Let Freedom Wring.

For my readers outside of the United States, Ad Aged will be taking July 4th and July 5th off. These are the days in amerika where we proclaim our belief in mattress sales, traffic jams, carcinogenic grilling, and nominally, freedom.

Of course, as Bobby McGee once said, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." And, by the way, we've lost it.

If you're at all interested in amerika and concepts like freedom and even the more hallowed reasons for the July 4th caesura from work, there's a book you might read, "Freedom's Dominion," by Vanderbilt University professor, Jefferson Cowrie. You can order it here from one of amerika's non-tax-paying monopoly booksellers. And you can read the review from "The New York Times" here.

Right now, I am about three-quarters of the way through another book you might want to pick up and actually read. It's called "The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins" by Stefanos Geroulanos.

As the title of the review from "The Economist" indicates (you can read the review here) words like history, humanity, origins, species, freedom, independence and hundreds of other don't have exact definitions so much as they have political interpretations and prejudices.

The amerikan far right and liberal people like me both believe in freedom. But our definitions of what freedom is (you'll know it when we let it ring) are as different as chocolate is from a cinderblock.

In Cowrie's book, and as the title of the Times' review indicates (as well as the photo above of george wallace) freedom means the freedom of the dominant race (so often that means native born, christian white men) to have things their way and not to have to pay tax for that luxury. They want to be free to have their privileges, like to kill little girls while they're attending church. Then call themselves, as bannon and trump are doing, "political prisoners."

Bobby Frank Cherry fought for the freedom to kill little girls.

Many of the 80,000 or so people who read Ad Aged every week are in the communications business. We should probably spend more time thinking conceptually about language. The shades, nuances and layers of its meaning.

There's scarcely a word uttered these days, especially when it's used in political discussion, that isn't laden and loaded with bias and subterfuge. It seems to me a lot of people use the words independence and freedom think they mean, "I should be allowed to do and say what I want and no one can stop me. But other people, people whom I disagree with, don't have those same rights. If they have the right to express themselves it takes away from my right to have things my way."

Essentially, that's the thinking behind those who say government can't take our guns but can take our ovaries.

OK. It's July 4th. It's Independence Day.

The day when all amerika is free to agree with everything I say.

Mainstreaming Lies.

Maybe it was always this way. Maybe I just notice it more now.

Maybe it's that there are no more watching dogs, whistle-blowers, truth-tellers.

Non-short-cut takers.

Millions are calling for a presidential candidate in cognitive decline to step away. Yet we accept a presidential candidate who's a convicted felon, a sexual abuser, and a pathological liar.

We live in a country where the liar is the debate winner. Ergo, the country is the loser.

The scariest part of all this is the part that's hardest to see. We're so used to the lying that we no longer notice it. Lying is like sirens in a city. They're supposed to alarm you. But they're so ubiquitous you no longer pay attention.

On Saturday, Jess Bidgood of The New York Times wrote about these lies in an article worth reading.

Maybe I'm exaggerating. Maybe I'm over-reacting. But similar truth-abnegation-through-repeated-lying-distortion-and-rewriting is happening in our industry as well.

Cannes is a perfect example of this.

Ogilvy won network of the year. They're doing it with fake ads. They fire people each month. They've reneged on their diversity pledges. They're losing (at least in their flagship office) millions of dollars per annum. And so on and so on.

I'd not be surprised if half of the big holding company agencies won some slim prismatic slice of an agency of the year award. And many of them--once the biggest names on what was once Madison Avenue--are teetering on the bring of insolvency or irrelevance.

In 2023, DDB won Cannes network of the year. 

I don't know if they even have 100 employees in New York anymore. And certainly, they seem to lose C-suite people as fast as trees lose leaves in a wind storm.

But like Trump and his legion of enablers, the industry is enabling the propping up of the lies of the industry. That it's doing work of consequence. That it in and of itself is consequential. Worst of all, that the ad industry is vital to clients and a healthy career.

Ogilvy's recycle lies for Coke are a perfect example. Yet. They win praise for an ad that allegedly ran for recycling. Yet.

        

If we say it enough maybe people will believe it. At least the ignorant will.

This is how we mainstream lying. How we blur the distinction between reality and salesmanship. How we obscure everything in service of share-holder value.

It was Orwell who said, “In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." Let me add to that. “In an age of universal deceit, telling lies is a business model."

We work for, vote for, live with, act on, abide by liars. 

The biggest lie is the one we tell ourselves when we don't notice any of this.

A Simple Test.

One of thing things that shocks me about AI is the spread between how great, powerful, all-encompassing, and always improving we're told it is and how bad it is when we actually confront it in the wild.

We're told how great, seminal and life-changing it is. I can't think of one shred of evidence how it's improved anything but corporate profits.

The phonus-balonus Toys R Us commercial is one example, but certainly not the only one.

Try to fix your broken cable bill with a chat bot. It's more Kafkaesque than anything Kafka could imagine. In fact, I'd get more help talking to Kafka next time my xfinity goes out.

Worse, watch something on YouTube. Take the clip above, for example. If an 11th-grader typed the transcription, you'd send him back to 10th-grade. You'd find some way to punish him. At least, detention. 

The typos. The lack of understanding. The way AI completely missed the essential humanity of the moment. Not to mention the humor. Yet the biggest companies in the world and the biggest companies in what was the communications business are willing to put their brand-equity in the hands of inept machines that aren't getting better. What's more, and maybe what's worse, at a time of record profits, they're all too cheap to have an actual sentient human "fact-check" AI's transcription and correct its glaring errors.

It's ok that it's an assault to the senses. Look at the money we're making.

What all this proves is quite simple and is, as AI might auto-generate: "As klay as the nodes on your feces." The corporations and their agents embracing these assaults on humanity care nothing for humanity. Using AI in such as way makes it all so perfectly clear. They don't care about you, or how bad stuff like this sucks. Cheapito, ergo bonus. It's cheap, therefore it's good.

I've noticed for years now, and don't know why brands accept it, how machines interrupt the videos you watch on YouTube with commercials willy-nilly. Not at a natural break, not at the end of a sentence. No, they'll shove one of their asinine messages smack in the middle of a punch-line.

Because, they can. 
Because they don't care about the film itself, the creators' intent.
Because they don't care about art, entertainment, performance.
Because they don't care about the viewer.

Because they only care about doing it cheaply. To mammothize their mammon.

That message is more important than the message they're propagating. The semiotics of interruption and disdain speak louder than the $49.99 triple-play bundle they're lying to you about.

This isn't about preciousness and not interrupting art. It's about a having the merest modicum of courtesy for the people watching. It's deciding where a break should occur with an eye toward the viewer, not only an eye toward doing it as cheaply and machinely-possible.

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is an ad agency now. Much of what ad agencies used to do is protect their clients from bad behavior. Stop them from doing things that hurt their reputation and their standing with people.

When we gave up our role as agents (that's why we were called agencies) and embraced our role as "vendor," and a low-cost commodity vendor at that, we gave up our reason for being.

Counterpoint: A few people at the very top got very rich. And are getting richer,

Our modern AI-derived calculus means it's ok to suck. If you get rich from it.