He Bellowed.

I got yelled at a lot a couple of weeks back.

Getting yelled at is not that usual for me these days--since I've gone to work for myself, the nattering nabobisms have decreased to almost nothing. Working in an agency, yelling--real or imagined--happens frequently. There are the all cap emails about late timesheets. The demands to be quiet because there's a client being pitched in conference room C. Or you expensed a black car home after working to midnight for eleven days straight.

You get yelled at in an agency anytime you act like a human with human needs. Remember, you're a resource, or an FTE, or an asset, or a cost-center, or a billable hour. Don't go all human on them. The MBAs (mindless bipedal asswipes) don't like that.

Those days are over for me now, but a short time ago, I got yelled at twice.

First by my therapist, Owen, of every Thursday morning at 7:45 for 40 years.

Yes, 40 years. 

I like to say I'm on a postage stamp in Austria.

Freud. Jung. Adler. Me.

Owen yelled at me for sticking to a plan I should have broken. He yelled at me for denying myself a bit more joy from my one-day sojourn into the city, and instead, committing to return to the Gingham Coast because I had typing to do for a client and my word is my bond in a way no one else's word has ever been his bond, even god and Moses and Owen himself.

You're making excuses, he excoriated.

And I temporized.

And he repeated.

And he was right.

And I was temporizing.

Second, I got yelled at by myself. For almost the exact opposite reason.

I went into the weekend assailed by ideas I had to have, writing I had to do, and worst, the re-writing demanded of me, by clients who wanted re-writing not to make the work somehow better but because they felt deserved it. 

It's like getting your tires filled to 32 psi and then yelling at the kid to fill them to 32 psi. It's just a show of meanness and power. The same thing, really. 

I used to be friendly with a couple who would never stay at the first table they were seated at. They always found something wrong with it and preferred a different place to have dinner. A lot of clients are like that. They want changes as if my responded to their ill-direction was some sort of floor-show.

Why did I want to keep these clients?

Neither was paying me well. They were clients leaning instead on puppy-dog eyes and playing to my need to be needed, they made me feel needed.

I'll do almost anything for anyone if they make me feel needed. Especially if they're nice to me because they needed me. The problem with causality is usually that I take it more causally than anyone. 

Be casual about the causal. My new motto.

So I had work to do going into the weekend. And I didn't want to do it.

I didn't want to let, as I so often do, obligation win out over being decent to meself. I wanted some time to recuperate. From the long week. From a world that is too much with me, and work that is too much too much with me. 

I yelled at myself.

George, I harridan'd. You will not work on these twin miasmas over the weekend. You will snip the obligations off your head like Frédéric Fekkai trimming Medusa of hissing reptiles.

I resisted all weekend the needs crowding in on me. I said no. I fairly yelled at my new Mac with the Power97 Max Chip set. Every time I walked by its perch in my Connecticut living room, I looked at it like a boss I was fighting with, or a client, or a friend I had grown to hate with ferocity increasing every day.

So, my weekend was like a sleepless night. I tossed and turned. I had in Macbeth's words, "Full of scorpions is my mind." Scorpions is my mind. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Even myself when I hate myself.

I yelled at myself for thinking of just getting it done.

Then I woke early on Monday--earlier than you, even if you're reading this in Greenwich Mean Time. And I gave myself a mean time.

I had reckoned the hangingness over my head, that which I was yelling at myself not to do, would take me 15 hours of actual doing. I sent appropriate notes with timings to clients. And then.

And then I did the first. Then the second. I took a walk and took the third in hand.

All done in just four hours.

Then for good measure, I yelled at myself again.

I yelled for the torture.

Then yelled when the torture stopped.

That's work sometimes.

A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

Hard Rolls. And Roles.

Sometimes I'll be browsing Linked In or some other dump of a social media site and see something so dumb, banal, or obvious it sends me into a couple hours worth of bad mood.

That's in addition to my normal 23 hours-a-day of bad mood.

I'll see that dumb thing and conclude, rightly or wrongly, that we're all doomed. That civilization has been completely stipidified and that the lead in our water supply has subtracted so much from our collective IQ that there's no hope, absolutely no hope, for the already-dim future of our species.

I saw one just now and I hopped off quickly to this page to try to hurl the dumbosity out of my Umwelt.

I saw someone listed as a Chief People Officer and beneath that heading the description, "In charge of people."

When I was a boy, back so many years ago, virtually every neighborhood had a bakery.

Bakeries were nice places.

You could get a genuine loaf of bread--many varieties of bread. You could get cookies, cakes, danish, even fancy-schmancy things, depending upon where you lived. Everything was made that day and fresh. 

