Mad About Mad Ave.

I sent the pieces below to advertising friends, the few age peers I have left from the business. Via the wisdom and good graces of Bill Oberlander, during Covid, about five of us--Alan Katz, a publisher, Dean Hacohen, a great freelance writer, Sandy Greenberg, a creative leader and partner in the Sandy and Teri agency, Bill, of Oberland renown, and Rob Schwartz--now a coach, then CEO of TBWA\New York, formed a "dinner-club," which has grown into a text-chain and dinner club. 

The group has expanded. It now includes Steve Landsberg and maybe one or two others I'm not at the moment remembering.  

About 91-percent of my texts come from this group. They are always good for a bon mot, a joke, a bit of outrage, or a word or two of encouragement.

I sent the Mad Magazine article below to my buddies and got from alumni of DDB when it was still great, this note back:

I think Grace's line is much more than a thoughtful appraisal or a dour summation of the state of affairs. I think it's a push not to dwell on alleged "golden ages." Instead, try to do what the greatest boxer of all time, Joe Louis, did. 

When asked to sum up his life, Louis said, "I did the best I could with what I have."

We can lament our current times. We can long for times past. But the best we can do really is express what I call the three types of loyalty in our work.

1. Our loyalty to our clients. Are we doing not what they ask for but what they need.

2. Our loyalty to our craft and profession. Are we using our brains, imagination, tools and ardor to do good work?

3. Our loyalty to our selves. Are we doing things we like and believe in.

Things suck.

They always have and always will.

We don't have to.

We can do things our way. Even if they cut against the grain.
We can say prove it. When someone repeats an unproven homily or claim.
We can say no. When someone demands yes.

We can be human in a world increasing built by and for machines.

Someday we'll look back on these good old days.

They ain't so good.

But they're the best we have.
 

-----------------

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Squash.

About 1990 or so, the Japanese car brand Honda became the first Japanese brand to enter the huge US automarket with a super-luxury line of automobiles.  

They called it Acura and at the start, before our environment, our safety and our highways were sullied by the enormous trucks everyone drives so as to compensate for their weenie peenies, they offered just two basic car lines: The high-end "Legend," and the sporty "Integra."

These were nice and good cars and the macro economics of the time and the strength of the yen allowed Honda, then Toyota with Lexus, then Nissan with Infiniti to carve out a pretty big share of the luxury and near-luxury markets.

Quickly, however, Acura had an issue.

Consumers knew the Legend. 
Consumers knew the Integra.
The strength of those product names surpassed the name of the brand or marque.

In short order, Acura alphabet-souped the names of their vehicles. While they still sell an Integra, their other offerings sound like a string of Lithuanian curse words. The TLX, ADX, RDX and MDX. I'd bet there aren't five people that understand Acura's Byzantine naming conventions.

Cars, though, aren't the point today.

The point is more personal for me.

About 10 years ago before I was officially fired from Nogilvy & dontMatter, I had an expensive breakfast with a friend who was no longer with the former behemoth's London office. 

She said to me, "George, don't worry about being fired.
Your brand is stronger than their brand."

That sort of topsy-turvy happens in all sorts of social organizations. From ad agencies, to law firms, to family businesses, to I suppose sports teams. (Back 100 years ago the Cleveland Indians were called the "Naps," after their star player/manager Napoleon Lajoie.) I predict the giant tumpian implosion will happen when someone in his misministration begins to overshadow his stench.

Sometimes, maybe often, a "product" becomes greater than the 
"brand."

When I realized this, I made a proposal to certain potentates at Nogilvy. 

Let me build "OgilvyStartup," I asked. And I listed a number of reasons why this made sense.

1. I'm attracting these clients anyway. Working as startups demand is a good discipline. All those attributes that fall under the nauseating rubric of "agile," is what I always did naturally. So, we could have a training, proving ground for a better way of working.

2. Growth and Innovation in the US ain't going to come from giant companies. It will come from start-ups. If you want cool account that almost inevitably will be famous, this is how you get them.

3. The US (at least pre-that-man) is a start up nation. Start ups and new business are an all-you-can-eat buffet.

4. If the start up fizzles, as 90-percent do, or decides they have no money for marketing, as 99-percent decide, you fire them after a year. If they listen and grow and "exit" and all that IPO chazarei, you move them into the mothership agency.

5. "OgilvyStartup" would be a great training ground for people with ambition. It would also allow the mothership to experiment with different ways of paying people. Currently agencies try to hire "the best and the brightest," and then give them a 1.77% raise every 36 months.

