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Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Are you talking to me?

For what seems like 96 or 107 millennia, I’ve been hearing all about people purportedly wanting to have conversations with brands. And brands that want to engage in conversations with people.

“How can we help you, George, improve your Airwick Solid Experience?” “George, thank you for your recent purchase of our Purple all-organic long-fiber fair-trade cotton 1200-count mattress cover. Here are some ‘pro-tips’ on getting the most out of your mattress cover experience.” “Dear George, our records tell us that the all-weather floor-mats you purchased in August 2001, may be due for replacement. Here are some simple ways to determine if your all-weather floor-mats are showing undo wear that could lead to hazards while driving. Please take a few minutes to check these floor-mat hotspots and improve your all-weather floor-mat experience.”

Way back in the run-up to the 2012, corporate titan and republican candidate, Mitt Romney said to a crowd of hecklers, “Corporations are people, my friend.” Romney was roundly derided for the tone-deafness of his statement, not to mention his condescending tone of voice.

I don’t watch a lot of TV. Everything I turn on, it seems to my ears that it’s played at double the decibels it should be played at—regardless of the volume on my set or computer. Laugh tracks convey too much hilarity, and most often the quality of what I’ve tune into seems woefully low. Also, I’ll admit to a certain Nathaniel Hawthorne prudishness. I’m not really interested in seeing other people have sex, talk about sex, allude to sex, intimate sex or fuck like jack-rabbits. I feel the same way about on-screen blood, gore, cruelty and torture. I don’t have to see things graphically to ‘get’ them. As Mr. Keats said so many centuries ago, “Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard, sweeter still.” This is the cruelest scene in movie history, and quite enough for me.

All this brings me back to our original topic. Brands.

I’ll make this simple.

So simple even a CEO could get it.

People like brands that act like the people they like.

I’m going to repeat that because it’s so simple no one believes it much less abides by it.

People like brands that act like the people they like.

People don’t like people who are dishonest, unkind, insincere and who over-promise. They like people who speak with them—not people who shout at them. They like people who do—not people who say they’re going to do. Or who brag about what they’ve done and look to get accolades for it. They don’t like egoists. Or braggarts. Or people who waste their time. They don’t like people who only talk about themselves and how great they are. They like to know they’re cared for, heard, listened to.

But when you watch TV tonight, analyze what you see.

Bombast.

False urgency.

Bullshit.

Forced glee or cliché emotion.

All at the top of some announcer’s lungs.

I can think of two brands I like. Really, out of all of them. Apple and Nike. Maybe IBM. That’s it, really.

Sure, I can find fault in them—Apple and Nike use slave labor and Apple doesn’t pay taxes. But nevertheless, I’m still ok paying $99 for a charger.

Apple and Nike act like people I like.

Nearly everyone else acts like people I like.

To avoid.

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Syzygy. And other matters of Physics.

Because of the general weirdness of life, I had two phone calls yesterday and a conversation with my wife that brought to my mind the scientific state known as Syzygy. Syzygy is the nearly straight line configuration of three or more celestial bodies, like when the earth, moon and sun are all lined up as in an eclipse.

There’s Syzygy in life, as well, as when things line up and neurons fire and connections weird, oblique and uncanny seem to occur.

Yesterday was one of those days.

First, I heard from a friend—a high-flying friend who asked me if “I was bored.” Before I even had the chance to say, “Rick, I’ve never been bored a minute in my life,” an ex-client called me. Heidi wasn’t actually my client, but she was a client of an agency I was working at, and along the way we became friends.

Heidi’s recently left her client-side job and is looking for what are often-called brighter horizons. She asked me if I felt, since my axing from Ogilvy, in emotional arrears because “I no longer have an important role on important accounts with smart people at a leading agency.”

I answered both Rick and Heidi essentially the same way. I told them what I would essentially tell my own daughters or other extraordinary young people as they make their way through their career and their life.

