Ad Aged: Methusalah Speaks.

This is going to sound like I'm one-hundred years old.

To be fair, I practically am.

But in any event, when I started in the business--and going back 25 years before that because my father was in the business, agencies used to be classy places.

Their offices used to be beautifully designed, sometimes by famous architects. Their decor. Their stationery. Their furniture. Right down to their memo pads and pencils.

These things were regarded as important signs of an agency's taste and even success. Like a salesman wouldn't be seen driving a 1992 Oldsmobile to a client's office, or wear a cheap, ill-fitting suit, no agency dared present itself to the world looking like a beige file cabinet shrouded with carpet tiles.

We sold substance.

We also sold appearance as well.

However, as the agency business became more and more fixated on the ephemera of design--decoration without meaning--their appearance has grown more and more debased. When I was shit-canned at Ogilvy, the office looked like Port Authority albeit with better copiers and worse wireless.

Some years ago I read something I thought was smart about dating sites. Rather than fill out a profile--which I'm told often include exaggerations and half-truths--people should instead upload pictures of their bookshelves and the inside of their refrigerators. Those locales might provide a better barometer of a person's character than what can be gleaned from a self-reported questionnaire.

Today office "design" is nothing more than providing a backdrop for instagram.

(According to the Wall Street Journal, instagram’s recommendation systems
guide users to networks selling child sexual abuse material.)

As an industry, we're ok with that.

Today, outside of a trophy case which is often filled with "pay-to-play" award-gaming, with trophies for ads that never ran, or other sort of entry-jockeying-legerdemain, there's really no way to measure an viability of an agency.

Reading agency about sections is like diving head-long into an Orwellian swimming-pool filled with offal and feces--you know, tump's reflecting pool. To make matters worse, suppose you're up to your neck in shit, and someone starts throwing baseballs at you. What do you do, duck?

Today, of course, as I wrap up my blogging week's tour of GeorgeCo's physical space, it occurs to me that for about 99.978-percent of all agencies today--at least the agencies I've visited since the business was desiccated, diced, minced and otherwise sullied by accountants and consultants and investors (they were buying cash-flow)--no agency anymore has a "decor."

They might have a logo.
They might have a set of colors.
They might even have a well-groomed corner where they take photos of executives on the precipice of some press-release pontifications, but they have no physicality.
Nothing that shows a care for their employees, their craft, or their own brand. There's no place someone can be alone, take a moment, put their feet up, spread out.
Nothing shows love of their work, their clients, their people, their lives. That ain't good, or natural.

I saw this first when office name plates went from embossed, or etched, or raised-lettering affairs to a xerox of your name on a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve. We went from a sense of belonging to a crumple-up-the-hammermill disposability.

At GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I refuse to give in to today's current culture of mean impermanence. How can you make ideas, platforms, words and images that are meant to define a company for years if not decades if you're surrounded by flimsy ephemera that won't last past tomorrow's trash pick-up?

In many ways we are products of our environment. An environment without taste, depth, caring, kindness, reflection, comfort and quiet, is doomed to produce work lacking in those qualities as well.

Care in = Care Out, in other words.

My friend Brian Collins, of Collins fame, has an office with nearly 6000 books. His office's library seems a sanctuary that encourages, stimulates, inspires.

Brian's office has two books for every one of mine. But of course, books ain't a number's game. It's a game about having what it takes, in the words of pre-subsumed Chiat\Day to "think different." It's a world where smart people (and Brian is among the smartest) find ways to make themselves uncomfortable when they're complacent, and comfortable when they're anxious.

Most of us know when we need a smack in the noggin and when we need an arm around the shoulder. We know the movies, the music, the pictures, the people, the places, the phonecalls, the dawdling we need to engage with so our physical space is no longer a place to be, but turns into a place to be better.

My office is not neat. It never will be. But my lack of neatness leads to the meander of looking for things you don't quite know the location of. Looking and stumbling upon something you weren't looking for is often where unexpected ideas come from. This picture here is of the over one-thousand movies I own, if I'm looking for X, sometimes I've found you're better off landing on Y.

You might, if you look with some perspicacity, notice on my shelves some small statues of Greek goddesses. That's Athena holding the owl--the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom. That's Artemis, with the deer. Always hunting, always fighting. There are Toby Mugs, too. Which I don't officially collect, but I love.

You'll find Laurel and Hardy, who as much as Groucho, have made me laugh for 65 years--and still make me laugh today. No one I know could write, "I was dreaming I was awake--then I woke up and found myself asleep." If you ever need reminding that to have impact, you need a twist, Laurel and Hardy can give you the heart you need to win laurels.

There's Winston Churchill, too. To me the granite example of courage, of never giving up and of the power of a few choice words. His WWII oratory was every bit as uplifting as Shakespeare's "St. Crispin's Day" speech. He reminds me to work my ass off to make it better.

Then, you might find a pirate or two. Pirates. People who broke all the rules to create a better world for themselves. Again, think Chiat\Day. And a masked man I think of as my own personal Scaramouch: A man, who in Rafael Sabatini's words, "was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

Like Scaramouch, that, not mammon, was my patrimony.
And I'm blessed for that.