Clarity.

Branch Rickey in his playing days.

When I was a boy, baseball was about 107-percent of my life and a full 134-percent of my happiness. Even though the sport was already in decline in the '60s, and both New York nines were or were teetering on the edge of abysmal, despite all that, baseball consumed me.

In fact, I learned a lot about people from baseball. And a lot about laughter.

First, when I was about five and playing in some kiddie game, I heard someone, maybe an older brother, scream out, "Aunt Jemima makes a better batter." (Aunt Jemima was a pancake mix--since renamed for racial sensitivity.) 

Aunt Jemima makes a better batter was an order of humor and wit on par, to my young ears, with anything Oscar Wilde could have said, or Dorothy Parker. 

"You swing like a rusty gate," was pretty high up on the Pantheon as well. Nice metaphor. Nice picture drawn in my mind, complete with audio.

There were two other barbs that persisted through my youth, both for ragging pitchers.

One was, "We want a pitcher not a belly-itcher." From the moment I heard that I put the speaker in the 'not worth talking to category.' That's no kind of a putdown, I judged. Especially in comparison to my favorite, "We want a pitcher, not a glass of water." To my tender ears, that was the apotheosis of wit. The guy is not a pitcher...he's merely a weak component of that--a glass of water. Loser.

All this, believe it or not has a semantic point and given that this is a blog nominally on advertising, an advertising point.

We were taught growing up to make words a vector. Spears with points. We were taught--indirectly at least of their power.

Some time ago, something crossed my eye, something I hadn't seen before. They were digitizations of typewritten scouting reports by the great baseball general manager, Branch Rickey. Rickey was the man who signed Jackie Robinson for the Brooklyn Dodger--to his major league contact. 

He's in the Hall of Fame, Rickey is. And with the signing of Robinson probably did as much to change the game as Babe Ruth, or more.

During his over 50 years in the game, Rickey played for three teams, managed two and was the general manager of four more.

Rickey's scouting reports were little works of art--like fine caricatures. In just a few lines, a facsimile of a player was created.

Before I get to a selection of Rickey's reports, a counter-point. Late last week I read an article in the horrible sports section of the New York Times--a separate website they call the Athletic. 

I found these two scouting reports in the above. And these two underscored assaults on the English language and communication itself.

Those words I've underlined stopped me. Because they annoyed the pine-tar out of me.

Back when I was five, we'd have said "good stick" to say someone could hit. Or "he gets good wood on the ball." Never in one trillion years would I have thought something as dumb and pure as baseball would resort to "very strong bat-to-ball skills," or "ability to impact the ball for damage." Be careful out there, mbas are everywhere.

As my friend Rob wrote when I shared these clips above:

In any event think about the writing above and below when you're looking at work. Or evaluating people you work with. 

Think about the difference between very strong bat-to-ball skills and good wood. One's bs. One's real.

CAVEAT:
You must forgive certain words in Rickey's reports. He calls African Americans "coloreds," and "boys." Those are marks of the time. They are not redolent of white supremacy or racism.

Fake news.

Human Universals.

To a Denisovan, this might have been Margot Robbie.

If you look at the history of homo-sapiens--though it probably goes back further, to Denisovans and Neanderthals and other ancient human forms that were subsumed by sapiens--there's one thing we have always strived for: the ability to make sense of a world we don't really understand. 

Viagra. 30,000 years ago.

So began religion, cave painting, myth, story, and a thousand other practices that were attempts to control the uncontrollable uncontrollable. And most things, if you spend a moment thinking about them, are uncontrollable. 

You should meet my dog, for instance.

Right now I'm reading about the wisdom of the ancient Mesopotamians. It's easy and very Western of us when learning of different cultures to put them down and scoff at their superstitions and oddities. Just like we might laugh at a commercial like this, as the nadir of sophistication, and say "what could they possibly have been thinking?"

Just as Pulitzer-winner Ed Yong talks about in his great book on animal perception and adaptability, "An Immense World," it's easy to think of "others" as dumb because we don't take the time or have the sensitivity to appreciate their unique acuity. Or, as Einstein never said, "If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

Just to go all hoity-toity on you, as the writer Marcel Proust once said, “The only true voyage… would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes… to see the hundred universes that each of them sees.”

Ashurbanipal won no FIFA peace prize.

But, back to Ashurbanipal in Assyria about 2700 years ago. When Ashurbanipal, the king of the world's mightiest empire. When Ashy wanted to know what was going to go down (as the kids say) he consulted his seers, intellectuals and sages. They, in turn turned to extispicy, which is not a Kentucky Fried Chicken offering.