If you were short a nickel or a dime, you could get a bag of yesterday's baked goods (slightly stale) for pretty cheap and it was fine.

Things got stale in those days, like things should. We have up here in Connecticut a loaf of Pepperidge Farm cinnamon raisin bread that hasn't molded in six weeks. What am I eating when I'm eating that bread?

My drywall gets moldy before my bread.

One of the best things about bakeries is they were pretty honest. If you had to make yourself a sandwich for lunch, you could run over to the deli and get a quarter-a-pound of bologna sliced, then walk down to the bakery.

As a kid who had to fend for himself a lot I made a lot of my own meals. 

Bologna in tow, I'd walk over the the bakery and get bread for my sandwich. (We hadn't fetishized sandwiches then. Or baby-talked them into sammiches. Some of us knew about the Earl of Sandwich and the Sandwich Islands, so our sandwiches had interstitial content attached.)

"Lemme have a hard roll," I'd say to the lady behind the counter, who was most-often the baker's wife.

"Ses'me or Poppy," she'd rejoind.

"Poppy." 

She toss the dingus in a waxed paper bag and I'd be on my way.

What struck me this morning was the dumbness of nomenclature we see today and the brusqueness of the nomenclature I grew up with.

i.e. the distance we've plummeted from "hard roll" to "Chief People Officer."

A roll that's hard. I get. 

A chief people officer? Huh?

One is descriptive and honest. It does what it says on the tin.

The other is meaningless and aggrandizing and obviously bestowed upon people in lieu of a real job with real things to do and appropriate compensation attached to that job.

Hard roll.

You know what you're getting.

Just like the word "Fly."

A bug that flies.

As I heard on an Economist podcast on language, use "short words. Words you can stub your toe on."

Somehow I think of this passage from Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint," which I often show to people I work with who aren't Jewish, who aren't from New York and don't understand how Jewish New Yorkers use (or mangle) the English language.

This man, who is a real estate broker and an alderman of the Davenport town council, says that he slept like a log, and I actually see a log. I get it! Motionless, heavy, like a log! “Good morning,” he says, and now it occurs to me that the word “morning,” as he uses it, refers specifically to the hours between eight A.M. and twelve noon. I’d never thought of it that way before. He wants the hours between eight and twelve to be good, which is to say, enjoyable, pleasurable, beneficial! We are all of us wishing each other four hours of pleasure and accomplishment. Why, that’s terrific! Hey, that’s very nice! Good morning! And the same applies to “Good afternoon”! And “Good evening”! And “Good night”! My God! The English language is a form of communication!

Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!

There are dozens if not hundreds of Politically Correct reasons we don't read Portnoy's Complaint or even Philip Roth anymore. Having sex with a piece of store-bought liver is among them.  But Roth's observations about language and mine are quite similar.

I don't read about 97-percent of the things I read because they are so devoid of sense and meaning.

For instance, here's Schmogilvy's (nominally a communications company) About section from their website.

We continue ... through Borderless Creativity—operating, innovating, and creating at the intersection of talent and capabilities. Our experts in Public Relations, Consulting, Advertising, Health, and Experience work fluidly across more than 120 offices in over 80 countries.

McCann's is only slightly less Anthrax-y. 

McCann’s total marketing services capabilities are enhanced and magnified through its seamless collaboration with the other major worldwide communications networks that are part of the global McCann Worldgroup offering. The McCann Worldgroup network provides today's marketers with best-in-class strategic and creative services that help their brands play a meaningful role in people’s lives and build their businesses.

Nothing that comes close to a baker's description: Hard Roll. The same is true when people introduce themselves. I'm an executive creative director. Or a group planning director. Or an associate.

When I first was promoted to SVP Group Creative Head back in 1993, I barely had a group, much less a head. A better title would have been: really good writer who handles the tough shit no one else can.

Hard to fit on a business card.

 

Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart!

There's something happening in the world, at least the world as I see it, that's quite disturbing.

It's the structural elimination or evisceration of the profit margin. Worse, the actual ability to make profit.

We've heard about for decades the American malady of living paycheck-to-paycheck. Or choosing between paying rent and paying for food. Or being unable to buy a home because you already have $250K of college debt.

But now, thanks to the vagaries of plunder-economics, investment banking, private equity or rapine-capitalism, profit for many leveraged companies is more ephemeral than ever.

Here's what I mean.

Back in my waning days at Ogilvy, I was asked by an eminence gris who was really eminent (though she dyed her gris) to do some work for Boeing. As a passenger air-craft manufacturer, Boeing is a near monopoly. Boeing and Airbus split--roughly 50-50--the West's passenger jet market.

Boeing, however, makes its real money as a defense contractor. They make jets, rockets, drones and missiles for the United States' trillion dollar military.