That all seemed reasonably arrogant to me.

But when an individual's "brand" is stronger than the entity they work for, about 99 times out of 100 the only thing the mothership (or the actual mother) thinks about is chastening or castrating or controlling that stronger individual.

They don't "free" or "encourage" or "build a system" around that stronger person. 

They eviscerate.

Today, I'm speaking macro-and-cosmologically here, much of the world has become a "gerontocracy." We are ruled in almost every aspect of our lives by old people, old norms, and old people named norm. 

The old are fine. I'm one of them. They only become a problem when they work to keep newcomers out, or poor or exiles. When they see everyone with the slimmest scintilla and ambition as a threat to their 12-rooms on Park and country place in Sag Harbor.

Meanwhile, Trump is nearing 80. (Age, IQ and pounds overweight.)
Putin is 72.
Xi is 71.

I'm not saying for a moment someone of advanced years can't be alive and vibrant. Warren Buffet was and is. And Bernard Baruch, advisor to half-a-dozen presidents, was said to have been teaching himself Latin at the age of 90. That should hic and haec your hoc.

"Let us drink, for we must die."

This is a long ramble really not on age but on squashing. On heels on foreheads. On repression. On bias. On I've got mine and I'm pulling up the ladder after me.

Well-washed and well-squashed.

The Greeks of course, more than 3000 years ago, had a myth about all this. The story of Procrustes and his bed. It's a story I think about a lot.

Theseus killed Procrustes. Before he even had time to put his pants on.

Procrustes had a stronghold on Mount Korydallos at Erineus. There were no hotels nearby. The hotel chain "The Red Doric Inn" hadn't yet opened. 

The gods set the rules. You had to welcome strangers into your home. You had to feed them. And keep them from your wife, sheep and daughters.

But Procrustes was a sicko.

He offered travelers a bed to spend the night. But once tucked in, he set to work on them with his smith's hammer. He'd stretch them to fit the bed or if they were too tall, he'd chop off their excess.  

This is how most social organizations work. 

Chop.
Chop.

Especially if your brand is bigger than their brand.

What's the Difference.

I don't follow minor-league football. (I can't semantically call it college football. Not only are the coaches paid more than anyone else in the state their "schools" are in, the players are paid, too. Plus, the players can leave one team for another it seems every few minutes if they can make more money at some other institution. What's more, I'd imagine published graduation rates bear as little relationship to the truth as tump does to marital fidelity.)

Nevertheless, even if you care not a whit about college football or Taylor Swift or some other imbecility, these things sweep our world with such intensity, that you can't fully avoid them.

If Thoreau were alive today and living in ostensible seclusion on Walden Pond, he'd probably get his food via GrubHub and spend his day looking at his iPhone. The incessance of amerrykaka is as unavoidable as a fart in an elevator and about as pleasant.

All that to say, though I haven't watched a college football game since Sid Luckman hung up his cleats, even I was aware of the remarkable football season of the Indiana University Hoosiers.

The Hoosiers have always been the doormat of the Big Ten. Before winning the conference this season (on their way to the national championship game against #10 ranked Miami on January 19th) IU's last Big 10 championship was in 1967. Their bowl (not bowel) record is 5-11. As a comparison, Ohio State's bowl record is 31-30 and Michigan's is 24-30.

Nevertheless, this season is different for the red and white. Fernando Mendoza, their quarterback has already won the Heisman trophy as minor-league football's best player and the Hoosiers and their unorthodox coach, Curt Cignetti, have made a lot of people take notice.

The thing that set me off on this post was an article in the January 8 Wall Street Journal about how Cignetti, by ignoring conventional wisdom, has built the strongest team in the sport.

So much of our lives, in advertising and outside of advertising, is ruled by conventional wisdom, by "if-then" propositions, by following the herd and by best-practices.

Perhaps, Little Eva said it best, "everybody's doin' it...":

In advertising, if a creative has an ad in her portfolio that successfully mimics all the au courant trends of the previous year's awards shows, that creative will get scooped up like a dollar in a sewer drain. If a story-board of a commercial looks like a story-board of a commercial, it's way more likely to get through the meandering intestinal track of the agency and client worlds. Do something "odd," and you'll be considered odd person out.

About Cignetti, the Journal wrote:

Since taking over at Indiana in November 2023, Cignetti has proven himself to be the premier evaluator in the country. By hunting for underrated prospects and exploiting the transfer portal, he has transformed the program with the most losses in college football history into the sport’s No. 1 team.  

