A Lot of People Will Hate This One.

I often think of myself as a can of soup.

Or a French mustard.

Or an Italian olive oil or balsamic vinegar.

You can go to any grocery store and find about 259 others that look just like me. 

259 others that have roughly the same ingredients, provenance and heritage. 

259 others that do roughly everything I do roughly as well as I do it.

That’s the world most of us face every day.

Whether we’re looking for a significant other or a significant occupation.

How do we get noticed?

There are 259 other cans of soup in the grocery store that are made with the same red, ripe tomatoes.

Some of those cans—most of them—may try to get an edge by lowering their price by a couple of cents. 

If everyone else is $4.29, and they’re $3.99, they might get a sale. Bargain hunters.

A few of those cans have red, ripe tomatoes enough to raise their price by a couple of cents. They charge $5.29 and hope that people will think they’re worth more and that they taste better and are healthier because they cost more.

But for every more expensive can of soup, there are about 28 cheaper cans of soup. 

Obviously, I’m not a can of soup.

Or a French mustard. And Italian olive oil or a balsamic vinegar.

Obviously, I’m not in a grocery store, either.

But it’s worse for us.

Our grocery store is LinkedIn. 

And there aren’t just 259 other creatives we are competing against for the same seven shitty assignments, there are 259,000 other creatives.

Not to mention four giant holding companies that control about eighty-percent of the jobs in the ad industry and because of their size and reach have pricing control over most of the jobs.

What’s more, with the proliferation of awards, everyone is award-winning. If Moses were alive today his LinkedIn would read.

And there are a lot of shoppers, holding company “talent acquisition specialists,” recruiters and head-hunters who really can’t tell the difference between one soup and the other and are paid and incentivized to do all they can to drive your price down.

The soup might be served in a bowl. But we are an industry of bottom-feeders.

It’s not different really if it were 1880, your name were Cżleotǔwicz, you were newly off the boat from Upper Slobovia, and you found yourself in the coal fields of central Pennsylvania.

You might have been promised by 25-cents for each ton of coal you mined. By the time you were a mile below the earth in Shamokin, PA, you were surrounded by so many competing Bohunks, that your promised 25-cents a ton was halved. You’d get 12 1/2-cents a ton. When the mine-owners subtracted what you owed them for use of their pick, their lantern, their mine elevator, their canary and the shack they rented you, you were, as the song goes, “another day older and deeper in debt.”

Then.

That’s the scenario in advertising today.

Now.

I started my GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company just as Covid descended on the ad industry. The ad industry was in the spray of a single cough transformed into the subtract-industry.

There was nothing left.

There is nothing left. 

Unless you’re one of the six people who get eight-figure salaries every year for slowing the shrinkage of the companies they mis-manage and extract from.

This is what I faced.

I had faced it before when I was fired from R\GA at age 56 and reckoned I would never work again.

I asked myself, “How will I ever get a job.”

Quickly, I answered myself.

As if I were a can of soup.

“What am I best in the world at?”

Not what am I good at.

Not what awards have I won.

Not who I know.

Not where I worked.

Not my winsome smile.

What do I do better than anyone else in the world?

I wrote my answer down.

I’m best at taking complicated things and making them simple,

friendly and even sexy.

That’s what I worked at.

That’s what I did.

That’s how I marketed myself.

That’s how I became ECD and Copy Chief at Ogilvy on IBM.

When Ogilvy fired me, I had to do that again.

What do I do better than anyone else in the world?

Recently he former head of Ogilvy recommended me to a new client. She wrote this about me.

"George is as good at positioning and articulating the purpose and value of an enterprise as anyone with whom I've worked. (George was a creative director at Ogilvy for years.). And he does it with charm.”

Your job, if you’re looking for work is to find a statement like the above without you.

No one works harder than Cżleotǔwicz.

No one tries more options than Cżleotǔwicz.

No one is more optimistic than Cżleotǔwicz.

I’ve written this because I’m about to write a note to a client who I’ve worked with since I opened GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. I was on retainer with him for five years. Then because he wasn’t making any money, we went our separate ways. About two weeks ago, he called me and wants me back.

