What Color is Your Mongongo Nut?

I think a lot about work. Not just what we're working on. But how we actually work when we're working.

Some years ago, I pie-charted how I spent my days when I was within a giant ad agency. Sure, you can say I'm bitter and angry and have an axe to grind.

That doesn't mean I'm not right. 

It seems to me--and this is based on a lifetime of seeing and living--we spend more time perseverating about work than actually working, actually getting things done. Fear eats our souls and sucks our creativity and saps our daring. 

That's on a good day.

Now and then, I'll read something by real anthropologists about how they might measure the affluence of a society. Often they don't calculate how many Mercedes-Benzs they have in how many driveways. They measure affluence by calculating how many hours a day it takes to gather the sustenance the people need to live.

By that measure, seemingly with more and more people working more and more hours for a more and more shaky livelihood, something is rotten in the state of the State. Last week alone there were a couple dozen articles about declining birth-rates, the pressures on parents and the rise in numbers of people living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Then there are the !Kung-San. 

They for live in what we would regard as an extremely adverse environment--on the western edge of the Kalahari desert. Yet they spend only a few hours a day gathering food. Mostly they sleep, chat with each other, gamble, tell stories and visit friends and relatives and carry out trance rituals.

The !Kung-San have such luxury, because they are blessed with something called the mongongo nut (Ricinodendron rautanenii schinz). An average daily intake of just 300 nuts provides 1,260 calories and 56 g (2 oz) of protein per person, five times the calories and ten times the proteins per cooked weight of cereal crops. They don't have to eat a lot or gather a lot to nourish themselves.

Lately, I've been working on a new client and I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how people work. Or, more specifically, how people spend their time at work. 

There's so much talk about innovation and productivity, but very little measurement of how much time we spend on either.

Microsoft tries to give you a calculus of how much time you spend writing whatever it is you're writing, but they're almost invariably off--usually by a factor of ten. I've never written anything this fast in my entire career:

These days, it's my belief, that the innovations in our world and in our business, don't come from the giant companies we grew up with. They come from the thousands of start-ups that are starting every year who are trying to breakthrough by breaking the hold of the status-quo.

Most everyone else spends their days not thinking or creating or gathering mongongo nuts, they spend their time fretting, worrying about when the footsteps down the hallway are coming for them, when the potentates who make an average of 300 times their median salary decide to toll the last ding-dong of doom and they're out on their adipose with no social safety net to break their fall.

There are those finding different courses. They're starting their own thing, or joining a start-up. There's a burgeoning of such companies, journals like the Economist report.

Many of these start-ups--not thousands, but dozens--call GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. Maybe because I seem to be working a little harder, a little faster, and a little more incisively than so many other agencies. 

Maybe I've found, somehow, somewhere, my own advertising mongongo nut. That's not to say I work only a few hours a day like the !Kung-San. But somehow, I have mongongo'd my working style.

I don't spend hours at a stretch worrying about the seventeen rounds of reviews I have to endure. Not to make work better, just to have the work under the control of a higher-up who's threatened. I don't spend hours on energy-sapping tasks that add nothing but an impecunious parsimony to the world. I don't spend days on end making fake work to win-over a fake jury in a fake award show and then spend more days on end making videos to promote the concocted videos that started the whole charade.

Further, somehow with the absence of fear, constipation--the bane of so many creatives--has disappeared. If earlier in my career I was tapped out after three ads or five, today I can sit down and write 50 or 100. I can keep trying something new, something upside-down, something different without the fear of being larfed at.

Somehow, lack of fear turns into a mongongo nut.

It's highly nutritious. It's tasty. It's satisfying. It's energizing.  

Those psychic mongongo nuts have sprouted since I started  working for myself. And they've allowed me to gain the ears of CEOs and CMOs and focus my energies and help dozens of companies figure out what makes them different, what makes them interesting, what makes them kick-ass. 

Maybe at the ripe old age of 66--almost five years after I was fired for making Ogilvy too much money--I've discovered not the Fountain of Youth, like the one de Soto searched for, but instead, the tree of mongongo of the !Kung-San.

I'm sticking with that for now.

Just call me !GeorgeCo.

The Fault Lies Not in the Goldfish, but in Ourselves.

As a creative person and a copywriter, I have a terrible belief. 

Unlike so many clients and so many of my colleagues, I don't blame people for their short attention spans. I don't blame people for not reading. I don't blame people for not caring. 

I blame us.

Not to terribly long ago I read this book: "The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction." 

The book covers a period known to people even more esoteric than I, called Late Antiquity, roughly between 300AD and 900AD. That's so long ago, they didn't even have bagel Wednesdays or casual Fridays. 

Back in those days a lot of people were seeking connection with their god through contemplation. Interruption was dangerous; it kept them from the divine. It didn't merely keep them from buying your client's brand of mayonnaise, it kept them from salvation and potentially dropped them instead in a burning lake or perdition.

Your timesheets are late

.

Monks worked hard at learning to concentrate, to banish thoughts of all things unholy, even food and cleanliness, from their daily lives.

Concentration = salvation.

In other words, attention spans were not just a matter for powerpoint proclamations and ad agencies. Attention spans were a matter of (eternal) life and death.