“He doesn’t care if you’re a five-star or have no stars,” said Indiana offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan, who has worked with Cignetti since 2016. “I just feel like he has kind of a sixth sense.” 

In Cignetti's 15-years as a minor-league football head coach, Cignetti has never once signed a five-star recruit. Five-star recruits are the Cannes winners of the sport. They're unusually gifted. Fast, strong and giant. Cignetti looks for character and other intangibles, like "flexible" joints (which lead to speed, torque and quickness.)

I have an axe to grind here. 

TBH, I usually do.

As an industry, we hire people who have learned how to make ads. Not people who (as Apple urged us) "Think different." We hire ad craftspeople, not creative thinkers.

All agencies are the same. All holding companies are the same. All our "insights" are the same. All our ads are the same. All our sameness is the same. And insane.

Like Procrustes in ancient Greece, we fill boxes and lop off the overhang. We fit people into boxes. We don't let them build their own.

There's a value in conventional practices, of course. There's a value in bringing in carpenters who know how to build the things you need built, who can dovetail joints, design chairs, and make a perfect Shaker table. There's a value in having people who know the how so they can do the what. But there's also value in a Nakaskima table. Built by someone who breaks the mold.

We need both in advertising.

Instead we get Ikea.

But there's a huge limitation in following.

Following can lead to stultification. 

And it doesn't win, as the metaphor goes, football games.

BTW, you should look at my friend Don McKinney's portfolio sometime. Especially his personal manifesto and Polaroid book.

That's what I mean.

Get Lost.

For a short time, this is back around 2013, while I was between jobs (and when aren't we between jobs--even when we're working full-time or double-full-time) I worked with an agency owner, a friend and art director who drove me fairly mad.

While we were "concepting," J. would never look at me. He'd be staring at his screen and moving type or photos or whatever, one pixel this way or one pixel that way.

I realized, I do the same thing. I doodle while in conversation, or do a crossword, or look at a cache of old photos I've stumbled upon.

We do dumb, kind of mindless things, to take our minds off of other high-intensity things. If you're an ordinary runner like I was and you run a marathon, some of the 26.2 miles ain't fleet-footed--they're plodding. They're almost "rote" miles. Ones you use to restore yourself for the tougher ones to come.

Just last week, I read the article above. 

Since the discovery of the wheel, or the spark-inciting flint, human-kind has said to other kinda-humans, "this new technology will make life so much easy. It will eliminate the boring shit you hate doing."

Probably within an axe-length of you right now, no matter where you're reading this, there are a dozen tools that were conceived, built, bought and sold on the premise of being labor-saving devices. Drudgery-eliminators.

A friend told me the other day about an agency wanting to freelance people 20-hours-a-week. You know, they want to pay only for "typing time." They don't want to pay for "thinking time," or "kibbitzing time," or "talking to colleagues time." They consider that downtime.

Here's the bit of the article above that the MBAs who run agencies, who concoct elaborate time-accounting systems and who babble on (unproductively) about productivity don't want to think about, fathom or, heaven forfend, even try to understand.

Or, more succinctly:

The world's "Frederick-Winslow-Taylor-derived" mania for productivity--for Stakhanovite-ness--is misguided and misbegotten. 

I suppose Silicon Gulley's current obsession with 996 is another, even more rancid, slice from the same moldy pizza.

One of the issues of the world today--Hannah Arendt called it the "Banality of Evil"--is the even worse Banality of Bullshit.

Today the world's self-affirming echo chamber is so unescapable that as Mark Twain is said to have said so long ago, "A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes." Today, some tax-negating trillionaire or faux-celebrity can say some asininity and in less time than it takes tump to steal another trillion, a billion willing-executioners are parroting the imbecility on social media.

It becomes believed via repetition. Like stupidisms like "the creator economy," or "AI customer service," or "brave clients."

That's swallowing of bs, aka hooklineandsinkerism, is why every agency went to "conversation-enhancing" open plan workspaces within about 20 minutes of each other. It's why they all issued RTO orders the same week. It's why they all foist the same efficiency gimmicks with conviction and no questioning even when they fly in the face of data and experience.

Once something is repeated enough so it becomes lodged, most people stop questioning it. And despite a million contrary reasons our un-questioning age should be just the opposite. We should be saying "prove it" about 92,000 times a day.

3:18, "Prove it."

I wish one of the $3,000 suits who take one of the 22 black cars waiting outside of office starting 4:30 would read this and write to me. I wish he would tell me about the efficiency they've brought to the ad business and how AI will bring more, simply by eliminating mundane tasks.

