Part the Eighth of Twelve.

Back during my first stint at Ogilvy, basically before I knew which of the urinals in the men's room didn't squirt water when you flushed it, I was dragooned by then president Steve Hayden to rescue a dot com account that had been all-but "cooled" to death.

1999 was a more naive era. Many people, especially ad people, believed you could shoot gerbils out of a cannon in a commercial on national TV, and that would get you a billion-dollar valuation. 

Today, we are so much wiser, richer and more experienced. Now, all you have to do to win a trillion dollar valuation is lose $80,000,000,000 in half a year. Then, you can cash in like the founders of anthropic or some other 'I'm-not-sure-what-they-do-or-why-it-matters.'

In any event, I was grabbed by Hayden and locked in my nearly-padded office writing scripts twelve hours a day for a weekend for a now defunct dot com, which was riding high at the time, called PeoplePC.

(I still have 6000 shares of their stock. Which is worth as much as a tranche of hegseth-futures.)

The next thing I knew, I had sold a package of scripts and was sitting in a white van with Hayden and my art-director Susan Westre (whom at that point I had never even met) at 7AM one cold morning on our way to location in a small town called Bridge Mix, New Jersey.

I had nothing to do with the previous round of commercials, but you can be sure they followed the universal strategy that every creative team and agency has followed for about the last thirty years. We don't have to tell people what a product does, what makes it different, why someone might need it, we only have to tell people it's cool. This spot below has, since last century, been the universal default commercial for every product--no matter what it does or who the potential target is.

In any event we were out in Jersey shooting a bunch of spots and the dweeb of a client approached Steve Hayden. He was happy with how the shoot was going and happy with the spots.

"It looks like we have a hit on our hands," he blow-harded.

Steve nodded as if he had been listening.

The client continued, "Too bad the first round was such a disaster."

Steve took a step back and, quietly, said "If the first round hadn't been a disaster, we wouldn't be here."

That's the sort of thing you remember for thirty years. And think about every thirty minutes for thirty years.

Which brings me to the point of the eighth of my Humanments: Thou Shalt Get Lost.

Not get lost as I so often hear it, as "go fug yourself," but get lost as in take a risk. Meander. Let your mind wander. Take the longest distance between two points. Think different and differently.

You can read about the institutionalized lack of getting lost in today's world in a dense book I'd recommend called, "Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation," by Bryne Hobart and Tobias Huber. 

You can buy it here, buy a machete here to cut your way through it, and read The Wall Street Journal review here. 

Boom is the kind of book, BTW, that people in agencies used to read when agencies existed to direct and steward clients' business, not just execute generic commoditized advertising. It's a brand-leadership book--not a mere marketing book. If people running agencies and holding companies still read, I'd call it a "must read." As it stands today and the fact that there's no influencer involved in it, it's a "must ignore." (That is, something not fed to you and everyone else by the reign of 'one algorithm fits all.')

The thesis of "Boom" is simple. 

In other words, all the agile-firsting, AI-tool-enabled, utilization-optimizing, six-sigma-black-belting, timesheet haranguing, briefing-by-eleven-first-tissue-by-three-ing, sprinting, brain-storming, efficiency-shibbolething, horse-hockeying nonsense is just that, nonsense.

More great work was done by people throwing pencils at the ceiling and kibbitz-thinking than all the algorithmic bushwa that the trillion-dollar-valuation sham-companies are spending trillions on forcing us to believe.

Why would anyone buy 'creative' from a company

that puts their name on something like this?

A. Says who?
B. I dunno, 'Think Different,' and 'Just Do It' are decades old and still relevant.
Not to mention Shakesepeare or the Bible. 
C. How has A.I. helped anyone in real-life?

I'd rather have six people from my personal ad group-chat take two hours and solve a brand issue than have AI do it. What's more, it would be funnier, more memorable, faster and cheaper. And we'd eat better, too. Pass the lo mein.

More and more we are following orders--the protocols edicted by McKinsey-inspired holding-company technocrats--telling us how to do things that they've never done and never will.

I'd rather get lost.

Good and lost.

And then come back with something I may get fired for.

Hopefully something that doesn't test well.

As opposed to that Miracle Whip spot. 

Which tested well above Norms.

Norm. Singular.