Status: No Status.

Every weekday morning at 9AM, a creative director friend of mine gets jumpy.

She has to stop whatever she's doing and get on a status call.

Every weekday morning at 9AM.
Every weekday morning at 9AM.

Usually, she tells me, she has about a 45-second role on these status calls. She does her bit, "I'm waiting for comments from Jennifer," and then, while she is still on the call, goes back to typing whatever she was typing. Or she reads the Times online, plays Wordle, or waits for the plumber to show up.

For about the past two weeks, my art-director partner and I have been enmeshed in a fairly large creative project for a fairly large company.

The clients are nervous about this project. It's like meeting your inlaws for the first time. Or having an ingrown toenail removed. It's all they can think about.

My partner, in the spirit of Franz Kafka, I'll call him X, is a very brainy guy. Amid all the back-and-forth of frenzied notes, texts, phone calls and crervousness (a neologism of cranky and nervous like hangry is of hungry and angry) X has been persistent.

He keeps asking a question that's unusual in advertising as we near 2023. "What exactly do you need?"

That question, which sounds simple enough has yet to be fully-answered and it's been weeks. Imagine going to a car repair shop and the mechanic can't tell you what needs doing. Rather than saying, "you're down a quart," he says, "we have to look at the bushings, the brakepads, the shocks, tire wear and alignment, the carburetor, the coolant and brake fluid" and so on and so on. He never reaches anyplace close to definitive.

So many people are so anxious about so many things that they spread their anxiety around ancient farmers sowing their fields with seeds. As Mao might have said were he in advertising, "Let a million ulcers bloom."

Additionally, despite X and I having had careers of 40+ years for some of America's biggest and best agencies, the clients feel the need to give us feedback at 4 and see the results of that feedback at 7 so they can give us more feedback at 8:30 so they can see the results of that feedback at 10, so they can send us more feedback in the morning so we can have another creative review at 10AM.

All this for about a dozen Linked In ads, a carousel or two and two digital OOH units in the Chillicothe, Missouri Municipal airport which has two scheduled flights a day, both of them canceled.

I know it is essential to humanity, or some portion of what passes for humanity, that we have to make ourselves feel important. We often do this by bringing forth anxiety and sharing it broadly. If we don't do x, y and z, the underpinnings of civilization will rot, sway and collapse and we'll be eating Fancy Feast right from the can under a highway culvert in Houston, Texas.

What's funny to me is that for all the incidental perseverance about should I write in the copy "you'll get," or "you'll have access to," 99.999-percent of all ads are so boring and promise-free that they fail to get your attention in the first place. Rendering 99.999-percent of all discussions about what you've done, or been told to do, completely irrelevant.

There was a time in our business, before the digital revolution took place, that changes to art and/or copy took at least overnight and cost a decent amount of what was usually union money.

I think back to those days because paying money for things you want forces a discipline that the world has been very good at destroying.

When I began in the business, most creative creation and approval processes were strict and orderly.

If you presented an ad to a client on a Monday, it was the client's job to get all the relevant feedback and speak to you about it in the next day or so. That was round one.

Round two was you agreeing on some things, disagreeing on others and maybe having a cognitive spark and adding something new. The client would go through their feedback process again. That was round two. 

And if round one had 15 things to do, round two had eight. Round three was like rounds one and two, except there might be just one loose thread. You sewed it up and the ad was approved.

Of course, life didn't always go this way.

But because money had to be spent on type and retouching and mechanicals, indecision or sloppiness or second-and-third-guessing was under a punitive stricture. If you couldn't make up your mind and do your job, you paid through the nose.

Today, American business and advertising are so consumed by fear and process that I'm shocked anything ever actually gets produced. Maybe that's why people and clients and agencies trumpet their work on social media sites and the trade-press no matter how badly it sucks. Good has been taken over by done. Likewise, most of the ads that win so-called awards aren't real ads for real clients designed to generate real business results.

They're examples of masturbatory lust created only to win C-level people holding-company-bonuses granted for performing well at award-shows they've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to enter.

I'm roughly 100-percent sure there's no Unified Field Theory in this post. Just, it seems to me, some remarks on what happens to a world that runs on fear, micromanagement, lack of discipline and ego-gratification.

I think that might sum it all up after all.