My boy George can write 50 ads in a hour.

"Nobody can write 50 ads in a hour."

"If my boy George say he can write 50 ads in a hour, he can write 50 ads in a hour."

"50 ads are a week's work. Man's liable to bust a gut writin' 50 ads in a hour."

-

I have in my fingertips the memory of ten thousand ads. I have virtually every One Show book ever published residing in my digits, every Art Directors' annual from 1962 on. Every Communication Arts Advertising Annual.

I have in my fingertips the wisdom gained from being beaten to smithereens by Chris Wall. And trusted by Chris Wall.

I have in my fingertips a truck-load of trust dumped onto me by Steve Hayden, who barely knew me but had an idea that I'd never let myself, him, the agency, and most of all my clients down.

I have Andy Berndt saying to me, exasperated, "You're writing ads faster than I can read them."

I have Kirk Souder turning thick leather reins over to me and saying, in a sense, you figure it out.

I have Hall of Famers Mike Tesch and Amil Gargano going to bat for my work--for something as small and inconsequential as a radio commercial, calling the client and saying 'you have to buy this.'

I have Marshall Karp and Harold Karp respecting me as more than a copywriter, as a writer.

I have the precision of Steve Simpson haunting me like a phantom. He put more pressure on me than almost anyone else. Because he trusted me and let me solve things my way. I was in it alone.

Same with the great Ed Butler, one of DDB's and Ally & Gargano's greatest writers who said to me after I wrote just one ad for him, "You don't have to show me your work anymore; I trust you."

I have all that and more.

It's all in my fingertips.

It's all there and ready for me to release.

There's no writer nowhere who doesn't face, at times, the specter of impotence and paralysis. When hot-tempered, vein-popping technocrats are mouth-breathing behind your Aeron and saying without words, "Where is it? We need it!"

There's pain and sweat and primal fear of those 2AM airless conference rooms when a dozen ads or two dozen have to be done for a 9:30 with the CMO, who more often than not doesn't know what she wants until you show it to her. Again. Again. Again. In four different media channels. To time.

There's a veritable United Nations of voices you have to accommodate in the 58 words of a spot or the 310 characters of copy for an ad. Ann wants this. Jill wants that. Amy wants this. And there's no brief. And no background. And no data.

There's only a blank spot on a layout filled with lorem ipsum that suddenly needs a beginning, a middle and an end, filled with facts, persuasion and because you give a modicum of shit and like a proper closure, a smile in the last line.

Just now my wife said to me as I start yet another 16-hour day, "You know you don't have to write your blog every day. You've written every day for 6,000 days. You can take a week off."

No. 

No, I can't.

This is what the Read-istas and other petty bureaucrats at the money and sphincter squeezing tops of the holding companies and their agencies can't understand. 

They're not ad people. They're accountants. They're not even humans. They're "managers." They won't can't never-will can't come close to getting it.

There are those of us who believe in what we do. 

We live what we do. 

We love what we do. 

We become students of what we do. Upholders of the craft. Fighters for integrity. Keeper of the dimming flame.

We can write 50 ads in a hour. Because sometimes that's what it takes. And everybody else has been shitcanned or is too busy coming up with "experiences" that will never escape from page 94 of a 91-page deck.

This is from Walter Isaacson's magisterial biography of a guy you might have heard of, Leonardo. (Not the turtle.)

I don't I won't I can't and I shan't ever understand the dastardly dumbness of the dim-bulbs who destroy storied brands by undoing and undercutting and ununderstanding what made them great in the first place.

It would be like removing the pin-stripes from the Yankees' uniforms. Or the twist of lemon from a really good martini. Or removing the moral from Aesop.

Such things may be costly and time-consuming. They may not deliver "robust ROI" or some cockeyed measurement that gets the spreadsheet-tyrants nodding and chortling.

But I think, I dunno why, about William Carlos Williams. Who figured out how much depends on things that most people can't even see or ever see.

The Red Wheelbarrow 

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

--

So much depends upon things that don't matter at all.

