This will be one of those posts that may be characterized as "oh-so-typically-george." I can practically hear the eyeballs of my myriad readers rolling so far back in their heads that they spin around like slot-machine eyes in one of those old cartoons I watched all-too much of when I was a kid. The particular example below has slot-machine eyes at :39 and avian cross-dressing throughout. TRIGGER WARNING: Not for MAGA followers, the talking Magpies switch genders willy-nilly.
This will be one of those "heady" ones or "wooly" ones where I take an observation from long human history and match it back somehow as guidance to our short, stupid business. This is where I look for the timeless in Bill Bernbach's guidance that advertising must be founded on "simple, timeless human truths."
I'm reading now "Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded and Built our World," by Patrick Wyman. You can order it here, if you don't mind spending money with non-tax-paying trillionaires. The Wall Street Journal, owned by other non-tax paying trillionaires said, "Lost Worlds convinces us of the value of slowing down to recognize the tremendous diversity of the human past. But he presses hard against the conclusion that there was any direction or pattern behind its complexity."
In other words, as Kyle Harper's WSJ book review says (find it here) "Here is a version of history in which a strong sense of unintended consequences plays a leading part." No ancient civilization woke up one morning and said, "hey, let's stop foraging. Let's genetically modify plant-life, invent agriculture, societal hierarchy and income disparity." No, the grains, rices, and roots that led to modern agriculture and all that, happened mostly over thousands of years and mostly by mistake.
Even when small band of people A saw small band of people B prospering, there were no MBAs around to say, "hey, let's adopt best practices." Agriculture arose in every continent not too many years apart for millions of reasons other than best practices. Mostly trial and error.
That's a key point of Lost Worlds.
Another key point is, essentially, the sluggish changeability of our species. People hold onto the old ways and the old order for literally thousands of years after new ways and new orders have raised their hands.
If I had a dollar for every blow-hard in the ad business who declared something dead, or who proclaimed, 'that will change everything,' I'd be a rich biped now.
But the fact is, over time, in anthropology and certainly marketing, the world moves slowly. Most societies and certainly in marketing, most "targets," don't fit neatly into the schema of social-evolutionary progress.
People might flock to cronuts, or Crocs or the latest AI protocol or GLP-1 and it might look to the blinking-eye that everything is changing in a flash.
Anthropologists (not planners who call themselves 'cultural anthropologists) often engage in what's known as "long history." They look at the glaciers or human development not in moments but in millennia.
This is the kind of shit that's hard to sell a client on. It doesn't fit merrily into a powerpoint.
But the fundamental nature of humanity probably has changed very little over the last 20,000 years, 20,000 months, 20,000 minutes, or 20,000 seconds.
We still seek, foundationally the same things humans have always sought. Warmth. Food. Love. Community. A smile. A laugh. A reason why. An explanation for it all.
How we answer the "brief" of those Maslowian needs has changed. But the need for them hasn't.
Yet we'll go on hearing that people are post-this and post-that. That attention-spans are no more. That people are irrevocably different than they every were and such-and-such an app or such-and-such a set of ones and zeroes will rewire the wiring that helped our predecessors come down from trees, start making tools, hunting in groups and forming human connections.
Like I said above, this all is inchoate as fuck.
But I just spent a week in the California sun. And as Moby Dick once spouted, 'shit harpoons.'
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Bonus Anthropology Joke.
The restaurant here has a sign out front that says "Breakfast Served Anytime."
I went in yesterday and asked for my bacon and eggs served during the Renaissance.
