Ad Aged: A Milling Cove.

For whatever reason, maybe it was the fourteen-days of day-rate (reduced) I just got from [large agency], the phrase "milling cove," popped into my head last night and I couldn't quite get it out.

Of course, I did the usual searches on Google, and got nowhere fast. Thought I did find an article on Mousley Hurst, the long-ago center of English pugilism, pre-Marquis of Queensbury, and of one Samuel Elias, the English bare-knuckle champeen in the late 18th century. Champeen is how you pronounce champion in da Bronx and the adjacent city, Yonkers, where I was born back when Pterodactyls competed with DC9s for air space.)

Dutch Sam, AKA Samuel Elias, a Milling Cove.
Dutch was known as his era's hardest-hitter and earned the
mellifluous moniker, "The Man with the Iron Hand."

Before long I switched to an AI search engine, Perplexity, and I found this piece from just a week under 75 years ago, September 22, 1951, by one of my favorite writers, A.J. Liebling:

Every-once-in-a-while, you read something by a writer you admire that can restore your faith in humanity and people who care about the words they choose, and the stories they tell.

My friend Debra Fried just sent me her latest Riff from her Substack, 'Ruffle' and, frankly, I had to put my computer down after her first paragraph. It was one of those passages that made me mumble aloud, 'well, fukaduk,' and feel wholly unworthy of my keyboard.

She begins:

Wow.

Debra and I are friends, both copywriters and around the same age. Though we've never spoken about it, our competitiveness sneaks out sometimes. It prances about our crania like some version of Terpsichore showing off, and then it hides so as not to derail our friendship.

There's been so much in the news lately about AI coming for all of humanity and on the cusp of destroying or enslaving all of us. (It's funny how private equity and tech bros assign blame for their bad actions to the technologies they create, gin-up and finance. It's never andreeson, horowitz that needs restraining--it's AI that's to blame for AI, not the carom-ing balls they set into motion.)

For all that hype about the last ding-dong of doom, it's worth thinking about all the small crafty things that have not been killed by supplanting technology. Podcasting for instance is basically old-timey radio. It is more vibrant than radio has been for more than 80 years. People still like beautiful hand-made clothing, furniture and wall-coverings. Even a wretch like me is

dying to wear this human-hand-stitched suit next time I wear a suit. I don't think a machine can do most good things. Most good things take humanity.

Of all the many and tremendously wise "Ogilvy-isms" I've learned and absorbed through the years, I think the one that's most important is the one that's most ignored. [I'm de-genderizing it lest I get excoriated for being part of the "patriarchy."]

The consumer isn't a moron; they are your significant other.

In other words, and to be Talmudic about it (another set of rules no one knows or anymore follows) treat others--even in your ads--as you yourself want to be treated.

That's so goldenly-obvious and so rare. Disappeared even.

As the ad industry flees humanity (and humanity flees the ad industry) nearly every bit of writing treats viewers like they're idiots. Jokes are tired, insulting, dumb. Over-blown-ness is everywhere. And more generally, slap-dash thinking that's a slap in the face of everyone who thinks.

Whether you call it crap, hack or slop, we can blame it on algorithms and machinery. But it's us that lets it happen and it's us that says that it's good enough to pay for and represent the brands that pay us. It's us that posits people aren't worth real work and that AI-made drivel is enough to answer the bell.

You need only read closed-captions to see how little care is expressed in accuracy and verity of the captioning. You need only to look at one seven-minute video with two or three commercial breaks that happen anywhere, even in the middle of a scene or a word to see how little our industry cares about either the viewer or what they're watching. That's a human decision, expedited by machinery. That's an imperious choice we have made.

Headlines like this abound. They make Slip Mahoney look like Nöel Coward.

I've never had a job with a degree.

The Milling Coveness I began this post with was from feeling pummeled and punished by people and a system that wouldn't know Shakespeare from the shipping news. Fourteen days of that left me feeling like I was laboring at the wrong end of a shooting gallery.

Bang!

That said, it led me to the A.J. Liebling I mentioned above. It led me to a couple emails with friends. It lead me to being more determined than ever to hold-fast to who I am, what I believe and what I do. What I may do better than anyone else.

It also led me to these sentences and paragraphs. [CAUTION: Liebling uses language that means I have to write a trigger-warning. He calls Black people 'colored' or 'Negro.' Such was the practice of the times. O tempora, O mores! as Cicero exclaimed. Oh the times, Oh the customs.]

All that said, it makes me feel like less of a milling cove to see work and people who treat work and people with a soupçon of respect and dignity. I feel less like I was knocked off my feet and left to die, lying prostrate on the filthy canvas that is life.

By the way, if you apply a little elbow grease I'm sure, even if you don't subscribe to the New Yorker, you can find the entire article online. Or you can buy Liebling's great book, "The Sweet Science," on abebooks.com for $6.52, not including tax and shipping. One of my two copies sits to my left right now, not five feet away from my good shoulder.

The problem with that is that my good shoulder hurts worse than my bad shoulder.