A Guest Post from Denise Kohnke.

Hello, readers.

Meet Denise Kohnke. A thinker. A leader. A doer. A strategist. A creative. A writer of today's post. 

Here's how Denise describes herself from her agency's, the 51 Group's website. My only issue with her description is the word cynical. I always use the definition that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Clearly, Denise values much. Kindness. Irreverence. Working. Laughing. Enjoying life.

Read Denise. 

LinkIn if that's your thing. And Denisify yourself. A synonym for believe in yourself, strengthen yourself, be kind to yourself. And ever-onward yourself.

 Read more Denise.

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George and I had a lovely chat the other day. We talked about copywriters of a certain age. How we are fast. And how if someone were to say, “Write like James Joyce” we could write like Joyce. Or Suess. Angelou. Or Springsteen. 

Just like AI. We were AI before AI was AI.

Oscar Wilde: Be yourself, because everyone else is taken. 

That conversation spawned discourse about being yourself, and working for a living as a writer in advertising, be it independently or with an agency. 

I read something on LinkedIn the other day – it was adorable. Paraphrased, if therapy is necessary because of your toxic job, that’s a bad thing.

No shit.

It’s a cliché – do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life – that is both true and false. I'm officially naming it "Schrodinger's Law of Advertising Copywriting" because no, you shouldn't need therapy for working where you work or doing what you do. But the vast majority of us write to get money to live. Which means most of us must fit in, stop quibbling over commas, do banner ads and resign ourselves to eat professional and artistic kaka to feed our families.

Writers in advertising are especially cognitive dissonant because of this.

Lest we forget that the world needs ditch diggers too, Danny. 

I do not know the statistics, but I suspect more men read George’s (magnificent) blog than women. Hang in there, men, I’m not going to bash you. But you should know a little something about why there are so few women who are creative directors, writers and art directors. It may help you reconcile middle age. Really, all of the ages.

Think about a pie chart. A man’s identity is mostly his work. Like 50 – 75%. Admit it. Advertising copywriting, unlike other creative endeavors such as filmmaking, is not so much collaborative as it is a single endeavor that is based on constant scrutiny and criticism. Writers are pitchers in baseball. When you get shelled no one else on the team takes responsibility. You barely get credit for no-hitters unless you pitch a perfect game.

A woman’s pie chart of identity looks like a pizza with too many hungry mouths to feed. Our identity is Daughter, Sister, Mother, Wife, Girlfriend, Caregiver, Bestie, Maker of Moments and Keeper of Traditions. Oh, and Advertising Copywriter (we can’t even claim “AdGuy” as shorthand). For women, these labeled roles are subconscious, hard-wired drivers. That would be science, not just my opinion.

If ad women are any good at their jobs, we threaten most men. We understand that American culture thinks men are more fun and golf better than we do. (“Nice drive from the women’s tee, maybe we can use your ball” fills our heads with a lot of fuck you.) We get it. If we advance as a writer, CD, strategist or account person in advertising because we’re extra super exceptional, we still don’t usually have a seat at the boy-club-cool-guy table. We have to go hang with the PR people. Not that there's anything wrong with that. 

That’s why women get paid less, are promoted less and eventually quit. It’s a value equation that doesn’t work for us very long. Fortunately, we are saved by having other identities that matter more than our career identity. We move on. We retire early. “Career” as a word sounds like a cage.

Now, about being ourselves at work as copywriters: Collectively, we writers need constant evolution of our inputs to be relevant. Which is why writers consume words and pictures like romantic dreams. 

Today, ironically, we copywriters fuel AI with the very words we write, because it is primarily advertising and academia that fuel AI. Journalists, stand-up comics, songwriters and screenwriters are suing for IP protection. Advertisers who own our work want it to “go viral” (dear God make that phrase die in hell). Speaking of dying, there’s a death gyre inside another gyre inside that baseball we pitch. Our treasured words are actually fueling mediocrity, the cockroach that wants to eliminate our job forever. We are snakes eating ourselves. (Too dark?)

We all need to open ourselves to the world of influence beyond advertising. Not just for sanity, but because that’s all we have. Us. You. Me. The discipline of putting words on a page, every day, will one day be ancient scripture. We have to dial up the quirkiness, the juxtapositions, the innocence, the ick and the glory. And feel it all. We have to stay one step ahead of the machine to differentiate ourselves and make our century in civilization look human.

