Get Reel.

A lot of people get on my ass because I don't imbibe in about 99.7-percent of what's currently on TV, or streaming or whatever. Neither do I listen to things on whatever's replaced radio. And frankly, I've listened to fewer than a dozen podcasts in my life, and nine of those dozen were interviews with me.

I can blame this in part on my parents.

And actually the best thing they ever did not raising me.

My father bought or stole and old Bell & Howell 16mm movie projector. He worked across the street from a store in Manhattan called Willoughby Peerless. They rented old movies that came in large rectangular cases closed with cotton straps that had two or three or four large reels which contained old movies. On celluloid. 

These we're movies of the old sort. Gangster movies with Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Bogart. Little guys like Jimmy Stewart versus giant malign forces like Claude Raines or Lionel Barrymore. Or Henry Fonda against rapacious capitalists. And so on.

The thing about the movies I realized when my wife had me watch the entirety of "The Sopranos."

After all those episodes, I noticed something. Something I didn't like. Something that rubbed my Old Testament view of the world the wrong way.

Everyone in the Sopranos is so complex, everyone is morally ambiguous. The bad guys are good, the good guys are bad. Right is wrong. Wrong is right. Choose your poison, whatever you do is compromised.

I don't like that world.

I like things a little more clear-cut, even if I am being dumb and simplistic.

I like my bad guys bad and my good guys good. Accepting moral compromise and ambiguity might be realistic and dramatic and great for a mini-series but in real life it confuses things that should be clear.

Rather than seeing the rapacious heads of holding companies who destroy agencies and the lives of thousands of people as un-alloyed evils, we buy their spiels. We believe in those people  ginning up worthless companies into billion-dollar Ponzis. We buy their stocks. We regard them as business leaders to be emulated and admired. 

All those nine-digit C-suiters who took companies that had employed 100,000 people and turned them into companies employing one-quarter that, while pocketing parachutes and private jets and payola are NOT good people. 

Don't morally ambiguous me. 

We've treated the rapist, philandering, non-tax-paying, seven-time-bankrupt, racist, misogynist, science-denying president in the same way. We cut him slack. Instead of treating him as human garbage.

For my rapidly depreciating two-cents, I'm tired of all the morally ambiguous horseshit.

There are bad people, period.

The quicker we acknowledge that they're stealing from us, that they're costing lives and destroying the very habitability of our planet, the better off we'll all be.

When the "weird sisters" in Shakespeare's "Macbeth" said "fair is foul and foul is fair," the incongruence represented a world turned upside-down, a world turned topsy-turvy.

It was the opposite of saying "it's ok to be fair and foul." There's an order in the world. There's fact. There's good. There's morals. There's standards. The opposite of all that is not something we should examine, they're things we should reject.

I don't care if my view is rigid and dated and doctrinaire. 

I don't see any good in a lot of things.

And I cut no slack for BS.

Not Easy.

A friend of mine just sent me a note. That's a screen shot of its contents, above.

Someone I don't know posted it on some social media site. He stole one of my ads, removed my logo and posted it as his own.

I run a lot of ads for GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. I might make making those ads look easy. But no matter how easy it looks, stealing someone else's work is much easier. Especially if you have no superego or sense of right and wrong.

Work, whether you're sweeping a floor, swinging a hammer or trying to succeed as a small ad agency is never easy. Even when the phone rings and the clients applaud and thank you and pay on time and give you referrals and repeat business, it's never easy.

It shouldn't be.

Nothing should be

Years ago I wrote a campaign for a technology that hardly got off my computer or within one-hundred yards of getting through the agency sphincter and to the client, who surely would have killed it anyway.

About a year after launching my client's first AI system, I had finally learned enough to know that though we had made good commercials, we had done a bad job. Yes, according to every metric and KPI known to marketing sciences, we had succeeded. But according to that which is never measured, that is actual impact, we had failed wretchedly.

I realized that while technology almost always promises in its marketing spiels an easier future, most technology is hard.

We had sold the AI I was working on as magic.

Instead, it was a lot of work.

So, I wrote a campaign that never made it off my Mac. "In praise of hard."

The metaphor I used was gold-mining.

You don't just start banging away with a pickaxe. Or blasting away with nitro-glycerine. You don't just find the nearest river, build a sluice, start panning and find nuggets the size of baseballs.

You scout.

You plan.

You provision.

You work.