I’m perseverating about how much to charge him.

I find myself talking myself down price-wise.

Something you should never allow yourself to do.

That’s why I wrote this.

Man, that is one amazing can of soup.

The Irrelevancing of the Ad Industry. (And Us.)

 

Last week, you couldn’t spit without hitting about 97,000 posts on LinkedIn and the bought-and-paid-for trade press about last week’s most important advertising topic. Or the most important topic according to all those easily shiny-objected out of noticing what’s really happening in the world.

Do you really care about instagram’s “runic” “r.”

Does it change the facts about the brand (no matter how many billions in legal fees are spent by non-tax-paying meta and zuckerberg to appeal the many rulings against their evil and corrupt company. A company that will do anything for the billions in ad dollars they suck up (or zuck up) regardless of how much data they steal and how many children are raped because of them.)

Some facts to consider before you get heated about the merits of their new masturbatory logo distraction.

• meta maintained a policy allowing accounts engaged in the "trafficking of humans for sex" to accumulate 16 violations before being suspended on the 17th. 

      In baseball we say “three strikes and you're out.” meta                   rewrote that to "17 strikes and you’re out.’

• A New Mexico jury ordered meta to pay $375,000,000 in civil penalties for “willfully violating the state’s unfair practices act.”
• meta misled users about the safety of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and enabled child sexual exploitation on those platforms.
• internal company documents showed a “pattern of executives prioritizing growth over child safety.” BTW, safety here is not a kid getting a bee sting or scraping her knee. It’s selling kids for sex and profiting from it.
• Meta's head of content policy, Monika Bickert, wrote that the company was "about to do a bad thing" and called the plan to encrypt facebook messenger "so irresponsible.” She warned it would hinder the reporting of child exploitation cases to law enforcement. 
• Internal documents filed in the case revealed that meta's own staff had repeatedly flagged the risks its platforms posed to children, but that safety features were blocked or delayed because they were deemed unprofitable. 
• As of March 2020, instagram had no dedicated mechanism for users to report child sexual abuse material. When an employee raised the issue multiple times, she was told building such a tool would require too much work. (Probably not as much work as a logo-redesign, however.)
• Internal documents from a November 2020 technical failure further showed that meta's ability to track bad actors was disrupted at a time when thousands of minors were reporting the most severe category of inappropriate interactions, including sex trafficking, sextortion, and real-world meetings for sex.
•  A 2019 proposal to make all teen accounts private by default was rejected after meta's growth team found it would damage engagement metrics. 

As an industry, are we really so shallow, stupid and corrupt that we’ll over-look these easily available facts and instead focus on ligatures, precious design and the like.

That “r”?

That’s heinous.

The child-rape? That’s our business model.

As Sir John Hegarty said some years ago, the industry has retreated to the fringes. We don’t build brands. We stunt growth.

We lie. We’re not even the “toy department” anymore. That’s too dignified.

So we do fake.

So we do hate.

So we do rape.

Hairballs.

We Should No Better.

Back about twenty years ago, someone had passed me a counterfeit ten-dollar bill. It looked a little strange, slightly washed out, but without thinking too much about it, I went to a local restaurant and bought a roast chicken with it. And two sides.

If you threw out everything that comes your way that looks off, the entire ad industry, every relationship you’ve ever had, and the world economy would grind to a halt. 

You accept. You move on. 

A few minutes after I tried to buy my chicken a burly guy came out. He was wearing a baseball cap that said NYPD on it.

He looked me in the eye and said to me, “that’s a counterfeit ten-dollar bill. You’re not getting your chicken.”

I said, “OK. Give me the bill back.”

“No,” he said, “I’m a cop. And I’m confiscating it.” He pointed to his hat. The sort you could buy on any one of approximately 13,452 corner stores in New York.

“You’re not a cop,” I said, out-burly-ing him. “You’re just pretending to be a cop. You’re just wearing a hat. You have no right to take my ten back.”

He continued to claim he was a cop.

