Promises. Promises.

It's Friday and I've been away all week. 

I've been away all week, on a long-overdue vacation, and I really didn't want to post.

But I did.

Some of that's my own neuroses. I worry that once I give people a chance, they'll flee from this space at the first opportunity. But more of my assiduousness is due to something else. Something elemental that, I'm fearful, most brands have forgotten.

This is as basic as it gets.

But still, most brands have forgotten it.

A brand is a promise.

A promise that whatever it is your brand does it does in a way that lives up to the standards of your brand. If you're a fast-food brand, or a grocery store, or an airline, you usually run ads that show your people smiling and helping customers. Your stores, or planes, are unimpeachably clean (in TV land) and your product is always in apple-pie order.

It's a brand's job not just to make promises to people but to keep them.

That includes ad agencies.

Which, my guess, probably have attrition rates that run around 40-percent. Which means their entire staff turns over every 2.5 years. 

Ad Aged is a blog. 

It's free.

I make no money on it.

But I have a good amount of readers and an even better measure of influence in the ad industry. My brand promise is simple. I write every day. Not because I want to. But because my readers expect that from me. After all, I promised. 

To a good brand, their word is their bond.

Yes, that's horribly naìve and kind of Andy of Mayberry or George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life." And no, it would cost me nothing to not be so hard on myself--so demanding, so exacting in my standards.

But what you do is, to a brand, or a blog, or even a human being, what you do is who you are. And I'd rather be George Bailey than Donald Trump. (Trump has more money. But George was the richest man in town.)

Somehow, and here's the nub, we replaced brand behaviors with brand guidelines. Using your brand's logo incorrectly is a sin. Not training people, not paying people, and thereby accepting slovenly behavior from representatives of the brand is rife.

The ad industry no longer guides brand behaviors. When we did, we were located on Madison and Park Avenues. We were the first call made by corporate CEOs when there was a problem. We forgot that was important. So we talk about guidelines and voices and coloring within the brand-lines. 

We used to have nice offices and get paid well. Now we have hot-desks and are vendors subject to the sharp-pencils of procurement fava-counters.

We never ask the simplest of all questions.

The one I asked myself when I decided to write this week.

Is that brand keeping its promises?

Help.

I'm busy.

You're busy.

The whole world is busy.

And, as always, the world is too much with us.

Shit is happening.

Shit is happening everywhere.

In the world.

In our country.

In our neighborhood.

In our homes.

The last thing we want to think about is how reliable our unreliable ISP is. Or how great a deal our Speculum cable is. Or the splendors of a triple-play bundle with a torrent of mouse-type that makes Niagara look like a tear drop.

We don't want to think about bad-side-effect medicines for disease we don't have. Or car showrooms filled with balloons and bad lease deals. We don't want to think about pink-slime hamburgers or chicken fried in rat-lard.

We hate marketing.

We hate advertising.

Humans always have and always will.

People LinkIn-ify proclamations like that as if they're news. As if people from my generation (Eisenhower was president when I was born and the world was still in black-and-white) or my parents' generation (Herbert Hoover was president when they were born) LOVED marketing and commercials. 

"Honey, shush, an Old Gold commercial with a dancing cigarette box is on."

No. No. And more no.

People have always and will always hate banalities and interruptions. They have and always will hate being screamed at. They have and always will hate marketing.

5000 years ago around some stoa in Attika, people got pissed if a goat-cheese vendor interrupted the blind bard just as Hector was being dragged through the mud.  Do you think Homer wasn't interrupted by commercials? Do you think people welcomed those interruptions?

Grow up.

Whether you grew up in a time conniving gods, of five channels or 50,000, you do your best to avoid crap, junk, lies, things that insult your intelligence, boredom.

Our job as marketers is to help people on behalf of our clients. Our job as marketers is to help people by showing them the value, the ease, the joy, the saliency of the product or service we represent in our messages. 

This isn't new. 

This is Gossage.

Or, as above, Homer. And not Simpson.

People don't read ads (or like ads, or respond to ads) the read (or like or respond) to what interests them and sometimes that's an ad.

I spend my days and nights visiting clients. 

Sitting in fluorescent ceiling-tiled rooms seeing the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...Those minds giving me lists of bullet points and mandatories and clichés that they're sure will make "consumers," "users" or "the target" buy their thing without us as marketers every working hard enough to explain to those consumers, users, targets--you know, people--how our clients' thing actually helps them--is good for them, can comfort their afflictions or afflict their comforts.

My job as an agency is to find things out about my clients' products and services that are actually valuable to the people they want to sell to.

