Five Minutes with our CRRO.

All characters and events depicted in this post are entirely fictitious.
Any similarity to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

AD AGED:
Hello, and thank you for spending a little time with me today.

CRRO:
Ooooh. You said the word...spending. Please. Not. In. My. Presence.

AD AGED:
You have an issue with spending, I take it.

CRRO:
Of course, I do. Especially as our Holding Company's CRRO.

AD AGED:
I'm not familiar with your title. What exactly does CRRO stand for?

CRRO:
I am the Chief Remuneration Reduction Officer.

AD AGED:
Can we have that in English, please? What does a Chief Remuneration Reduction Officer do?

CRRO:
Simply put, I reduce salaries.

AD AGED:
Wow, that sounds harsh. I've heard a lot in my days. But I never heard about a salary being cut.

CRRO:
Well, not cut exactly. But as inflation and hours worked increase, salaries stay flat--sometimes for decades. So in effect--

AD AGED:
So in effect, you have remuneration reduction.

CRRO:
Yes. I've distributed to managers throughout the holding company 44 plausible reasons inflation will continue to eat into salaries.

AD AGED:
44 reasons?

CRRO:
That's right, an agency no longer has to give an employee a bonafide reason why her buying power is decreasing. The manager merely has to state a number between 1 and 44.

For instance:

If I say to a salary supplicant, "12," that means: "Your group did well but your department didn't."

Remuneration reduced.

AD AGED:
Ingenious.

CRRO:
Here are some more:

If I say 1, it means, Salaries are frozen.

2 means, You didn't produce a lot.

Here are a few more. These are so ubiquitous, we no longer even have to say the whole reason. We just blurt a number.

3. You produced a lot but didn't win awards.
4. You produced a lot, won awards, but not the big awards.
5. You produced a lot, won awards, including big awards, but didn't bring in new business.
6. You brought in new business but not a lot of revenue.
7. You brought in new business and a lot of revenue but the business isn't winning awards.
8. You brought in award-winning new business and a lot of revenue and that business is winning awards, but the margins aren't great.

AD AGED:

Wow, that is dispiriting.

CRRO:

That's right. That's how it's done in advertising today.
Try these:

24. Our business model is under pressure.
25. Our business model is in great shape but we're anticipating a tough 2019.
26. We're good through 2019 but we're anticipating a tough 2027.
27. We're anticipating a tough 2021.
28. A lot of clients are cutting back.
29. Our costs are rising faster than revenue.

AD AGED:
Well, our time is up for today. Thank you for spending five minutes with Ad Aged.

CRRO:

Spending. You said it again. Remember, we don't use that word.

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Special Saturday Edition of Ad Aged: The Trump Cabinet, 2020.

Secretary of Ponzi:                              

Bernie Madoff

Secretary of Nepotism, Grift and Favortism:

Jared Kushner

Secretary of Charlatanism:                
Elizabeth Holmes

Secretary of Procurement, Pandering, Prostitution and Payoffs:  Bob Guccione

Secretary of Racism:                         
Tucker Carlson

Secretary of Income Inequality:                      

Peter Thiel

Secretary of Climate Denial:               

David H. Koch

Secretary of Snowballs:

Jim Inhofe

Secretary of Big Rocks:

Mo Brooks

Secretary of Police Brutality and Illegal Arrests:           
Joe Arpaio

Secretary of Ill-Health and Inhuman Services:                       Jenny McCarthy

Secretary of Nuclear Annihilation:

John Bolton

Secretary of Child Molestation:

Roy Moore

Secretary of Child Trafficking:

Jeffrey Epstein

Secretary of Child Shootings:

Wayne LaPierre

Secretary of Child Caging:

Kirstjen Nielsen

Secretary of Deception and Husband-Bashing:

Kellyann Conway

Secretary of She-Said-What?:

Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Secretary of Anti-Constitutionalism:

Mitch McConnell

Secretary of Complicity:

Fox News

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Nobody asked me, but...Spring is Here Edition.

Nobody asked me, but...is my every-so-often tribute to the great New York sportswriter, Jimmy Cannon. When Cannon had no subject to write about, he'd assemble a miscellany like my list below.

Nobody asked me, but...

I just attended a technology conference. Now I'm thinking of placing an old bathroom scale near my desk. When people ask why, I'll say "I'm copywriting at scale."

90% of the discussion at the conference was about "improved targeting." Which is an anodyne way of saying "increased surveillance."

If you took the cliches and buzzwords away from most people, they'd be unable to speak.

I've been to so many going-away parties lately, maybe we should switch to “who’s staying parties….”

How is it possible I spent 25 years in this business without hearing the words storytelling and insight and now I hear those words 50 times a day?

If I ever had to do a commercial with animated and talking mucous, I think I’d hang up my cleats…

Likewise, if I ever had to use the word sale-a-bration….

I have a feeling most agencies today need a primal scream room…

But book your time early, the room is filling fast….

It’s 2019 and they’ve yet to invent a dessert that’s better than a creamsicle.

Oh, and I don't mean a fetishized creamsicle made with organic free-range Seville oranges and organic non-pasteurized camel's milk.

Thirty years into the internet era, I think the greatest advance to emerge from this age of technology is the E-Z Pass.

Unlike E-Z Pass, most technology is too hard to understand and I don’t know what it actually does.

Most everything (and everyone) is too hard to understand, and I don’t know what they actually do.

When I’m feeling particularly disconsolate, I watch this scene from George Stevens’ classic movie, “Shane.” Especially the dialogue between 1:00 to 1:40...

I've been watching it a lot lately.

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A walk through New York. And time.

I was mixing again yesterday. So yet again, I took another walk in the city, five miles in all. The first half--from the Upper West Side to midtown in the 40s--I walked with a young friend of mine. 

