Wednesday, December 25, 2024
Tuesday, December 24, 2024
Leave Me Alone.
I'm almost embarrassed to say how important LinkedIn is to my business. My network is large though not vaynerchukian. It's taken a good amount of work, but it seems worth it. It often seems to me that much of the industry knows who I am and doesn't despise me.
Further, about twice a month I get a message from a CMO-like object asking for a phone call. About half of those calls turn into revenue.
But there's a pernicious side to LinkedIn. And not just LinkedIn, but amerika. Lately, I've noticed a trend and become annoyed by it.
I get a shitload of intrusions like these.
When I respond by trying to get rid of them, I get messages like these:
By what algorithmic alchemical bullshit are you feeding me this shit? If you, LinkedIn, are randomly suggesting that I pay attention to people I'm sure to find idiotic, how does that help you, LinkedIn, or me, a LinkedIn customer.
How could you possibly think I'd give a shit about this? You're force-feeding me garbage. Regardless of any binary so-called understanding of my taste and reading habits.
What's more, or worse, there's this semantic miscarriage.
I have blocked every one of your suggestions, LinkedIn, for the almost twenty-years I've been on your platform. Yet, you keep making them. You keep insulting me, lying to me asking me for more information in order to "improve my feed." My job is not to improve my feed which you are crudding up.
Listen, I never asked for my feed to be improved. I want my feed left alone. I want you to leave me alone. You have no right, LinkedIn, to assume I need your help in improving my feed or my anything else.
What your suggestions and solicitudes are are lies. Much like the lies we all get when we go to a site and buy something and then get two emails a day for the rest of our lives. Or when we leave something in a "cart" because we've thought better of it and we get two emails a day for the rest of our lives telling us we've made an error and left something in our carts.
I don't need any of this shit from brands.
I don't need to be addressed by my first name as if we're friends. Or lied to under the guise that you're doing something special for me. Or treated like I'm an idiot and without you I wouldn't know a major pagan celebration is coming.
I don't need to be addressed by my first name as if we're friends. Or lied to under the guise that you're doing something special for me. Or treated like I'm an idiot and without you I wouldn't know a major pagan celebration is coming.
I don't need to be revved up by your fake buy-now hysteria. I've got my own hysterium to deal with and I don't need yours on top of mine.
Modern marketing must have been contrived by the same sort of people who designed the old-fashioned shooting galleries they had at amusement parks when I was a boy. To modern marketers I'm a slow-moving duck and they have endless ammunition to shoot at me with.
Modern marketing treats my in-box like a horny priest putting his hand up someone's skirt or down someone's pants. Modern marketing thinks they own my in-box, my time and they have some sort of carte blanc permission to treat me as a "friend" (which in modern marketing, is really a victim) when all I want from brands is to be left alone.
In fact, brands today treat people like they're always on. When all I want from a brand is to be there when I need you, do what you promise and leave me alone.
About two-decades ago, my younger daughter, the marine biologist, used to spend parts of her summer at "whale camp" on a nearly-deserted Manhattan-sized island in the Bay of Fundy, called Grand Manan.
The cod and sardines died out in the 1960s, and Grand Manan died with them. Where there used to be jobs and fishers and processing plants today there is desolation, poverty, despair and heroin.
On the entire island, outside of a bed and breakfast or two, a store where you can buy sterno (to drink) and white claw, which is cheap wood alcohol mixed with seltzer and cut with bile, the ferry terminal and a bar or two, there is no commerce. There's nothing to do at night except watch TV and get stoned.
The island, in short, is post-commerce. You can scarcely find a souvenir t-shirt of the place.
The island, in short, is post-commerce. You can scarcely find a souvenir t-shirt of the place.
I'm old now and have all I need to live for my remaining life-expectancy without the need to buy anything save food, propane to heat my house, and about three gallons of gas-a-week. I have no material wants. I don't lust after any inanimate object.
I'm old.
I've earned the right to be left alone, not besieged by marketers who treat me like I'm an imbecile and work ceaselessly to create a mercantile mania in order to make me think I'm missing out on something.
When you try to opt out of something, say (because they ask) that you have no interest, they send you one-thousand more. This is not marketing. This is harrasment.
It seems the entirety of amerika is built on lies that there's always more to buy, and the mechanized and automated and the AI'd marketing industry is endlessly turning out crap to support and propagate those lies.
This isn't work in service of a brand. This is mania. And it's destroying trust, companies and crushing our souls.
Monday, December 23, 2024
Maazel.
I've seen the best minds of my generation, eaten up, chewed to mush and spit out by the extractive billionaire MBA/CPAs who treat every sphere they touch as a coal mine in anthracite country.
They tell you you're lucky to have a job. They coerce you into working 60 hours/week and pay you for 40. They work you until you're used up and then they kick you to the curb.
