29 Wishes for 2020.

1.    I’d like to see at least one agency have the boldness to say ‘open-plan’ is a failed experiment and start a trend back to offices, or at least cubicles.

2.    I’d like one agency somewhere to understand that chatting with people, or going to a museum, or listening to music actually makes creatives more creative and being 191% billable actually makes them less creative.

3.    I’d like if agencies spending millions on awards shows realized that it only shows how desperate they are to win awards.

4.    Outside of enriching a few people, I’d like to know three advantages of being part of a holding company.

5.    I’d like computer software updates that take less than two-hours when I don’t have two free hours in a week.

6.    I’d like clients to get the first round of work for free then get charged on an escalating basis for each round of revisions.

7.    I’d like to ban the use of the word agile.

8.    Barring that, I’d like to know what agile means—if it means something other than work faster than is good for you.

9.    I’d like the Death Penalty for anyone who says “_________ is dead.”

10. I’d like to see more creative people doing creative and fewer people managing creative and even fewer people managing the people managing the people managing the creative.

11. I’d like to see the phrase “the creatives” no longer be a diminutization or a put-down.

12. I’d like creative interns to come out of their years of ad school knowing who Ed McCabe, Ralph Ammirati, Mike Tesch, Roy Grace, Mary Wells, Helayne Spivack, Reba Korda and Phyllis Robinson are.

13. If ad schools won’t teach the fundamentals or advertising (or introduce students to the Babe Ruths of our profession) I’d like to see agencies either insist they do or do it themselves.

14. I’d like to see more people entering the business who didn’t go to ad school. Who worked on tramp steamers, taught Latin in Senegal, or played minor-league baseball in Saltillo, Mexico.

15. I’d like to ban jargon. Or fine people who use it.

16. I’d like everyone who hears something they don’t understand (because an acronym has been used or a meaningless phrase) to have the courage to ask, ‘can you explain that to me?’

17. I’d like Bernbach’s Ghost, like Marley’s Ghost before him, scare the meeting martinets into stop calling meetings and actually figure things out for themselves.

18. I’d like an agency’s management to actually consider these words that John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in the 1950s and then consider what to do about it. And then do something. “Then there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.”

19. I’d like Gary Vaynerchuk to shut the fuck up.

20. Ditto Martin Sorrell.

21. I’d like to see raises return as an expected, not extraordinary, annual event.

22. I’d like to see C-level employees at one of their “transparent q and a sessions” justify how they are worth 200 times the average employee.

23. I’d like Fish Bowl to actually take place in an actual fish bowl.

24. I’d like to see one serious bit of journalism about ageism in the advertising industry.

25. I’d like to see one serious bit of journalism about the affects of venture capitalism on the adverting industry.

26. I’d like to see a medieval stockade in every agency lobby for publicly punishing “executives” who don’t respond to employee emails in a timely fashion.

27. I’d like to see the return of polite. People who say please and thank you and who reward you when you do something extraordinary.

28. I’d like to tell Gary Vaynerchuk to shut the fuck up. Again.

29. Please.