Ashurbanipal's advisors read sheep livers, and could foretell the future that way. Here's a 4-minute video of Assyriologist and author of the book shown above, Selena Wisnom, showing us how extispicy works. It's said that some markings in sheep livers actually looked like Mesopotamian writing--Cuneiform. It's as if the gods had written messages just for us. 

Extispicy was one way the ancients believed they could see the future. After all, the gods we're always sending us signals. They weren't distant and far away. They were always around if you knew how to look.

The other Assyrian manner of prediction was Astronomy. Their chief astronomer during the time of Ashurbanipal was a guy called Balasi. Winsom, above writes, “Balasi would not have cast a horoscope for the king, or sought his own destiny in the stars, but saw himself more as a translator of a divine code, reading the messages that the gods were sending in the sky and conveying them to their intended recipient.”

If you read the underlined above there's a lot to take in.

I'd argue that most of the tech-world believes at some level that data and its concomitant crystal-ball, AI, are "divine code." That is, "messages that the gods were sending...to their intended recipient" (musk, altman, karp, amodei--the pantheon of AI visionaries.)

At some point, maybe, humanity will develop some sort of accurate predictive capability. We'll know exactly when a stock should be bought, when the steak is perfectly medium rare, when to get an on-time flight to Mustique at a value price, when the bomb the shit out of an adversary real or imagined. We'll know what combination of words and images will drive sales through the roof with virtually no media support. We'll know whether or not to kiss the girl when we see her home. 

We'll have entrails or stars or algorithms or super-positioned electrons that will tell us exactly when to flip our predictive pancakes.

My guess however is that accurate predictive capability will always be just over the horizon. It'll always be next quarter, or like cleaning carbon out of the atmosphere, something we'll do by 2030.

It's worth remembering that Isaac Newton, a once-in-a-millennia-mind who today is famous for his advances in physics and mathematics, spent most of his time working on alchemy. He considered alchemy--turning base-metals into gold--a godlike area of enquiry.

In other words, next time you hear about a splendiferous advance in our ability to see and predict the future, think about how close we are--not how far we are--from looking at ovine offal and saying, "I'm betting on the Knicks. That blood vessel tells me to--it looks like Jalen Brunson."

Much of technology, many of the world's pundits, are based on magical thinking. Thinking that a year or a decade or a century from now will be derided and laughed at. Next time you hear about some splendor of machine "learning," or artificial "intelligence" consider that the worse client or account person you ever dealt with has over six-trillion synapses in their brain. Most of our technologies are run on a series of "yes/no" options--that despite all the bluster and private equity money being raised are right about as often as they're wrong. The first three minutes of Hans Rosling's 4,200,000-million-view Ted Talk is more than worth your attention. 

Of course science has advanced since 1000BC, 1000AD and even 2025AD.

But not as far as our humanity--our core need to believe we're in control of big-bang-randomly-exploded and propelled particles--wants to believe it's advanced.

That'll happen tomorrow.

What's In a Name?

I ran into the kitchen not too many minutes ago and saw a half-used bottle of the Stop-N-Shop brand dishwashing liquid leaning against a new bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid that I bought at the store just a few hours ago. 

My wife and I both grew up with Depression (and depressing) parents and try as we might, neither she nor I can 100% get over the "re-using ziplock bags," "saving bakery string," and buying store-brand soap. A few weeks ago, I was in the city. Some friends and I were going to dinner at a place in midtown--a place I'd never heard of. But nonetheless, when I opened the menu, there was a steak listed on it for $87. 

When your first apartment cost you $90/month in rent, I don't think--even if Mackenzie Scott for whatever reason decided to give me billions, I don't think I could ever spend a rentsworth on dinner. Even if the agency or the client was paying.

Despite my impecunious side, I'll tellya something about Stop-N-Shop brand dishwashing liquid.

It sucks.

It comes out like bubble soap, thin and watery. It doesn't foam. It doesn't clean. It doesn't even smell good.

I don't really give a hoot or a holler about it, but it sent me down a spiral. You've heard me rant and rave about how major advertisers stopped advertising. They stopped telling people why their dishwashing soap was better than the store brand. They stopped letting people know about the R&D they do, and the secret ingredients they add that cut washing time by 22%. They stopped all that in favor of meaningless garbage. Now when you see their brand in the store for $7 and the store brand for $4, you buy the store brand. The georgesurvey estimates one trillion dollars of brand-equity has been destroyed over the last thirty digital years--all in the name of saving on advertising expenditure.

The thing I did notice on the Stop-N-Shop brand dishwashing liquid was how they named the scent of their blue SLO (soap-like-object.) 

