In My Own Little Corner.

Odysseus was married to Penelope for years and years when he sailed away with Agamemnon to fight for Menelaus against Priam, Paris and their Trojans. 

Paris stole Menelaus' wife--the most beautiful woman in all the world--Helen. To the Greek world this was a double-affront. Stealing a wife was bad. But betraying a gracious host was even worse.

Odysseus spent ten years fighting in Troy. And cursed by the gods, another ten years trying to get home to Ithaka and Penelope. Along the way, Odysseus was saved from drowning by a divine nymph, Calypso. Not only was she beautiful and ageless, Calypso also offered Odysseus immortality if he would marry her. 

Odysseus was sorely tempted.

Who wouldn't be?

Even back then in Homer's time, there was ageism. And being ageless was a plus. Especially nymph-wise.

But Odysseus made, still, the tough choice to return to his wife, Penelope, who of course, wasn't ageless.

I think about this story of wandering as I sit in my office--perhaps the most beautiful office in all the world--in the small cottage on the sea that my wife and I bought back in 2020 and renovated to the marrow in 2022-2023

Being up here in Connecticut reminds me of Odysseus. Because we got here by the same forces that addlepated wily Odysseus.

We were wind-blown.

We had no map.

When Covid hit, our ship was at the mercy of Aeolus and we wound up here.

Not by design.

We were windblown.

Every day as the malefactors of great wealth call their workers back to offices that have been stripped clean of privacy, quiet, comfort, charm and dignity, we hear about demands on workers to return en masse to these offices because of this spurious reason or that.

But mostly because, I believe, this is a matter of control. When you're in the "office," you are "theirs." That's the way the forces of consolidated capital want things. 

They want to own you.

My office is not large. 

It's probably 12'x10'. And though I have natural light, I am in the basement with no view of the sea. I cannot hear the waves or the clang of the incessant buoy that sits a quarter-mile from our clapboard.

But as Hemingway wrote about in the story of the same name, it is a clean, well-lighted place. And it is mine. Surrounded by the things I love. Including a 1950s era IBM mechanical time-punch-clock that is about as loud as a tank battle in Kursk.

I sit in my office and I think about all those demands to return to a long noisy bench with picnic seating, not even a chair, not even your own work-station. With not even a concession to the needs of humans. Your own place. A single hook on which to hang your hat.

How much easier would it be for all these "leaders" to  actually lead. To throw up some sheetrock and build a few hundred or a few thousand little rooms with a door and a place to put your feet up and think.

"That's too much money," they'll say.

"The doors will break down collaboration and communication," they'll claim.

Never calculating the cost of the noise and despair and disdain so many have for the offices they're being forced back into.

Imagine working in a place that treated you like a human.

No.

I am more than a little tired--just five years into the so-called AI revolution--about people banging on about everything AI can purportedly do.

(Have you yet to see a great AI-ism in the wild? Something nuanced? Astute? Beautiful? Surprising? Funny? Smart? Satisfying?)

Frankly, AI reminds me of the old thesis that if you give enough monkeys enough typewriters they can eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare.

Or at least Marlowe.

I couldn't give a rat's rectum about what AI can do. What AI can do is a parlor trick. Look! It made a movie! 

AI reminds me of an arcade they used to have down in Chinatown. They kept a chicken in a cage. If you deposited fifty cents, you could play a game of tic-tac-toe against the chicken. The chicken always won.

The difference is back then no one said "we're turning our marketing over to captive poultry. Chickens are better than humans and you can pay them....chicken feed."

I'm not interested in what AI can do.

I am much more interested in what humans can do.

It's Friday afternoon as I write this. 

I've had a helluva week--a long week of writing proposals, doing work and hand-holding clients on four continents.

I'm tired. Exhausterated, in fact.

But I've written this blog virtually every working day since 2017, and if I don't write a post or two on the weekend, I'm behind the eight-ball when the next work-week starts.

In thinking about next week post's, I thought about the "Wobbly Chair" ad above.

AI couldn't.