Once you know that--when you finally know that, not until you 

know that, are you a professional. Otherwise, you're a dilettante 

or a technocrat, or a cost-cutter. Or worse of all, a faceless punch-card from corporate who squeezes and squeezes and cuts and cuts because the fat cats in the carpeted private offices need their vig, that's what they do for a living. They do it to you before you can do it to them.

Once you know that, you know everything.

A meditation on suck.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day, I suppose we were talking about the tyranny of Trump and virulent fact-
denial--92 percent of all conversations today involve those subjects--and the person I was talking to said something about Shakespeare's Macbeth.

As I so often do, I galloped down an unplowed path. 

"In 1606, I said, Shakespeare wrote King Lear, Macbeth and Anthony and Cleopatra. Three major plays in one year. Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro calls 1606 'The Year of Lear.' Three great plays. In a modern agency, most people don't produce three :30s in a year."

We nodded over the phone and then went on our way. Human conversations are as rare today as spotting a giant fish owl in the wild. You can look your entire life and never come close to seeing one.

Later on, still yesterday, Kristen Cavallo, the CEO of The Martin Agency, and a LinkedIn connection, left a comment about one of my blog posts on Linked In. 

Ms. Cavallo and I don't really know each other. I couldn't pick her out of a line-up, or more appropriately she couldn't pick me out of a drunk-tank. We've only been connected since August. But as you grow older in our benighted business (still better than the alternative) the survivors become fewer and fewer. Sooner or later it seems everyone knows everyone else. It's a bit of Peyton Place, I suppose, on Madison Avenue, but with HR looking on so nothing prurient, or even fun, ever happens.

In any event, Cavallo being CEO of one of the few agencies left to admire, I was flattered that she was reading my humble blog and even more flattered that she commented.

I thought about how I should respond--should I beg for work, should I suck up, should I just say something dumb and platitudinous? But when I couldn't think of anything, I was just me--for better or worse--dumb.

That got me thinking of course. 

How many good ideas never get out of an agency--even the best agencies--because we've created a crushing infrastructure that closes in on people in such a way that they've learned to close their mouths, close their minds, close their guts off to being, well, stupid. 

Where we should be lucid, we are constrained. Where we should be funny, we instead censor ourselves.

I wondered, how much of the agency business--and the client business for that matter--is afflicted with a serious case of congenital, chronic and soul-killing constipation. 

I read somewhere that when Woody Allen was 16 he got a job writing jokes for the Sid Caesar show. I was 16, I think when I read this, and I was amazed that Allen could write 50 jokes in a day. I also remember my ex-boss Ron Rosenfeld who was at one time the youngest copywriter in the Advertising Hall-of-Fame would tell me how he could sit down at his typewriter and write 100 headlines.

Then I remembered a chat I had with a friend of mine--another CEO of another vaunted creative agency. We had written a commercial with another writer, but had failed to create the requisite website. My friend wrote, "You know, I made that website an hour before our launch!"

What we do in advertising isn't very hard.

We have to find simple and original ways of saying something. We usually have a ton of tools at our disposal. And we usually have people around us who are funny, who can add and build on ideas, etc.

But, there's the other, darker, Soviet side of agency life. 

For lack of a better phrase, I'll call it the "Sphincter-Industrial Complex."

It's where people and places create a narrow, undefined gamut of work. A range only they have the ability to interpret. And, sadly, anything they haven't seen before or wouldn't have thought of themselves is deemed unacceptable and, even, wrong-headed and offensive.

There's a lot of this Sphincterism afflicting our business. It's small-minded martinets and know-it-alls who know exactly what won't work and why. They know exactly what the client wants. They know everything but how to do it themselves and how to be lucid and free. 

They're bolstered by the managers and project managers and resource directors and pissant picayunistas who incrementalize and regiment and logicalize out of existence anything that challenges the status quo.

So we regress to the mean. We beigize humor. We blandarize casting. We sand the edges off of every bit of work and destroy the souls of one and all involved. An old boss of mine when reviewing work would often classify something as "flat as a plate of piss." We don't talk that colorfully or candidly today. We'll get in trouble if we do. So we nod. There's polite applause. And we move on.