“Agencies are no different than any other social organization. A boy scout troop. A manufacturing company. Even the army.” Both Rick and Heidi know me well enough to get out of the way when I start on a gallop.

“Bad agencies hire on the upslope of the bell-curve. Good agencies hire on the downslope. But there are very few social organizations that know how to handle people who are unusual—who are at the far right side of the bell-curve.”

That could be arrogance on my part. But when you’re considered by many to be a cross between Bill Bernbach and Bill Shakespeare, with maybe a soupcon of Bill Loman mixed in, it comes with the territory.

“Usually what happens is called ‘regression to the mean.’ It’s easier for an organization to stifle the one extraordinary person than to upset the ten or fourteen people who aren’t quite as good as that extraordinary person. Rewarding the extraordinary pisses off a dozen people. Where as putting a lid on them irks only one person.”

I continued, as I do so well, and so often.

“That’s why most businesses that were formed by brilliant and charismatic leaders rarely maintain their original verve. Everyone is mown down like a field of wheat. In time, businesses become about productivity not creativity. Just think Steve Jobs vs. Tim Cook. Even if Cook were as inspired as Jobs, organizationally he wouldn’t have permission to be as bold, aggressive and take-no-prisoners.”

I went on to answer each of my friends.

No, I’m never bored. I’m happy reading a 600-page book about John Maynard Keynes followed by Marjorie Garber’s new book on the history of “character.” I laugh at an occasional episode of Nat Hiken’s old shows like “Car 54,” or “Bilko.” And walking Whiskey along the seaside is poetry itself. How could I possibly be bored? I have a hundred books I want to read and a thousand books I want to write.

And as for feeling displaced and untethered since my release from Ogilvy, well, fine. They didn’t really want me in my fullness—they wanted a part of me and shuddered and were afraid—or threatened by me—when the fullness of George stepped out of the Procrustean confinement they had sentenced me to. That’s the rule of thumb in most places. Don’t be too good or too bad or you’ll get killed. In fact, another ex-client once confided in me with these words—I was 30 at the time, he was 55—‘George, my policy is fly low, fly slow and try not to crash.’ That is Dante-esque in its damnation—and the way most organizations work.

Finally, Syzygy happened when my wife told me about a note she received from a friend of her—an eminent cancer doctor. Bill is one of the world’s leading doctors, and a true polymath. A classical musician. A jazz musician. A Olympic-caliber sharp-shooter. And god knows what else.

My wife read me an email from him yesterday, “I just got done restoring an 18^th-century cello and electrifying it. I hooked it up to an amp and I couldn’t believe the sound quality, the timbre. I’m also putting the finishing touches on two Adirondack chairs I am making out of reclaimed wine-barrels.

For all the gloom, despair and medieval dark-agedness of the world today, for all the anti-smart, anti-science, anti-logic, trivialization of everything that rattles around the ether, how you live is up to you.

You can be bored and stifled and just get by.

Or you can fight it.

When you fight it, when you do, you’ll notice Syzygy when it happens. And it does.

--
BTW,
you might like this, from the surpassing Neal Argawal.

Monday, July 20, 2020

Buying experiences in Connecticut.

If you’ve been over the last decade or so at least somewhat sentient, say for about five minutes a month, you’ve heard someone spout this nonsense: “People don’t buy things, they buy experiences.”

If I had a chainsaw, a good lawyer and a hope of impunity, I might chop into little bite-sized human pieces the next person I hear who issues such a proclamation.

Just as nothing today in government seems to work—from our voting system, to our tax system, to our legislative system, nothing in the state of retail, restaurants or service seems to work either.

As you may or may not know, my wife and I have bought a small cottage not thirty feet from the sea in the quaint-as-fuck bucolic village of Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Roughly four-hundred years ago, some gun-bearing ruffians from England by way of Massachusetts, decimated the local Pequot population and set in motion the concomitant rise in real estate prices, replacing indigenous long-houses with clapboard homes each of which houses a Sub-Zero refrigerator, a Wolf stove and a Miele dishwasher. Not to mention a few hundred thousand dollars of debt.