AI is "perfect." (Except for the hallucination thing.) And, mostly, AI pretends it can't make a mistake. Worse, the people promoting AI, the same people who promoted the last 27 or 91 things that we're going to change everything, act as if AI can't make a mistake. They act like somehow a mistake, in the case above, a wobbly chair, is a failure.

And we don't talk about failures. We and AI like to pretend they can be eliminated. All we have to do is copy something that worked. Or follow best-practices. Or listen to some marketing guru who no longer markets anything, really, but himself.

Or win an award. As if awards mean something.

I quickly found the wobbly chair ad.

I remember when Julian Koenig, the man who wrote the ad died, his daughter Sarah, the producer and creator of the wildly popular podcast "Serial," created a radio tribute to her dad. She spoke about Koenig's long-running feud with his ex-partner, George Lois, who had the reputation of stealing credit for work he didn't do.

George claimed authorship of the Harvey Probber ad above, though it was Julian's. George's behavior so incensed Julian that with his own money Koenig took out an ad in Adweek attacking Lois. 

The headline told the entire story: "Low, Lower, Lois."

In any event, I don't think AI can admit its lack of perfection. Most people can't. How could a machine?

AI could never create this picture. Or even realize the difference between how things are and how we want to pretend they are. The gap--ever-widening--between reality and AI-fantasy.

AI will never work unless it learns to make honest, human mistakes. Honest, human mistakes are what humans learn from. Honest, human mistakes are the true origin of our species. They're how we went from poking things with a stick to a three-speed variable multi-rachet 72-bit power drill. We didn't invent such a thing. We mistaked our way into it.

I took a minute as I sat to write this, and I retyped Julian Koenig's copy. I tried to match the typeface and the line breaks. But I'm no whiz at these things. I amn't a typographer and I can't even touch-type.

But I typed it all over again.

Maybe so today we can marvel, for a moment, at really good writing that was done in the service of selling an expensive product to people who cared about design and longevity. And writing.

It's not a bad practice every now and again to type over something you like. To "feel" the words in your fingertips. I think it might make you not just a better writer, but maybe a better person, too.

Here's the entirety of the copy, except for the mouse type, which I couldn't read.

Here's the sentence that really nailed the whole thing for me, and maybe sums up my feelings about a lot of today's current bushwa about AI and the anti-human feelings a lot of humans have.

In this era of AI when corporate titans are bent on making people a thing of the past so they can get richer, don't for a second forget about those unique machines most of us still possess.

It's too easy to.

I mean don't overlook your eyes, your hands, your brain, your soul, and mostly your heart.

 

Ask Me No Questions.

About 20 years ago I was between full-time jobs and I got a freelance job working for some pretty hoity-toity creative people at an agency in Durham, North Carolina called McKinney. 

McKinney had an excellent creative reputation and I was intimidated by the job. What's more, I had never met the creative people before and I was working without a partner. Also, I was new to freelance. I had never really done it before. In short, I had no place to go, no one to turn to for encouragement or reassurance. I felt more than a little out of my depth.

I knew I was working hard and doing a lot of work, but I wasn't sure if the work or if I were up to snuff.

Most creatives probably have that feeling now and again. No matter if they're seasoned and ensconced in an agency or on an account or if they're fresh out of ad school. This is a very subjective business and it's not always plain to see how your work is being received. 

About two weeks into the assignment I had just finished reading a bunch of scripts to the group creative director of the business. For anonymity's sake, I'll call her Matilda.

"Matilda," I said "Are you happy with me?"

There was a pause on the other end of the phone and quite a long bit of silence. A pause that added to my case of nerves.

I repeated the question and added to it.

"I've been working for you for two weeks. I've presented a bunch of work. You've given me feedback. But I need to know. 'Are you happy with me?'"

Finally she laughed.

"No one's ever asked me that before," she said. "Thank you. Yes, we're happy."

As people who read Ad Aged regularly know, I've recently had two rounds of cataract surgery at New York University hospital in Manhattan. The surgery itself an experienced doctor can do in about the time it takes to scramble an egg over a high heat. But before the surgery and after, I must have had ten visits. 