SSo when people--go to the store, regardless of where the store is, regardless if it's real or virtual, and when those people are confronted by a spate of bullshit, confusion, blandishments and deceptions, they can find solace, even succor in my brand.

Let your brand serve people. Help people. 

   Let your brand organize a supermarket with 16,000 products and reduce that supermarket to 35 products so people can get in and out in 15 minutes, not 90 minutes. Let your brand do the same for the strip of road that has eleven different car dealerships all specializing in selling the same ugly SUV for $67,000, not including transportation fees and dealer prep. 

That's what advertising is supposed to do:

Inform. Entertain. And help.

It's that simple.

I

T

Naïveté.

I read something the other day in a pretty heady book I just finished reading. 

I had always--perhaps ignorantly--assumed that a community's population would be maintained if each two people had two children. Two people have children, two people die, it all evens out. At least that's what I assumed.

However, according to David Miles in "The Tale of the Axe: How the Neolithic Revolution Transformed Britain," reproduction rates of about 2.2–2.3 children are required to keep the population steady. That's because along the way, about ten-percent (the .2 to .3) of children die before they reproduce.

Of course that makes sense. There are diseases, accidents, violence. All kinds of things happen to us. Speaking both colloquially and ontologically, as far as life goes, "there's many a slip twixt cup and lip." i.e. shit happens. Or as Moby Dick said so many voyages ago, shit harpoons.

In other words, life is hard. 

And no one gets out of it alive. 

As Paul Simon wrote in his great song, "An American Tune,"

I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to its knees
Oh, but it’s all right, it’s all right
For we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
We’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong

Like Mr. Simon, I don't know a soul who ain't been battered. I scarcely know anyone who hasn't suffered some terrible hurt along the way--hurts that don't rectify themselves via Hallmark cards and sappy LinkedIn imprecations and banal homilies about picking ourselves up.

Yet, in advertising the world we depict in our spots could hardly be more removed from the reality of the world we live in. You need only look at a car commercial--any car commercial--to see what I mean. Life in car commercials is driving on traffic-less roads or off-roading on an empty beach while lip synching to some classic rock anthem. 

According to our industry, the biggest problem amerikans face is who gets the last nacho chip. About 93% of amerikan commercials beckon you to ask your doctor, when the fact is 93% of amerikans can no long afford to even see a doctor.

I schtumbled across this long article the other day. I'm not sure how it found me, or I found it, but here we are. 

It's not hard to proffer another of Gioia's triptych's for the ad industry.

From long copy print ads, to :30s, to :06s.

From here's how we can help you, to we'll make you happy, to what a celebrity thinks.

As an industry, as a society, I worry that we've forgotten. We've forgotten that we're not just to be selling and yelling, we're supposed to be helping people improve their lives through our clients' products.

Maybe this is childish on my part. Naive.

But the best advertising has always helped people. 

As Carl Ally once said, "Advertising should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted."

That sounds right to me.

And I'm going to keep trying.

--

PS. Ad Aged is on vacation this week.
Posting but later than usual.

You Make Me Bizzy Miss Lizzy.

If you don't read John McWhorter who writes for the New York Times and who's an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University (spoiler alert: Linguistics is not a form of Italian pasta) you're really missing out. Language, in many ways, is what makes humans human. And understanding how words form and languages are used is a window into how people, cultures and communities think.

Last week, McWhorter wrote an article on the vibrancy of our language--much of which, he laments--is no longer being taught in schools. He starts his piece recalling a language exercise he was given while in seventh grade.

When I think about language, and my own fascination with words, I think much of that comes from being raised an outsider--a Jew in a Gentile world. Because my parents didn't grow up speaking English, when they learned English I think they were more attuned to its vibrancy. Outsiders are almost always better observers than insiders. It might be why so many of the people who guide amerikan culture come from outside of the main avenues of amerikan life. 

Billy Wilder, for instance, who won six Academy Awards and was nominated for a total of twenty-one, didn't speak English until he came to this country--escaping the nazis--at the age of nearly 30. His ear for language came from not knowing the language.

But enough of all that tongue twisting.

What really got me from McWhorter's piece was the off-register type at the top of this post. And his brief look into the derivation of the word "business."

As someone who has a full-time job but who works independently, I am an outsider to the business world. I work with business people, but I'm not one of them. I run GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company as my business, but as a business, GeorgeCo, LLC, is completely without rules, strictures and protocols. 

I win pitches, get assignments, do scopes, do the work, sell the work, revise the work, and sometimes produce the work. But I do it all without formality. I do it in a way that accommodates how I think, live, breathe and walk Sparkle, my one-year-old golden retriever. I do it in a way that lets me do business with a minimum of busy-ness.

