A Tear Down.

Looking back on my long life, I might say that the best job, and the best metaphor, I ever had was one of my early ones. 

Back fifty years ago, summer jobs were not easy to get. You had to comb the want ads just about every night when the local paper arrived if you wanted to snag one. If you couldn't get your local paper at your college, you had to wait until you got home for the summer to get a summer job. Usually by that time, only slim pickings were left.

One summer, I think it was my last summer in New York and living with my parents, I got a job helping two brothers who had a rusty Chevrolet pick-up, a metal-bending brake and some small success doing aluminum siding. Aluminum siding was a relatively new idea back in the 70s, and it hadn't yet gained its subsequent tarnished reputation.

As far as manual skills go, I have none. The only thing I can rightfully do with a hammer is bang my thumb, but I was a big strong boy, and when the brothers Frankie and Olindo Nocito saw me, they hired me on the spot for the then staggering sum of $125/week. Cash.

Because I had no skills, and the brothers had no intention of teaching me any, my tasks were confined within a very narrow range. 

We would arrive at the house to be re-sided and the brothers Nocito would leave me a hammer, a crowbar, a ladder and an assortment of large black garbage bags. My job was to remove all the shingles I could off the house. And keep the shingle droppings off of my head and out of the bushes.

If I could strip a house clean by the time the brothers were ready to pick me up at the end of the day, if I collected all the shingly detritus and had it all swept into large garbage bags, the brothers were happy. More often, if I missed a spot--say something up by an eave too high for me to get to with my ladder, I would hear a torrent of Italian curses like an outtake from some movie by Francis Ford Coppola, and only a bit more threatening.

The metaphor here is simple. 

I was a big dumb unskilled kid doing big dumb unskilled work. Ripping shingles off a split-level.

Anything that required skill, taste, experience or artistry, Frankie and Olindo would do. For the "value-add" part of their business,  wasn't even allowed to bend the aluminum. I would cost them more in misshapen metal than I would save them by doing it myself.

The more I see of the so-called AI revolution, at least as it pertains to advertising, the more I see no one buying, selling or promoting the splendors of AI acknowledges how much of a blunt instrument AI is.

AI is great at producing the 765 different rectangles in 8634 different sizes and swapping in a matrix of offers, calls to action and ethnicity of stock photos so clients and their agencies can produce a broad spectrum of ubiquitously annoying ads that no one will ever notice because they have no oomph of stopping power. AI is great at checking off boxes, at saying we have an 300x250 ad for the site "Mayonnaise Today." We'll be able to test four headline variants, six offers and a dozen calls to action. We'll learn so much we can optimize and improve our results from 12 clicks per 100,000 impressions to 12.375/100,000 clicks.

Doing such work has tremendous value. And AI is made for such tasks.

However, I'd doubt that anyone can tell me the difference between a Nissan or a Toyota or a Hyundai or a Kia or a Ford or a Chrysler or a Mazda or a Mitsubishi. Knowing the difference might do more for a brand than knowing well-qualified buyers can lease a new _______ for a little as $599/month.

That sameness applies to nearly every category from Caribbean islands to car insurance to quick serve restaurants to airlines to political candidates. 

In fact, as skilled as the ad industry has become in creating ads that are indistinguishable from any other ad, on the client side, clients are equally skilled at deriving almost identical offers. 

BTW, just as no brand being advertised today has a unique selling proposition, just as no brand being advertised today stands for something or promises, the same holds true for about 99.79-percent of all agencies. They all seem to work at the intersection of verbal flatulence and acid reflux.

AI is great in a world where it's a given that everything 
looks the same
sounds the same
is priced the same
and has the same legal copy.

AI is not great, as I was not great when I was in aluminum siding, at adding value. At differentiating. At getting noticed.

I don't see anyone on either the client or agency side who's really thinking about "using the right tool for the job." 

There's a place for AI, just as there was a place for me as an aluminum sider.

But what smart brands do--find a voice, find their confidence, and articulate what they believe, it might be worthwhile not having a blunt instrument. Instead, working with someone who can help a brand discover its sense of direction and double-down, not on programmatic legerdemain, but on the courage to stand apart from everyone else.

That's the kind of shit you learn from the aluminum siding business.