Then we go home at night and turn on the tube and we sit and watch and wonder.

How can all this work suck so bad?

Some have mediocrity thrust upon them.

 

If I had to characterize the ad industry essentially since it died of self-inflicted wounds, I'd say something very simple.

For the last thirty years or forty, we have been selling too much and helping too little. 

We have been inundating consumers with billions of dollars of messages on every conceivable medium saying "buy me, buy me, buy me," but we've been doing nothing that involves giving people bonafide reasons why or even reasons to believe. 

We've been doing nothing, or very little, that rings true and honestly and we've been doing a lot of school-yard bullying--essentially the advertising equivalent of because we said so, that's why.

I think much of this anti-why, anti-respect, anti-honesty posture comes from an ethos that is essentially anti-people. For thirty years, as the control of American life has essentially been grabbed by fewer and fewer bigger companies, we have treated people as if they are, instead of people, MROs--marketing receiving objects. We are all just pockets to be picked--service, respect, kindness--they're like driving with the brake on.

Giving the monopolistic nature of the world today, we no longer in our marketing persuade. We employ a Goebbels/Trump strategy that might be called "the Big Lie." We lie over and again till your brain is either deadened or flaccid so you accept our lies.

We're here for you. We're in this together. We care. We're making _______ better, for you.

Except everything gets worse.

Verizon, for instance, spends over $1 billion to tell you how reliable their network is. They'll spend $1 billion showing you maps that show how great their network coverage is. They'll probably spend another $10 billion promoting 5G. They'll tell you and tell you and tell you. Yet about half the calls you make probably drop, the more important the call, the greater the likelihood it'll fail. 

They'll tell you how great their customer service is. Except you can't get help. They'll tell you how seamless their seamlessosity is, except there's nothing seamless about it.

Along the way, if an agency made a plea to the client for more candor, if someone presented an ad that had a scintilla of self-effacement and humility in it, they'd be removed from the account, if not the agency by day's end.

Advertising has become--and we've let it become--a giant Trump rally. Exaggerations, lies and bullshit are repeated at triple-digit decibel levels and the "showrunner" of such assumes the public is too fucking dumb to know when they're being lied at.

Can you imagine if the aforementioned Verizon--only a for instance, ran an ad or a commercial that said: "Last year, American's suffered through 1,254,775,398 dropped calls. Here's what we're doing about it."

Never happen.

It's too honest and too respectful. And too considerate. And too close to the golden rule--treating others how you'd like to be treated.

The purpose of advertising in a respectful community is not to use adjectives and honeyed words extolling the virtues of a petro-chemical laden cleaning pad that will linger in Staten Island landfills for 200 years.

The purpose of advertising is not to show smiley clerks who are always friendly and helpful and knowledgeable when in real like every clerk I've ever encountered in any CVS store is usually drinking a Big Gulp and walks the other way when I'm looking for something I can't find.

What makes it all worse is that everybody knows this kind of shit is a lie. They know when an oil company says they're spending $100 million on environmental clean-up that expenditure is on profits of $27 billion. They know that no flight-attendant in real life has ever smiled. And now when I go online and get immediately a pop-up window with a small picture of a super-model named Britney who is in real life is nothing more than a badly-function bot, they know I'm going to be pissed.

But advertising is always selling.

Always assuming we're stupid.

And always doing everything they can not to actually help people. Because we're a monopoly, dammit, and we'll do as we please.

I want an ad from a rental car company that doesn't show a smiling woman behind the counter and no line.

I want an ad that tells me business travel sucks and maybe they can make it suck a little less.

But no.

That would acknowledge reality.

That would mean treating a person with respect.

Why bother.

Stacey and us.

For the last few years, the ad industry has been making itself look foolish, chasing its stupid self-serving tail attempting to align their self-serving selves and their self-serving brands to "purpose." 