My wife and I moved into our new domicile on Saturday morning and of course, nothing works and you can get no help. For whatever reason, the fattest nation in the history of the planet determined that garage doors must only be openable with the press of a button. Actually getting out of your car and lifting a door is beneath us. Of course, our garage door opener doesn’t work, so I can’t open the garage door.

Undaunted, I break down and pile up corrugated boxes and place them on a small strip of grass near my neighbor’s garbage bins. This I’m told is an Cardinal exurban sin—something on the order of pederasty or washing your dishes by hand. Though we pay thousands of dollars a year in taxes, the trash-collectors won’t pick up trash that isn’t in a bin. It’s just not done.

So, I load up my 1966 Simca 1500 with the boxes and drive to the house we are still renting and use our rental garbage bins. I sweat like a pig a week before a luau.

Buying all the shit in those boxes, of course was another experience. It’s virtually impossible today to NOT shop at a big box store or, worse, Amazon. So, for a vacuum and a microwave, I had gone to Best Buy. There is no help. There is no service. There is no selection. There is no accurate pricing. There is nothing best about it—and so much psychic discouragement, I’m surprised people buy at all. Death-bed, Bath and Beyond was not much better. Little things like replacement bottles for a Soda Stream are all but unattainable—and finding a “salesperson” who cares is even scarcer.

Our next stop was CostCo, more accurately it would be named AccostCo. I am not a wisp of a man and never have been. I am thick-headed, thick-boned and like an old coastal skow, broad of beam. In AccostCo, I feel like a sallow French model who’s ingested nothing but cigarette smoke, cocaine and two sips of champagne for the last six weeks. Why anyone would need to buy 1080 Q-tips at a time, or a gallon of Hellman’s mayonnaise, or two-hundred AA batteries is beyond me. But the waddling masses pile in and merrily take home nine-dozen eggs, two-pairs of dress pants and a brand new trailer for their boat all from one gigantic warehouse situated on what used to be a swamp situated on what used to be an Indian trail situated between a Chili’s and an Olive Garden and a Golden Corral like 94% of our clouded hills, our Jerusalem among these dark Satanic Mills, all closed now and shipped to Southeast Asia—even darker and more Satanic.

Worse was still to come: Internet service and setting up cable TV. And dealing with extortionate monopolies that name tax-payer-funded sporting arenas after cable companies everyone hates.

Forget about “experiences” there. It’s Mengeleicious. Torturous, cruel, mocking. They make a nazi dentist look like Florence Henderson.

What I wouldn’t give for an RCA TV with a proper dial: 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13. That’s it. Something not screaming at me on each station. And maybe a bit of news that contains actual news, not some blathering about a one-armed lady in Upper Lower Lompoc who sews masks for people without noses.

Yeah, I’m in a crappy mood.

The “experiences” I’m purportedly so eager to buy make me wish I were part of the clean-up crew on the set of The Exorcist. And the things—when you can find them—are cheap, plastic and made to last about as long as a pubic hair in a drain.

I’ve been out of the city four months now.

I need a fatty corned beef sandwich, some aggressiveness that isn’t passive, a Checker cab and a good one-liner.

As long as that one-liner isn’t about experiences being greater than things.

Friday, July 17, 2020

More on the dismal science and the dismal state of Holding Company advertising.

As much as I generally have respect for the craft of journalism, I hold the advertising trade press in very low regard. I feel this way because the advertising trade press covers the gossip of the industry, the trivia, the trendy instead of the real news.

Just yesterday, I had to get internet and television service for the house my wife has decided I want to buy. In the little town we will be sheltering in, Comcast is essentially the only provider in town. Across the country, Comcast connects nearly two our of three homes and businesses. The company enjoys a market-cap of just under $200 billion thanks to, not its excellent service, but its near monopolistic-control of the market thanks to its lobbying efforts. It pays $30 million on lobbying. A cynic or an Orwellian might say that lobbying is merely Newspeak for bribery.

