meeting rooms, client presentations and finished work, I've noticed that laughter--which used to be welcomed and expected, which used to be a personal differentiator--is now not only anomalous, it's actually scorned. You can get fired for being funny.

There's a simple parallel. You can also get fired for being different, for being human, for disagreeing, for standing up for things that today are oft-interred. That is principles, taste, decency and thought

The prevailing ethos in advertising and the world today is that we are in a serious business. Clients are paying serious money, and the industry itself is run by serious consultancies, so making a joke is like doing stand-up at an autopsy.

(To be blunt about it, the industry--and most of those in it--have serioused themselves to death.)

What's more, the billionaire-class, who increasingly are the C-suite of the Fortune-50 companies with global brands that agencies serve, have become through the years less-and-less human. They're too busy and too rich to actually laugh. In fact, they have so much money--and are so unlike the people they're ostensibly "messaging" to--that they are hardly anymore to be considered like you and I. They don't lower themselves to one-liners, pratfalls, word-plays or even merry mix-ups.

That's all beneath them.

As someone who's wrestled with the three-headed, or six-headed, or thirty-six-headed growling dog-god of depression, I've probably been sad for sixty-eight of my nearly sixty-nine years. I think my ratio might be a little worse than most others, maybe I have fewer serotonin uptake inhibitors than most, but still, if people were inherently merry, liquor and beer sales in the US would likely not tally almost $80,000,000,000 a year. In 2013, the last year I could find data for, cocaine sales tallied $34,000,000,000, and legal marijuana sales are close to $40,000,000,000. That's almost one-hundred-and-fifty billion dollars spent annually in intoxicants--that's a lot of money staving off dour.

No wonder Woody Allen said, and millions agreed, "being funny is a second choice."

Or as Henry David Thoreau never said (while his mom did his laundry) “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them.”

A lot of unsung songs.

Those are eloquent ways of stating the obvious.

As are these:

'Life," as Hobbes said in the Leviathan, "is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

Or as the Buddha might have said, "everyone carries a burden."

Or as, most profoundly, Shecky Weinstock said one night at the Nevele many decades ago, "Life sucks and then you die. Try the veal."

With all that, maybe the kindest, most-loving, most-uplifting. most-human thing one person can do for another might also be the simplest.

Handing someone a laugh.

BTW, re the remember part of "remember to laugh."

My sister was killed in 2007 as she was riding her new Ducati motorcycle up 12th Avenue in Manhattan. It was early on Mother's Day morning and a drunk ran across the wide avenue.

Nancy swerved to avoid him and in a moment the large bike crushed the small girl. 

I have a lot of memories of Nancy. 

But as I was writing this piece I remembered two jokes she liked that somehow capture who she is, maybe better than a complete Robert Caro biography would.

The first she made up when she moved to Chicago with our parents when she was 16 or 17. 

She said someone asked her:

"Have you lived in Chicago your whole life?"

She answered, "I don't know. I'm not dead yet."

The second laugh she made up was at a bus stop in Chicago as she was waiting for the 151 bus on Michigan Avenue. 

Someone asked her:

"Does the bus go to-the-loop."

Nancy answered, "No. It goes beep-beep."

The gods. Part the One, of Twelve.

Yoknapatwapha. A cosmos.

(Faulkner never called it a campus.)

As someone who has no god, I spend a good amount of time thinking about gods. 

I think a lot about the Greek gods. I like very much the idea that as opposed to the muslim, christian or jewish god, the Greek gods are many and they are far from perfect. They are as flawed and jealous and petty as humans--just immortal, tremendously powerful and sometimes wise. I never got or could understand the unique "genius" of monotheism. So what. I'd rather have one cleaner for glass, one for furniture, one for tile, than one that does everything. 

Back to the greek pantheon. While I have no burning desire to disguise myself as a swan or a bull so I can have my way, I think often of Athena's words to Odysseus. Third-born and grey-eyed, Athena kicks me in my ass. Her words motivate me. 

Even Owen, my therapist of 91 years cannot expunge this line from my cerebellum. "Few sons are the equals of their fathers. Most fall short, all too few surpass them.” It drives me even in my dotage--a quarter century after my father's demise.