There's a notion cascading off the walls of the advertising-hating ad industry that selling shit is somehow beneath us and we should instead be changing the world. The same brands that tell you that it will take them until 2030 to eliminate plastic straws from their supply chains will spend millions of dollars to tell the world that they're doing x, y and z for the betterment of the universe.

Many of the insincere efforts don't stand up to an eyelid blink's worth of scrutiny. We're told brands are making all these great efforts for the planet, for equality, for the climate, but these same brands (and the agencies that create the fictional gossamer to 'support' this) fire people over 40, barely pay a living wage, employ few people of color, shirk taxes like a Trump and in many cases use far-eastern slave labor in far-eastern sweatshops that would make the Triangle shirtwaist factory look like Shangri-la.

The thing about 99% of these advertiser/agency efforts is they can be summed up in a three-word phrase: Talk is cheap. Work and effort are hard.

Spending a million dollars on a commercial saying you're spending a million dollars on masks is bullshit. In fact, to my eyes, most of these spots are nothing more than "cause-washing." Especially when I've seen few if any clients publicly walk away from support of Fox and it's holdings, including Fox sports.

I have gotten glib reasoning why from the heads of various holding company media companies. But I haven't gotten anything convincing.

If Fox were a department store and the sports department weren't racist but the rest of the store were, you'd be morally obligated to boycott the entirety, would you not?

In any event, a better example of doing good than anything any agency has done is that of Stacey Abrams. Abrams had the governorship of Georgia stolen from her in 2018 by a combination of virulent voter suppression and corrupt vote counting under the aegis of Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp who was in charge of the counting and was her opponent.

Since that thievery Abrams has not been running commercials saying how hard she's been fighting to rectify one of our nation's million historic wrongs. Instead, she's been working. It's been estimated she registered 800,000 unregistered Georgians. That's almost triple the number of voting-age people in Atlanta.

My point isn't that advertising should give up trying to make the world a better place. My point is that advertising should grow up.

It will take more than a logo, or a spot or a tagline to change this country. Advertising can help.

At its best, it can inform people, move people, inspire people. 

But none of that really happens if it's drowned out by chest-beating.

Quiet, please.

I wonder what would happen if we said no.

No to the aspects of the modern world that really make no sense.

Like the constant noise.

The never-ending jabber.

The speculation.

The gluing ourselves in front of the television. 

And listening to quasi-models for hours-on-end talk about things they know nothing about.

I wonder what would happen if we decided to take a break.

A break from the 24-hour news cycle.

Where one sensation pushes out the previous one like sanity whack-a-mole.

Where catastrophes and disasters and once-in-a-lifetime tragedies happen sixty times a minute. 

Even our hundred-year storms happen five times a month.

I wonder what would happen if we limited our exposures.

We shut down the computer.

Shut off the TV.

Plugged our ears against the incessance.

And read a book.

A nice, meaningless, directionless book.

Maybe something that made us think, feel, cry, think or laugh.

I haven't turned on the TV through all this.

I'm not listening to NPR.

Sure, I check the newspapers. 

The Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and lately the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Las Vegas Register. 

I give them about ten seconds each.

I see if there's any news--not speculation, news. 

And I move on.

It's great that we have the entire world perpetually at our fingertips.

But life shouldn't be structured like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

We need restraint.

And we need distance.

And quiet.

Happy Friday.

We'll get through this. 

Amerikan Lycanthropy. (When humans turn into wolves.)

 

Are we not wolves?

If you’ve read as much about the rise of Nazism in Germany and much of the rest of Europe as I have, and if you’ve been fortunate enough to read Silvano Arieti’s “The Parnas: A Scene from the Holocaust,” you might spend some hours of your day thinking about the psychological ailment known as Lycanthropy.

Lycanthropy is, literally, when humans turn into wolves, or sometimes dogs, or sometimes, like Odysseus’ men before Circe, pigs. Lycanthropy is not some Georgian weirdness. It’s not me speaking in metaphor. It’s when humans turn into wolves.

