Not Easy.

A friend of mine just sent me a note. That's a screen shot of its contents, above.

Someone I don't know posted it on some social media site. He stole one of my ads, removed my logo and posted it as his own.

I run a lot of ads for GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. I might make making those ads look easy. But no matter how easy it looks, stealing someone else's work is much easier. Especially if you have no superego or sense of right and wrong.

Work, whether you're sweeping a floor, swinging a hammer or trying to succeed as a small ad agency is never easy. Even when the phone rings and the clients applaud and thank you and pay on time and give you referrals and repeat business, it's never easy.

It shouldn't be.

Nothing should be

Years ago I wrote a campaign for a technology that hardly got off my computer or within one-hundred yards of getting through the agency sphincter and to the client, who surely would have killed it anyway.

About a year after launching my client's first AI system, I had finally learned enough to know that though we had made good commercials, we had done a bad job. Yes, according to every metric and KPI known to marketing sciences, we had succeeded. But according to that which is never measured, that is actual impact, we had failed wretchedly.

I realized that while technology almost always promises in its marketing spiels an easier future, most technology is hard.

We had sold the AI I was working on as magic.

Instead, it was a lot of work.

So, I wrote a campaign that never made it off my Mac. "In praise of hard."

The metaphor I used was gold-mining.

You don't just start banging away with a pickaxe. Or blasting away with nitro-glycerine. You don't just find the nearest river, build a sluice, start panning and find nuggets the size of baseballs.

You scout.

You plan.

You provision.

You work.

From a societal point of view we don't seem to any longer extol the virtues of work. Or the fulfilling feeling that comes from exertion--both mental and physical. We like to believe, and we too often sell, the notion that everything is push-button easy.

Whether its buying a car, taking the kids to soccer practice, flying to a tropical location, checking into a hotel, or even making a call on your over-priced cellphone.

The phrase that pays these days is "frictionless."

Most of life is about as frictionless as a sandpaper enema. In advertising, there are never any traffic jams, there's never slovenly service, your room is always ready and your seat is always comfortable.

We are so often told about ease and convenience that we hardly ever realize that nothing anymore is easy or convenient. 

Years ago, I read a bitter essay by one of my favorite writers, Mark Harris. His novel "Bang the Drum Slowly," one of the finest ever written, had been passed over as a Book of the Month Club selection. Such a selection would have propelled Harris' career forward. You might even have heard of him. He might have become Oprahpopular.

The selection committee wrote to Harris. They told him that the book that beat his out was "easier to read." In other words, his was harder to read.

Hard today is a curse. 

It's like earning the epithet "he's hard to work with." Once you get that, your career is all-but over no matter how much your hardness might produce goodness.

Hard to read might just mean that there are ideas in your work that demand unraveling and thought. They might keep you up at night or vex you. 

They might make you put the book down and think.

That's hard.

So, in advertising and life, we gravitate toward easy answers, also (to my view) known as lies.

Easy answers, magic, miracles, alchemy--making gold out of dross--is how our industry (and our country) has ended up in the mess we're in.

Good advertising and good government is based on truth and hardwork.

We avoid both.

AI will do it. Or data. Or programmatic. Or diversity. Or borderless creativity. Or some other dopey concoction of sloganeering.

Very often when I get briefed I get one-hundred powerpoints and hours of incoherent misdirections. 

I can't really complain about that.

It's my job, not the brief's, not a planner's, not a client's to work hard and figure it out. The old TV detective Columbo didn't have a planner lay out all the evidence, draw conclusion and observe things for him. He did the leg work. The brain work. The frustrating-can't-sleep work.

Why do we think advertising should slice and dice thinking, hoping it all comes together, when nothing really ever has?

Columbo had to do it himself.

Just like good people in an profession have to.

No one moves the pen for you.

Or fires your synapses for you.

Or negotiates successfully the word you wanted rather than the word the lawyers wanted.

That's you.

You have to find your own threads, chase your own clues, bark up your own dark alleys, piss up innumerable ropes.

It's hard.

As it always has been.

As it always will be.

Especially for those who refuse to give up.