Fecundity and Profundity.

When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to have had a teacher, Mr. Bockius, who was bent on making me crazy. He didn't teach like other teachers taught. He exposed us to Evelyn Waugh, GK Chesterton, Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis and Alan Sillitoe. Unusual for high school English. 

These were all people who didn't really fit in with their surroundings. Their work and their lives were a bit off-kilter.

Mr. Bockius wasn't just trying to teach us literature. He was trying to teach us that it was ok to be different. That's quite a lesson for a 15-year-old to take in. Today, I suppose, we'd call it an affirmation--be your Best Self, or some vomitous hallmark-sentiment.

Occasionally in Mr. Bockius' class, we'd get a writing assignment. It was the hardest assignment you can give a person. It was this: Write something.

No topic. No length. No suggestions. Just write something.

I had been reading Greene's "Our Man in Havana," which involves a wayward English spy who's done no spying only drinking, being pressured to provide Cuban state secrets. At a loss, he does the only thing he could do. He copies the blueprints from a vacuum cleaner he just bought and sends it to HQ as the plans for a top-secret new weapon.

In my essay, I took off on this idea and created a giant state-run vacuum cleaner that sucks up all reality and leaves New York an Elysium, a paradise.

Later, I was encouraged to use the piece as my college essay and I got in everywhere I applied but for Princeton, and one school told me it was the best student essay they had ever read.

Mr. Bockius taught me something else.

Often in this final stage of my career, I have a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. I have close relationships with senior-level clients and they want me to solve things. They don't want to wait. Nor should they. I charge them a lot of money.

People ask me--don't you ever feel like you just have no ideas, nothing to write? Of course. But then I think back and remember Mr. Bockius taught me this thing.

"If you have no ideas, if you can't think of anything, write at the top of your page (we still used paper and pens in those days) 'I like.' Then in a second column write, 'I don't like.' Just write a list. If nothing else it will get you going.

I've always found it does. I'm no longer thinking of big problems to solve or the shape and sound of words, or 29 people who want 47 different things from my copy, including my art-director who wants no more than nine words. 

I'm just writing.

Pre-pandemic I had a cup of coffee with an old friend of mine. Someone who had risen to the highest heights in the business, had built a great reputation and also found time to lead one of America's premier portfolio schools.

I had signed up to teach a couple of ad classes at different schools and we were talking about teaching and techniques.  

"George," he said, "We have a weekend boot-camp at school. This is a full-time accredited school, so it's different from some other programs. I tell the kids during a Friday night class that they have to come up with 100 ideas for, say, shoe polish by Saturday night's class. Not 50 ideas. Not 97 ideas. 100 ideas."

That made me nervous and I'm not in the class.

"During Saturday's class, we kick the shit out of those 100 ideas and get it down to ten. On Sunday, they have to make those ten ideas better. Then on Monday, they have to present three ideas."

That might be a little Draconian, that process, that workload. And I'd bet that if you instituted it where you worked there'd be a line down in HR as long as the line of c-suiters' black cars leaving the agency at 4:45 every night.

But I think it's right.

The best way to work, to create, to think, to do, to write is to do. Not to noodle on your phone. Not to search for a bag of Doritos you might have forgotten about. Not to call a friend and shoot the shit. Not even to take your very doe-eyed puppy out for a much-needed walk.

The best way to work is to work.

Ted Williams used to take batting practice until his rib-cage bled, abrading against his elbow.

Somedays, I feel the same, my fingernails down to the quick from writing and writing and writing.

I'm forty-one years in this business come May. Forty-one years making my living clacking on a keyboard.

The only way to write is to write.

Becoming a part of culture.

About 60 years ago there was an agency that many people regarded as the best agency ever. It was called Carl Ally. A later, but still excellent permutation was called Ally & Gargano. It had  some names after that--when I joined the joint in 1990--but by that time, its greatness was long gone.