Some years ago, Airbus, which is based in Europe and owned by a group of European countries, was given a subsidy by European governments. They covered part of the costs of Airbus' nut. In other words, for every dollar (or Euro) that went into a plane, Airbus only had to pay eighty-five cents. Friendly governments covered the rest.

Boeing asked for the same from the US government. But our government said no. It's enough to let Boeing jack up prices for billion-dollar bombers.

In the world's passenger jet business, Boeing had to price their aircraft the same as Airbus. But because they received no subsidy, they cost about fifteen-percent more to make. Boeing couldn't raise prices--that would send people to Airbus in droves. So they had to find fifteen-percent costs savings or corner cuttings to compete.

That's why their planes are crashing, or doors are blowing off, or there are more delays because of mechanical issues. They have to compete, though structurally they can't, so something has to give.

The same phenomenon is happening, I believe in advertising. 

The Holding Companies, in their greed, overpaid for all of the literally hundreds of agencies they bought.

Twenty years ago, IPG paid $200 million for Deutsch. Earlier this year, they sold half of Deutsch, packaged with Hill Holliday and sold it for $20 million. That's like buying a new car for $60,000, putting it together with another $60,000 new car, and selling both together for $10,000.

The Holding Companies are in a hole of their own digging. So the money they charge what had been independent agencies for the privilege of being held goes up each year. They've got to, somehow, make up for the loss incurred from the initial expenditure. Further, the holding companies, have lowered prices for their services. When you stop competing on quality of product, the only thing left to compete on is price. Ergo, a race to the bottom.

The only way the individual agencies can hope to pay their vig to their owners is to cut their operating costs. So more and more experienced people gets leavified by their agencies every day. In turn, the prices agencies can charge get lower and lower. So their costs have to get decrease so as not to outstrip their lower prices. Quality can be sacrificed. People fired. The physical plant uglified. Margin reigns supreme.

Soon, no one's left to do the work who's ever done the work before. Soon, agencies says "AI will make it ok." But AI is, like electricity, a commodity. My ones and zeros and yottabytes of data are exactly the same as yours. The first mover might have an advantage for a short time, but it's like getting your dinner first at a restaurant. Before long, everyone else is served.

What happens next is a vicious circle. Prices are lowered, quality sinks. Because quality sinks, prices are lowered. And so on.

What's happened isn't anything but a structural economic commitment to failure.

Everything crumbles.

But share price. 

Executive compensation.

And scowling press-releases.

Next time you hear about a door blowing off a 737, or a near miss, or a wheel plummeting to earth after takeoff, take a deep breath and say, "that could be us."

Because it is.

Wonder Weapons.

When my older ad friends and I get together to talk, or kvetch, whichever comes second, it doesn't take long before someone bemoans the disappearance of the "agency of record" relationship.

In this era of GSP (Generalized Parsimonious Syndrome), no one wants to spend money on anything--least of all, continuity, the value of which is hard to measure. Further, like Hitler and dozens of psychotic leaders before and after him, as a "culture," we have bought into the idea of "Wunderwaffe," or "Wonder Weapons."

Wunderwaffe are an adjunct of societal mania. They're magical thinking--and a hypnotic delusion.

Back when I was in my early 20s, I knew a kid who wanted to be a novelist. He'd check his mailbox every day for a letter from a film studio, Henry Holt or Alfred Knopf. That letter never came. In part because this kid never finished his novel much less sent it out.

Wunderwaffe, in war, novels and advertising, embody the fantasy that something will come along, magically (or wondrously) and change everything in one swell foop. 

Like trump's curing Covid with bleach, or light, or horse medicine. Or obese people thinking that eating grapefruit will make them look like Farrah Fawcett. Or the late 80s, American idee fixe about space lasers that could shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. Or NFTs, the metaverse, crypto-currency, or whoever will save the Mets this season. Or that data, or the use of the word 'agile' will save advertising.

(Speaking of panacea, I read something last week about a new nuclear-powered American aircraft carrier called the "Gerald Ford" which cost $13 billion to get up and cruising. The writer said, for that price you could have 650,000 $20,000 drones. Which would likely be way more devastating and able to destroy anything in their path.) Wonder Weapons or smarter reality?

But this is about advertising, remember. And agency-of-records.

Today, clients rarely buy and agencies even more unusually sell "Legos." 

I don't mean the actual blocks. 

This is a metaphor, remember.

The writing herein is fersisticated.

I mean a system of communications that can grow, contract, and shape into infinite configurations. That anyone can enjoy. That is endlessly adaptable and easy-to-use. 