“Let me see your badge. You’re impersonating a cop. That’s a crime.”

He pointed to his $4.95 hat.

We were standing chest to chest at this point. Though I had five semitic inches on him.

Just then, a real NYPD cop came into the restaurant with his partner. They were like so many New York cops, brusque, all-business and roughly five-by-five. Like me, all they wanted was their chicken dinner.

“Whassa problem?”

“He took my ten and won’t give me my chicken. He says it’s counterfeit.”

One cop couldn’t resist, “The chicken? It probably is counterfeit.”

The other Joe was in no mood for his funny sidekick. “Give him his chicken. You took his money. Give him his chicken.”

In a moment the fake cop gave me my bird. It was all I could do not to give him the bird.

The all-business cop said, “And take that hat off. You’re not a cop.”

I went home and never really thought about it again. Until just now when I saw a video on the Times site that showed three or five or seven masked cops accusing a woman of trying to run them down and pointing their guns in her face.

All three or five or seven cops were wearing masks.

I don’t know how there is not outrage.

Stone-throwing, Molotov-outrage. 

Not Banksy-outrage.

Gasoline, liquid soap and a rag in an empty Dom bottle.

Class.

This is not “normal.”

It in no way resembles anything “amerikkkan,” unless you count the masked-cowards of the aktual kkk as aktual “law” officers. It doesn’t matter a whit your political stripe.

We don’t do masked cops.

Ever.

BTW.

We don’t do this.

Oh, wait. 

First they came for ____ but I was not a ___...

We do do this.

Etiam si omnes ego non.

There’s a Test for That.

Over the last couple of weeks, WPP’s stock has risen considerably.

Its share price, which was down in the low-teens six months ago, is now in the mid-to-high twenties. Its market-cap, which had plummeted to about $3 billion from a high of about $16 billion has climbed to almost $6 billion.

Much of that rebounding comes after WPP’s latest earnings report which financial people regard as encouraging. Mind you, encouraging has as many shades to it as sewer water mixed with motor oil and a soupçon of PCBs. The encouragement here for WPP as reflected in their stock increases isn’t that they are winning business, increasing revenue or making money. It’s that they are decreasing revenue less quickly and losing money less slowly.

To quote the British journal “The Observer,” "The embattled advertising group appears to be easing its revenue slide.”

Easing is revenue slide is not the same as making money. As written above, this boost in share price stems from many things one of which is “losing money less slowly.” To be a bit of a dick about it, if you took the words “easing its revenue slide” and ported that description over to someone with a severe drinking problem, you might be saying, “My embattled friend appears to be easing his alcohol dependency problem. He now has just twelve martinis a day, down from a high of sixteen.” Progress as it's reported here is relative. And no, not my relative.

Or as Mark Twain and or Benjamin Disraeli are said to have said, “There are lies, damn lies and statistics.” Or in the similarly astute words of a WWII German tank commander destroying more Soviet tanks than he was losing—but still unable to replace his losses, “We need to stop this blood-letting if we do not intend to win ourselves to death.”

Win ourselves to death.

There’s a lot of that going around.

I’m not a financial person. I have a good head for numbers and for a “creative” person an extraordinary sense of how business works, but I don’t read financial tables, SEC filings and the like. I seldom consider "diluted EPS,” "Adjusted operating cash flow pre WC,” or "Adjusted operating cash flow before working capital.”

I do like this boilerplate, however. 

And that WPP, though it’s about seventy-percent shrunk from its 2017 size, uses the word “growth” as a bludgeon. Which might be appended to their “cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements."

Years and years ago when advertising people still had a hand in running advertising agencies, I was forced to serve on a committee with Chris Wall on creating an HR-endorsed 360-review form that would serve as a basis for evaluating the value of creative people across Ogilvy.

As you might expect, there was a lot of hot air in that tea-kettle, none of it of any value. We were arguing about semantics and as usual missing much of the point. Does so-and-so “partner well,” or how can we evaluate how “collaborative” they are.

Finally Chris had had enough.