She left my agency almost six months ago and we both decided we liked each other too much to let our friendship dissipate through too much distance and too little contact. So every two weeks or so, we find an early morning and walk and talk for an hour.

Peace can be found walking through the city, walking slow while the world rushes by. Sometimes it's good to act 33 rpm in 45 world, or even a 78 world. It's ok to let things that happen too quickly happen too quickly. It's better to take a pause with a friend--a wise, seeing, funny friend--and have a nice chat and a nice walk.

On our way downtown I stopped and read these words of the prophets. The whole city is a construction site these days, it's being torn down, cut up, and rebuilt in service of the super-rich--the plutocrats, or patriarchs, who more than ever--rule our lives. 

(So much for those marketing know-it-alls who started proclaiming--without evidence--not long ago that "the consumer is in control." Most everything in our lives from what we watch, to where we work, to where we pick up our daily coffee is dominated by oligarchs. What kind of control do you really have?)

Every block or so there's a towering crane, burly construction workers in day-glo hoodies and hard-hats smoking arm-length blunts on their way to work. The noise, the pound pound pound of the pile-driver against Manhattan's schist, drowns out even the dull, persistent lament of a million workers working too much for too little.

I walked west after I left my friend. I decided to visit Patience and Fortitude--the two Tennessee-pink-marble lions, named by Fiorello LaGuardia--just to say "hi." There's something magnificent about these stolid and stony beasts. Maybe I like them because they remind me, in fact, of me. Whatever happens, whatever the day, whatever the week, whatever the weather, like me, they show up and stand (or sit) sentinel.

A couple blocks downtown, past the shuttered Lord & Taylor department store (they're out of business now, replaced by a We Work space) and a couple blocks up from the old, shuttered B. Altman's department store, I came upon this bronze relief. 

I've spent 60 or so years in New York, and I had never noticed it before, though I might have 100 times walked by it.

The Wendel family, according to "The New York Times," were New York's most-powerful real estate family in the early 20th Century. They owned over 150 properties valued at, in today's dollars, well-over $1 billion.

The Wendel mansion in the early 1900s.

Not long after this photo was taken, the mansion was knocked down to make way for the Lord & Taylor department store.
Now Lord & Taylor has gone belly-up. And We Work--part of the burgeoning benefits-less economy--has taken over.

The Wendels, according to the Times, “were the delight of the local papers, for, rich as they were, the family — six sisters and a brother, all unmarried — lived together in a shuttered mansion without electricity on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 39th Street, and dressed in grim Victorian garb that had gone out of style half a century earlier. Tour buses regularly pulled up in front of ‘the House of Mystery.’”

Further down Fifth Avenue, at 24th in Madison Square Park, I came upon this plaque on a plinth. I can't find anything out about it. I assume America's glorious dead were our WWI war dead. Or maybe victims of 1920s Irish gangs, like the Whyos or the Dead Rabbits.

A block south on 23rd, sits the Willam H. Seward statue. Seward is best remembered today, if he's remembered at all, as being the best cross-legged statue closest to Danny Meyer's Shake Shake. 

Seward was governor of New York, senator from New York, and a member of Abraham Lincoln's Team of Rivals as his Secretary of State. He's also credited with buying from the Russians what became the first the territory, then the state of Alaska.

The massive land area was purchased for $7.2 million, or about 2-cents an acre, the price of a tootsie pop when I was growing up. Back in the day, they called Alaska "Seward's Ice Box," or "Seward's Folly."

Whaddaya want for 2-cents an acre?

Olde and new New York.

I had a couple of recording sessions yesterday around Union Square and as I was walking around the neighborhood, a wave of memories washed over me.

It's a strange feeling to have lived in essentially the same place for your entire life. Sometimes when you look at something you can feel like you're looking at it through various plates of glass. The first view might be today. The second might be ten years ago, the third plate might reveal images from twenty years ago, or thirty, and through yet another plate, you might see the location as you saw it when you were a little boy and being hauled around town by your old man or old lady.

Along Broadway in the high-teens, I saw the gabled window on the top the old peaked roof of a late 19th-century building. The building my office was in was connected to the old Arnold Constable Building at 111 Fifth Avenue, built between 1894 and 1895.

I worked in that office for 20 months back in 1988 through 1990. My room was a big spacious place with a sofa and two windows. Better, it was far away (almost a full-block) from the front of the office where my two bosses sat.

While my bosses liked me, I was less-than-enamored with them. They were both in the Advertising Hall-of-Fame, yet they seemed to have lost almost all enthusiasm for the business. I was hoping to learn advertising from them. What I learned instead was to run down to the Strand at nearly every lunch hour and buy old awards annuals for about $10 a pop.

The Strand (their slogan back in the '80s was "eight miles of books," today, the miles measure 18) is a huge old used bookstore down on Broadway and 12th Street. Up on the second floor they had a graphics section where over the years, I collected probably 75 annuals.

Like so much of New York today as opposed to 30 years ago, the Strand has been scrubbed clean. There are more new books than ever before and used books, where you can pick up something rare or a bargain, are relegated to the fringes of the store or the basement.

The Old Town Bar down 18th Street between Broadway and Park Avenue South, is still standing and still looks much the same as it did back when I used to go there for a burger and a beer. 

Prices are a lot more expensive today, of course, but the old place seems to have kept its deprecating sense of humor. Just nine years ago, Old Town celebrated the 100th Anniversary of their genuine Hinsdale urinals. They are the oldest working Hinsdales in New York, as reported in "The Village Voice," "Bon Appetit" magazine, "The Wall Street Journal," and other esteemed media outlets.

So, I guess you could say some things change. While urinals stay roughly the same.

I gotta go.