What Does it Do.

Imagine yourself in one of those incredibly stupid 1960s sitcoms that a lot of people my age grew up with and somehow survived. Almost any sitcom will do. From ones that featured a genie in a bottle. To ones that featured benign blonde witches. To ones that featured talking horses, talking cars, Martians who suddenly appeared on earth or modern-day astronauts who somehow went back to caveman times. (No. I'm not calling them cave-people. Call my cave-lawyer.)

Almost all those sitcoms involved situations where something 99% inexplicable to half the cast had to somehow be explained. How the fuck did Lassie know that kid was in a well? How did Mr. Ed dial a phone.

It's 65 years later now. 

I'm an OFM (old f'in' man) and about 99% of everything I do in advertising--and yes, life is taking something apart, looking at it and explaining to people who either don't know or can't be bothered or who are somehow intimidated by whatever, how something works. 

I bought an indoor clothes line the other day. The instructions that came with it are more complex than anything ever written by John Maynard Keynes. (BTW, Keynes was more than anyone was responsible for the 60-years of post-war stability the world, relatively speaking, enjoyed before trump destroyed it.)

There are even, I'm told, agency or production companies (they're kind of the same thing today) who make a living creating explainer videos. And most of the time if you can't figure out something with your Mac, or your Microwave, or your Mrs., you can find a badly-produced YouTube video that says press this, click this, and voila, marital bliss.

Robert Caro, my favorite living writer, once described his particular facility as "Find out how things work and explain them to people." When I was helping run the IBM account at a now defuct and defuct agency called Ogilvy, when I interviewed writers, I'd tell them, "we were in the translation business. We take things people don't understand and understand-ize them."

About 75% of my current book of business comes from financial companies or technology companies. 

They:
1. Don't know what they do.
2. Can't explain it.
3. Can't say why they're better.
4. Get scared when you ask them--angry even.

I recently had to buy a streaming service. There was no way to evaluate them other than price. No one did anything different, told you anything different, or said anything different.

I'd be damned if anyone anywhere knows the difference between one pubicintercom agency and the next, much less the difference between this award-winning credit glommer and that. Much less this agency that formerly stood for something and that. 

When they're all the same, you buy the cheapest. Cheapest means what they do sucks. And eventually to get you back they have to re-cheaper. Eventually their margins are thinner even than they're ethics and they're out of business.

The same, sadly, has happened to politics. There's no humans. Just regurgitating focus-group tested sloganeering wrapped in a thick paste of meaninglessness. So we buy the emptiness who's the best liar and promises the lowest taxes, not worrying about the debt bill that's well-over due and the collapse of everything government is supposed to help with like health, schools, roads, clean air, defense and access to progress.

There's not an iota of difference (or morality) in anything or anyone, so we vote for the protoplasm we'd most like to 'have a beer with,' though the only ones politicians have beers with are $12,000,000 lobbyists or felons begging for pardons with million dollar checks in tow.

The way around this is to stand for something.
To say something different and back it up with an actual difference.
Different gets more business.
Different can charge more.
Different is liked.

That's the difference.