We don't sell Legos anymore. Even though Legos last forever and, like Sara Lee cakes, nobody doesn't like them.

Instead, we sell Wunderwaffe.

Wonder Weapons. 

If you only do this's, everything will be solved. People will love your brand. New customers will flock to you. Your cash registers will reverberate. And your CMO will keep his job for 19 months, not 18.

So, we hire Beyonce for Verizon. A company that drops three calls in five and over-charges on five-out-of-five. A company universally hated. 

Then we commission twenty million dollars of research study to prove the Beyonce spot worked. Do we ever ask people what they think? Do we ever imagine what would happen if there were a non-oligopoly choice? Do we ever calculate the cost of losing millions of customers/month to attrition and dissatisfaction?

Do we ever construct a Lego system of pieces that work together, that people love, that lasts forever that can address the disdain consumers have for the brand?

Or do we just do another commercial with another set of cruddy actors gushing cruddily over prices and services that no one actually sees or gets because no one actually sells it. And when that doesn't work, and it won't, we do it again with another set of cruddiness and hope for different results. Or commission the research to prove it's working.

What we've got here, above....and below.

A failure to communicate.

Because there's no patience or time to actually do things methodically, thoughtfully and foundationally.

Every ad I see looks like a car dealer ad or those horrible Cover Girl pre-roll commercials, where "near-models" open the spot by smiling into the camera and saying "this is a game-changer."

Naw.

The only thing that changes the game is changing the game. A different set of dice won't do it.

I don't know why I think of this now. But I do, so I'll end this way.

I've read in two different books over the last three months. One was by a former MI6 agent, one by a former CIA agent. They each wrote that the way to tell if you're being "surveilled" or followed by someone is to look at the suspected follower's shoes.

People tailing you will put on a fake mustache, a wig, dark-glasses, change their blue blazer to a black hoodie, and even walk with a limp. What they seldom do, I've read, is change their shoes. 

Apparently, that takes too much work. Just ask your teenager who tracked in mud. Again.

So if it appears some different people are following you but they all have on brown tassel loafers, it's probably one person not half-a-dozen. 

In short, change takes change from foot to head.

Not a Wunderwaffe. 

A complete wardrobe.

Or to make a mnemonic couplet out of it.

There's no such thing as a panacea
For either you-a or me-a.

This Is the Worst. Monday Edition.

I had a small epiphany the other day. 

Maybe you could call it an epiphanette.

I think it's a function of being old as fuck. 

I can go weeks without talking to someone within fifteen years of my age.

That sucks.

I remember an episode of M*A*S*H, the fairly-decent TV show that hasn't aged well. In the episode, a US-based newsreel reporter was interviewing the people of the 4077th. 

When they got to Harry Morgan, who played colonel Sherman Potter, leader of the unit, they asked him what he missed most about being thousands of miles from home in Korea fighting a vicious war, Morgan said, "Mostly I miss being around people my own age."

I used to think about that a lot in my waning days at Ogilvy. My waning days at Ogilvy began on my first day at Ogilvy. In today's ad industry, people are hooked fish--they begin rotting, being disposal-phreno-genic, as soon as they are reeled in.

As an older person, your different perspectives, references, experiences and a whole lot more are essentially sent to Siberia. You, and they, are isolated and almost mocked. It's alienating, isolating and hard. So much for "inclusion." It means as much as the top-bunk at Treblinka.

The other morning I was getting ready for a client meeting. 

I have about seven a week.

Which means I have to create at least three tranches of work a week. 

I figure I have about 75 major client presentations per annum. If each one of those presentations includes two manifestos and 25 ads, you can do the math. It's a lot.

And by the time Saturday morning comes along when I try to write a blogpost or two, so I'm not behind the content eight-ball when the work week begins, I feel like Ol' Man River. 

I get weary

And sick of trying,

I'm tired of living

And scared of dying.

That's Jerome Kern, if I'm not mistaken. A man whose soul had grown deep like a river.

But blogpost I must. 

My posts are greatest new-business-tool in the history of advertising. Why some holding company doesn't try to buy me, is a testament to just how testicularly-squeezing and ageist the ad schmindustry is.

Anyway, back to the epiphanette.

I was thinking about my daughters as I so often do. H is 32, a marine scientist, and helps run the world's leading institute of Marine Science. S is 36, a clinical psychologist, and helps run one of the world's leading clinics for kids with ADHD. Touch wood, they're home-owners, and happyish. But like me, they worry.

They look at the world around them and they see the rafters burning and collapsing in the flames. We seem to be living in an ontological House of Usher. 

Then it hit me.

All those articles we read and the news stories that assault us. We are living in an endless cycle of existential doom.

Existential doom sells papers. 

