O Tempore! O Mores!

A friend of mine, though she's even older than I am, is still ensconced in the holding-company miasma of what hasn't been bled dry of what had been the ad industry. Not that many years ago, the ad industry had glamor, a modicum of prestige and was considered a good way to make a living.

That "remember-when" is about as antiquated and archaic as the notion of justice in amerika. When the income of an entire holding company is, say, 10X, and just five or ten chieftains take 5X for themselves, it doesn't matter how many awards the holding company buys, how agile they are, how data-bricked their AI or how borderless their creativity. The ship of state has been torpedoed by the plutocrat class and there are life boats for no one but them.

This friend is a veteran freelancer.

Very much in demand.

And after six months or twelve or eighteen at one holding company, though she's learned the business she's on and built important relationships with clients, they have to let her go. 

They don't offer her a full time job--even though they need her. In the holding company schema, it's better to give less-good work to clients, and endanger their hold on an account than it is to have an FTE on their books. The money people don't like FTEs, especially FTEs who are creative--and they can't understand creative, so why pay.

Besides, they don't want to give benefits or pay for healthcare. (My guess is that much of this is illegal. But since crimes by big against small are no longer punished, illegal doesn't much matter.)

In any event, my friend called me the other day, she just switched from a running-out-of-time holding company job to another, soon-to-be-running-out-of-time holding company job and she therefore has to be set up with a new Mac.

Getting a new Mac when there were tech people working at the agency that paid you used to be a simple affair. No more. Now tech help is consolidated. That's a modern way of saying sent somewhere where you can't reach anyone and no one is accountable and there's no one to complain to if the job isn't done well.

My friend's Mac arrives a week after she's started working, and the "streamlined" and "consolidated" and "newly-efficient" systems that are more streamlined, consolidated and newly-newly efficient thanks to the recent subsuming of IPG by OMC, but after a week, a Mac arrives, but no email as yet and she has to call the Philippines to get an appointment with a tech-person somewhere to set up her computer.

"Help Desk" is an overpromise. Like "good ad."

It takes a good twenty-minutes of holding for the "support" person in the Philippines to pick up the phone and another ten minutes for her to understand an alien-sounding Anglo-ish name. My friend claims she was patient and finally she's offered an appointment time on Monday, May 24th, because the person making the appointments in the Philippines doesn't understand that you can't get emails, get invited to meetings, download docs if you aren't on the network, but they can't get you on the network for a good ten days, because of the consolidated and streamlined efficiency that comes from their consolidated and streamlined efficient subsumation of fifteen billion dollars of agencies.

There's no immediacy in any of this. No one really gives a shit. In fact I'd imagine holding company agencies earn more money for not doing work than they do for doing it. 

The whole of the last fifteen years of amerikkkan business has been about buying and selling businesses to other businesses for the benefit of a few rarefied shareholders. Employees and customers be damned. The only thing that matters, really, is that you have another 100,000 people reporting to you and if from each one you get a dollar a day, you're ok, that way you've earned your $25,000,000 per annum.

No one on the client side ever questions the dumb and monopolistic practices of their agencies. They realize, or they're don't question, that they have no choice, and advertising doesn't really work or matter anyway, so things will continue this way till the whole thing expires like an alewife in Lake Erie, unable to get the oxygen it needs to survive and laying bleached by the sun amid old beer cans, used condoms and cigarette butts belly-up and stinking.

Madison Avenue in its consolidated and efficiencized and holding-ized permutation is a dying alewife. There ain't enough oxygen to keep anything alive but one-celled species like cost-accounters, technocrats and holding company doyens. The creatures that used to keep the eco-system healthy are extinct or nearly so.

Every once in a while, someone might spot one such being somewhere, but it too will suffer before long. No one will hear of its death.

There will be no one to write the story.

They'll be waiting for IT to give them and their computer "permissions."

But there are no more permissions.