From a societal point of view we don't seem to any longer extol the virtues of work. Or the fulfilling feeling that comes from exertion--both mental and physical. We like to believe, and we too often sell, the notion that everything is push-button easy.

Whether its buying a car, taking the kids to soccer practice, flying to a tropical location, checking into a hotel, or even making a call on your over-priced cellphone.

The phrase that pays these days is "frictionless."

Most of life is about as frictionless as a sandpaper enema. In advertising, there are never any traffic jams, there's never slovenly service, your room is always ready and your seat is always comfortable.

We are so often told about ease and convenience that we hardly ever realize that nothing anymore is easy or convenient. 

Years ago, I read a bitter essay by one of my favorite writers, Mark Harris. His novel "Bang the Drum Slowly," one of the finest ever written, had been passed over as a Book of the Month Club selection. Such a selection would have propelled Harris' career forward. You might even have heard of him. He might have become Oprahpopular.

The selection committee wrote to Harris. They told him that the book that beat his out was "easier to read." In other words, his was harder to read.

Hard today is a curse. 

It's like earning the epithet "he's hard to work with." Once you get that, your career is all-but over no matter how much your hardness might produce goodness.

Hard to read might just mean that there are ideas in your work that demand unraveling and thought. They might keep you up at night or vex you. 

They might make you put the book down and think.

That's hard.

So, in advertising and life, we gravitate toward easy answers, also (to my view) known as lies.

Easy answers, magic, miracles, alchemy--making gold out of dross--is how our industry (and our country) has ended up in the mess we're in.

Good advertising and good government is based on truth and hardwork.

We avoid both.

AI will do it. Or data. Or programmatic. Or diversity. Or borderless creativity. Or some other dopey concoction of sloganeering.

Very often when I get briefed I get one-hundred powerpoints and hours of incoherent misdirections. 

I can't really complain about that.

It's my job, not the brief's, not a planner's, not a client's to work hard and figure it out. The old TV detective Columbo didn't have a planner lay out all the evidence, draw conclusion and observe things for him. He did the leg work. The brain work. The frustrating-can't-sleep work.

Why do we think advertising should slice and dice thinking, hoping it all comes together, when nothing really ever has?

Columbo had to do it himself.

Just like good people in an profession have to.

No one moves the pen for you.

Or fires your synapses for you.

Or negotiates successfully the word you wanted rather than the word the lawyers wanted.

That's you.

You have to find your own threads, chase your own clues, bark up your own dark alleys, piss up innumerable ropes.

It's hard.

As it always has been.

As it always will be.

Especially for those who refuse to give up.

Karatydides.

I remember when I first read the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." I was twenty. In those days The New Yorker used to publish before the longer-form pieces in the regular magazine, brief capsules of reviews of plays, movies, concerts and gallery shows.

Many of these were written by Pauline Kael or James Agee. You could read worse.

I'd read these with some care. These were pre-VCR days, pre-cable even. And it took work and attention to learn about and see the classic movies that today you can just "stream," though no one does because they're considered old and we scorn anything in this country older than two years.

Especially me.

I read ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in a movie review I believe of "The Man Who Fell to Earth in The New Yorker.

I had no idea what it meant, and it took me a week to find its meaning. However, having made the effort to find it, I deemed it important, and never lost it.

It's funny how hard it was to find things out. 

It's funny how back in my youth knowledge didn't come from something like a vending machine like it does today. You couldn't, back then, just pull and handle and a small bag of unique thinking would be dispensed. You had to hunt and ask and red herring.

Desmond Morris, the great anthropologist, wrote a worthwhile book called "The Nature of Happiness." The embarrassing cover makes the book look like a Cialis ad. But if you can look past its aggressive stupidity, you'll find wisdom.

Morris believes, as do I, that happiness often comes, not from getting what you want, but from searching for it. The hunt, the forming a group, the assigning of roles, the physical chase and the capture, is generally when people are happiest. The searching very often surpasses the getting. The chase is often better than the capture.

As Galen of Pergamum said almost 2,000 years ago (he was clearly politically incorrect)  “post coitum omne animal triste est sive gallus et mulier." After sexual intercourse every animal is sad, except the rooster and the woman. Again, the chase is  better than the capture.

For twenty years I searched for a book by Joseph Mitchell, "My Ears Are Bent." He published it, just once, in 1938--and later somewhat disowned it. My wife finally found it from a bookseller occupying space below ground in Muncie, Indiana. There were old Carole Landis movie posters on the wall, like in Laird Crager's room in the 1941 noir "I Wake Up Screaming."