It's "If it bleeds, it leads" on a galactic basis.

The epiphany is that every moment believes the moment we are currently in is the most perilous moment of all time. Nobody has ever woken up in the morning, kissed their oatmeal and eaten their spouse, and said "I live in the golden-age of happiness."

Today we seem to be faced with a pizza cut into 32 slices of variegated doom. Climate crisis. Fascism (trump). Income inequality. Crime. The beaten goes on.

We look back to the 80s, say, as some benign, almost Leave-it-to-Beaver-like warm-muffin of life. Naw.

I remember one morning in the early Reagan years when the great Alzheimer's president himself was rattling nuclear sabers at the Soviet Union. A disarmament group had painted ash-colored silhouettes all over my subway stop on Broadway and 110th Street. Those were to indicate vaporized bodies. Then the train came. Covered in graffiti (not street art) and crack vials. And people dying of AIDS, with no respite. And so it goes.

That was my Golden Age, the one we look at nostalgically.

I get a lot of calls from friends, near friends and non-friends in the industry. They're fed up, used up or looking to get up-and-out. 

"How do I do it, George?" they plead.

Fifty pounds and fifty years ago, I was a decent long-distance runner. I'm no Colin Smith, the runner in the Alan Sillitoe book, but I ran a dozen marathons in my time--most in the low threes.

I get a lot of calls from friends, near friends and non-friends lacing up their $180 running shoes. They're achey. They're breaky. They're god-foresakey.

I have the same advice for all of them that I have for all of humanity every day until Faulkner's "last ding-dong of doom."

One foot. Another foot. One foot. Another foot. One foot. Another foot.

"Don't look back," as Satchel Paige said. "Someone might be gaining on you." Don't look left. Don't look right. Don't be distracted by the chips on your shoulder. Don't think about the bruises and the blood and the bowels of life.

One foot. Another foot. One foot. Another foot. One foot. Another foot.

Happy Monday.

Culturally Relevant.

I remember when I heard about Pacific islanders in the small, isolated coral islands thousands of miles from elsewhere and how they developed cargo cults.

It's reputed that American military planes--after abandoning and exfoliating the islands after World War II--had to drop huge amounts of food and other supplies to keep the indigenous population alive. The residents of the islands, not really understanding the provenance of "food from the sky," began worshipping this cargo. It's said they developed a cargo cult and prayed to un-seen forces from beyond.

I'm reminded of that because of a couple sentence I just read in Agency Spy--a conduit for advertising agency press releases. Agency Spy as an editorial organ doesn't comment on things, they have no judgment, scrutiny, investigative sensibility or honesty. They just print tripe--no matter how self-serving and self-promotional it is. All they do, in fact, is print what agencies and clients want printed. I suppose in return for advertising dollars. They're what passes for journalism in advertising.

Here's the bit I read:

This has nothing to do with either Naked Juice or their new agency Fig and everything to do with the industry drinking something other than Naked juice, that is Kool-Aid.

Kool-Aid glass one: "identifying the brand as culturally relevant..."

Can someone, anyone please tell me what this means? Culturally relevant juice? I'm not trying to be hard-headed, I literally can make no sense of this Cult of Culture. In fact, I'm 66-years-old, I remember in 1967 when I was just nine, four teams were fighting it out for the American League pennant--the eventual winners, the Red Sox, the White Sox, the Tigers and the Twins. 

÷

Carl Yastrzemski was on his way to winning the Triple Crown and a local baker--Arnold (not the ad agency) came out with Yaz Bread. That was the last time I cared about cultural relevance and a packaged good. 57 years ago.

The second glass of Kool-Aid is even bittererer: "articulating the role Naked plays in consumers' lives."

I like a nice glass of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice. I mix it with seltzer (cutting down on my sugar intake) and pour it over ice. I do the same with genuine lemonade--tart, no sugar. When I'm in LA, or the Caribbean, not much beats a nice pulpy glass of fresh juice. Like I said, juice is something I really enjoy.

But juice is not part of my life.

My wife is. 

My kids are.

My son-in-law. My grandson. My puppy, Sparkle.

My friends. My cousin Howard.

My baseball hats.

The 5,000 books I've acquired over the years and 1,000 movies on DVD. 

My 1966 Simca 1500, with a 2.8-liter BMW straight-six.

My writing is part of my life.

My apartment in New York within spitting distance of the East River and my small cottage in Connecticut within spitting distance of the turbid Long Island Sound.

Even this dopey blog and my 83,000 weekly readers are part of my life.

But juice--one particular brand of juice in a world of 279 different juice brands? No.

Not part of my life.

Not even close.