Ally spawned Ammirati. Scali. Messner. Altschiller. And a few other merged-out-of-existence entities. All of those shops at one time or another were among the places the best people in the industry wanted to work. Because they did the best work. 

Many of the brands you know of today were incubated at those agencies. FedEx. BMW. MCI. Perdue chicken. Volvo. Saab. Dunkin' Donuts. FedEx for instance had a budget of $300,000 at its outset.

At Ally, I was taught something as intrinsic to advertising as the golden rule is to being human. It was their belief in what advertising is meant to do.

"Our work will impart useful consumer information in an executionally brilliant way."

Every day I hear something different about what advertising is supposed to do. Mostly that it's supposed to be part of culture. 

I'm not trying to be contrary but I literally don't know what being part of culture is supposed to mean. Also, what's part of culture to you is likely not part of culture to me. I can almost guarantee that my culture, whatever that means, has no idea of what culture was being cultured during Sunday night's Grammy's. 

If culture is atomized--meaning that every group and sub-group, every person even, can claim their own cultural signposts, then what is the definition of a culture? If it's a shared set of likes, dislikes, preferences, tastes, styles, beliefs and behaviors, fine. But how many people have to be sharing it for it to become a culture?

And given this, what does it mean that we strive to make advertising that's a part of culture? Again, I'm not trying to be captious or obstreperous, I literally don't understand. When do you know when a brand is part of culture? Nike, I see. People display their logo as a badge. But very few other brands ever rise to that level. Or if they do, my culture just hasn't noticed.

Which in large measure is why I don't understand the latest Burger King (a culturally imperious moniker if there ever was one. Shouldn't their name be changed to the more egalitarian Burger Proliteriat?) 

Why does any brand think it falls to the brand to mend a broken world? I think Burger King's job is to make better hamburgers, pay its employees better and maybe clean up more of the massive amounts of trash they generate. Let's start there. When you're perfect at all the things I want from a burger joint, then we can talk about ocean plastic.

I remember a couple years ago when every airline in the world decided that the way to their customer's heart was through a funny, sexy video on how to insert the metal tab into the buckle. Safety videos had always been the stuff of $79 production. Now, overnight, they were being given $2 million dollar budgets.

I never liked those videos for one very simple reason. When I'm seated in a seat more suitable to an about-to-be-slaughtered veal calf than a 6'2" man with more than his share of adipose, I want to think that the airline I'm flying on has done everything they can to make me comfortable--not to make me amused. When your product sucks or your service or your sense of societal responsibility, don't try to buy me off with the filmic equivalent of a happy meal. You've only pissed me off.

Likewise, when I've spent $500 on opera tickets, don't put a ten-point message on the little screen that translates the lyrics for me saying, "Tonight's opera sponsored by Bank of America."

I know who Bank of America is. And how they ass-raped the poor with subprime mortgages and other forms of rapacious credit. I paid $500 for these seats--you, Bank of America, are a theatrical mugger. Taking shit from me that I didn't want to give.

As for Burger King saying a woman's place is in the kitchen, no matter how that thought was intended, misintended, well-meaning or utterly tone-deaf, it's just dumb. And it's none of your business.

My culture says burger joints should focus on making great burgers. Phone companies should focus on building a network that doesn't drop two calls in five. And ad agencies should be 98.989% concerned with making effective and likeable advertising that produces business results.

There's a Talmudic precept that says "whoever saves a life, it is considered as if they have saved an entire world." That's yet another reason I feel like companies should do what they do. Do good for your clients. The rest will follow. Don't try to earn brownie points by showing an uncaring public how goddamned noble they are. Or how important their role is in shaping culture.

Of course, you can disagree with me.

You probably do. My opinions are not very au courant.

So disagree all you want. But these beliefs are my culture.

Resiliency. Orwell Modernized.

Yes, we have lost a skein of accounts lately. Culminating in the loss of an account we've had for 71 years. 