She paid a lot for the book (but did not pay $11,000 for it.)

I first read it on microfiche, deciding to spend the day in the main reading room of the New York Public Library.

Today, I fear the joy of the hunt is gone. 

Or not understood.

Or at least under-valued.

AI will not help us here.

The easiness of AI, in fact, has overwhelmed the essential humanness of hunting.

Most people don't even know, anymore, about the importance of the hunt and the happiness derived from it.

Life is not supposed to be easy. Quests are supposed to be fraught. Scylla and Charybdis can kill you. But there's nothing like the excitement and accomplishment of having survived them.

Ask Don Quixote. 
Or Odysseus.
Or someone fat who got in shape for a marathon.
Or anyone who's sold a big ad campaign to a giant client.
Or just a jerk like me who's built a business based on orare est labore. To work is to pray.

Years ago I was lucky enough to get to spend three hours working with Milton Glaser. We sat elbow to elbow at his table.

I was due to arrive at his townhouse in the east Thirties at eight. 

Of course I got there at seven and stared at his place.

I wanted to see the Karatydides not just the Parthenon.

I took this photograph of the transom above his front door.

AI wants us to forget this.

We want push-button ease in everything.

We want miracles cheaper by the dozen. 

But Art is Work.

I don't think we should forget this.

Fool Me Once.

About 15 years ago when I was an ECD at R\GA (if you have brain cells left, you might remember calculations like what follows) the hot metric among digital agencies was "Facebook likes." People in the agency and at at the client would routinely state that their advertising goal was to get the client to "one-million Facebook likes."

Outside of improving your Klout score, getting your client Facebook likes was the sine qua non of marketing success.

This was before Facebook had gone full-fascist and before it assumed the mantle of the world's #1 Child-Trafficking site. These were simpler times.

The brand I ran was a financial services company that specialized in helping people with their retirement planning. Their average customer was about 60 and had a couple of million dollars saved up. Their aided brand awareness was seven-percent.

There was a UI or UX or CX -guy or whatever in my group who disliked my "traditional" orientation. He was the sort person who declared everything "broken" or "dead." Especially if it wasn't popular in a four square-block section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 

He was heavily into artisanal mayonnaise.

Who isn't?

He went to the Chief Operating Officer of the agency to complain about my old skool-ness. How I wanted to raise awareness via TV that drove referrals, not via Facebook likes.

I was called on the carpet tiles for that.

Emboldened, this guy said, once again, "we have to get Facebook likes."

I exhaled through my mouth, and mouthed the words of Jack Palance in "Shane." "Prove it," I said. "Show me one brand that's converted Facebook likes to brand value and I'm in like Flynn. I'll do whatever you say." 

Once again I was called on the carpet. 

But, such is my strength (or weakness) I never relented.

On Friday there was an article in The New York Times called "The GenX Career Meltdown."

The article is the usual bemoanization about how everything we once had is gone and obsolete and eviscerated by the rapacious saliva of Pervert Equity and perverting silicon germanium technology. 

There was nothing new in the article. It made me glad my father forced me, at a stupidly young age, to take speed-reading lessons. I can still get up to one-thousand words a minute when I need to, with little loss of comprehension. Such a facility comes in handy when you're fed a giant nutburger of words.

The first thing that occurs to me that's wrong headed is GenX (or any gen) as a helpless victim of giant financial forces. You can't really have victims without perpetrators. For every murder victim, there is a murderer. And for every GenX-er (or any other gen-er) thrown out of work, there is a banker or a c-suiter in an eighteen-room Park Avenue apartment along with eleven acres in Wainscott, New York or maybe the Vineyard. 

Part two pertains to my story above.

We have decimated agencies and agency staffing. We have turned the work agencies used to do over to equations we obtusely call algorithms, though I'd imagine roughly 97.9-percent of people who use the word algorithm have no idea what the word means. They use the word the way Beckett used the word "void." As in "There's no lack of void."

No one is saying what I said to the CX or UX or UI guy I described above. No one says, "Prove it. Show me one brand that's built brand value based on Large Language Models and plastic manipulated stock photos and I'll hang up my spikes. Show me one brand that's using AI and creating a brand people like and I'm with you."

No one asks. 

No one challenges the dominant complacency that machines can do it better. We're all just going scuba diving with tanks filled (by ourselves) with carbon monoxide. Every day we hear about the splendors wrought by AI on customer service, via phone trees, via bots. We hear how fast and cheap ads are. No one has the wisdom or temerity to say, "but they suck." "But they might be doing more damage than they're creating." 