“Look,” he 6’10”-ed. “There’s one way to evaluate the worth of a creative person. It’s Friday night, the pitch is Monday. Do you want them here over the weekend?”

You can do essentially the same thing with financial data—especially financial data as it pertains to holding companies and ad agencies.

You can ask salient, revealing questions.

Questions that numbers can’t obscure.

1. Do clients pay you the fees you ask for?

2. Do clients come back?

3. Do clients recommend you to other clients?

I could really give a rat’s ass about who’s up 2.3% YOY on an LFL basis. A lot of these numbers are, frankly, phonus balonus so someone can get his bonus.

For instance:

John Wren of Omnicom for instance had a 2025 salary of just $1. He wound up taking home $69,000,000 ($191,000/day or $400/minute) in part because he slashed billions in Omnicom salaries and Omnicom costs. Slashing those costs says nothing about Omnicom’s actual viability. But everything in how they choose to pay their top-most executives. Will $1,000,000,000 in cost reductions lead to a better holding company, or just a better pay day for one person?

Again,

1. Do clients pay you the fees you ask for?

2. Do clients come back?

3. Do clients recommend you to other clients?

Between plastic trophies, phony accolades and various Order of the British Empire citations, the ad industry has all sorts of ways to show off and reward a small portion of their people.

The bigger question is the simplest question.

Can you charge what you believe you’re worth for the services and products you provide and create?

If you can’t, you’re not really in business.

Two is the Loneliest Number.

It’s Sunday morning as I type this. 

Sparkle has been walked. 

She’s had an hour in the dog park with various canine friends. Especially Graham.

I’ve done two walks me-self.

One of two miles in the dog park.

Another of two miles along the beach.

It’s about 200 degrees out and I’m schvitzed.

I have two posts written for next week, and can’t relax until I get a third.

That’s the rule.

If I don’t have three going into the work-week, I’m behind the blogging eight-ball and all week long, I feel the pressure of being blog-arrears.

Much of my life has been demarcated in increments of three. You need three ads for a campaign. Three ads to show your boss. Three ads to make the next meeting. So you can get the work killed and do three more ads.

I’d guess, about twenty-percent of your time is spent coming up with the first ad. Ten-percent on the second. And very often seventy-percent of your energy finding a third.

It’s like running a marathon. Twenty-five-percent is the first mile. Fifty-percent is the last three miles. Twenty-five-percent is the twenty-two miles in the middle. 

While I’ve moved past the hardness of getting to three professionally, every once in a while like with this week and blogging you get stuck on two.

Despite going to all my idea sources, despite my willingness to electrocute my complacency, sometimes you get ossified. You’re stuck on two.

I’ve spent probably fifteen years of my almost sixty-nine stuck on two. If they’re the right two, you’re really ok. But you never know. And the rule of thumb is, you go for a third.

We all have techniques for fighting through two-ness.

Go out for a good chicken-and-broccoli at Wu’s. Take a walk around the block. Read the New Yorker, or at least the cartoons. Look at an old award’s annual. Talk to an old friend or partner and just shoot the shit. Even realizing that at almost sixty-nine, I have to look up broccoli every time I spell it lest I order chicken-and-brocolli. Even looking up broccoli can get you past complacency, if you do it right.

One of the tricks of the trade that you can learn only through rhino-grindstone-ism, is learning how to push through. Learning how to make a joke, or a rhyme, or to channel what’s keeping a customer from considering your offering and making an ad out of that. 

No one can teach that sort of thing to you.

I suppose it’s a little bit like being in the marines where you have to learn to take-apart and put-together your rifle blindfolded and in complete darkness. You have to get good at the things that help keep you alive. 

If you grew up driving in New York as I did, you develop a sense of how to skirt potholes, psychopathic and drunk drivers, psychopathic and sober cops and the occasional road hazard like a herd of rabid rats crossing the street or a homeless encampment in the center of Alexander Avenue as you’re trying to get onto the Deegan.