In any event, I've been thinking about gods and people. 

And the biggest problem with gods is when people start believing that they are gods. 

1. That they are better than others.

2. That the rules don't apply to them--their reality is truth.

3. That they face no consequences and take no responsibility.

When people, companies, "leaders," religions, nations,  begin believing in that trinity is when the world--large and small, macro and micro--becomes fuckupterized.

That's where we are today. When the non-tax-paying trillionaire freeloaders and grifters posit that they are better than others. Not just better cheats, thieves and gonifs. 

Some years ago, I read that when Roman generals returned in triumph from a giant victorious battle with countless slaves, with loot and gold, and with people bowing down to them, they hired someone to stand alongside them and keep repeating, "You are not a god. You are not a god." 

Beware the throne. 

That seldom worked. 

Most people when they amass power, no matter how small and idiosyncratic, start believing the trinity above. When Roman emperor Vespasian was dying of dysentery, his last few words were reported as, "Oh dear, I think I'm becoming a god!" I think many of amerikkka's current trillionaire and political class believe they are gods.

All that prompted me to write, not too terribly long ago, for a TedX talk in Lisbon, Portugal, something I called The Ten Humanments. Ten behaviors that might help you be decent.

Over the next eleven or twelve or twenty posts, I've decided to go through each one of my Humanments and explain what I mean by the behaviors I've identified.

 

It's never been harder to be a human.

It's never been harder to feel free, safe, among friends, part of something bigger. Today, you are odd-man-out if you smile at a stranger or help someone. I think the felon-in-chief might call you a "sucker." God knows what peat hegseth would call you. Likely a weirdo and a beardo.

They are well-armed.

Human. Right.

Encroachments on our human-ness seem to be coming from more angles than there are angles.

At work, we're made to do things faster than ever.

We're made to do things even when we know they suck.

Our controllers, whether those controllers are machines or private-equity orthodoxy or profit-maximizing anti-human forces or algorithms designed to eat up free-will, force us into a machine-mandated mediocrity take without give. You must comply. If not you are monopoly-banned. They control the jobs and you must obey. Especially if you want that rarest of human privileges, the right to health-care. 

So, or even alas, we work harder and harder and longer and longer to make things we have less and less ownership of and no pride in.

All-the-while, the lead story in what seems like about 75-percent of all news stories is that we can be replaced at any time. We breathe employment peril like coal miners inhale coal-dust. It's in our lungs and destroys us from the inside-out.

Machines in other words have become the pillars of humanity--they'll last. 

While people are regarded as drains on profit, in the parlance of fascists gone by, 'useless eaters.' We're protoplasm that interferes with all that matters. Profit for about a dozen people on top, and the frictionless hegemony of machinery.

But as Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize Acceptance speech from 1949--when humanity faced a different specter of annihilation, "I decline to accept the end of man." (Faulkner's 'man' was an inclusive man. Don't go damning him for being gendered. That sort of sectarian behavior only plays into the grasping hands of those on top. They've taught us and trained us and set us up to fight each other, so we don't fight them.)

The humanments are about declining to accept the end of humankind.

The humanments are about refusing to give into the gods of selfishness and empty profligacy.

The humanments are about refusing to quiet.

Refusing to fill out forms.

Refusing to have machines call us by name and to use the first-person pronoun for themselves.

The humanments are about refusing to become a machine and a line item.

The humanments are about refusing to accept false gods and their puniness.

The humanments are about refusing and declining to accept the end of man.

As Faulkner concluded his speech, "when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. 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.

That's what this is about.

Recognizing and rejuvenating our spirit.

Our spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

What will follow are rules I've learned--ways of living I've adopted.

So I don't become dumb and numb and no more.

Rules that let me give permission to myself to be angry, outraged, happy and in love.

Rules that let me be me.

A fucked-up, full-of-fault, fallible and sometimes frail human.
Who despite my sometimes frail has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance, so I do not fail.

One Humanment a day.

For much of the next couple weeks.

If I am semiotic about it, maybe ending on Thanksgiving.

If we last till then.