Testing and measurement. Testing and measurement again because they forgot to test and measure something. A post-operative session the day after surgery. On Tuesday next week, I have yet another follow-up examination with the surgeon. 

I've also had a dozen phone calls with low-paid but officious phone-callers. Also about forty text messages via something called my chart reminding me of appointments, medications, not to eat before surgery and so on.

In all, I'd guess I've had over 50 points of contact around the procedures.

After each one, I've been asked to fill out a survey on how things went. Each time they ask you to fill out a survey, the letter asking you to do so starts by apologizing in case you've already filled out the survey. 

I feel like we're getting to the point where they'll start sending me surveys on how my survey filling out experience has been.

I suppose all these surveys are translated somehow into ones and zeroes and populate my patient profile. If I complain that the woman at the front was surly and never looked up from her 96-ounce cup of coffee, I'd guess they have some way of codifying in and marking it down.

All this surveying and contact is supposed to make me feel that someone gives a shit. Like I am receiving attention and care. That someone's concerned enough with my well-being that they're conducting surveys to see how they can improve.

Modern life today is monitored for quality assurance.

But the only quality they're assurancing is that you pay too much, wait too long, have a lot of unanswered questions and still feel fairly like a strand of hair swirling down a drain rather than a human.

Since we're subject to so many surveys, it probably makes sense to have a couple rules about surveys. Here are a few.

1. If you're not going to change your behavior, performance or how you serve people based on responses, what you sent is not really a survey, it's a sham. It's like one of those 1970s psych lab experiments where the button you're told to press doesn't actually do anything, but you don't know that.
   
   
2. A machine should never send a survey about how a human performed.
   
   
3. A human should never send a survey about how a machine performed.
   
   
4. Improvements based on survey responses should be tabulated and published. "You told us we didn't have enough cashiers. We've doubled our staff and reduced wait times accordingly.

I don't know when survey mania started, sometime, I suspect during the rise of computing power in the late 1990s. The rise in computing power coincided, btw, with the rise in the power of MBAs. 

I have the feeling in MBA school they teach people "you don't have to make service better. You just have to pretend you're making it better."

There's an old story about a management consultant brought onto a factory floor to find ways to boost productivity. He suggested they change the lighting every couple of weeks or so.

"If they can see better they'll perform better?" some naif asked.

"Not at all," he replied. "You only have to make them think you're doing it because you care. It doesn't matter if you make things better or worse. People just want to know you're paying attention."

This brings me back to a gendered David Ogilvy-ism that nearly everyone today no longer abides by. "The consumer isn't a moron, she's your wife." 

It's so much easier and cheaper to treat people like they're morons. And to assume they're too stupid to know what's being done to them.

The Past is a Present.

If you read, as I do, an endless succession of large, long books on history, you realize the timing we append onto historical events is about as deceptive as a well-groomed congressional child molester or presidential rapist.

Humans like, as a species, hard and fast beginnings and ends. So we can say things like "World War II ended when Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945."

Very little could be further from the truth.

If the shooting stopped in 1945, the legacy continued. A dozen wars started when that war purportedly stopped. From the Reds versus the Kuomintang in China, to the wars on the Korean peninsula, to Vietnam, from anti-colonial movements all over Asia.

Things don't stop because we deem them stopped.

Even the religious wars like the Thirty Years' war or the Hundred Years' war lasted longer than their convenient date-derived names suggest. The legacies continue long after we mark things done.

America's Civil War might be the most-expressive example of the ongoingness of ongoing. I'd argue that 160 years after Lee's "surrender" at Appomattox Court House in 1865, that war is still being waged today.

As the January 6th confederate raid on the capital showed, it never really ended. And I'd say that with the resurgence of socially-acceptable hate during trumpism, that in terms of race-hate, amerika today is much like amerika in 1880s, that is we are redefining the permissability of evil treatment, odious terms and racist assessments.

The myth of the Lost Cause emerged in the 1880s. It is re-emerging today. 