I silently applauded the copywriter, or the committee, or the "naming team" that came up with "Waterfall Mist." What a perfectly evocative aerosol of verbal nothingness.

When I was a boy, still in college, I worked as a writer for the Montgomery Ward catalog, specifically in the shoe department. The worst part of that horrid $225/week job was when the featured photograph on a catalog page showed a pair of women's pumps, or a slingback or something, that came in a variety of colors.

Because the type had to be "dropped out" (white over a color photo) you were in a lot of trouble if you got one of the colors wrong or left one out. It cost a lot of money to fix that sort of printing bollocks.

One catalog season, the task of demarcating color names fell to me. It usually went to the women in the department. They wrote more of the women's pages. But I was either "moving up," or being punished and it became my job.

I've had a career full of pressure. I've been towered over by 6'10" Chris Wall. Growled at by Pytka. And maniacked at by Tony Kaye.

Nothing came close to being on the wrong side of Rocco Imbriale, the catalog's Joe-Pesci-like production manager. 

I quickly figured a way out of ever being asked to write the colors again.

I typed

Black
Navy
Red
Yellow
Pink
Green

And then I thought and rewrote.

Black power
Navy bean
Red scab
Yellow jaundice
Pink elephant
Green mucus

I handed the copy in to Rocco and left for the day.

He never said anything, but they never gave me the color job again.

I missed my chance at Waterfall Mist.

The Four Hs.

When I started GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company nearly six-and-a-half years ago, though I was somewhat in the grip-of-unemployment panic, I was methodical about what I was doing.

First, I posited what I had heard from so many clients over so many decades in the advertising business. "We love working with you. We despise working with agency name goes here." With that bit of direction, I tried to think like Richard Branson when he started Virgin Air or Steve Jobs when he started Apple.

You might say, I used this ad as my brief.

I found everything that makes and agency hurt and threw it a way. Or how could I open a new that acts nothing like the old? Put another way, what sucks about ad agencies (or airlines or computers) that I can do something about?

So, while agencies decked, I would ad.
While agencies bloated, I would streamline.
While agencies complicated, I would simple. 
While agencies jargonned, I would English.
While agencies talked, I would listen.

Second, like a good ball club, I did my scouting. I went to every website of every agency. I looked at their "about" sections. I looked at their "leadership" sections. I looked at the way they spoke to viewers and about themselves.

I didn't come up with a 164-page white-paper on the state of agency marketing. But as I used to say to my older brother, Fred, about the neglectful/abusive parents we shared, "No one is totally useless. They can always serve as a bad example."

The website carnage of 2020 was a great bad example.

Today, so many newly-freed senior ex-agency people come to me and ask how they can start their own business. They sometimes ask how I established (seemingly with such felicity) GeorgeCo.

Looking at your competition is always a good place to start. 

I'm always surprised how few people see that the right fielder sucks, but still pull the ball to left. For my entire baseball career I was guilty of same.

I've learned.

In any event, late last week as the cacophony of my client roster had begun to quieten, I began another round of competitive research.

First I looked at Omincom's site.

I could find nothing either semantically or aesthetically that indicated they deal with creativity and ideas and stopping power. What someone smarter than I (Bernbach?) called the "last unfair advantage in business."

Not only was there no mention or way to link to any of the storied creative agencies Omnicom had subsumed, there wasn't a smile within one-hundred miles of any of their expensiveized corporated pixeljargonization. 

Their site, under headings "corporate leadership" and "capability leadership" showed about 30 or 40 headshots. Not one ever sweated over finding the right word, looking at a cut for the hundredth time, finding an insight on page 99 of an annual report. Their site is the intellectual equivalent of learning to fuck by reading instructions from a nunnery.

I will only say that WPP's site was worse, like the East Germany's Stasi might have been worse than the Soviet's KGB. Levrentiy Beria not withstanding.

Mostly because WPP's site started with a lie so big and Orwellian that it made me even more nauseous than lunch in the WPP cafeteria (which for a time was their number-two source of profit, behind expense-padding.)

How can a company that by about 27-different measures has shrunk between 75% and 89% over the last ten years, lead with this mendacity? I think the sine non qua of the words "growth partner" should be growth. And WPP are in free-fall in a coyote- off-a-cliff-chuck-jones kinda way.

WPP's market cap has reverse-grown from £23B to £2.5B in ten years.

(That's like losing 89-cents out of every dollar.)
But they want to be your "trusted growth partner."

Maybe Daniel Lambert (13 March 1770 – 21 June 1809) an English jail-keeper
and at 700lbs the heaviest man on record, should be your dietician.

