Bubble Babble.

I remember reading Jerry Della Femina's great book on advertising, the one with the title you couldn't use today, "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought you Pearl Harbor, Front Line Dispatches from the Advertising War." It told a story of how he and his partners, after just opening their agency hadn't attracted a single client.

Sixty years ago when Jerry opened his agency, you needed a lot more capital than I did when I opened GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company six-and-a-half years ago. I had no overhead save a Mac, an internet connection, my huge network of people I've worked with in the past and my compendious experience. Della Femina needed a physical office--well-decorated (people cared in those days), he needed staff, a Xerox machine, phone systems, magic markers, pads, typewriters and more.

In any event the story goes that after six months in business Della Femina et al hadn't attracted a single client. They were down to their last $5000 (say $50,000 today) and despondent. Instead of closing up doors and getting another job (there were jobs in those days) Della Femina et al decided to throw the most lavish Christmas party Madison Avenue had ever seen and invite what was then a considerable contingent of trade-press.

Though they were failing, they decided to exude the idea that they were wildly successful. They were attractive, cool, fun and glam.

To hear Jerry tell it, it worked. In short order Della Femina et al was a hot agency. (By the time I met Jerry, he had sold his agency so many times, he wasn't even allowed to use his name anymore. His last agency, if I remember right was called something like Jerry and Friends.)

In any event, Jerry's tactic of 'fake it to you make' it is nothing new. Spiffy restaurants hire models to sit at tables near the plate glass. They hire "extras" to wait on line to get it. There are rumors that political parties do the same with paid shills at rallies and protests. The illusion of success often generates real success. 

There's nothing wrong with selling the sizzle not the steak. But sooner or later you have to put meat on the plate.

Just yesterday, I read this opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal. It was written by someone whose writing we might want to think about.

It's rare to see an article in the Journal that questions the hype around run-away market success. But this one does, claiming that the giant AI companies are doing a bit of what Della Femina did back in 1970. Selling an illusion, not a reality.

The first few paragraphs here make me wonder. For years--since I worked on IBM Watson in 2014, I've been suspicious of the real-world utility of artificial intelligence. I've seen the cost-savings. I haven't seen the value of the work it purportedly does. It seems to me like an electric car that has a one-thousand mile range when it's parked. Maybe that's why so many AI companies are paying people to use it.

Two more bits that might, if you're part of the reality-based community, give you pause.

Back to my domain for a moment. Back to advertising.

For about the last year, the "word" on the street (not verified but probably more valid than the mere boosterism and PR-regurgitation of today's trade-press) is that the one advertising holding company that doesn't look like the advertising equivalent of Spirit Air, Publicis, gives its creative away to clients and compensates by charging for media. 

WPP, whose market cap in ten-years has free-falled from $32,000,000,000 to about 3,200,000,000 (missing zeroes add up) and who have gone from 203,000 employees in 2017 to just over 90,000 today appears to be doing the same. They'll do anything, it seems, to make it seem that they are still in business.

All of the above, of course, is scurrilous on my part. As Pozen's op-ed is scurrilous on his. 

I know nothing about the inner workings and finances of any of the companies mentioned. I may well be completely wrong.

But I do know that paying people to "like" you is not a long-term strategy. 

In this famous ad from DDB back around 1970, there's a line toward the end of the copy that we might want to think about.

No donkey chases the carrot forever. He catches on. And quits.

That's the lesson to remember.

Unless we do, we die.

Ouch.

Saturday was one of those days people with incipient arthritis dread. 

I have the ailment in my lower back, my right hip and my left shoulder. There are days when it hides like a guerrilla fighter. There are days like Saturday, cold and raw--what Melville called "a damp drizzly November in my soul," when the disease is like the Cong during the Tet Offensive. No mercy. No turning the other cheek. And no prisoners taken.

On top of the aches listed above, my "good" shoulder, my right, has a torn rotator cuff. While I have rehabbed it to the point of tolerability, on bad days it is not so good. Sometimes it locks and I wonder if I'll be able to move it at all, or if I'll spend the rest of my days 'hailing a cab.'

Saturday I was also visited by my elder daughter S, her husband R, her Boston Terrier, T, and my two grandsons, J, 3.5 years old and Ri, 1 year old.

For whatever reason and without complaint, when I'm with my grandsons, I am the Santa float in the Macy's parade. They know a soft touch when they see one. 

And they can't get enough of me.

There are electrons in nuclear molecules that, on Saturday were up and down and in and out and spinning around less than I.

When my aches of time and tide finally started over-taking me about five years ago, I concocted a fantasy. I would check myself into the Mayo Clinic out in Rochester, Minnesota, a town I visited once because IBM had a server factory out there.

The Mayo Clinic. Home of the TBR.

The Eero Saarinen-designed IBM factory.

I would check in and demand and operation I made up. A TBR.

I told my wife, who barely tolerates me, I am going to the Mayo Clinic for a TBR.

L looked at me dripping like a carwash not with suds but with disdain.

"A TBR?" she humored.

"A Total Bone Replacement. They tie a string to your toe bone and the other end to a door. Then they slam fast the door and your bones come out at if you're a well-cooked haddock in the hands of a skilled maitre d'.

"Then they replace the aching bones with uncooked pasta."

Last night, as I so often do, I lay in bed and took a quick 12-point inventory of my corpus. 

1, 2: Ankles. Pain.
3, 4: Knees. Pain.
5, 6: Hips. Pain.
7: Lower back. Pain.
8, 9: Wrists. Pain.
10, 11: Shoulders. Pain.
12: Neck. Pain.

If I were an Oldsmobile I would have failed inspection and badly.

The author in automotive guise.

For a moment, from sea-side Connecticut, I was transported 3,000 miles and 51 years to Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico. 

I am laying in my single bed, alone. Sisto is out somewhere. The A/C was taking the summer off and the ceiling fan mocked me with its languor. It spun as slowly as time passes when you're waiting for a local train in a piss scented subway station.

We had played, in 92-degree heat, 12 games in nine-nights. Two games extra innings. Traveling by bus on long rides when we should have been in feather beds. Eating street enchiladas and churros instead of food.

12 games. 114 innings. 

Grounders in your groin and Adam's apple. Your left elbow hit by a pitch. Twice a ball fouled into your front foot. An abdominal muscle strained. A shoulder thrown out trying to throw someone out. Putative dysentery.

I have felt pain in my time.

Who hasn't.

Life is sweat and pain and tears and more sweat and pain and tear.

You lay awake.

You aspirin.

You turn and change positions and hope there's relief in something new but there never is.

The ceiling fan spins like Tycho Brahe's planets mocking the pre-destined fate on an old fat man with more ambition to play with his grand kids than common sense.

There no hope but this:

TBR.

To go with TSR.

Total soul replacement.