Every time I hear about the "right message at the right time," I say "when?" I've yet to get the right message at the right time. Even when I proposed to my wife.

As Chico said, "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" We believe the power of money against our own powers of observation.

Maybe the math works because everything in the world today is under monopoly control and so offers exactly the same product at exactly the same price and there's no place you can buy from that's any different. That's certainly true of holding company ad agencies.

You can't find a good airline or ad agency or telco or cable company or rent-a-car or hardware store or political party or restaurant. They're all the same. 

But sooner or later, alternatives will green shoot from out of the desiccated terrain. Sooner or later someone will realize that not everything you eat needs to have been frozen first and shipped 14,000 miles. Not everything you buy needs to work like shit. Not every ad has to suck.

Whatever gen you are, gen-erate the will to fight. To not accept. To resist.

In an era of universal technology, being a human is a revolutionary act.

Revolt.

Robert Frost won four Pulitzer-prizes for poetry. To my ancient and glaumy eyes that means he might be worth considering at times.

He wrote in "The Mending Wall,"

Maybe we can think about the algorithm he describes and repurpose it for today.

Over the course of my five decades in advertising, I've never once had someone within the agency or a client do something "because I said so." Even that old parent joke, "because I'm your father, that's why," never really worked for me.

But when it comes to AI and other unproven technologies wiping out whole industry, we buy the notion without a shred of proof. We buy the efficacy of the algorithm on faith.

We buy it on faith.

Which is what suckers do when charlatans sell them a bill of goods.

They pay full price.

Shop elsewhere.

There Is a Season. Turner, Turner, Turner.

I was first introduced to JMW Turner in September, 1979. 

I was in a graduate seminar at Columbia University. I forget the name of the course and even the professor's name (though he, to a degree, changed my life.) 

I was just 21 and it was the first time I had a literature teacher make me look past the words on the page into the tectonic happenings of the world and how those happenings were influencing everything around them.

The painting was "Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway." And I had never seen anything like it. 

Have you?

All at once we could see the tumult of the industrial age.

The New York Times runs a periodic column called "10-Minute Challenge." In it they ask you to look, closely, at a painting without distraction for a full ten-minutes. Here's their piece on Bruegel's "Hunters in the Snow."

The thinking behind the Times' column is a useful reminder of how rare it is to actually focus, and think, and examine, and think some more and then, importantly, to follow the interstices of your thinking. You know, where one thing leads to another, like falling in love.

I remember back to the hot of 1979, New York falling apart, four years after bankruptcy, two years after the violence and burning of the 1977 black-out riots. I remember listening to the great Columbia radio station, WKCR, and their disc jockey Phil Schap. He was the world's leading authority on Yardbird Parker. Schap's show "Bird Flight," provided the soundtrack for the crazy, runaway train of New York when I was a boy.

I realized then, you can't listen to Bach in New York. It's too orderly. It has to be Bird. 

Today, as I write this, I am an old man. Prior to my cataract surgeries, which take place on April 9 and 16, I am practically blind in my left eye. My right eye is holding out, but I'm having it done on the second date, before the trump cataclysm takes away the healthcare I've been paying taxes for since 1962, when I, as a "child star" in TV commercials, joined SAG-AFTRA and paid my own way for coverage before Medicare was even passed. 

I'm thinking lately of JMW Turner, because back in February, 2024, Yale University republished a facsimile of his last sketchbook. If you have just a few of the ten-minutes I mentioned above, you can browse a digital replica of those sketches. 

I came back from a seaside walk last week, soaking from a light drizzle that turned heavy. My wool baseball cap taunted me. Its brim held the rain, and when I least expected it, a cold drop would land on my face. It made me crile--cringe and smile at the same time.

When I entered our small house I ran downstairs into my book-lined office and grabbed my copy of Turner's notebooks. I leafed through it.

Yep.

Fifty years after my first Turner, Turner is how my cataracts occlude my world.

I see now in JMW Turner.

I've never seen with such clarity.

Drip. 

The Naked and the Clothed. An Accounting.

You feel naked.   

You have been axed from a job and 

you feel all alone.

But you're clothed.       

You have been axed from a job and you have decades of friends and connections who care.      

You feel naked.   

You no longer have a paycheck every week.

But you're clothed. 

You can now earn money from lots of different places. And for every hour you work.

You feel naked.  

You no longer have a client.