In their leadership section, WPP featured one creative. And you could see some work they had purportedly produced for clients. So their site was slightly less of an SEC filing than Omnicom's, in the way that stomach cancer might be less bad than brain cancer.

Years and years ago, I was at the "Digital Agency of the Decade" when Sheryl Sandburg's book title was on everyone's lips (and no one's night-table.) 

I got into a row with the head of trend-parroting aka the agency's "head of planning." She said two things that were so painfully au courant that they still twist my duodenum.  She said:

1. No one watches TV anymore.
2. When people get home from work they want to 'lean in.'

I replied with some asperity--not unusual for me when my politesse levels are running low, as they so often are.

"Andrea, when I get home from work, I'm exhausted. I had a long day of corporate nonsense and too many things to do. I had to avoid four drunks and six puddles of urine on the C-train. The kids are screaming and my wife is pissed. And I see their point. I hate me, too--who doesn't. All I wanna do is lean back and watch the Knicks lose by fewer than 18 points."

What I meant by that I mean in light of the mean financial-services takeover of the ad industry.

When I turn on the TV, or the radio, or go to a site, or hear something on ferstunkeneh Gas-Station TV, dammit, I want something that makes me laugh and/or smile. Something that welcomes me, comforts me, appreciates me by showing a little care. I don't want to hear about a free something I don't want when I buy something I don't want.

I don't want to be screamed at and mouse-typed. I don't want to be bad-joked. I don't want to be actor-grin-fucked. I don't want a piece of crap badly produced that shows the efficacy of "world-class production at scale for the always-on world." 

I don't want gyrating teens showing me their cell-phones and orgasming over some Famous Footware BOGO deal. I don't want to hear about the $49.99/month Verizon deal which I know winds up costing me $89.99/month by the time all the hidden charges are un-hidden. Likewise I don't want to hear about your network reliability when it's been ten years since I've been able to have a phone conversation without one side of the call dropping at least once.

I want empathy.
Not oligopoly.
I want truth.
Not press release.
I want humanity.
Not legalese.
I want common-sense.
Not ratiocination.

Back to the friends who call me for advice in setting something up for themselves.

I usually go on a tirade like I just have. And conclude by saying, "I think there's a need for what we do.

"A need for the Four Hs.
Honesty.
Humanness.
Humor."

"What's the fourth H?" they ask.

"How much do I owe you?"

Sold. Out.

If you've ever had a mortgage, one of the felicities of having one is getting an envelope in the mail with an unknown letterhead. I'm usually loathe to open things I don't recognize. I figure it's flaked with some kind of anthrax or ricin or actual physical spam. Why are you, you unknown letterhead, mailing me something.

(The fact is, I don't even put phone numbers with names into my phone until I've known someone for ten years. As Paul Simon sang, "It took a little time to get next to me.")

Once, not long ago, I got something with a logo that said "Mr. Cooper" on it. What I found inside was a bill for my monthly mortgage payment.

I said to my wife, "I thought we had our mortgage from Citibank." She answered, "We did. They must have sold our mortgage." 

That doesn't seem right to me. 

I paid Citibank for something--ostensibly a loan and service surrounding that loan. How can you sell it?

But they did.

Without telling me.

Fortunately they sold it to Mr. Cooper, "my home loans & refinance partner." Like Adolf Eichmann was my ZyklonB and Crematoria partner.

A similar thing happens at times when you book a flight on, say, American Airlines to Phoenix. You'll notice when you print your boarding pass type that reads "this flight operated by Such&Such Airlines."

It doesn't do any good to bark about any of this. There's no one to complain to and no good answer for any of this except that someone figured out there was more money to be gained buying and selling customers than actually serving them. 

What's more, the people in various organizations doing this slicing and dicing aren't really in any business--not mortgages, not airlines. They're in the arbitraging business. They don't really give a rat's ass about mortgages or airlines. That's not where the money is.

The other day while on LinkedIn, I saw an ad for an agency called BBDO MW. Quaintly, I figured the MW stood for Midwest. I assumed BBDO had consolidated their Chicago and Minneapolis offices. 

I clicked on the ad and saw this sleight-of-hand and slight-of-management.

MW had been founded in 1947 was sold to Omnicom in 1998. It's now been eaten by Omnicom and reduced to two letters. 

I'd imagine there are clients who chose to work with Martin Williams. Creatives, too. But their career mortgages have subsumed their careers. Their "home" has been sold. 

The cynicism. A name means nothing. It's just an expense. A heritage means nothing. Memory is just an expense. As is tradition, the past, even values.