Maybe one of the reasons advertising today sucks so bad is that we're so consumed with out own pomposity. 

We put the self-importance in self-importance.

We think we can make brands culturally relevant like Taylor Swift is or become part of people's lives like a stent or a pacemaker. 

I think the idea that we're part of a conversation--that people are having conversations about brands is so much solipsistic bushwa. The notion that we can make a candy bar or a tupperware container or a tool to clean our gutters a part of peoples' lives is beyond arrogance and beyond pomposity. It's as convoluted and esoteric as a PhD thesis. 

Here's what advertising can do:

We can hand people a laugh. Or a memory. Or a moment. Or an idea.

We can implant something if we're working for a client willing to be a) consistent for decades and b) spend a lot of money for decades. 

Even then, I'm 99.9-percent sure we're not creating cultural relevance or resonance.

Sure, on a rare occasion we can get lucky and get viral with some stupid human trick like pouring ice-water over our heads or dropping our drawers in public or making a bank out of baked ziti or licorice or ginger bread. But those things are mere sneeze droplets on the radar screen of life, not something engraved or permanent like Hadrian's Wall.

Sorry, Naked.

Sorry, ad industry.

Even Yaz, whose stat line in 1967 was pretty immortal, guess what? No one knows who he is anymore.

Now imagine he were a Brillo pad.

Not an Andy Warhol one. 

Just a rusting square of food-stained and soapless steel wool.

End of conversation.

101 and Done.

This will be short today.

Or brief.

Whatevs.

Too many people in our business, writers, account people, clients, MBAs, marketing directors and their spouses, influencers, focus-groupers and gropers, non-native English-speakers who therefore become experts on English usage, people with graduate degrees in English and Comparative literature from Ivy League universities like myself, treat the English language as if it were engraved in marble and as immovable as a client with a giant budget and a dearth of taste.

Too many people, including so-called creatives, who are often more rigid than a horse-fly wrapped in spider-silk, don't understand that the English language--any language worth it's salt for that matter--is supposed to be fun.

It's supposed to help us understand and communicate. So all the tools that humans have at our disposal (humans, not algorithms) have evolved over the last 4.5 million years since our erection, to make us funny, and memorable and different. 

Everything, for instance, Jack Gilford in the clip above can do with his face, we are allowed to do with words. We must do with words: with their manglement, with their juxtaposition, with their sound, their sibilance, their Slip Mahoney-isms, their music, their dissonance.  

This isn't about, of course, just making words up willy-nilly. It's about finding ways to express ourselves and our thoughts that breakthrough, become memorable, and are even talked about and shared.

This is about a line like "nothing is impossible" sucking and "impossible is nothing" being brilliant. It's about upside-downing a world that forever thrusts its tightened sphincter in your face.

Or, if Zero Mostel can turn into a rhinoceros, we are allowed to be preposterous.

Or, if Annie Ross, the most verbal singer since Maria Callas, can steal the scene by ooooping, why can't we?

One more. Two words: Babs Gonzales.

Or one more one more. If a hundred-year-old movie can teach us to "free the camera" why do we abjure anything but the "latest"?

OK. I lied. One more one more one more. This one from god herself. A Yonkers gal.

This entire exegesis on language was spurred by one word from the Tweet above from that stuffiest of newspapers, the cheery, neo-fascist Wall Street Journal.

When was the last time you were as playful verbally as the word "Upsetologist."

99.79-percent of all writers, human or artificial, would have blathered on slinging jargon like corned-beef-hash at a lumberjacks' breakfast. They'd write something like: "we utilize people-centric, data-driven predictive analytics to calculate the asymptote likelihood of defeat and/or non-defeat, to wit, victory in the funnel."

Fuk-a-duk, as my first art-director, Angus McClennan used to bourbon. Fuk-a-duk, indeed.

We don't like people without imagination, humor and nuttiness. Why do we do ads without them?

Scat, cat.

A Poem and More.

I got my first freelance assignment when I was just 22. This is back, if you can believe it, in the 1970s. I think Jimmy Carter was president. 

The assignment was from a guy who sold space in FSIs. Free Standing Inserts. Those sections of the Sunday paper that were an insert of about sixteen four-color pages full of coupons. Believe it or not, people looked forward to them.

The guy who I worked for had a deal with Colgate toothpaste or something, if I remember right. If you bought a tube of Colgate, you'd get to bowl a game at a local bowling alley for free. 

That was the general tenor of these things. They were about as high-class as mike pence's morality and/or foreskin.

I remember I wrote a line. Something like "Get bowled over with whiteness." Hardly Shakespearean but when I presented it, the guy who hired me was very pleased. 

It's been 45 years now and I'm still waiting for my check.

