E Pluribus Grift.

Two things happened yesterday or the day before that not too terribly long ago would have had a profound impact on my life.

First WPP, the holding company that's shed more than half its people over the last ten years, has just announced yet another round of "restructuring."

It's hard for me, a guy who shuns euphemisms and prefers honest language, to accept a world that's allowed the word "restructuring" to usurp in meaning the word "fired." 

I'll admit I'm old fashioned. But I like language that uses words people understand in order to communicate. As I read once in the Economist, "words you can stub your toe on." 

I remember years ago reading a novel which was set in upper-crust salons in Victorian England. Somehow someone offends someone else, remarking on her "sizable obliquity." 150 years ago that's how posh people said, "she has a fat ass." IMHO "communication companies" like WPP should try to trade in clarity and truth, not subterfuge and circumlocution. Obliquity, my ass.

In other words, since the currency of effective communication is truth, we should, now and again try telling it. Speaking of truth, my supposition is that WPP gave Ad Age false data about how many people they've fired over the last 20 years or so. The data from "company disclosures" is very different from the data you can find if you do two minutes of research. I wouldn't expect such diligence from the trade press--by all appearances the trade press is bought and paid for. Their reporting is Shakespearean in that it's, "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

The second news item on my idiosyncratic radar was the nearly 24% drop in the share price of IBM, my client for more than a dozen years, in just one day.

Here again, there's some semantic bushwa happening, and in the feckless spirit of our modern age, no one is called out on their bald-faced prevarications. 

When your share price drops 23.93% in a single day, you shouldn't be able to get away with saying your company "faltered." That's like abruptly driving your car into an outdoor cafe and killing twelve. You can't say, "my steering faltered." 

That's not faltering. 
That's disaster.

Likewise when you've missed projections by seven-hundred-million dollars that's not from "not anticipating the magnitude of the capex reprioritization." In the parlance of pre-Jalen Brunson Knick basketball, "that's stinking up the court."

$17,900,000,000
- 17,200,000,000
       700,000,000 

Believe it or not, though, this isn't a post about either WPP or IBM.

It's a post about using language to lie, to confuse, to mislead.

It's a post about the press, and readers like you and me, not being outraged when we're being lied to. Not questioning, not noticing, not looking for the nearest pitchfork. Or Molotov.

It's also a post about what happens to once great companies when no one any longer (including the people who work for those companies) knows what they sell or what makes them different or better.

Here is a screen shot of IBM's homepage. 

1. I have no idea what that means (and I'm pretty smart about technology) and
2. I would have hard time having confidence in you when you've lost 23% of your value in a single day.

3. Your company has lost $69,000,000,000 in market cap since the start of the year, please don't talk about modernization--you might disappear in a quaint old-fashioned way. (Maybe this message isn't getting 'traction.')

Here's WPP's homepage:

1. It's hard to call yourself a trusted growth partner when you've shed 51% of your work force and lost 87% of your market cap and killed many of the brands you bought and brought into your holding company.
2. If you have to say you're trusted, you're not.

--

Some months ago I got called by a jerk asking me if I would pitch a vodka brand being developed by a fourth-tier 72-year-old Hollywood "star" and his 29-year-old creative director/wife.

Around that time I started hearing about a start-up whiskey brand called 'Uncle Nearest.' They had produced an "origin story" video that could make you weep. I would be proud to produce work like Uncle Nearest did. 

GUY 1: Every layer has been so genuinely good and interesting and fascinating, that our main job here was to not screw it up.

GUY 2: This is something important and this is something that's gonna last. This is something that's going to be beyond us.

And then.

It's not unreasonable to conclude, when a country elects two times a six-time bankrupt, a convicted defrauder and a con-man as president, allows its political class to engage in insider trading, and permits the super-wealthy to "donate" hundreds of millions in "campaign funds" to candidates all while letting them not pay taxes, maybe all of amerikkka is just one big grift.

From agencies to agentic to alcohol.

On a lighter note, may I suggest this as a replacement for our National Anthem.

Hummable.