But for all the words in the article, it was a single sentence that got me, reminded me of GeorgeCo's Unique Selling Proposition, and where so many of my competitors fail and fail abjectly.
George Tannenbaum on the future of advertising, the decline of the English Language and other frivolities. 100% jargon free. A Business Insider "Most Influential" blog.
Friday, February 7, 2025
Inadequacy. Our New Standard.
But for all the words in the article, it was a single sentence that got me, reminded me of GeorgeCo's Unique Selling Proposition, and where so many of my competitors fail and fail abjectly.
Thursday, February 6, 2025
As Reliable as a _____________________.
You'll find it in the first twenty seconds of the clip above and you owe it to yourself to, once a decade or so, acquaint yourself with a world view that involves more than fukking the other guy or avoiding taxes.
Pursuant to shaving and drunken barbers, I realized just now the entire problem with the world. Maybe it was prompted by going to the local supermarket and finding them out of bananas. I'm 67-years-old, I've never before NOT been able to buy bananas.
And then it hit me, in what used to be the "last best hope on earth," what used to be "a government of the people, by the people and for the people," has been taken over by an unreliable narrator.
Someone who spins BS as easily as he breathes. It's convenient, malevolent, evil, and will surely separate you from your freedom, your money, your future and your set of principles, that is, if you have any left.
Our industry too, all industries, are being led by unreliable narrators.
Narrators who tell you they have to downsize. Then take $49,000,000 golden parachutes. Narrators who tell you how they'll save $750,000,000/year and try to hide the fact that it will lead to the end of at least 7,500 jobs (at $100K/job.)
This is your trade-press. Calling mass firings "cost savings [sic] and structure updates. |
A gallery of unreliable narrators. |
Narrators who claim to believe in DEI, until they don't.
Narrators who believe in diversity, that doesn't include Jews and people over 50.
Narrators who fire people and hire dumbness-producing AI bot machines and call it "marketing."
The unreliable-narrator-ness is endless.
In fact, if you go to the front page of Ad Age--the nominal advertising journal that stole their name from this blog--look at every story and append to that story the words "unreliable narrator."
Do the same when you turn on the late-term abortion that is television news. Or the slightly earlier-term abortion that are The New Tork Yimes or the Stall Wheat Germinal.
When you hear anything from our Liar in Chief, or his ruling Kakis, felon muskmelon, the blonde spokesthing: Unreliable Narrator.
Any agency award, any agency press-release, any blather about the effect of man-in-the-moon superbowl marketing: Unreliable Narrator.
I remember as a three or four year-old hearing this lyrics and asking my mother about their incongruity. She babbled something about silliness. Missing, as we all have for too long, the Unreliable Narrator of Life.
The cosmic Drunken Barber.
It rained all night the day I left
The weather it was dry
The sun so hot, I froze to death
Susannah, don't you cry.
Or maybe this is better, by Yip Harburg, Harold Arlen and Billy Rose.
Say, it's only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me
Yes, it's only a canvas sky
Hanging over a muslin tree
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me
Without your love
It's a honky-tonk parade
Without your love
It's a melody played in a penny arcade
It's a Barnum and Bailey world
Just as phony as it can be
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me
Or, Conrad.
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Maintenance.
If you own a co-op in New York City, you're familiar with the term "Maintenance." It's a fee you pay every month to live in your building. It helps the building's management keep things up to snuff. Or it helps them snuff things up.
It covers payments for the underlying mortgage, salaries for doormen and the super and the handyman, keeping the boiler working, keeping bricks from falling, paying insurance and taxes.
No one likes to pay maintenance. But it's a necessary cost of life on earth--or in a New York co-op, whichever comes second.
These days, I'm finding too many parallels between the collapse of amerika and the demise of the ad industry.
In amerika, we no longer want to pay maintenance. So our roads are pocked and poxed and unsafe. Our air-traffic control system is unsafe. Our cops and law-enforcement are missing. It's why our borders are permeable, our medicine is missing, our air is filthy, our schools don't teach, and so on and so on.
If you delve into the notion of "Societal Collapse," which is what amerika is undergoing now, you'll realize it happens when maintenance stops. It happened in Knossos 3,500 years ago. It's happening in your town, today.
Agency brands stopped spending money on their own brands and stopped upholding their own values. They stopped paying for people, paying for training, treating our profession like a profession. AI can do it.
Clients--and their agencies--were even worse. Most products I grew up with spent tens of millions of dollars developing and propagating the ingredients that made them unique. Their advertising told the world about these ingredients. They cost a fortune, but they returned more money to the corporate coffers.
For things to maintain their value you have to tell people why they are valuable.
Maintenance.
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Money, Honey.
I've pasted about twenty images below. I'll admit, I did a shitty job, neither squaring up the photographs or orienting them correctly. That's ok. And my lack of attention might add to the harrowing-ness of the images found in the book.
I don't know enough about economics to foresee Weimar level inflation in what used to be the United States. But when your nation is run by a seven-time bankrupt, a charlatan, a stock-market speculator and a band of thieves who will surely pillage government coffers while taking bribes at every turn, phrases like "sound as a dollar," will be more obsolete than ever. As will social services, things like healthcare, social security, veterans' benefits and everything that staves off societal collapse.