All this happens because amerikan business is no longer about the business it's in. It's about selling, ginning up and getting out of town before they catch you.

amerika is take the money and run.
And if you take enough you can avoid paying taxes.

The names mean nothing.
The traditions and legacies and histories have been destroyed.
Customer preferences are ignored.
What they "bought" and what they get aren't related.
All for something more important.
Fifteen or so very wealthy old white men getting very-wealthier.

When I was in Cairo, Egypt with my family about 20 years ago, we went to the famed and ancient Bazaar, Khan el-Khalili. You can probably learn more about marketing and advertising from a few hours in Khan el-Khalili than you can from one-thousand years in MBA school. 

There are no chain stores. No flashing neon. Every shop is owned by the owner and worked by the owner. Most shops have a picture of the current owner's father or grand father framed and in a place of honor. If you're smart, you say to the current owner, "That's your father? What a handsome man. And you look just like him." That's the equivalent of breaking bread with someone before arguing or negotiating. It's the stuff of humanity--and has been for thousands of years. 

Names and legacies aren't erased. Scaling isn't the topic 24/7. Nor are agentic bots. 

In a world where names mean nothing, nothing means anything.

That's the modern ad business today.

Audience Participation.

As my legion of readers know, I'm as prolific as Typhoid Mary (and about as popular.) 

Not only do I write this blog every day, I also usually post a "GeorgeCo" ad for my business almost every day. These ads get me probably one-third of my business, which is nothing to sneeze at--assuming sneezing is still allowed now that a madman is our dying nation's doyen of health.

Also, ensconced as I am with a slate of clients (touch wood) as long as the menu in an old Greek diner, I prolific-ize for them as well. 

If the way you boiled down the brief or the positioning or their attitude is good, rich and fecund, coming up for clients with fifty ads is as practicable and doable as coming up with the holding-company anachronistic belief that three ads is an adequate amount.

There's a little bit of the bible that Forbes magazine had stolen and used to use on their backpage--a page on which they'd print timely and wise quotations. Here's the whole thing, from Proverbs 4:7-9, with the part Forbes used as their page header highlighted. 

"Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: And with all thy getting get understanding."

Often when I am writing something, whether for this blog, my business of for a paying client--or to get a paying client--I have another writer look over what I've written.

That's how I get understanding.

In the early 1960s, the Chicago Cubs--the woeful Chicago Cubs fired their manager and replaced him with a "College of Coaches." After almost a decade-and-a-half of second-division finishes, they decided to try something different to see if it would reverse their fortunes. The Cubs would no-longer have a single manager, instead they'd be guided by an eight-man committee.

I have something of the same scrutinizing every bit of copy I write. Even if the people involved don't know it. Some of them are even dead.

Call it the College of Crotchety.

I always have my friend Rob Schwartz read my copy. By that I mean, I look at it through what I perceive is his perception. His quick, wise and astute view of the world. I always have Steve Hayden look over everything. Is it "correct"? Is it smart? Is it bigger than the assignment? Chris Wall reads what I write too. But that might just be me being mean to myself--in trying to live up to his nearly impossible standards.

My friend Debra Fried looks at things, too. I find her judgment especially important if I am using, as I do rarely, a writing scalpel as opposed to my usual bludgeon. Debra is a craftsperson and her taste is refined and adroit and, yes, demanding. She wields a sharp pencil. My wife, Laura, too, is a fine barometer. She often warns me when my words could cause some rough weather. 

Ed Butler and Harold Karp, bosses from the 1980s and 1990s read too. They were both "writers" who happened to be in advertising. Theirs are standards that cannot be ignored.

I'm not sure today that such super-ego-ism exists in advertising. Maybe this is an old man talking, but today people praise work not for its essential quality but just because it's made it out into the world. The standard has changed, from producing something notable to producing period.

The modern agency structure has something to do with that lowering. As does the predilection of our age, where everything cruddy piece of art deserves a place of honor on the refrigerator. To see the decay of taste and standards, you need look no further than the vomit of gold filigree puked onto every wall within 32-miles of the white house. You can put a laurel wreath on a donkey's ass, it's still a donkey's ass.

When I was young and working for the aforementioned Ed Butler, one of advertising's best writers in the 1970s and 1980s, Ed would, about four times a year see a print ad or a commercial he'd like. He'd drop everything at that point and find out who wrote it. Once he did, he'd write a hand-written note to the person. He wasn't after any quid pro quo--he looked for no recompense.

It was just a cosmic reminder that someone's watching. And pleasing that someone--and yourself--counts.

We lost something when we lost that.