Briefing.

Most of my clients do not give me a brief.

If they give me anything typewritten at all, it's a manuscript of fear, things they have to do, and panic brought to a simmer over the low heat of time-pressure and garnished with mandatories that are often contradictory and draconian.

I read brief but all but ignore it. Not in a mean or haughty way. But I listen to clients when we speak about what they need when they call me. I find that more helpful. 

And I ask them a lot of questions. 

Often they're so consumed with fear that what I get as a briefing is a swirl not an approach.

I guess that's why they pay me.

Years ago when I was working for Steve Simpson at Ogilvy, I wrote a short story for a pitch. It was, if you can believe it, a children's book on a technology called Robotic Process Automation.

This was heavy stuff.

I turned it human and funny. And I did it quickly.

Steve has a very intense, tiny hand-writing. He marked up my manuscript like a prisoner sneaking messages to the outside world. He made every scrap of paper count and he wrote his comments in about four-point type.

I knew what I wrote was relatively unassailable. Not only was the idea fairly good, I wrote it very well. I went through all of Steve's comments and "yepped" them. 

Yep, that makes sense. Yep, that makes sense.

But I got to one and I was floored. He made the thing immediately better and funnier. 

I ran down to his office.

"How did you do that," I threatened. "You make it so much better in one sentence?"

"That's what editors do," he answered, hardly meeting my blues with his.

"You did all the work, I just had the perspective."

Of course. 

That's what we do in advertising that clients can't do.

It's what AI will never do. Can never do. Can't.

It's judgment.

One of the issues with AI and the data on which it's based, like the data upon which CRM is based or the surveys companies are constantly besieging us with, is that we think they allow us to paint an accurate portrait of a person because we have so much data. That's about the wrongest thing in all of marketing and has been since marketing began.

No matter how much data you have predictability is unpredictable. Predictability is unpredictable.

This isn't going to be exactly accurate, but you'll get my drift. Think of how different a human is from a pig. Yet from what I've heard, we share about 98.1-percent of our DNA with pigs. If merely 1.9-percent of DNA is what makes us so different from a wallowing pig, think of all the data we represent. We are made of complexity that is unfathomable. 

I've read that the human brain has about six-trillion connections and synapses. That's far more firings than we can ever codify.

We also have memories that have such a layered complexity that they defy machine or even quantum replication. You can be walking down the street, for instance, and smell tar being poured by a road-crew. It's a common enough smell, especially during an election year when politicians pave roads to win votes.

That smell for me brings me back to a hot summer day when I was four in the Bronx sitting on a green vinyl seat in a school bus on the way to the zoo, in traffic, as burly men fix a broken road. I have a brown paper bag in my lap and a jelly sandwich on Arnold white bread from my mother. It's been in the summer heat and wrapped in cellophane and the jelly has soaked into the bread. Accompanied by a six-ounce glass bottle of warm Welch's grape juice, it is the most delicious thing I will ever eat.

At the zoo, I'm given a nickel for a machine that dispenses pellets of brown deer feed. A deer eats it out of my hand, his whiskers like an old man's.

On the way home the bus driver has the radio on. The announcer says it's "83 double you a b c degrees" and then I hear a commercial for Hoffmann's soda and think of my Welch's grape juice. I still hear the song. "The prettiest girl/I ever saw/ Was drinking Hoffmann's/ Through a straw./ The prettiest girl/I ever saw/ Was drinking Hoffmann's/ Through a straw."

That's our job, in a way. 

To take all those nutty inchoate words and turn them into something that appeals, persuades, impacts.

Machines can cut grass.

Humans can be Breughel.

Elder or Younger, it doesn't matter.

Though Elder is more likely to get fired.

He's cranky.