Simpler.

Many years ago--through 1993--I worked, indirectly at least, for Hall of Fame art director Mike Tesch. I say indirectly, because Ally, where Mike was ECD (when that was the highest creative title) was a well-run agency. If you were a Senior Vice President, Creative Group Head, you ran your business with your account guy. You hired the people you needed. Got rid of the people you didn't and approved or killed ads as you deemed appropriate.

There wasn't a lot of meddling, so long as the work was good. That gave people a necessary sense of autonomy and kept back-biting and turfwars to a minimum.

So, while Tesch was looming in the background, I had little to do with him. Ed Butler and Mike Withers approved my work, and that was fine. Once, it must have been a summer Friday, Ed and Mike were out for the day. An account person came running down to my office fairly breathless. 

"The client just called. They need an ad this afternoon to run in the Times for Monday morning."

"But Mike and Ed are out," I stammered.

"You do it," the account guy said, making scarce for the 2:18 to Scarsdale. "Get Tesch to approve it."

I quickly wrote an ad--a headline with copy and I doped out a rough comp and trembled my way to Tesch's almost pitch black corner office.  I explained the crisis in about three words--and leggo the work I had done when he brusquely grabbed for the paper I was sweating over.

"OK," he said. And he went to work.

In about two minutes he had found me and handed me a comp. I was to sell it to the client. About an hour later the client approved it and Tesch sent it out for type and got the studio work going so the ad could plate over-the-weekend for the Monday Times.

I remember reading something about Tesch around the time in some awards magazine. It might have been on the occasion of Tesch's entry into some advertising Hall of Fame or another. The sentence read something like, "Mike believed there was no marketing problem that can't be solved by a great commercial."

Certainly, if you look at the best of Tesch's work you can see why he was a true believer.

Today, of course, no one believes statements with the sort of simplicity and directness of Tesch's belief above. 

Below is a bit from an article from The Athletic, the New York Times' really crappy sports pages.

I don't one-hundred percent know what all of the above means. I know a good pitcher and a good catcher will move the ball in and out, up and down, fast and slow. Every at bat, real or metaphorical, is a cat and mouse game with the batter. And the best way to win that game within a game is to mix things up so the batter is almost always guessing.

From a batter's pov, we hear a lot today about bat speed, angle of approach, knowledge of the strike zone and so much science. When I was a boy, we heard about two things from our coaches. 

1. Hit the ball hard.

2. Hit 'em where they ain't.

I think we can find a trillion things to say about agency marketing ecosystems and what works and what doesn't work and why. You need spend no more than nine micro-seconds on LinkedIn to get enough marketing theory to choke a hippopotamus.

Just about every third person on LinkedIn has a mini-MBA from Mark Ritson, or some certification in agentic asphyxiation from the Seth Godin Institute of Chrome-Dome-itis.  In those places you learn how to derive 192 page decks that prove your eyeballs didn't bleed when you were forced to sit through a reading of the 192 page deck and the accompanying :30-second spot with seventeen different testable offer tags.

I suppose all this professional wankery is good for the economy. It employs thousands of people to do the work of about a dozen and then tell us why they work could be better if every decision that was validated by research yesterday is invalidated by new research from today.

I don't watch a helluva a lot of TV.

But when I do, I never see anything that stops me, that intrigues me, that interests me, that makes me a promise I'll remember until the next day.

Somehow we've made it so complicated it's all spinning down the drain and no one has the balls to say so. And say maybe complication has rendered it so.

I miss Mike.