Everyone Gets a Trophic.

I realize that though Ad Aged is ostensibly a blog on the ad industry, I very often deviate and start writing about topics somewhat meatier and more important.

A lot of my "depth" comes from a simple practice of mine. I don't read books on business to learn about business. I read books on life--a much deeper topic--and apply what I've read to advertising.

My Account Director, H (whom I call the smartest person in advertising) about a month ago recommended this book to me. It seemed very much up my alley. I only started it last week and I'm just about 160-pages in, but I've already used it to win a piece of new business. That's not a bad ROI from a $19.99 Amazon Kindle purchase.

I'll start here, with a quotation from the great Dutch naturalist and geologist Geerat J. Vermeij. He said, "'the ability to create a future has been intrinsic to living things for billions of years.' Humans, however, were more adept at creating futures than any other species." 

Hmmmm, I underlined, "create a future," that's what good advertising people do for brands. They don't just create a sale, they create a future--a long-term viability.

(That the holding companies have abandoned that is evinced by the way over the last ten years or so they've shed on the order of forty percent of their employees.) They're not trying to create a future, rather a quarterly vig so they can gin up their bonuses.

Author David Miles says, "It is worth emphasizing that hunter-gatherer populations are generally small – the ecologist Paul A. Colinvaux made this clear with the book title: 'Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare.'  Big-game hunters like Neanderthals and modern humans living on the mammoth steppe had small populations for the same reason as polar bears, tigers and great white sharks...."

"To put it simply, plants form the broad base of the pyramid at trophic level 1, with herbivores at level 2, predators at level 3 and carnivores or apex predators forming the peak. 

"...the basic rule is that the consumers at one trophic level convert only about 10% of the energy of the level below into their own organic tissue, so apex predators are relatively inefficient consumers and must be rarer than the species below them. This is inevitable for tigers and great white sharks..."

When you're big, you don't have a lot to feed on. Or eventually your food supply disappears. Then you perish.

When I started GeorgeCo., off the bat I started making more money than I ever dreamed of. My wife and I decided to buy a small cottage along the sea on the Gingham Coast about two-hours northeast of the teeming fleshpots of Madison Avenue. Interest rates were low at the time and we went the local bank to get a mortgage. Naturally the bankers asked for my employment history and saw that I didn't have a steady paycheck from one gigantic source. That's usually grounds for denying your mortgage application.

I said to the banker, "I used to have one source of income. Now I have six. It's much better to have multiple streams rather than just one." Apparently that worked and we got the loan we needed. 

Essentially, I explained that I can feed, as above, at many trophic levels. I can earn my financial calories, so to speak, from meat, fish, plants, birds, beans, legumes, leaves, algae and more.

I used this etiology in pitching a client this morning. I said to them, "you don't have one off-the-shelf-solution. You make things that work for your customers. An apex predator, only has one way to amass calories. It had to go for a mammoth. You can get sustenance from a dozen sources. That's the way I work, too.

"It's exactly why humankind transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming. When we became farmers we found many different sources of sustenance. Grains. Beans. Fruits. Not to mention the animals they could hunt, fish they could catch, birds they could kill. That's the methodology that successful businesses build to succeed."

You take nourishment from many sources. It's the opposite of "if all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail." If you have a brain and you have elbow grease and you give a shit, you'll find a way. It's TWTW. The will to win, too.

I'm not sure they understood much after I said trophic.

I'm not sure I understand much either.

But I got the business.

Survival.