Yikes!

Not too long ago, working alongside Steve Hayden, I got paid to write a manifesto for a venture capital company.

Almost by definition, investment companies like the one I was working for, take bets on the future. They look at the world and say, "this technology will make us money." Or, "I don't thing this technology will amount to much."

Then they invest behind their judgment.

While everybody assumes big VC firms are adroit and prescient, my guess is, like most things in life, they have a major league baseball success rate. The best baseball teams win about 60-percent of their games and lose about 40-percent. The worst do the reciprocal. I think most businesses and people--no matter what field they're in--abide by those ratios. Of course, there are always outliers, but for the most part, even when you love someone, you're only hip to their jive about three-times-in-five.

The best teams win about 60-percent of the time.

And lose about 40-percent of the time.

Though there are always out-liers. Or in politics and advertising, out-liars.

I first developed what I call my "60-40 Rule," when I read Andrew Roberts' 1152-page biography of Winston Churchill. The Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph each called it the best single-volume biography of Churchill ever written.

I've always been a Churchill fan. That whole "standing-up-to-the-Nazis-and-saving-Western-Civilization-thing." But if I were from the sub-continent or an Irish trade-unionist (he had troops fire on strikers with live ammunition) I'd likely feel differently. I'd guess 60-percent of what Churchill did was good. 40-percent was invading the Dardanelles or Narvik. Disastrous.

I think Czeslaw Miłosz had it right. And I wish more people would think about this.

Clip and Ignore!

Over the last 20 or 30 years as massive changes in technology and media have arisen, many in the advertising industry drink the kool-aid. I was at R/GA from 2009-2014. For the later half of that time, virtually every conversation inside the walls of the agency was, for some reason, about 3D printing. I could never figure out why. But as Walter Cronkite used to intone, "that's the way it was."

Just a moment ago, I read a book review in the "cheery neo-Fascist Wall Street Journal." I hate enriching the Murdoch family, but the WSJ has a book section that feeds my brain like nothing else. And I'm a sucker for the Whore of Mensa.

The Journal's pay-wall is way more effective in keeping people out than any wall human-kind has ever created for the same task. Even the Theodosian Walls around Constantinople (Istanbul) built in the 5th Century were eventually breached. Though it took invaders a good thousand years to do the job.

In any event, just now I read a review of The Long History of the Future: Why tomorrow's technology still isn't here. It wouldn't entirely shock me if in the entire ad industry, I was the only one who read it. Again, besides the point.

But here's the part I really dug. I'll underline what I think is the best bit.

"Ms. Kobie’s central argument is that many moonshot technologies haven’t yet arrived because they are hard, if not impossible, to build—and that our failure to build them should not be cause for despair. The first driverless car was tested in Nebraska in 1957, for example, but the technology involved embedding circuits under the road, which rendered scaling infeasible. And as Ms. Kobie recounts, a later, more advanced system developed in Germany—a closer ancestor of today’s semi-automated cars—successfully ferried notable guests from Charles de Gaulle Airport but struggled with everything from potholes to computing power. 'We had 95 per cent—that’s nothing,' one of the German researchers tells Ms. Kobie. 'You need 99.999 percent—every decimal takes another five to ten years.'” 

People in advertising don't really understand the nature of change. I'm often asked about the ads I run for my agency, or even the efficacy of this blog.

I answer simply.

They're how I get my business.

But there's no, "run something on Tuesday, get a call on Wednesday causality." The world doesn't work like that, and I don't think it ever will. Even the Chicxulub asteroid impact which happened 66-million years ago last Tuesday, I'd bet it took more than a day or two to wipe out the dinosaurs.

People in advertising--clients and agency side--are looking for magic and they're engaged, most often, in magical thinking. The complexity of decision-making and communication goes way beyond any bs McKinsey or some marketing strategist can concoct. In marketing we often segment consumers in six "buckets" or ten or twelve, when the likelihood that there are six or twelve million.

You can predict, perseverate, prognosticate and analyze the pants off complex data-matrices. Still when push comes to shove, no one knows anything.

And the more you say you do the less you do.

I remember reading something many decades ago by the great historian Barbara Tuchman. She said, "The persistence of the normal is strong."

That's why putting you money on Bernbach's simple, timeless human truths makes sense and trying to anticipate behaviors never will. To sum it up in just two words: Shit happens. To add a couple words to that profundity, Shit happens and always will.

I know this is a lot for a blog on advertising.

I've traveled through advertising history, back to the time of the dinosaurs, through to the Crusades, Churchill and the history of science.

I know that's a long way to go.

And I thank you for your time.

I've been writing in this space for 17 years. 

It's what I do. It helps me breathe and think.

Which proves the persistence of abnormal is also strong.