Since then, I've freelanced for a hundred agencies and a couple hundred pieces of business. Now that I run GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, the lessons I learned freelancing remain relevant and they are almost always the same. In fact, you can sum them all up in essentially one-sentence: "Easy money isn't."

No matter how much money you're slated to make, or how clear the assignment, or genial the client, it's always a slog. It makes Bataan look like a walk to the grocery story. It's always tough sledding.. I know of no prospector who struck gold with her first swing of the pickaxe. It might be like that in the movies, but real-life ain't tinsel town. 

Somehow, this scene from "The Sweet Smell of Success" comes to what's left of my mind.

As Bert Bacharach and Hal David wrote and Dionne Warwick sang (to perfection)

L.A. is a great big freeway
Put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they'll make you a star
Weeks turn into years. How quick they pass
And all the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas

And that's who we are, today. As job security, and even jobs, are no more, and every week, it appears twenty-percent of the industry (new portmanteau: Undo-stry) is let-go, and even the best-regarded agencies and the biggest-global CPA-led holding companies no-longer have agency-of-record relationships, we're all free-agents now. We all make Sisyphus look like the very modern model of job satisfaction. (You should see his 360-review!)

With all that being said, with all that as an overture to the opera that's coming, where the great consolidation of spending and pricing power falls to a few malevolent and autocratic hands leaving the last of us fighting for scraps: vicious, hungry, desperate, I've written a short numerical poem that captures the "story arc." 

Business as she is broke.

1. Wow, this is a lot of money.
2. This is easy.
3. Shit, this more work than I anticipated.
4. This really was a bait-and-switch.
5. These people are assholes.
6. What if they don't like it?
7. They love it.
8. Damn, I worked hard for that money.
9. I'm not sure I asked for enough.
10. 90 days to be paid?
11. Next time I'm asking for more and getting half upfront.
12. Sure, I'll cut my rate.
13. That was great!
14. Let's do it again soon.

This is the pattern.
Advertising has always been about differentiation.
Are you different?

Why from a Death Notice.

I saw an Economist podcast the week before last. It featured a woman called Ann Wroe who writes the magazine's obituaries.

The Economist's obituaries are notably famous. They're literary, off beat and thousands of people, like me, look forward to them. Not to someone dying, but to learning about the life they led.

The podcast 48 minutes long and it details Wroe's process and commitment to the task of:

a) being interesting and

b) meeting a stern deadline.

I said to myself, this is what we do in advertising. This is "blog material."

Then I had an idea.

When people call me looking for work, or help getting their career started, I'll send them this link. That will weed out people who won't invest 48 minutes and who can't think.

Here are my notes from watching the video. (They're my notes, so they might make no sense to you. I take notes to spur my prodigious memory, not to copy things down.) The numbers in the notes are approximate time codes. In case I need to go back and see a clip again.

When they're done watching, the people looking for jobs have to call me and explain to me why they think I wanted them to view this. Because asking a 24-year-old kid from an inner city to watch a 90-year-old, aristocratic obituary writer from England ain't a typical ask.

A young man called me the other day. He's the first one I gave the assignment to. Just about four hours ago he called me back. Though he's a designer by training, he wrote a good headline:

We also had a good, strong, intelligent 45-minutes discussion about Wroe's work and style and what it means to us in our business.

I'm one of those weirdos who believes that pretty much everyone these days has a decent portfolio. You can kind of posit that. Just like most baseball pitchers can hit the mid-90s with their fastball.

The hallmarks of someone special though are harder to pin-point. Whether you're looking for a life-partner or an art-partner, there's no portfolio or resume or Linked In profile that will do the trick.

And maybe my obituary idea won't.

But you try it. See what you think. If you need the log in, let me know. 

I'm not a natural optimist but I'm feeling good about this.

--

Here's an obituary from Wroe from about a month ago of 

Robert Badinter. The man who persuaded France to abolish the guillotine.

Read the first two sentences at least. Are they better writ than any ad you've seen in the last quarter-century.

Obituary | His old enemy

Robert Badinter persuaded France to abolish the guillotine

The man who fought to abolish the death penalty in France died on February 9th, aged 95

image: getty images

Feb 29th 2024

What clothes do you wear to be killed in? What clothes do you wear to witness someone die? This was what was worrying Robert Badinter as he dressed on that cold, dank November morning in 1972. It was 3am and he was going to La Santé prison to witness his client, Roger Bontems, be guillotined. Ridiculous, really, to worry about clothes. They cut the collar off the condemned man’s shirt anyway: it helped the blade to fall better. And yet he hoped Bontems would get his own shirt back. To die in that hideous prison suit seemed somehow terrible. Badinter chose his own clothes with care, too: a dark suit. A pale shirt. A plain tie. For a lawyer to witness his client be guillotined, a little politesse was surely necessary.

