Dumbbell.

Years ago, I made a career move that was about 97% dumb, but I wound up learning a lot from it.

I had joined Digitas, which was independent at the time, thinking it was an ad agency, not a ersatz consultancy like a Bain, McKinsey or Accenture. I thought it was an agency that did shitty work. Improving work is a challenge I was up for. What I couldn't handle was staring down 109 Harvard MBAs who knew everything about marketing and advertising though they had never actually done any.

I quickly learned something--this is 22 years ago--that has been more relevant since I quit Digitas in 2005. I learned that in many places whatever it management cannot do or cannot understand, they find a way to say those things they can't are not important.

If you owned a fleet of cars and a dusty parking lot and no hose, you'd formulate data that demonstrates that having a shiny car is dumb. That keeping a car sparkling is a waste of time and money. If you owned a sailing ship and had no access to vitamin C, you'd probably find data to suggest scurvy will overtime strengthen the fleet and the bloodlines.

Management consultants, to be blunt, don't understand creatives or creativity. So they've constructed huge ratiocinations to deny their importance and the need for creativity.

According to WPP's Annual Report of 2017, WPP had 203,000 employees. In WPP's Annual Report of 2025, released a week ago, WPP had 99,000 employees.

The corporate headshots who have presided over the halving of the workforce and a nearly 85% loss of market-valuation, of course are the only ones who know how to turn the ship around. 

Here's a small sampling of quotations about their business and the services WPP provides from the 2025 annual report.

I've spent my entire life in the ad industry, as have many of my friends. None of the quotations selected here has even the vaguest connection to what was my chosen profession. To be clear, I don't even know what most of them means. 

In fact, it all reminds me of Richard Feynman's academic writing on Quantum mechanics, which I also can't even pretend to understand.

“Quantum mechanics” is the description of the behavior of matter and light in all its details and, in particular, of the happenings on an atomic scale. Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen.

Newton thought that light was made up of particles, but then it was discovered that it behaves like a wave. Later, however (in the beginning of the twentieth century), it was found that light did indeed sometimes behave like a particle. Historically, the electron, for example, was thought to behave like a particle, and then it was found that in many respects it behaved like a wave. So it really behaves like neither. Now we have given up. We say: “It is like neither.”

If that's clear to you, you might be qualified to write some BOGO ads for Applebee's "Cheesestravaganza."

The clip from above that really rubbed me the wrong was was the last one I chose, one portion of it in particular: "our role will become more...important, as marketing continues to evolve and becomes more fragmented and complex."

Here's a metaphor.

The scientists currently running the ad business seem to think they will reach effectiveness Valhalla if they can count all the stars in the sky, all the sand in the sea and all the pockmarks on trump's keister. They spend their billions trying to find ways to sift through massive amounts of data with great efficiency. They never for a second say, the alternative to complexity is not a better accounting mechanism, but is more focus, more clarity, more definition.

They look to nuance and slice and mince and dice to find the precise moment to sell synthetic motor oil to blind non-drivers using left handed stick-shifts in 1922 Dusenbergs. They never say that granularity--is the enemy, not the answer.

What so many in advertising and in technology fail to reckon with is the enormous complexity of the human brain. Attempts to "recreate" thinking or "synthesize" it have been around since the beginning of time. It's one of those play-god-like things humans hubris over. They seldom say, "this is beyond us." 

According to Matthew Cobb, the human brain, has 90 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses and its billions of glia (these figures are all guesstimates), so the idea of mapping it to the synapse level will not become a reality until the far distant future. Yet we believe we can predict behaviors and create stimulus to guide those behaviors.

Cobb says “systems can involve astonishing degrees of complexity. For example, in the body wall of a maggot there are cells that respond as the maggot stretches when it moves, forming part of a circuit that controls movement. Each of these cells has eighteen input synapses and fifty-three output synapses; most if not all of these synapses can involve more than one neurotransmitter.  All that just to tell a maggot muscle movement circuit–not even its brain–that its skin has stretched. Researchers have recently described a single inhibitory neuron in a region called the visual thalamus of the mouse–it has 862 input synapses and 626 output synapses. What exactly the cell does is not clear, beyond the fact that it is involved in many different functions. The complexity of the nervous system–any nervous system–is simply astonishing.”

You really believe data based on a poorly written survey will get me to produce "strategic, imaginative work that will drive client growth."

Most things closest to the cores of our souls we can sum up in three or four words.

We should Love thy neighbor.
Care for our children.
Clean up our messes.
Lend a hand.
Chew our food.
Rotate our tires.
Don't over-eat.
Don't drink and drive.

Most brands, the ones we carry with us used to do the same.

The ultimate driving machine.
Soup is good food.
Kills germs on contact.
The quicker-picker-upper.
Have it your way.

If you can't write things like that--which holding company management can't--you convolute ways of saying that way of communicating or thinking no longer matters.

You make something up, that only you understand.

Thoughts from Don McKinney.