I've seen the best minds of my generation, destroyed by the industry they loved. While the fat, marzipan-skinned bosses fly to azure islands on private jets and herald the coming of the algorithms that will eat our remaining faces and suck dry our souls.
But.
All is not lost.
We can, you can, we all can say no.
We can find a little maazel.
Some Henry Cooper guts and fight back.
How.
Here are 11 thoughts for generating your own personal maazel.
1. Take a mile walk at lunch. In other words, don't allow yourself to be a captive of your desk and your over-bearing boss. Get out of your plasticine workspace. Breathe air. See faces. Hear the music of the streets. Visit a museum. Work your legs, your wind, your mind.
2. Un-Suppress. Question why. Speak first. Assert. Ask what something means. Refuse to give into the diseased hierarchy where you're ruled by small minds with big titles.
3. Laugh. There's nothing in plutocrats that run advertising agencies understand less and hate more than laughter. Laughter is the prerogative of free people and free-thinking. It frightens them
4. Don't be a Stahkanovite. Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov was a Soviet miner who thought hard-work would lead to things like job security and money. I believed that for 40 years only to be fired at the age of 62. Remember Arthur Miller's words, "you can't just eat the orange and throw the peel away. A man is not a piece of fruit." Except management thinks you are.
This is not to say don't work hard. But don't think by working harder you will be secure, treated well, or protected.
5. Transition. Most hegemonies want you thinking, "I am lucky to have this job." You must hegemon yourself and turn that into "they are lucky to have me."
6. Cultivate. The great Sally Hogshead once said to me, "George, you have three things in this business. 1) Your portfolio. 2) Your reputation. 3) Your network. Work on each of those each day. They're where your creativity and ardor will give you the most.
7. Make your brand better than their brand. That's not hard. Their brand sucks. Work on making yours unique and important. This frightens them.
8. Acronyms. There are two you need to know. Two that can inform your world view. YOYO--You're on Your Own. And WITT--We're in This Together. Chances are you're working for a YOYO. Escape to a WITT if you can find one.
9. Never use jargon. When you use the language of the Oligopoly you become a slave of the Oligopoly. Use simple, clear language that is not owned by the dominant culture. If you're really ambitious and want to know more about this, read Viktor Klemperer's "The Language of the Third Reich."
Resistance starts with phonemes.
10. Care for yourself. Deep Self Appreciation. Your boss doesn't care. Management doesn't. The holding company doesn't. You must.
11. The three types of loyalty. Most people and organizations demand that you're loyal to them. Two other loyalties are important. Loyalty to your craft. The final loyalty is the one people forget. Loyalty to yourself.
That is what I've learned so far.
Friday, December 20, 2024
By Its Cover.
I'm probably wrong here, I usually am, but it seems to my aged and glaumy eyes, the advertising industry trails virtually every other industry when it comes to creative expression.
For years, I've kept a list of great websites that take complicated information and present it in arresting and interesting ways. Here's just one from the week before last. It starts with a piece of journalism--a photo by Art Kane from 1957--and is improved thanks to good creativity and a great use of today's design and tech. Here's the site I'm talking about.
Why agencies can't do work like this, or brands is beyond me. Except for five major reasons. 1) Why bother. 2) It takes time. 3) It costs money. 4) It might not win at Cannes. 5) No one's already seen it in a previous awards annual.
If one of the main questions an ad must address is "why would anyone care?" I question if ad agencies have that in mind anymore when they work. It seems like the goal of most advertising is to get something done. Not to do something worth doing.
But doing and achieving are light years apart. Doing is not achieving. Doing something meritorious is achieving. Somehow, we've swept that under the carpet tiles. It might upset people who, after all, are trying as hard as they can and besides, they have back-to-back meetings.
The Art Kane photo from 1957 and the New York Times update from two weeks ago are achievements. Show me advertising as engaging and I'll buy you a sugar-water diabetes infusion offering.
In any event, Print Magazine just published a list of 100 of 2024's best book covers. You might think of a book cover like you think of a banner ad on a crowded site or a print ad in September's Vogue. Your book cover is vying for attention--like your ad is vying for attention, like your tweet, ppt, your every move is vying for attention--and the only way to win amid that attention competition is to do something great.
Great.
Not merely louder, or shinier, or celebrityier, but better.
I think the ad industry is spending a lot of time thinking about things that are the equivalent of pissing up a rope. Even if you can do it, your face is going to get wet. We've focused on margins, data, AI, merging, awards and pomposity. We focus on all manner of nonsense.
Anything but doing something breathtaking.
(By the way, my favorite cover is for Salman Rushdie's "Knife," by Arsh Raziuddin.) Here's Arsh's website. Like her book cover way below, It cuts through.
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