Though by the end of that terrible morning he was, he felt, no longer his client’s “lawyer”. You cannot advocate for a corpse. Once your client has been sliced in two, you cease to be their lawyer and become instead “a man who remembers, that’s all”.

Badinter was being modest. That was not all. From that day on, and for the rest of his life—first as a lawyer, then as justice minister, then finally as France’s moral conscience—he campaigned against the death penalty. And in France, successfully so: on October 9th 1981, France abolished it. Badinter had defeated the guillotine—“my old enemy”. He could not defeat the memories of that morning. For the rest of his life he would remember the sound of the blade as it had fallen: not with a hiss, or a swish, but a single, sharp, crack.

He had never expected to hear it, when he took on the case. He had been certain that his client Bontems—a prisoner who was complicit in the murder of a warder and a nurse but who had himself killed no one—would be acquitted. Badinter had been brought up by his Jewish father to love France, and its justice system. His father had fled to France from revolutionary Russia, arriving in 1919 with little more than his book-learned French, a fondness for “La Marseillaise”, and a conviction that France was the finest country in the world. And for a time, for him, it was. Soon, he had a young bride and enough money to buy his young family a fancy new apartment in a fancy arrondissement: his son Robert could see the Eiffel Tower from his bedroom. The whole family loved this land of “prosperity, freedom and peace”.

His father had adored France with an intensity that no Frenchman could match, giving his sons French names and making them read 19th-century novelists like Victor Hugo. His love didn’t even waver when some Frenchmen started making terrible, antisemitic speeches; nor when his sons found graffiti—“Death to Jews”—scrawled on the walls. He had reassured them. This, he said, was just a false note; France was a wonderful country. When his father had applied for a form of naturalisation, the official had asked him why he wanted it. He had said: “Because of my feelings towards France.” They would arrest his father in February 1943. He died in the Sobibor extermination camp.

Hatred was never so frightening as when it wore the mask of justice. Badinter had seen enough of hatred to know that; all men of his generation had. And he always mistrusted the mob. As a teenager, he had watched two armed men drag a shorn, half-naked girl through the streets because she was a “fille à Boches”—“a girl of the Germans”. The men were despicable—but so too were the crowd. The mob played a part in his case, too. France wanted Bontems dead: a poll showed that most French supported the death penalty. But Badinter was not worried. The French mob might be angry but, like his father, he had faith in French justice: you could not kill a man who had not killed. He said so to Bontems: You have nothing to fear, he said. You’ll be pardoned, that’s for sure.

But clemency never came. And so, on that cold Tuesday morning Badinter had set out to go to the prison in his well-chosen suit. The suit was ridiculous. But then his client had worried about his appearance, too. A few weeks before, Badinter had gone to visit him in prison and had been struck by how well his client had looked. “Oh, I do gymnastics, sir,” Bontems had replied. “I keep myself in shape.” That remark had struck Badinter as terrible. The death penalty made everything ridiculous. On the morning of the execution, before Bontems was led away, he had asked for a moment to do “a little grooming”. Then, ready for his beheading, he had carefully combed his hair.

La Guillotine herself had been not absurd but grotesque. Badinter had seen the scaffold as soon as he had walked into the prison courtyard on that dark morning. The sight had shocked him: he had expected his old enemy would be hidden away, in some secluded courtyard. But there she was, in the open. He was not wholly surprised by his reaction: like his father, he adored Victor Hugo, the great abolitionist author. Hugo had famously written that the guillotine was so sinister it felt almost animate. That no one could look at the guillotine and remain neutral.

He certainly had not. After the execution, and his client was cut in two, he had left La Santé swearing that he would fight the death penalty for the rest of his life. His first chance to attack it came soon enough. In 1977 he took on a case in which a man had killed a young boy. Ostensibly, it was the man who was on trial; but Badinter turned it into a trial of the death penalty itself. Justice—and the jury—were in the dock. The jury could sentence his client to death, he told them. But if they did then they should know that his death was on their hands. “You are alone, and there will not be any presidential pardon.” They would all be guilty, each and every one of them: “You, and you, and you.”

He had won that vote. And then, a few years later, in 1981, he had won another when the French parliament had voted overwhelmingly to abolish the death penalty. La Guillotine, his old enemy, was finally defeated. She would now be relegated to the museum. When that vote was over, he had walked over to Victor Hugo’s seat in the Senate. He placed his hand on the commemorative plaque and he thought: “It is done.” And then he had walked out, into another Parisian morning. This time, it was a beautiful day. ■