So, when I got to McWhorter's exegesis on the word, it was especially interesting to me. 

“Business” starts with “busy,” and the first mystery about busy is why it’s spelled that way. We are so used to seeing it that we may not notice how weird it is....So how do we get 'business'? 

"A Scottish poem called 'The King’s Book,' from around 1400, describes “the little squirrel, full of busyness.” There was even an opposite word, busiless.

"Today, however, you don’t really think of this word as meaning a state of being busy. That is partly because we pronounce it not “busy-ness” but “bizzness.” Unmoored from that audible connection, its meaning has been free to drift its own way, although if you squint you can sense the original meaning in a sentence like 'Knock off that ‘Stranger Things’ business and get to work!'”

When I think about how much I am able to get done in a given day, how GeorgeCo's yearly revenue probably outstrips that of all but a handful of global agencies, it's because I have (productively) eliminated the busy-ness from my business.

I don't have endless meetings.
I have a way to create accurate scopes in minutes not days.
And I am able to reach the highest level of clients to get briefed so as not to be bogged down and confounded by an elaborate game of corporate "telephone," where the more the message is relayed the more it gets muddled.

Somewhere along the way, our corporate culture has conflated looking busy with getting things done. We've equated nervous activity with accomplishment. We've likened a long to-do list with actually doing.

Nothing could be further from reality.

Maybe busy-ness will show your boss how valuable you are. Becuase if you're so busy you have to work all night and work all weekend, it makes you feel important. But it makes me think of a bit I read by John Kenneth Galbraith, the great economist who wrote this in his 1958 book, "The Great Crash of 1929." (BTW, Galbraith's book is great and accessible. And, I fear, burning in its relevance.)

"Finally, 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."

Busy?

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Some words go abstract. We say “It’s none of your business” as a single chunk and think nothing of it, but it’s an odd expression. It doesn’t refer to a business in the dictionary sense. It means, “It isn’t something that you are supposed to busy yourself about.” Things went even further with an expression my parents used to playfully use, saying “Nunya” as a shortening of “It’s none of your business,” in the same way as “goodbye” began as “God be with you.”

Then business was used even more abstractly in the old-timey expression “like nobody’s business” which meant “to an extreme degree.” This is where “So Long Letty” comes in.

Letty runs a beauty shop, something considered kind of racy in a time when ordinary women were just beginning to wear makeup. She sings about her clients:

You ought to see ’em
When Letty gets through with ’em
Oh, what I do with ’em
It’s nobody’s business!

But how does this refer to business at all? Think also of “Give him the business!” or an animal “doing its business.” None of these uses have anything to do with capitalism.

I hope I do not seem to expatiate (it means to go on at length). But there is no reason that the basics of linguistics — how sounds actually work, why sentences come out the way they do, how language changes over time, how children learn language — should be taught only to college students who intentionally seek them out. We teach schoolchildren about many types of transformation, including history and evolution. Why not the one they encounter every time they open their mouths to speak? (Incidentally, to get a sense of what a romp language and linguistics can be, I highly recommend a smart and also gorgeous card-based game League of the Lexicon. It’s a feast for the inquiring mind and even smells good.)

Meet Simone. Meet Rachel. Meet NBZ. And Learn.

One of the absolute joys of the internet era is that it enables extremely shy people like myself to be extremely social. During the 35 years I worked within the black-mold-infested walls of various ad agencies, I probably went out for drinks with people fewer than 35 times. That's less than once a year--if you don't have a head for math.

While I was at Ogilvy, I never met Simone Oppenheimer Mandel who worked in new business at Ogilvy. But somehow, I suppose by dint of my Brontosaurus-sized social footprint we were linked in. About four years ago, Simone and her partner, Rachel Segall sent me a note and we set up a call. You know, to meet.

Simone and Rachel run NBZ, a new business, let-us-help-you-win-more-market-better-do-cooler-things-get-known-solve-problems-consultancy. Since we've met, I've followed NBZ's work, their successes, and their rise and rise and rise. I've done work for Rachel and Simone now and again--but more for the chance of working with smart, energetic, warm and funny people than for the money. A lot of people might not understand that motivation--but such is NBZ's power. You just feel better after spending some time with Rachel and Simone.

A few weeks ago, Ad Aged had a couple guest posts in the space of a week. NBZ whacked me across the metaphorical knuckles with a ruler. "What about us," Rachel and Simone asked. "Can't we write something for Ad Aged?"