It’s an ailment rare but well-documented in psychological annals. Arieti writes about it as a psychiatrist and a Jew in WWII Italy where he is confronted by a snarling, salivating wolf in a Nazi uniform, formerly a human. If you think this is bullshit, consider the enduring mythology around werewolves. Or accounts of Lycanthropy in the Torah, Daniel 4 specifically, as when Nebuchadbnezzar’s “dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field.  They shall drive you from men, and make you eat grass like oxen…”

It is also believed that King Tiridates III of Armenia suffered from Lycanthropy. He was said to be cured by Gregory the Illuminator. As a sign of his gratitude, Tiridates proclaimed Christianity Armenia’s state religion, making Armenia the first Christian state.

In my lifetime I remember early on seeing these photographs--and wondering, even at the age of eight or nine, are humans human? Are those dogs attacking men? Or wolves? Or wolfmen?

Some years later, My Lai happened. When Lt. Calley, later pardoned by Richard Nixon, bayonetted children, tossed them into the air, and impaled them once again on bayonets.

I suppose the simple question about Lycanthropy is not whether or not it is a real disorder, but whether or not an entire society--a culture--can turn Lycanthropic under the right malign stressors.

That seems to be the lesson from the Trump administration. To be charitable, it might not be the evil he himself does--he's a bloated buffoon after all, but rather the evil he unleashes.

This seems to be what's happening in America and around the world. Evil unbounded, unchecked, unloosed. And unstopped.

We have met the enemy.

And he is us.

Stan' up an' fight.

I came downstairs Wednesday morning expecting a lot of tears.

My wife is a breathtakingly level-headed woman, but she went to bed Tuesday night convinced that the Bully-in-Chief had won the 2020 presidential election.

I had, all night long, been getting a series of pings. Usually followed by two phonemes. 1) Uh. 2) Oh.

What a horrible indictment of a country of 325 million with a $22 trillion economy that this monstrosity could become president not just once, but twice.

I thought back to September 11, 2001.

That horrible day.

I was stunned how many people couldn't turn off the news.

In fact, they watched tape of people leaping from the towers over and again.

No. Turn off the news. It will still be there in 48-hours.

In any event, I came downstairs defiant.

There's little in this world I despise more than bullies. I've always felt that way. And I will not let bullies like trump and mcconnell and susan collins and the entire fox "news" network bully me. I will not let them make me one of them. I will not become, stealing a phrase from Daniel Goldhagen, one of Hitler's Willing Executioners.

Nicht icht.

I told my wife a story from my childhood.

I was running home from a friend's house. It must have been a Sunday. It was twilight, and I was taking a shortcut through the empty parking lot Gristedes. The lot had no cars and the shopping carts were strewn about pell-mell.

Glen Hall started chasing me. He was the biggest kid in the 7th grade, and African American and as a result of those two factors, he was the most fearsome kid around.

He decided he wanted to beat me up. He wanted to bully me.

I was scared shitless.

But I caught myself. 

I'm as big as he is, I said. And his race endows him with nothing I don't have. I'm not going to let him scare me.

I turned and started walking toward Glen. 

I tried not to show fear.

He said something like you'd expect. That he'd smash my face in, or something elegant like that. 

I tried not to show fear.

Instead, I did the opposite. 

I grabbed a nearby shopping cart and ran toward Glen with it as a battering ram. He ran scared. But even pushing the cart, I was faster.

I trapped him at the chainlink and in a minute or two we were on the asphalt, slugging each other. But by this time, I had the upper-hand. I was crazy enough to run after him. No one does that to bullies.

I had bullied the bully.

I got him on the ground and pinned him with my knees on his shoulders. He struggled but he couldn't get up.

"I could beat your face in now," I screamed at him. "But you're not worth it." 

I let him up.

It was his turn now to run away scared.

Somehow at six this morning this seemed like an apt story to tell about America's political reality. 

Since then reality has altered slightly. It seems at the moment marginally less awful than it was twelve hours ago. That could shift 19 more times as trump does what he's always done: grab things that don't belong to him.

My two cents is simple.

At work, in life there are always bullies about who will try to cow you into submission.

Don't be bovine about life.

Faith.

Etiam si omnes, ego non.

Look up the Latin.

