Promises. Promises.

It's Friday and I've been away all week. 

I've been away all week, on a long-overdue vacation, and I really didn't want to post.

But I did.

Some of that's my own neuroses. I worry that once I give people a chance, they'll flee from this space at the first opportunity. But more of my assiduousness is due to something else. Something elemental that, I'm fearful, most brands have forgotten.

This is as basic as it gets.

But still, most brands have forgotten it.

A brand is a promise.

A promise that whatever it is your brand does it does in a way that lives up to the standards of your brand. If you're a fast-food brand, or a grocery store, or an airline, you usually run ads that show your people smiling and helping customers. Your stores, or planes, are unimpeachably clean (in TV land) and your product is always in apple-pie order.

It's a brand's job not just to make promises to people but to keep them.

That includes ad agencies.

Which, my guess, probably have attrition rates that run around 40-percent. Which means their entire staff turns over every 2.5 years. 

Ad Aged is a blog. 

It's free.

I make no money on it.

But I have a good amount of readers and an even better measure of influence in the ad industry. My brand promise is simple. I write every day. Not because I want to. But because my readers expect that from me. After all, I promised. 

To a good brand, their word is their bond.

Yes, that's horribly naìve and kind of Andy of Mayberry or George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life." And no, it would cost me nothing to not be so hard on myself--so demanding, so exacting in my standards.

But what you do is, to a brand, or a blog, or even a human being, what you do is who you are. And I'd rather be George Bailey than Donald Trump. (Trump has more money. But George was the richest man in town.)

Somehow, and here's the nub, we replaced brand behaviors with brand guidelines. Using your brand's logo incorrectly is a sin. Not training people, not paying people, and thereby accepting slovenly behavior from representatives of the brand is rife.

The ad industry no longer guides brand behaviors. When we did, we were located on Madison and Park Avenues. We were the first call made by corporate CEOs when there was a problem. We forgot that was important. So we talk about guidelines and voices and coloring within the brand-lines. 

We used to have nice offices and get paid well. Now we have hot-desks and are vendors subject to the sharp-pencils of procurement fava-counters.

We never ask the simplest of all questions.

The one I asked myself when I decided to write this week.

Is that brand keeping its promises?