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.

Societal Collapse has also afflicted the ad industry. 

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. 

Today, most consumers cannot tell one car from another, or a generic mouthwash from Listerine. Mostly because agencies and clients no longer tell people why they should pay for better products. They're no longer "maintaining" the differentiators or the vig that the brand spent, in some cases, years or decades establishing.

Compare these two Volvo spots as a for instance. 

This lack of maintaining is a function of lack of spend. But it's also a function of lack of smart. 

For things to maintain their value you have to tell people why they are valuable. 

And that messaging is never "set it and forget it." It must be done with regularity, with consistency, with repetition.

Maintenance.