In advertising, we are prisoners of the same sort of date-based dopiness. Such thinking leads us to data-ize the work we do that clients run, giving us a calculus so we can create yottabytes of numbers that allow us to post-mortem things that can't really be post-mortem-ed. We also subscribe to the notion of causality in advertising. If we do x, y will happen. Ignoring that the human brain has something like six-trillion neural connections. We don't know what happens with them when we run an ad. We never will

In brief, most everything, including ripples, have ripple effects. Such as an earthquake in Krakatoa that might have caused societal collapse in Nineveh, almost 7,000 miles away. 

As they say, shit harpoons. And keeps on harpooning.

A dumb ad made by AI might start to unravel dozens of years of great advertising done by humans. We like to bubble-boy our efforts--walling it off from the past. We delineate and attribute results to current moments when common-sense says they're not really delineatable or attributable. 

Bernstein had this just about right in Mankewicz's and Welles' "Citizen Kane" from 1940, before even I was born. 

I still covet BMWs based on ads from BMW did back in the 1980s and 1990s. The ads they do today do very little for because they don't seem to understand driving, the car itself or the mind-set of their potential customers. 

I'd bet a good portion of BMW's sales, or Coke's, or IBM's or almost any brand's are based on decades of imagery and messaging that hasn't run for half a century. My guess is the top two ads for Coke above sell a helluva lot more diabetes-water than the bottom two ads--if those bottom two ads ever actually ran. (Oh. And Coke lies about their recycling. They're the world's largest plastic polluter.)

I suppose all of this would have been un-needed if we all just read Faulkner's 1919 novel "Requiem for a Nun."

That's where you can find these words.

Imagine them on a 165-page powerpoint.

164 pages of padding.

Or, if you prefer.

A Prophet of Anti-Pessimism.

I read an article the other day in The Economist.

When I think about that sentence alone, it might serve to differentiate me as a creative person. While a large majority of creatives are creative, there might not be fifteen who read The Economist. In a business that's essentially built on being different and standing out, reading The Economist helps me do just that.

As an Ogilvy CEO said to me over coffee after I was fired, "George, ten out of ten creatives can do the funny spot. You can build businesses."

I'll miss Cannes once again. Too busy building businesses.

But I'll take that. I always have.

In any event, I read this article in The Economist and started thinking as I so often do about advertising.

I wondered, could I learn about what would make a golden age in advertising from reading about golden ages in civilization? What would thriving civilizations have in common with thriving agencies. And similarly, what sorts of conditions lead to the downfall of civilizations and agencies.

My brief for this post. In red, above.

Of course, this Economist article is merely a brief review of a 400 page book that won't come out until September. So, what follows will necessarily be reductive. But I learn a lot from book reviews. What's more, this one is 1100 words long. Which is about the length of a ten-minute podcast--so while shortened it's still about 25 times longer than what we currently regard as "long copy." 

Finally, The Guardian newspaper, called Johan Norberg "a prophet of anti-pessimism." That's a moniker we could, today especially, use a helluva lot more of. While anti-pessimism ain't my natural habitat, adaptability may be. So, I'll take it.

Here are a few attributes Norberg notes great civilizations have had in common over the last three millennia. Alongside those, I've added my thoughts on how successful agencies most-often act in accord with successful empires.

Here's the entirety of the Economist article. Assuming you can still read.

.

Peak Human. By Johan Norberg. Atlantic Books; 400 pages; $32.99 and £22

The way to start a “golden age” is to erect big, beautiful barriers to keep out foreign goods and people. That, at least, is the view of the most powerful man on the planet. Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian, makes the opposite case. In “Peak Human”, Mr Norberg charts the rise and fall of golden ages around the world over the past three millennia, ranging from Athens to the Anglosphere via the Abbasid caliphate. He finds that the polities that outshone their peers did so because they were more open: to trade, to strangers and to ideas that discomfited the mighty. When they closed up again, they lost their shine.

Consider the Song dynasty in China, which lasted from 960 to 1279AD. Song emperors were much keener on the rule of law than their predecessors, who tended to rule by whim. To enforce predictable rules, they hired lots of officials via meritocratic exams. The first Song emperor enacted the “unconventional policy reform” of “[not] killing officials who disagreed with him”.