There are many right-wing, Hayek-influenced economists of the Koch/Norquist/Ayn Rand camp who believe in the almost Divine mechanics of the Invisible Hand of laissez-faire economics. We are told repeatedly of the intelligence of the market--its ability to regulate gigantic economic forces—prices, supply, demand, wages—even the adherence to the greater good, things like environmental protection and consumer safety. Yes, there are those who believe, or ratiocinate, that the Holy Genius of economics will regulate these things for the greater good of mankind.

Those who abide by such beliefs decry any government intervention or regulation as practically apostasy, that is human intervention into the economy assaults the divine mechanisms of such sacrosanct laws as supply and demand. No matter that laissez-faire has led to poverty, pollution, starvation and serfdom. Theory trumps reality.

None of this is really very complicated. I learned it all—essentially, in Professor Beck’s Economics 101: Introduction to Macroeconomics and Economics 210: Introduction to Microeconomics. Most poring over what back in the 1970s was the definitive economics textbook, by Paul Samuelson.

Of late I am reading the new biography of John Maynard Keynes. I’ve always been a Keynsian. Believing more in the enlightened human management of the economy than the neo-Calvinist Hayek, Friedman, Rand, Koch, Libertarian, Reagan, Norquist, Stockman-belief that the rich deserve their riches and their god manipulate markets in such a way that benefits them because they, after all, are chosen.

This might be a little Red, or at least Pink, for some. But that’s fine and most data about GDP growth rate, debt, deficit and unemployment statistics bear out that the economy does better under Keynsian/Democratic control than it does under Reverse-Robin-Hood Republicanism, when forces steal from the poor and give to the rich. See George W. Bush who collapsed the economy and Donald Trump who’s doing an even more effective job destroying the world.

But back to advertising.

I have a friend in the business who is very much in demand as a freelancer. For whatever reason, fear most likely, he’s hewn to the agency path and has chosen to rack up his freelance hours at holding company megaliths.

While I have struck out on my own with all the vagaries of that choice, he steadily works for this agency or that.

Just yesterday morning he called me. “I’m booked with ___________ through October,” he said. “And yesterday, ___________ called me about a job. And last night, I talked to the CCO of ____________ about another job.”

“That’s nice,” I answered. “In a non-monopsony system, a system guided by the free-hand of supply-and-demand, such demand would tell you to raise your rates. Or more accurately, that you’ve priced yourself too low.”

“I can’t ask for more money. I am already at the top of the pay scale. They’d never pay it. They put a cap on salaries.”

And that my friends, brings me back to where I started.

The Monopsony (the five holding companies controlling roughly 80% of the jobs) have colluded to create a market situation in which there is only in effect one buyer. An example of pure monopsony is a firm that is the only buyer of labor in an isolated town. Like a company town with a coal mine. Such a firm is able to pay lower wages than it would under competition. Although cases of pure monopsony are rare, monopsonistic elements are found wherever there are many sellers and few purchasers.

That is what those of us remaining in the industry should be fighting about. While the chieftains make 200-300 times the median wage of an average employee, wages for workers are artificially capped or stagnant or rolled back through illegal practices.

Not long ago when the industry was rocked by a free-falling economy and something like 36,000 jobs were lost or furloughed, someone began a spreadsheet of job openings at different agencies. I remember (I can’t find the spreadsheet) that one agency listed a couple hundred openings. Below I found 20 or so jobs—just for Account people—listed at a single Holding Company shop. A New York health care agency has 91 open jobs in creative, 112 in account and 99 in strategic planning.

But wages don’t go up.

I can only think illegal monopsony collusion is why.

If we had a free and independent advertising trade press, they might investigate.

But nah.