Maybe get a tattoo.

At least try to think about it.

As a slogan, it ain't "Just do it."

But...

People who don't know me call me a pessimist.

I don't just see the glass half-empty, I say 'what glass.'

I am lugubrious by nature.

Dark.

Brooding even.

But...

People who know me--maybe they total three in number--will tell you I am about the toughest sonuvabitch on god's no-longer-green and warming to death earth.

That is, I NEVER throw in the towel.

I never give up.

I make the energizer bunny look like a slacker.

This will be a short post today. Apply it to the world. To whatever you're fighting. Or even advertising.

I will never give in to the motherfuckers.

The racists. The liars. The robbers. The greedy. The doctrinaire. The zealots.

Most of all, I will never give in to the bullies.

Because they're evil and small-minded isn't "creative direction." It's guidance for resistance. It tells us to be kinder, more generous and more expansive.

I'm not a religious person.

But to my mind all the guidance a human needs can be summed up in ten words.

Act justly. Love mercy. And walk humbly with thy god. (Please note--thy god--not just god. That is, you can follow your own god or gods.)

We will get through everything the Prognathous throw at us.

Keep the news off for a while.

Kiss your children.

Kiss your significant other.

Call friends.

Smile to people.

That too, is faith.

And fighting back.

Of ice cream and agencies and crowds.

If you think about things like politics, art and the wisdom of crowds it makes sense to think about ice cream.

I don't remember where I read it, but I read something recently that stuck with me. When I was a boy if you wanted an exotic ice cream flavor you went to Howard Johnson's--America's biggest restaurant chain when I was growing up.

They were the king of ice cream choices, offering 26, if I remember correctly, flavors. Some years later a chain called Baskin-Robbins opened down the street. They offered 31 flavors. Wikipedia tells me there's an ice cream shop in Merida, Venezuela that offers 860 flavors, including trout, mushroom, spaghetti and cheese and wine, as well as black bean and sweetcorn.

That's hardly astounding. Just go to your local supermarket, or remember back to the Democratic presidential primaries, and you might recall dozens of equally odd choices.

That's not what's really interesting though.

Now say there are 100 people sitting in a conference room. They are presented a list of those 26 flavors or 31 or 860 and told they must all agree on one flavor.

In that situation, something very strange happens.

Fifty percent of the time, the group of 100 will choose vanilla. Fifty percent of the time, the group of 100 will choose chocolate.

You might say to yourself, all those myriad choices, and most-often, the two most typical flavors get chosen. How does that happen?

The key here is the dynamic when you try to get a lot of people to agree. Compromises are made. You might be dying to try tuna salad ice cream but someone else in the group finds the very idea repulsive if not nauseating.

That keeps happening as the group winnows down the list. Someone is allergic to strawberry. Or the nuts in butter pecan. Or is abstemious so skips rum raisin. Maybe someone is gluten-free, so oreo-cookie is out. And so it goes.

To get a large group of people to agree on something--even something as inconsequential as ice cream--is an exercise in regression to the mean.

Before all that long, the only two flavors that don't offend or alienate anyone are the two most expected. Vanilla and chocolate.

I just got a phone call from the search consultant who had sent me the RFP I was being considered for last week. She's a very smart and honest person and though I usually have a Maginot line up against most inter-personal advances, I like and respect her.

She said, "George, they loved you. They really want to work with you. They really think you're special but they just aren't sure how you'd handle--with your virtual agency--the crush of work."

I knew this was coming. I sensed it in the meeting.

"They're happy to take a leap of faith that a 24-year-old with little senior supervision can understand their complex offering and their older audience, but they can't see how I could manage a few dozen direct mail letters a month."

We laughed at that. As I knew we would.

The modern calculus of our business is much like my ice cream scenario described above.

Someone among the decision-makers says, "George is a bit of a loose cannon."

"How's he going to do all this churn?"

Someone else says, "he's brilliant, but..."

"I feel better about _____."

"I can see that."

"They've been around forever."

"He's a newcomer."

I'm not upset or angry or even disappointed about not winning.