Ergo, we, the writers of advertising, are single-handedly fighting against the singularity, just like Sarah Conner. Advertising is the last bastion as the media conglomerates sue to keep their content out of AI’s grasp. Clients will never sue for IP. Clients want skywriting.

Yet do not underestimate what we do. Advertising ubiquitousness just won an election. Journalists didn’t matter. Long articles in The Atlantic or The Economist didn’t matter. Books were ignored. If it was policy that mattered, we would have had President Elizabeth Warren. If competence was ever the tipping point we’d have President Hillary Clinton. Instead, the trajectory of our country’s values were changed by slogans, taglines and memes. Make America great again. Drain the swamp. Lock her up. Drill, baby, drill. And the dagger, Trump will fix it.

When we fight, we win! That didn’t have a chance.

So much of our perfunctory world is full of shit we write that should never have been written. We made down up and up down on the daily. And as a writer/strategist who uses the heuristics of psychology, I know that we’re the people who just changed the very fabric of America. Copywriters. Copywriters who need therapy because we did both a bad and a good job. 

There’s the dead cat.

Is our job toxic? You bet. It’s the most toxic job in America when we lower ourselves to lie and call it spin.

So carry on, righteous advertising copywriter warriors. Broaden your world view. Stay true to truth. Cultivate your identities. Feed the algorithms with imagination, kindness and basic morality, well written.

Old or young, we are the last of us. Save yourself. And the country.

Have nice day, (bitches)!

Trenches.

Almost two years ago, a client friend of mine left the client side of the business and went on to hoity-toity-hood at one of the large advertising trade groups. I won't say which one, but there are only two, so you can probably guess.

I contacted her, I'll call her B, about an idea I had to get their websites some readership, to give their members something of value to read about and to perhaps help make the ad industry (what's left of it) reality-based again.

My idea was pretty simple. And while I would not have charged much, it was well out of B's range. B and her organization are all for providing value to members. Until it costs money. Content doesn't suck because people can't think or write. 99.8-percent of it sucks simply because no one wants to pay for anything. 

(Content runs on the same math as food in coach on an airline. You get the equivalent of half an ounce of pretzels. Usually stale.)

At the end of the day, that's why AI will replace so many of us. It's not because it's any good. It's because the price is right. AI could be the techno-modern set up for the old Borscht Belt joke with the punch line, "the food is terrible and such small portions." With AI it's, "the content is derivative and there's so much of it."

The idea was a blog called "Trenches." This was my pitch deck. The names have been removed to protect the innocent.

My motivation for Trenches was three-fold.

1. I love writing--and Trenches would force me to write more.
2. I thought I could make a couple hundred of bucks a week for doing what I love.
3. I thought it would get me business. My writing on my blog does. I figured this would show my skill to more people.

All this to repeat, Trenches never got off the ground. Or off my keyboard. And I let it drop.

But of late, Ad Aged has been asking FOAA (friends of Ad Aged) if they'd like this space for a post of their own. You can attribute it to the misalignment of the planets or some atmospheric miasma, but the week before Thanksgiving, four "luminaries," sent me posts they had written.

All four of them are fighters. 

All four of them are leaders.

All four of them are teachers.

All four of them believe in our industry and the power we have.

All four of them make their clients happy and their Excel spreadsheets fat.

All four of them, though they occupy the rarefied heights of the ad business, have never left the Trenches. Despite their prominence and their stature, all four still roll up their sleeves, furrow their brows and work to help clients, business, themselves and others.

Ergo, this week on Ad Aged is Trenches week. 

Tomorrow, we'll have a report from Denise Kohnke.

Wednesday, we'll hear from Angus Tucker.

Thursday, my young, old friend Pauline Oudin.

And on Friday, which is generally a low-readership day but better not be this week, my ballast, muse and better-seven-eights, my wife, Laura Tannenbaum.

Like a lot of life, Trenches is an experiment.

Hopefully, you, my readers like the idea. And Ad Aged gets even more than it's typical 80K weekly views. If I'm really lucky, more people will volunteer to write. I hope so.

Thanks, all.

And as always, enjoy the Trenches.

Dig we must.