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?"