But we are resilient.

Sure, we haven't had any significant wins--or even come close to a significant win- since we fired just about every senior creative person three years ago.

But we are resilient.

I know we're trying to put a positive spin on things by announcing the wins of Acme Safety Match company and the rebrand of Billy Bob's Mason-Jar Moonshine and Furniture Lacquer Company, even though the revenue of those two accounts in total couldn't pay for the hair on a moldy Whopper.

But we are resilient.

I get it, we're not making short-lists. The market has dubbed us a dinosaur stock and the consultants we hired to help lead our digital transformation (though we ourselves have a consultancy) have just been fined $573 million for their leading role in causing thousands of deaths during America's opioid crisis.

But we are resilient.

Yes, you're right. Most of the agencies in our network don't even know their names anymore or even if they'll have a new name next week or month. 

But we are resilient. 

Of course, we're taking $4.3 billion in impairment charges due to a failed acquisition from over 20 years ago.

But we are resilient.

Yes, our headcount is down 7% from a year ago.

Yes, we went from a £1.21 billion profit in 2019 to a pre-tax loss of £2.79 billion in 2020.

And our fourth quarter organic revenue was down 6.4% in the U.S., 7.4% in the U.K., 0.8% in Germany, 8.9% in India and 12.1% in Greater China.

BUT WE ARE RESILIENT.

No, our CEO doesn't own a decent tie and our entire holding company is virulently ageist with fewer than one out of one-hundred employees over 60.

BUT BRUTUS IS AN HONOURABLE MAN.

(Inspired by today: The Ides of March. And Marc Anthony's speech from William Shakespeare--one who harkens back.)

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest--
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men--
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

 

One night. One mile below Madison Avenue.

WE OPEN IN A LAVISH PANELED BOARDROOM CARVED OUT OF A DORMANT VOLCANO THAT SEETHES UNDER NEW YORK'S ONCE THRIVING MADISON AVENUE. THE CAPO DI CAPI OF THE WORLD ADVERTISING INDUSTRY ARE GATHERED AROUND A GLEAMING 75-FOOT LONG TABLE.

CEO OF PUBICOM: 
Gentlemen, these are not easy times for us.

CEO OF OMNIGORE:
No, they are not. Certainly not.

CEO OF PEW:
Something must be done. But what. 

CEO OF INTERSPECIES:
Every time we hear the word "margins," the phrase razor-thin is appended to it.

OMNIGORE:
So, do we look to develop thinner razors? That would make our margins...razor thick!

INTERSPECIES:
Who has the Gillette account--can they work on this?

OMNIGORE:
We used to have it but...

PEW:
We have it. But they're not talking to us.

PUBICOM:
Gentlemen, thinner razors won't help. We need some big ideas.

INTERSPECIES:
Can we hire an agency to help?

OMNIGORE:
McKinsey? They need the money after that $573 million judgment for killing thousands of people for their Oxycontin clients.

PEW:
Gentlemen, I have a staff of over 300 CFOs and 180 business transformation experts. 

I think we have something...

INTERSPECIES:
Something big?

PUBICOM:
Something you're willing to share.

PEW:
We will all stand together, gentlemen, or we will all hang apart.

At PEW, Plastic Eviscerating Wire, we have an idea. 

Lights, please.

[THE CONFERENCE TOMB DARKENS]

Gentlemen, slide one:
I give you Cee Ess Tee.

OMNIGORE:
CST?

PEW:
Yes. CST. 
Creative Savings Time.
Every time there is a creative project, we move the billable clock back one hour, so we can bill for more time. AND we move the creatives' clock ahead one hour so they don't bill at all and we can fire all those who are left.

PUBICOM:
We have over a dozen blood-sucking creatives wanting to get paid every week.

INTERSPECIES:
Leeches.

PEW:
With CST, Creative Savings Time, we can bill our clients more--and give them less.