The elite (in the Late Antiquity, holy people) have always decried humanity's susceptibility to distraction. In monkish parlance, "Habent operam spatium hippurus." People have the attention span of a goldfish.

Today, it seems that every commercial I see, no matter where I see it, seeks to overcome mankind's purportedly recently-arrived attention deficit disorder by having the VO shout at people, by employing asinine stuntification, or via a too-hot mix and a music track that tries to ear-inveigle its way into your frontal lobes.

WE HAVE TO SHOUT AND PANDER TO THE LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR BECAUSE OF THE FAULT TO OUR AUDIENCE WHO HAVE NO ATTENTION SPANS!!!!!

No one says,

IT'S OUR JOB TO DO SOMETHING INTERESTING AND IMPORTANT ENOUGH SO THAT PEOPLE WANT TO PAY ATTENTION.

So no one is kind to the viewer anymore. No one gives them something interesting to look at, savor, enjoy, learn from.

Our job can be simply described.

It's to create lust for things people very often don't think about. They don't have time to think about. Or they don't know why they should think about.

Our job is to find things that make things--even seemingly unimportant things--interesting. It's the same job a movie director has. Or a painter. Or a war correspondent. 

It's not the thing. It's how you tell the thing.

Robert Capa, maybe the most-noted war correspondent ever once said, "if you're pictures aren't good enough, get closer."

He never said, "Jeez. This is such a boring war."

He got closer.

Consider that creative direction.

What follows are not too long to read:

Everyone's heard the story before. 

How do you find a different way to tell it?

When John Kennedy was assassinated, there was, as you might expect, a lot of coverage. Every creditable newspaper covered it. Every news magazine. Every television network. 

Here's a brief synopsis of what New York Herald Tribune writer, Jimmy Breslin did to get people to read him, not anyone else. Update Breslin by 60 years, this is what he did to get clicks. Or eyeballs. Or to combat "goldfish attention-spans."

It's not the thing. It's how you tell the thing.

He thinked.

He angled.

He was interesting.

My Morning [_______________.}

The increasing usage of the phrase "Artificial Intelligence."

Even in what used to be called the advertising industry, which is not supposed to be about intelligence, or data, or science, or technology, we all spend too much time talking about talking about those things. 

We'll do everything we can to try to reach people more effectively, except focus on what reaches people, which is things that are interesting, funny, beautiful or, simply, different. The same things that have always reached people. A bonafide interesting story, well told.

It seems that WPP is buying seven new agencies a week and hiring a CEO for every day of the year so they can pretend they still have a viable business. Let me clarify, so they can pretend they still have a viable business after firing all the creative people who at one time made their business viable.

They invest more in data than they do in art. The entire industry does. And then they say, "there's a flaw in the algorithm. That's why people are blocking our ads." Or they say, "Generation G abjures advertising." They never say, "our ads suck, that's why no one pays attention." Or "our ads are as flat as a plate of piss."

More creative people, more agencies, more clients, more brands are talking about artificial intelligence than about laughter or a good joke they heard or even a rainbow they saw one afternoon. 

I don't understand why we're not talking about the amazing, stirring, 'holy-shit-did-you-see-that' things that are all around us.

As Joyce Kilmer never wrote:

"I think that I shall never see,

An ad made interesting algorithmically.
Unless, in fact, we use our head,
The industry is wholly dead. "

On Monday, September 9th, I read about this book below, "1001 Movie Posters." On Monday, September 9th, I ordered this book below, "1001 Movie Posters." On Friday, September 13th, I received this book below, "1001 Movie Posters."

I suppose for some it might be considered prohibitively expensive. It cost me about $70. Roughly, in my estimate, what the average hipster pays per week for chain-store coffee. Or what they pay for two drinks at an expense-account private-banker bar in New York.

I throw nickels around like manhole covers but I couldn't see any good reason for not buying "1001 Movie Posters." If it extends my useful career for ten minutes, it's paid for itself.

Three points here today.

One. Human intelligence trumps the artificial sort. Laughter trumps almost everything. 

Two. Books, which organize and make tactile information, trump digital renditions. You can hold beauty in your hands, not see it through a veil of pixels. And

Three. From a communications point of view, 99-percent of advertising and marketing practitioners have forgotten what is evident in the 1001 posters, some of which I've pasted below. Effective communications generally are made with:

a) Stunning design--you haven't seen before.
b) Memorable type/copy.
c) Design hierarchy.

About 99-percent of the websites and ads I see online have none of the a,b,c I've written above. They're just a hodgepodge of A.I. spin-art that made a committee of degree-holders happy. They're a tale told by a committee-iot, full of compromise and bad taste, signifying an abuse of  the viewer.

Why is every online ad--and every TV commercial--so devoid of the a,b,c above. Oh. It's gone through seventeen rounds of approval and it's enhanced by research, data, best practices and AI. Even ads by ad agencies advertising for creative people look like they were designed by a short-bus bot. See above.

If you want to do good work look at good work. Not just what won purported awards from a purported award show. Work that lit fires and stirred souls.

Usually if I have a call early in the morning, someone on the call says, "I haven't had my caffeine yet." 

I wish I heard people say, "I haven't heard any Brückner, yet."

Or "I haven't looked at a Klimt, yet." Or "I haven't read any John O'Hara, yet."

Those things can wake you up, too.

And should.