Of course you can, I answered. 

And they have.

And it's here.

By the way, a lot of companies, agencies and brands talk a lot about Thought Leadership. In most instances, the phrase has the currency of Monopoly money. There's really no thinking in  the thoughts or leading in the leadership.

Like I said, NBZ, Simone and Rachel, Rachel and Simone aren't like most others. For instance,above is the Thought Leadership page of their site. Real, live thoughts. Real, live leadership. From two real, live mensches.

And now, their real, live wisdom. (This might be a C and S...Clip and Save.)

 

Here Are Ten Lessons We've Learned as NBZ

 

Hype. If you don’t believe in it, why should anyone else? Show up loud. Show up proud. This is how we built our brand and advise others.

 

Universe. Manifestation is real. Positive thoughts, clear goals, and specificity. The universe works with you when you work with it. That’s how we’ve grown—both in business and life.

 

Generosity. Believe there's room for everyone—even competitors. And always make time to give back. Building a network is about supporting, not hoarding.

 

Fail. Experiment fast, fail forward. Get things out there quickly, and don’t be precious. Speed beats perfection. This is how we move.

 

Innovate. Even when it’s hard—especially when it’s hard—break things and make things. Rebuild them better. Growth has no comfort zone, and neither do we.

 

Trust. Trust yourself. Trust your gut. Trust your vision. Trust your partnership. That’s how we’ve built a business and balanced families.

 

Act. Confidence is a verb. Act like you’ve already won. The world will follow. That’s how we create energy and optimism for the future.

 

Network. If you've built your network with intention and generosity, it will repay you a gazillion times over. The connections you nurture will come through when you need them the most.

 

Human. Be real, be raw, be human, be you.  It’s how we connect, build relationships, and acts as a natural filter or magnet for who you work with .

 

Oh Well. Not everything will go your way. Sometimes it wasn’t up to you, or you couldn’t find the time to make it perfect. Shrug, say “oh well,” and move on. Power lies in letting go. That’s how we’ve balanced it all.

Thanks, NBZ.

Thanks for being you.

And for being friends.

Man-o, Man-o, Manichaeanism.

Not to be all Manichaean about it, but you can bet your bottom diphthong that's where I'm going. Manichaeanism was, about 1800 years ago a popular religion that saw in the world a battle of two forces. Light, good, kindness versus darkness, bad and evil.

Obviously, for the purposes of a dopey blog on advertising, I've simplified things quite a bit. Suffice to say the world of Manichaeanism is a binary world. A world without gradations. A world much like the political one amerika is living through now. And has been for a while. 

You're either upstanding or you ate Buttons, the cat.

Way back in the early 60s, reactionary republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater said, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” It seems that 60 years later Goldwater's thinking prevails, not that of the candidate who defeated him 6.5 votes to 3.5. Lyndon Johnson.

There's a galloping trend of Manichaeanism in the ad business as well. 

Here are three or four instances:

1.
Doing ads designed to win awards vs. Doing good ads for real clients and hoping they win awards.

2.
Crafting a personal brand vs. Being good and earning your reputation.

3.
Proclaiming that being kind/equitable/fair/transparent are part of your 'core values' vs. actually being/ kind/ equitable/ fair/
transparent.

4.
Announcing you're a 'best place to work' vs. being a good place to work.

To my eyes, most of the dark side derives from trying to be acclaimed without actually doing anything worthy of praise. And too often, in too many ways, practiced by too many people Manichaeanism seems to prevail.

Ergo, short cuts and expedience win out over hard-work and diligence.

There are no short cuts to building a proper brand. Any short cut you take for expedience's sake will eventually bite you in the ass. If you don't do the hard-work of watering the rose, the bloom will eventually be off the rose.

Years ago when I worked on a major international business machine account, they had a problem. Because they made so much money selling hardware--in particular mainframes and other servers--they had underinvested in building a "cloud."

By the time they finally did try to sell their cloud services, Amazon, Google and Microsoft had already attained market dominance. I remember one Saturday morning reading an article in the Weekend Wall Street Journal about the trillion dollar cloud market. 

My client had less than a two-percent share. 

This is after spending billions on advertising promoting their cloud.

If you have less than two-percent share of anything, you should probably fold your tent. I'd bet the reason so many relationships fail is that one party feels they're getting less than two-percent share of the other party's time. That's why human relationships fail. And agency relationships too.

The two-percent share thing bothered me. It was a failure on the part of the agency to do right by the client.

Even though I had already resigned from helping run that account, after 12 years on it, I was still invested in its success.