Peasants were granted property rights and allowed to move around, rather than being tied to a lord’s land. Farm output more than doubled, and the extra food supported much larger cities. In the 1100s Kaifeng, the capital, had 65 times the population of London. Canals made domestic trade easier. International trade followed. Merchants started issuing paper money, six centuries before Europeans did, and the government embraced this brilliant idea—so much easier than carrying heavy strings of copper coins.

“Crowded cities set the stage for an unparalleled exchange of ideas, goods [and] services,” notes Mr Norberg. Artisans devised new industrial processes, such as burning coal to smelt iron. The invention of movable type in the 1040s allowed the printing of books so cheap that one philosopher griped that people would stop learning the classics by heart. By 1200 Song China had the world’s richest economy, a merchant navy with “the potential to discover the world” and a habit of tinkering that could have brought on an industrial revolution centuries before Europe’s. But then the Mongols arrived.

The popular image of Genghis Khan and his mounted hordes sweeping across the world slaughtering and burning is accurate as far as it goes. However, the Mongol dynasty took pains to preserve its predecessor’s technological marvels—even if it did not add much to them. It was only when the Ming emperors took over in 1368 that China really turned in on itself.

Free movement within the country was ended. Free exchange gave way to forced labour. Foreign trade was made punishable by death, and even the construction of ocean-worthy ships was banned. Pining for the good old days, a Ming emperor brought back the fashions of 500 years before. Men caught with the wrong hairstyle were castrated, along with their barbers. Largely thanks to reactionary Ming policies, Chinese incomes fell by half between 1080 and 1400. The country did not recover its mojo until it opened up again in the late 20th century.

Some of the golden ages Mr Norberg describes will be familiar to readers, but he adds fresh details and provocative arguments. Athens was not just the birthplace of democracy; it grew rich because it was, by ancient standards, liberal. Tariffs were only 2%. Foreigners were welcome: a Syrian ex-slave became one of the richest men in town. On a measure devised by the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think-tank, ancient Athenians enjoyed more economic freedom than citizens of any modern nation, narrowly beating Hong Kong and Singapore. (Such freedom did not apply to women or slaves; a caveat that applies to all golden ages until relatively recently.)

Rome grew strong by cultivating alliances and granting citizenship to conquered peoples. It learned voraciously from those it vanquished—Greek slaves taught Roman children about logic, philosophy and drama. During Rome’s golden age, one set of laws governed a gigantic empire, markets were relatively free and 400,000km of roads sped goods from vessel to villa. As a gobsmacked Greek orator put it: to see all the world’s products, either travel the world or come to Rome.

The emperor Augustus introduced a flat poll tax and a modest wealth tax. Extra income from hard work or innovation suddenly faced a marginal tax rate of zero. Small wonder Augustan Rome grew as rich as Britain and France were 1,500 years later.

Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of America’s House of Representatives, thinks Rome collapsed because of “rampant homosexual behaviour”. Mr Norberg offers a more convincing explanation. Bad luck—plagues and barbarian attacks—was compounded by policy blunders.

Cash-strapped emperors debased the coinage, reducing its silver content. This caused wild inflation. Price controls were then slapped on everything “from sandals to lions”. Trade atrophied.

Intellectual freedom gave way to dogma, with the persecution first of Christians and then by Christians. Finally, Rome was too weak to resist the barbarian onslaught. Revisionists say the Dark Ages that followed were not so bad. Archaeological evidence, such as a sudden fall in the number of cargo-ship wrecks, suggests they were “the biggest social regression in history”.

Mr Norberg deftly punctures popular misconceptions. The zealots of Islamic State revere the Abbasid caliphate, but would have hated its tolerance. The Italian Renaissance, which modern nationalists such as Viktor Orban see as evidence of European and Christian cultural superiority, began as a revolt against Christian orthodoxy and in imitation of pagan cultures. Despite what you read in Blake and Dickens, Britain’s Industrial Revolution was not miserable for the workers: a study of diaries shows the only group consistently dissatisfied was poets and writers.