You learn these things as a copywriter too. The account people who say the client hates funny. And the account people who say the client wants funny. And the CCO who wouldn’t know funny is you strangled him with a Borscht Belt. Or even Borscht suspenders.

Sooner or later, you do what an in-distress nuclear reactor does. You undergo a “partial shutdown.” You block everything out and just work.

To date I’ve written about 7,500 posts in this space. At an average length of three-hundred words, that’s well-over two-million words. This week alone, I’ve written probably 7,500 ads. 

That’s what I do.

I take a shit load of information and try to coalesce it down to something startling, impactful, informative and memorable. 

Somehow we’re usually told to do three of those.

You’re much better off learning how to do three-million.

Be a Rube.

About 15 years ago when I went back to Ogilvy to help run the IBM account, I came to the realization that while a lot of people jabber on and on about technology, very few people understand what technology actually does or how it actually works.

Even fewer can actually explain it so it’s memorable and sexy.

I also realized that journalism had started doing a better job explaining processes and flows than advertising. Mostly because nobody any more in advertising was dug in on a single piece of business, so no one had the time to try to break things down and show potential customers how they work.

I realize the world was full of blather like the blather below. That might actually be unfair to blather. But the simple truth is that much of what’s explained is instead confuserated and everyone is too cowed to call bullshit on it. This sort of language is everywhere.

I can’t imagine it doesn’t depress sales.

About the time I rejoined Ogilvy, I ran across this article in the Times. 

I had read a book once called “Water for Gotham.” Basically it was about the importance of taking a long-view on infrastructure. It’s the story of how a smallish city with no potable water built a multi-trillion dollar system to bring fresh water from the Catskills to New York’s to quench what in time became 30 million tongues. 

I noticed the Times had told the story with six or seven cartoonish pictures and a few hundred words of copy. The New York water system is one of the most-complex infrastructures in the world. If it can be explained this simply, why can’t we do the same when we’re selling AI, or data migration, or Quantum, or whatever?

As the world has grown more complicated and the need for explanations more prominent, our ability to explain things has grown concomitantly more and more atrophied. 

True, I don’t need to know how an internal combustion engine works or how an electric engine works, but I might want to see some forensics on how these machines can help my business.

In fact the very term “horse power” grew out of such a seed. Almost three centuries ago, people had no understanding of a steam pump. To make it palpable scientists created a calculus—horse power—that explained the amount of work a machine could do in terms people understood. Terms they could also apply as a basis of comparison.

There’s no similar nomenclature of any current technologies. scam altman calls his AI ’super intelligence,’ which is about as meaningless as a holding company’s earning-reports. When new bombs are built we say “it has the power of twenty Hiroshima sized bombs.” That gives people an idea. Why don’t we in tech say something is an MIT⁷, that is, it has the computing power of seven times Dr. Horchner’s advanced physics lab.

We also fail to explain process.

We fail to say, for instance, that a cancer doctor might look in his lifetime at 5000 MRI scans of cancerous cells in a lymph node. An advanced AI system will have been trained on five-million MRI scans. From a volume point of view alone, that can lead to insight and acuity. It allows the AI system to say “that looks off.” It can then summon a human to double-check the system’s work.

If you’re routing a delivery truck through a city grid and there are twelve turns, that’s a relatively simple job. But by the time you have two-hundred trucks in fifty cities making a thousand deliveries each, the possible decisions number in the trillions. That’s what our AI does. Figures out the shortest distance and the fewest number of turns.

On my Kindle, which is about the size of an old TV Guide, I can carry around with me about 2000 books. About one-third the size of Thomas Jefferson’s library, which was the seed of the largest library in the world, the Library of Congress.

One of the books I have on my Kindle is this one. I recommend it to everyone. 

Goldberg’s work is funny.

It’s memorable.

It explains how things work.

We might consider that.

BTW, when I rejoined Ogilvy and IBM, I started keeping a list of articles that took complicated things and explained them simply and memorably. People always kept list of directors and photographers they liked. Why not do the same with data scientists?

Each page of my list has about seven urls on it. The list is 35 pages long. It helps me. 

It can help you.