Too many technocrats (too many technocrats is a tautology. It's like saying 'too many herpes viruses') fail to understand that the world's most-effective productivity technology is not AI-based. It does not leap fully-formed like Athena from Zeus' head, and is not the product of binary code.

It's leaving your phone on your desk, throwing on a light-sweater and taking a two-mile walk in the middle of the day. Preferably near a body of water, without music and alone.

Let's get lost.

Immoderate.

My favorite adjective in all of literature is "immoderate."

It's not a $12 SAT word, or an especially indecipherable word. But I'm sure I've never used it when speaking to someone, and until this evening, Sunday night, as I am writing this after a tough weekend, I'm not sure I've ever used it it writing.

I came across the word in the great Emily Wilson's fairly new translation of Homer's "Iliad." While I've always been an "Odyssey" -guy, Wilson's rendition of Homer--which is really the story of immoderate Achilles is winning me over quickly.

BTW, Emily Wilson is one of the world's great treasures. When the decaying of the world is too much with you, when you've been too thoroughly noemed and tumped and hegsucked and millered and disad-vanced, read a little something by Wilson. The Odyssey large and small and without direction will do you well.

What does Wilson mean by "immoderate"? It's an odd word after all. In my lifetime, and yours, it's hardly been used at all. According to Google's Ngram which tracks the frequency a word or phrase appears in the aggregate corpus of the language, "immoderate" seems to be printed about once every ten-million words or one-hundred-million.

Yet, it's the perfect word to describe Achilles. And maybe a perfect word to think about if you ever, in a dark moment, ponder the death of the West.

Wilson call Achilles immoderate because he has his code and he sticks by it. When he is slighted, mistreated, insulted, hurt, lied to his is a "deadly refusal to accept any of the traditional forms of compensation for the various losses he experiences."

He does not accept apologies.
He does not accept lavish compensation.
He does not accept the thousands-of-years-old rules of war.
He does not accept life, if accepting it will deny him his place.

When Agamemnon steals the beautiful captive Breisias from him, DAMN Agamemnon! Achilles will not fight. Even if it means the Greeks will lose, he will not fight. Not for riches. Not for slaves. Not for bended knee. 

He is immoderate.

When Patroclus, Achilles' closest friend, puts on Achilles' armor, when he dresses as Achilles to rally the Greeks and when Patroclus is then killed by Hector, Achilles' revenge goes against all the principles of war. 

Achilles kills Hector. Binds him by his ankles and drags his dead body seven times around the city of Troy, through the dirt and dust, as his grieving family watches.

He is immoderate.

When Achilles goes ballistic and turns into a killing machine to try to defeat once and for all the Trojans, he chooses a short bloody life over a long boring one.

He is immoderate.

Someone I'm very close to is, like Achilles, like me, immoderate. This someone is nearing seventy and just as immoderate as he ever was.

He believes in himself.
He believes in how he gets work done.
He believes in how he wins clients and their revenue.

His firm, after almost four decades, wants him gone.

He is immoderate.

He scares the people he works with.
He's too too by half.

They want him gone.

How many directors became persona non grata because they were persona immoderate? Or Creative Directors because they put the long-term value of the work (and therefore the agency) ahead of the compromise that was being demanded of them?

How many people, immoderate people, were cast aside for their immoderate-ness? As Shaw said in "Man and Superman,“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Yes, you can substitute Shaw's unreasonable for Emily Wilson's immoderate. 

You can make a leap from Achilles to my friend in this paragraph. And yes, "wrath," though we're meant to be polite and collaborative bridge-builders is how so many Achilles-like performers get ahead.

They are extraordinarily talented. Quick-footed. Fighters. Perhaps with divine blood. And they are never never never given adequate compensation.

“Achilles’ wrath is driven by a belief that he, an extraordinarily talented, quick-footed fighter with divine blood in his veins, should never have to suffer loss without adequate compensation. His wrath can end only once he recognizes that no mortal, even the son of a goddess, can ever hope for such good fortune.”

More,

“The limitless wrath of Achilles can end only once he recognizes that no absolute, permanent victory is ever possible. Everyone must bear unbearable losses, for which no compensation could ever be enough. In the end, we all lose.”

The tragedy of work is that the people who drive us forward often drive some people crazy. And so they are driven away. And most-often, work is driven backward.

I believe in immoderacy. In sticking to who you are. In opposing the prevailing winds--especially the ill ones which are buffeting us today and show no signs of abating.

Immoderacy.

Embrace it whole hog.

Be piggy about it.