Could a history book be more timely? Of all the golden ages, the greatest is here and now. Of all the progress of the past 10,000 years in raising human living standards, half has occurred since 1990. Openness went global after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But now it is in rapid retreat, as a multilateral trade war looms and ever more states suppress free inquiry.

Previous golden ages all ended like Rome’s did, jinxed by a mix of bad luck and bad leadership. Many thriving societies isolated themselves or suffered a “Socrates moment”, silencing their most rational voices. “Peak Human” does not mention Donald Trump; it was written before he was re-elected. America’s president will not read it, but others should. The current age of globalisation could still, perhaps, be saved. As Mr Norberg argues: “Failure is not a fate but a choice.” ■

This was all pretty heavy, I know. 

If you made it this far, I'll leave you with 167-seconds of Babs Gonzales. More intelligible than what I just wrote.

Frank Capra Knew.

There's a lot of Orwellian crap going on in what used to be the advertising industry that no one notices anymore. It's ignored because it involves neither fake work nor a pretentious festival that celebrates fake work in a faraway land.

Last week, for instance, literally thousands of humans were replaced by algorithms in what used to be the world's largest communications holding company. This company, with no one noticing (because they keep it out of the trade press) has shed 100,000 humans over the last ten years while it keeps accumulating "Agency of the Year," or "Network of the Year" honors. 

You know the drill. 

War is peace. 

Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Free $400,000,000 planes are ethical.

Shrinking is growing.
Fake is real.
Awards are client success.

The Orwellian bit is at least two-fold and very trumpian. First, we are deluded by the distraction perpetrated by the "list-mania'd" trade-press, a la: "40 Left-Handed Art-Directors Under 40 whose jeans are too tight." Second, and even more pernicious, is the language behind this corporate upheaval.

In the top headline, Adweek uses the word "layoffs." They're not layoffs unless they're temporary. These are job and position loses. Not a momentary, circumstantial set back. If they're not temporary, they're not layoffs. They're reductions in force or, PRIFVA--an au courant companion of EBITDA (Permanent Reductions In Force Via Algorithm.)

In the second headline, Adweek uses the word "restructuring." When a change affects 45-percent of a company, it's not a restructuring, it's a blood-bath.

Frank Capra, the great film director, had seen this movie before. Take a look at this scene from about 1:00 to 1:10.

Because what's happening in the world today is large. And mean. 

It's a war.

A war of concentrated capital against you and I--and everyone else not in the one-percent of the one-percent. (To be in the 1% of the 1%--that's 133,000 households--you need $46,300,000.)

You might like this from Stanford professor Walter Scheidel's book, "The Great Leveler." I drew the chart below myself, updating Scheidel's data which had stopped at 2015.

Yes, 15 years ago it took 388 billionaires to have much as half of the rest of the world. Today, it takes just 26.

Here's what got me going this morning, though. An article in "The Wall Street Journal."

The article, though most people won't see it this way, is about the war I mentioned above. The war between concentrated wealth and everyone else.

Here's what's going on, girls and boys. As Jimmy Stewart says in the clip above, "Don'tcha see what's happening?" While Covid was no Black Death, there was a surge in wages and workers' rights. Now, comes the backlash. 

The laws haven't yet arrived.

But less job security, lower wages and absence of healthcare have. 

In the banana republics of central and south America when those states were run by United Fruit, people couldn't eat if they didn't work for United Fruit. (There was no food in stores and all the land was owned by United Fruit, the church or the junta.) If you didn't work for United Fruit you starved. Today, we just deny health care. Soon, someone will cut out the middleman.

The GINI coefficient (a measure of income inequality) in our country is bad and getting worse. I'd imagine the same can be said for our industry.

Here's a look at the Gini in the United States from 1990-2020. A rise from .43 to .49 is precipitous.

During World War II, a Wehrmacht tank commander who saw tens of thousands of his fellow Nazis killed and thousands of tanks destroyed only to have the battle declared a victory by the war's "upper management" said, "We do not intend to win to death."

Before too many days go by, the agencies laying off thousands will announce that they're "Something of the Year." Their smiles will gleam with falsehood.

And thousands more people formerly in the industry, will trophy themselves into unemployment.