21 Things I Don't Understand About Marketing Today. And Never Will.

1. I don't understand how I've never signed up for an email newsletter but I unsubscribe to about ten a week.

2. Why it takes a week to remove your name from an email newsletter mailing list.

3. The purpose behind email newsletters in the first place.

4. I don't understand how it seems every agency is "agency of the year," or "most innovative," and I can go months without seeing a decent spot on television.

5. The same for all the people claiming they're the world's 14th-best associate creative director.

6. Speaking of associate creative directors, I don't understand how no one remembers Billy Wilder's great quip that "an associate producer is anyone who associates with a producer."

7. I don't understand dancing in commercials. Or asinine A.I. aids like above.

8. How anyone could write dancing into a script. How anyone could approve it. Or how any director could shoot it.

9. I don't understand what happened to all the Holding Company diversity efforts and why we've heard nothing about progress (or lack of progress) since the initial PR onslaught about three years ago. See this from three years ago.

10. I don't understand how a Holding Company could win Network of the year having shed 50,000 employees over the last half-decade.

11. I don't understand how an industry can exist with no investigative journalism questioning its statements and actions.

12. I don't and never will understand open-plan workspaces. They've been proven to reduce productivity, increase illness and incite attrition, but they prevail.

13. I don't understand where new words come from. For the first 55 years of my life the only things that were transparent were windows and Saran Wrap, now everything is, though nothing is.

14. I don't understand why no one in any agency reviews rough-cuts by inserting the cut in a real of 12 other spots, so you can see the spot as people will actually view it, that is surrounded by eleven other spots that look, sound and feel identical.

15. I don't understand why pharma commercials are even allowed on television. I think the world would be better if we heard less of the word 'diarrhea' set to music.

16. I don't understand why so much acting seems synonymous with screaming.

17. As for the Spectrum spokesperson who screams $49.99 twelve different times in 12 different scenarios in 20 seconds, I don't understand how people can see that spot and not be pro-abortion.

18. I don't understand what 'borderless creativity' means. Worse, I don't care. Worse worse, whatever it means, it sounds like a lie.

19. I don't understand freelancers who tell the world 'I'm available.' That seems to betray a lack of understanding of the basic precepts of marketing.

20. I don't understand why we have the word "Officer" in titles. It's as if ad agencies think we live in the same world as Gomer Pyle, and maybe we do.

21. I don't understand why no one replaces the word "Officer" with Ossifier, that is 'to become set in a rigidly conventional pattern.'