I wrote a note to the CEO of North America--a long-time colleague and a friend.

"X," I wrote, "2-percent share. We need to do something before we get fired. We need to show we're leading the business not a vendor to the business.

"We need to sell the capabilities of all of the tentacles of WPP. I can't do that. You can. But what I can do is write a mission. What we're going to do to define the assignment, rally our forces and fix our clients' principle problem."

"What's your idea," X wrote back.

"5-2-10. A five year plan to leverage all the resources of the world's largest communications company so that our client can get to ten-percent marketshare." (I figured ten-percent was the threshold of major player-hood.Z)

X backed off.

That's not what agencies do anymore. Now, we'd make a virtual cloud-nine installation and hand out hairnets and free umbrellas. We'd produce a case-study video and claim we got a billion impressions and show some bottle blonde newsreader gushing over the "cloud journey." "Bob, today news-team seven went inside a cloud!"

I was fired about eight months later, X left about three months after I did. 

In fact, over the last five years, the agency has halved itself. That's like McDonald's closing 20,000 restaurants out of the 40,000 they operate. Or the NFL closing the entire AFC. Or a racehorse running on just two legs.

In our Manichaean universe, that's enough to win you Network of the Year.

Are You Talking to Me?

Not all that many years ago, when I was an ECD at the "Digital Agency of the Decade," I often felt like I was the only person in the agency who actually wanted to be in advertising.

I felt I was the only person who believed in telling people what a client did, why that client was important, what made them different. You know, why it would be good to look into that client.

Everyone else was off in a tangential world I simply didn't understand. 

I still don't.

They wanted to design logos. They wanted to design "experiences." They want to design "user interfaces," brand guidelines, content management systems. The most ambitious of my erstwhile colleagues wanted to create "new products."

I kept mum about this for a long time. 

I wasn't one of the cool kids and didn't want to betray my un-coolness by revealing that I didn't know what a new product was. So many people were bent on creating them, I was sure that somehow I had missed the boat.

In fact, I'd think about everything I ever bought and I wondered how many new products there actually were. Where were these new products, who was buying them and what purpose did they serve?

I thought about mops. We had a mop at home. I thought about the food I eat. We eat pretty much every day. I thought about household goods like grape-jelly and aluminum foil. For the life of me, I couldn't think about any new product I had ever bought.

A new yogurt in a tube rather than a cup isn't a new product. It's a new way of consuming an old product. Likewise, adding vanilla artificial flavoring to a cola ain't a new product, it's a variation on a theme. Even a car to replace my 1966 Simca 1500 with 425,000 miles on it wouldn't be a new product. It's just a new car--not a new mode of transportation.

Like I said, I'm stupid this way and I didn't understand why all these new products seemed so important to so many people.

I thought a lot about it. I still do. How advertising agencies (and the holding companies which are really simply big-box leveraged buyout entities that have hundreds of ugly aisles of indistinguishable products--formerly independent agencies) have decided that building platforms to communicate a brand's efficacy is considered, today, passé.

Then I started thinking about failure and relationships that fail, which is most of them. 

Most marriages fail.
There's hardly a parent-child relationship that isn't tainted by sadness.
The bond between governments and people is weaker than ever. 
As are most service relationships. Broker-client. Waiter-diner. Mechanic-car owner. Contractor-home owner. Client-agency. 

The glue that keeps the world working--if it's ever going to work again is relationships.

Relationships based on candor, honesty, trust, doing what's promised. Relationships based on coming through, being there, listening and being kind.

These relationships are based on clear, accurate, honest and warm communication. 

Communication.

When relationships falter or fail, or both, it's usually because communication sucks. Yet the advertising industry today seems to have forgotten the importance of communication.

That used to be the role of advertising agencies and advertising people. Tell people who don't know about your client about your client in a way that makes them consider your client.

Communication.

It goes back to pre-historic times. Sorry if this is triggering, but Venus of Willendorf dates from about 30,000 years ago. It communicated to the people who made and shared it. Love, lust, fertility, the potentcy of womanhood and the power of sex.

I don't care about your brand. I don't care to be screamed at. I don't care about your new logo or triple play bundle and your death-defying offer of unlimited minutes. I don't care about what tested well or what bullet points you're shooting me with.

Who are you?
What do you do?
Why should I care?

Communication.

Ms. Willendorf was a way of communicating.

It's not data.

Not AI.

Not mustard-flavored ice cream.

Or a mayonnaise handbag.

Not a celebrity as creative director.

Communication.

Get it.

h/t to Dave Dye for access to his Ammirati & Puris trove.