Murder. Mergers. Me.

Last week, on the same day the CEO of a major Healthcare Denier was murdered (they call them providers, but perhaps denier is more accurate) there was an op-ed in The New York Times that really hit me.

In fact, I sent it to a few clients.

There was a strange serendipity that fewer than 15 minutes after I read Jessica Grose's piece, a CEO whose company is famous for ignoring paying customers, was gunned dead on a New York City street. You can read the whole article (which should take you all of three minutes) here.

Just a couple days after Grose's piece came out, the largest merger in advertising history was announced. The merger, though we will surely be told otherwise, is not exactly the high-water mark for human interaction. Or even humanity. 

Surely, it's an overture to the opera that's coming. An advertising future where more work that's supposed to move, influence and motivate people is made by machines. Machines who haven't a scintilla of humanity making ads that haven't a scintilla of humanity.

Grose cites sociologist Allison Pugh in her op-ed, and Pugh's book, "The Last Human Job." In the book, Pugh shadows an apprentice hospital chaplain as she goes through her day. Grose writes, "Pugh interviewed not just chaplains. She spent five years following teachers, doctors, community organizers and hairdressers — more than 100 people in total who perform what she calls 'connective labor,' which is work that requires an 'emotional understanding' with another person. 

Since this is a blog on advertising, I'd assert that our jobs, at least if you're over 30, used to entail having an emotional understanding with another person. Yes, Advertising used to require an emotional understanding.

Today, I doubt that.

If you hold onto some old ways, as I do, that the best advertising, in Bernbach's words is based on "simple, timeless human truths," and in Carl Ally's words should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted," today's advertising is more algorithm, formula and best-practices than empathetic.

Grose writes, "...a lot of care work cannot be tracked and cannot be standardized. Industrial logic, when applied to something like chaplaincy [or advertising] borders on the absurd. How do you even measure success when it comes to providing spiritual comfort?..."

Again, Grose is not writing about our business. But think of these words in relation to the mechanistic mess our business has become. The inhuman yelling, the incessant retargeting, the surveillance capitalism at industrial scale. And yes, the clanging clarion of the all-important triple-play bundle and $399 lease deal with accompanied by legal copy longer than the Magna Carta:

"The pro-tech argument I often hear... is that it’s better than nothing for people who would otherwise not have access to services. Which is to say: Emotional support [or customer 'service'] through a chatbot   is better than no support at all....

 

"We’re increasingly becoming a society in which very wealthy people get obsequious, leisurely human care.... Everybody else might receive...[very little.]  Or, as Pugh puts it, 'being able to have a human attend to your needs has become a luxury good.'

 

"As I was reading her book, I had a minor revelation about the growing lack of trust in various American institutions...the picture is one of declining faith over the past 40 years. That’s roughly the same period in which technology has accelerated and replaced or bowdlerized a lot of low-stakes human interaction, otherwise known as weak ties, like the ones you have with a grocery store clerk you see regularly or even the primary care physician you see once a year."

This is clearly what's happened to our business. Both how we serve clients and how we're treated by the companies that employ us. 

All humanity, all decency, all kindness and most insight and empathy (which are based on humanity, not binary code) have been removed from the system. They're no longer. Treating someone or even a client well is not just anomalous, it will get you fired.

I read all this.

I thought about this commercial done probably 35 years ago by, I think Leo Burnett, now a Publicis agency.

If I was in one of those corner aeries with old men whose salaries include seven figures and whose net-worth includes eight, I'd watch this commercial now and again.

No.

I'd watch it every day.

I'd watch this fairly often, too. Especially if I were feeling suicidal.