This Will Cost Millions.

There's an old Jewish joke that goes something like this:

Miriam, 77, has invited Sylvie, 78, up to see her new apartment on the Upper West Side.

"It's easy to get here," Miriam says. "You get off the Broadway local at 86th Street and push through the turnstile with your left elbow."

"Umhm," Sylvie agrees.

"The building is right there. Pound on the door with your right elbow and the doorman will let you in. Then walk down the hall and press the elevator up button with your left elbow. When the car comes, press floor fourteen with your right elbow. Then turn left off the elevator and bang the doorbell to 14G with your left elbow."

"I get it," Sylvie says, "but what's with all the elbows."

"Well," says Miriam, "I assume you're not coming empty-handed."

Greeting people with kindness, making them feel welcome has been a human-norm since the Zeus-fearing ancient Greeks. You could literally be punished by the gods if you didn't welcome someone into your home. If you didn't offer them fruit, wine, olives and a bed.

The same holds true in many middle-eastern cultures today. If you visit a Bedouin's home, you barely talk until you've shared a cup of tea. When you try to buy something at Khan el-Khalili, Cairo's great bazaar, you eat and drink and talk and friend. Before you dicker.

When I was a boy in graduate school I traveled the girth of New York interviewing a skein of once-famous now almost-unknown Black poets. Even at nine in the morning, if you were offered a glass of wine, you took drank it, and gladly. If someone comes into your office, you come out from behind your desk. If your grandson visits, you sit down on the floor with him.

Now, against 300,000 years of human behavior on earth, the Silly-con Valley non-humans are suggesting, as they have, that you abnegate what remains of your human-ness.

If you ever wonder what the real motive is behind technology-ization, I suggest you consider that it's the destruction or at least abeyance of human norms that go back to early bi-pedal times. 

Norms cut into profit. Manners cut into profit. As does kindness. As does respect. As does leaving a place better than you found it.

In our Mammon-ocracy, ruled by the whore-of-Babblin'-idiots, anything that cuts into profit is bad.

Last week, my long-time friend and producer Joe Maire, sent a note to my client with final 16:9 and 1:1 high-res cuts conformed in h264 and pro-res. 

Quickly, though it might have cost legions of Sam Altman acolytes money, we all got back a flurry of those costly bits of humanness. 

Though I've been making a living in advertising for forty years and am considered pretty good at it, I can't say I understand the recent trends. We fire people who have experience. We push laughter and creativity to the fringes and we applaud efficiency and cheapness and inundation and surveillance. There's an algorithm somewhere that proves every bit of illogic--that is, believing you'll be successful if you make work people hate, block or ignore--makes sense.

I even worked once at a Bain-led consultancy run by more Harvard MBAs than there are bacteria in a goat's gut.

All that I know about client service and advertising can be summed up in a sentence or two. Clients and advertising that are kind, that say please and thank you, that show faith and trust and believe in their creatives get the best work and have the best careers.

Phil Knight is a billionaire not because he made a better sneaker. But because he treated good agency people as they deserve to be treated. He challenged them. Then let them answer the bell.

The same, I'm sure, is true of Steve Jobs. Yes, he made a better PC. But no one would have known if he didn't say please and thank you to a few people at Chiat\Day.

It's funny how the prevailing wisdom of the world puts a cost on human-decency but is myopically blind to its incalculable benefits--the profit it brings you. Oscar Wilde once defined a cynic this way: as "someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

Think doge, think trump, think of the holding companies constant lay-offs and impecunious cost-slashing and you'll get it.

Those client comments I've pasted above, show a client who gets it. I've known her since the early 2000s and she's been a GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company client since 2020, when I opened my metaphorical doors.

I could keep a tally I suppose of all the times she's driven me crazy, or asked for a lot for a little in no time.

Somehow that's all ok.

She pays on time.

She says please and thank you.

She hires me again.

It's really that simple.

Thank you.