 

But you're clothed.   

Every client you've ever worked with and helped (many) is potentially your client again.

You feel naked.   

You're not quite sure how you'll fill 

all the hours of the day.

But you're clothed. 

You won't be filling them in mindless meetings and bureaucratic beatings.  

You feel naked.  

Your Microsoft calendar is blank for the first time since you started using Microsoft calendar. 

But you're clothed. 

You can take a walk, pick up the kids from school, and work according to what you need and when you need it.  

You feel naked.  

There's no one telling you what to do. 

But you're clothed.  

You haven't needed someone telling you what to do for about fifteen years.

You feel naked. 

You're alone. No office mates. 

No friends in the cafeteria.  

But you're clothed.    

You have more friends--who care--than you
ever imagined possible. 

And no cafeteria.

You feel naked.   

You haven't gotten a project
or even a nibble in a week.

But you're clothed.  

Next week you might get eight.
Or twelve.

You feel naked.  

You have no extrinsic 'status.'
No agency name behind you, no title. 

But you're clothed. 

You have the three things you need
to be successful.
1) Your network.
2) Your portfolio.
3) Your reputation.

You feel naked.  

You're scared. 

But you're clothed.  

You're pinching yourself.  

You feel naked.  

You wonder how you lasted so long.

But you're clothed.  

You wonder what took you so long.  

The Unmistakable Metaphor.

One of my strengths as a writer or, stretching it a bit, a creative person, is my gift (or curse) of metaphor. Professionally, I'm often charged with explaining difficult ideas or solutions. Metaphor often answers the bell. That last bit in itself is a metaphor.

Even as a father, you're faced with similar obstacles. Often, the best way to make something complicated understood is by comparing that complication to something people already grasp.

Not long ago, I wrote this about the fleeting nature of a technology advantage in business.

When I was a boy, I taught my baby sister the rudiments of fractions using the different sections of a Hershey bar to explain the different pieces of a whole number. (I haven't had a Hershey bar in a while. In those days a nickel bar was divided into 16 pieces.)

In short, I'm good at metaphors. 

Almost as good as I am at dad jokes. Like the one about the guy who's taken up two new hobbies: taxidermy and explosives. He once made an otter you can't defuse.

Even at the doddering old-age of 67--just three years from the Bible's "three score and ten" -- I am still trying to figure out how the world works. Like Dashiell Hammett's Flitcraft in his great novel "The Maltese Falcon," I am still trying to take the lid off life and “look at the works.”

Metaphors help here, too.

Just now I read a book review in "The Wall Street Journal," of a new book called Unreliable: Bias, Fraud, and the Reproducibility Crisis in Biomedical Research" by Csaba Szabo. 

Reading the review, I couldn't help but wonder if the book's title  could "metaphored" into "Unreliable: Cheating, Fraud, Fakery and the Demise of Advertising Efficacy."

In particular, I saw in these two passages from the Journal's review, parallels to the industry's-awards-mania.

The WSJ writes:

Ad Aged rewrites:

The WSJ goes on:

Ad Aged rewrites:

When Advertising worked, advertising worked. Rolled up its sleeves and worked. (BTW, I once had a fight with an ECD telling me to add a call to action. I said "the whole ad is a call to action. What will adding "learn more" do besides muck it up?" I was fired from that job for being insubordinate. But do any of these ads need a learn more button?

Famous agency brands were built on the advertising work they did to make real brands famous. The best agencies had a certain "inextricable-ness" with the best brands. 

They had no "one-offs." There was no, as mentioned above, "reproducibility crisis." Day after day, year after year, team after team, ad after ad, brands (and agencies) were built. Yesterday I saw some work hailing the ugliness of oatmeal. It's a stunt and a one-off. And if it ever ran in the wild, I'd be shocked. We are writing academic papers so to speak, for our peers, that make no difference outside of our closed loop.

Whereas:

DDB--VW.
Scali--Volvo.
Ally--FedEx.
Chiat--Apple.
Wieden--Nike.
TBWA--Absolute.
Ammirati--BMW.

Leo Burnett--Kellogg's.

DKG--Talon Zippers.

The list is long. 
The list was without fakery and awards' jockeying.

Today, agencies seem to be places brands go to die. 

I can't think of anything today (excepting Apple/TBWA and Nike/Wieden) that comes close to anything like these. 

Ads that built brands and agencies. That didn't need to fake results.

(h/t to Brian Burch for his efforts in posting great ads.)