Lying in Bed.

There's a company that advertises ceaselessly on LinkedIn. They bang on and on about the incredible freedom and power and even joy employees will get from their services. I'm not sure what their services actually are because the ad is so bad and smiley. But I think it involves doing your own payroll.

A friend of mine freelances at one of the big holding companies--the single one that seems to be growing (even though they keep firing people.) If he started working there on, say, June 1st, he spent the entire first week subject to training so he could understand how to record and enter the time he spent on this project or that. 

I know there are countless software companies that make doing your own expenses, booking your own rental car or vacation, or filing something or other, allegedly as easy as destroying a democracy.

I got news for you, giant corporations. I don't want to do my own payroll. I work hard. I want you to pay me without me having to do more work. When you're a freelancer, even if you work for a friend, it often takes 90 days and three or four prodding emails to get paid. Then you get an automated email, telling you you can get your money today for a mere one-percent or the total. 

In other words, if I have a $9,000 month retainer from a company I do work for, I can pay $90 for the privilege of getting paid in 89 days rather than 90. If Frank Nitti did behaved like that on the old Untouchables TV show, Robert Stack would make mincemeat out of him.

With the Enlightenment finally over once and for all (the new US administration will kill it with more ardor and efficiency--at MBA speed--more thoroughly than Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or Nixon--I'm thinking once again about dichotomies. I'm thinking in a Manichean manner: light versus darkness, good versus evil. Or more starkly, loving fellow humans versus exploiting them.

That's where we get down to advertising.

Do brands exist to pick our pockets, maximize our profits and enrich our shareholders, or do brands exist to serve people, and thereby make us rich? In other words, do brands work via doing something good or by being ruthless.

The other way of looking at this that helps me weigh what's happening in amerika is economic. Is the pie growing or is the pie shrinking? 

During my final years at ogilvy, I realized the stark difference between the place in 2020 and the place in 2000. In 2000 there was optimism and growth--there were dozens of great and important clients and jobs to be done. In 2020, the agency had turned into a zero-sum game. There were about three awards-potential assignment a year. And if I got one, you didn't. Knives were out. Clients no longer mattered. That awards-potential assignment did. 

With apologies to Darwinists, the agency business has become "survival of the trophy-ist."

About ten years ago, I stumbled until two acronyms that capture the dichotomy between today's competing agency, brand and world view. Everything falls, starkly, into one of these two groupings and there is no venning or meeting in the middle.

What we have is a battle of YOYO versus WITT, with most enterprises, brands, agencies, social organizations, government systems most firmly in the YOYO camp.

YOYO stands for YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN. You'll get nothing from us other than a monthly automatic charge on your credit card. Most often you don't know what you're getting for that charge. You don't remember that you signed up for it. You don't use it and you don't know how to cancel it.

Further, if you need or want an explanation, if you have a problem, if you need help to make something work, YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN. 

I suppose, with a tip of the Mitre to the Catholic church, they call it self-service because self-abuse was already taken. 

This is the world without healthcare. The world without please and thank you. The world without help or answers. The world of hold times, bots and bullshit. 

The alternative, for brands, agencies, government, spouses, friends and more is WITT. WE'RE IN THIS TOGETHER. In other words, let us help you find the jello in the supermarket, explain a cable bill, show up on-time not at minute 239 in a 240-minute window. 

WITT is the vanishing world. Because in the short-run it costs a bit more.

One of the great charades that was perpetrated by all of the holding companies and all of the agencies in all of the world over the last twenty years was "the open plan work-space." All the evidence pointed to the dumbness and unproductiveness of open plan--plus people hated it--but it saved money, so it became de rigueur. As for a quiet place to think: YOYO.

Of course this post isn't about open plan, or phone trees, or anything else save do we decide as a society, an agency, an industry that we treat others as we wish to be treated or do we just MBA-the world to death and maximize the fuck out of people in pursuit of profit that goes almost entirely to people who would throw water on a drowning man.

We've made our beds.

We're laying in them and lying in them.