The only exigency that makes the result difficult is accepting that we have built a system that sands away character for things that are expected and safe.

It might be why so much advertising sucks.

About ten months ago a prospective client and I were chatting. He had been in a senior position, at one time, at P&G. I said something off-hand about Wieden's Old Spice work.

"George," he said, "let me tell you a story. The brand manager for Old Spice sat in the office next to mine. He came back from a meeting with his agency--the one where they presented their "the man your man could smell like work.

"He said to me, George, this is crazy. How can I buy this? I'll be drummed out of P&G."

"But he did," I said.

"Yes. He said, what do I have to lose? We don't spend a lot of money because our brand is dead and we lose sales every year. I'm going for it."

The rest, as they say, is advertising legend, if not history.

My point here is simple.

It's easy to choose vanilla.

I understand that. I can't fault you. I actually like vanilla.

But just so you know, no one will ever talk about the amazing, daring, uncanny choice you made.

Try the veal ice cream.

I'm here all week.

Top 5 Advertising Job Skills Needed for 2025.

I'm not sure it's safe to assume we'll be alive after Tuesday's sham of a US election. I call it a sham because we're not sure who gets to vote, which votes count, who counts the vote, or even if vote totals matter. 

But assuming some of us remain alive--not killed by a hoax virus, runaway opioid addiction, one of the 400 million guns in the US, a lack of available healthcare or radical racist right supporters of a radical racist right reverse Robin Hood repugnant republican part metaphorically driving what used to be democracy off the road, it makes sense to think about how we'll survive the crescendo-ing demise of the advertising industry.

Now that there is no longer any such thing as either having a conscience or an investigative arm of what used to be journalism, it takes a little individual work to juxtapose headlines. It's the best way to really get an idea about the raping of the industry by the holding company minions and their associated vandals. 

I put together this confluence on Friday but what so sickened about the avarice and rapine displayed that I waited through the weekend--until now--to post it.

Let's lose more than one out of every 10 dollars, cut one out of five jobs and then bonus ourselves. My guess is that 90% of those bonuses will go to the million-dollar C-suiters, with 10% being distributed in thousand sou parcels to others so the C-suiters can extol the egalitarianism of those bonuses.

Ha.

Even so, this is the profession we have chosen. To that end, and in the imitative spirit of so much so-called journalism, I thought I'd doff my pundit head-ware and present my list of Top 5 Skills Needed to Work in Advertising in 2025.

1. Groveling. "Please sir," you might practice, "strike me again." "Please make me work 70 hours and through another weekend. So you can take a black-car home and expense your wine-cellar, sir. I'm just lucky to have a job, sir."

2. Obsequiousness, ie the ability to thank people for your lack of job security and for not being paid for half the hours you work because after all, you work in a "creative" industry, and that last animated foot-fungus spot you shot went through only 17-rounds of client-mandated changes.  

3. Inherited wealth. Since the only people who get raises are those who don't need them, all those remaining in the industry will have to have had a rich family just to live in high-cost cities.

4. No sense of smell. Also known as Anosmia--it's needed since you'll be working for people who believe their shit don't stink. (Trust me, it does.)

5. Eating bugs aka Entomophagy. Advertising, except for a few-dozen people at the top is not just a low-wage industry, with its notorious "razor-thin" margins, salaries are actually decreasing from year to year as are payrolls.

According to a UN study reported in the "National Geographic," there are over 1,900 edible--and economical--insect species that can fill you up without emptying out your wallet. According to the study, "Many insects are packed with protein, fiber, good fats, and vital minerals—as much or more than many other food sources."

Consider these varieties.

Beetles, particularly the long-horned, june, rhinoceros and dung varieties (op cit Gregor Samsa) can be roasted over coals and eaten like popcorn.

Butterflies and moths. They're more than just pretty! They're full of protein and iron.

Bees and wasps. They're not just for honey anymore. Bees taste like peanuts or almonds and wasps have a pine-nutty flavor--pignoli anyone?

Lice. From your head to your dinner plate, they taste, I'm told like duck or fish.