OMNIGORE:
That is the return of the path to profitability. Do less. Charge more.

PUBICOM:
That is genius! But if a Frenchman thought of it, it would be not just Creative Savings Time, but Client Savings Time as well.

INTERSPECIES:
CST! We save on what we spend on clients.

OMNIGORE:
And we save on what we give to creatives!

PEW: My, friends, CST is our road back.

JUST THEN THE LIGHTS FLICKER BACK ON AND A TINY SCOWLING MAN ENTERS THE ROOM.

PEW:
It is Sir Martin.

PUBICOM:
All hail!

MARTIN:
You old Holding Companies are doing it wrong! You don't need CST. That's the old Agency Model.

SSSS4444 has a new way.

CSSSST.

OMNIGORE:
CSSSST?

MARTIN:
CSSSS4444--Certainly. Sorelbow Steals Shareholders Souls. What did you think SSSS4444 stands for?

A TREMENDOUS CRASH OF THUNDER SOUNDS. THE ROOM DARKENS AGAIN AND THE FIVE MEN DISAPPEAR INTO A CLOUD BLOOD RED SMOKE.

Meanwhile, back at the Holding Company...

I've spent my life in the advertising industry. It's paid for my two homes, my kids' college and grad school educations, my dog's extensive wardrobe and my 1966 Simca 1500 with a broken heater and loose muffler.

In an effort to save Holding Companies the time and money involved in firing people, I've created the "Fiero. The World's First Firing Bot."

... Welcome to the Fiero... 

The World's First Firing Bot

Fiero:          

Hi, how are you today. I'm Fiero,

the world's first automatic Firing Bot.

How can I help you today?

Victim:        

What's this about? 

Fiero? 

You just popped up on my screen.

Fiero:          

... THINKING THINKING THINKING

Victim:        

Fiero, are you there?

Fiero:          

Hi, how are you today. I'm Fiero,
the world's first automatic Firing Bot.

How can I help you today?

Victim:        
You contacted me.

Fiero:          

....Yes.

Fiero:          
... THINKING THINKING THINKING

Fiero:           
You are being fired today.

Fiero:           

Your last full day of employment will be

three weeks ago yesterday.

Victim:         
What do you mean I'm being fired?

I'm scheduled to shoot a spot next week.

Fiero:          

... THINKING THINKING THINKING

Fiero:          
Hi, how are you today. I'm Fiero,
the world's first automatic Firing Bot.

How can I help you today?

Victim:        

You just said I was fired.

Fiero:          

Your last full day of employment will be

three weeks ago yesterday.

Press 1, if you've been made redundant based on    

a reevaluation of the changing client needs.

Press 2, if you hearken back to the '80s.

Press 3, if your agency is undergoing strategic
reassessment based on the shifting media landscape.

Press 4, if your Holding Company is hemorrhaging money

due to severe mismanagement bordering on thievery.

Press 5, if you'd like to repeat these options.

Victim:        
What kind of severance do I get?

I've worked 40 weekends this year

and worked here for 12 years.

Fiero:          

Hi, how are you today. I'm Fiero,
the world's first automatic Firing Bot.

How can I help you today?

Fiero:          

Your last full day of employment will be

three weeks ago yesterday.

Victim:

What is going on?

Fiero:      

Press 1, if you'd like a box to put your things in.

Press 2, if you'd like to settle Aeron-chair rental fees.

Press 3, if you'd like an envelope to put your things in.

Press 4, if you'd like to be switched to our

Empathy and Consolation bot.

Press 5, to repeat these options.

Victim:        

This is crazy. I just ran into Liz the CEO!

She told me what a great job I was doing.

I had dinner with the client last night.

Fiero:          
Hi, how are you today. I'm Fiero,
the world's first automatic Firing Bot.

How can I help you today?

Victim:        

I've put in 12 years here. Nights, weekends,

canceled vacations. I'm winning awards.

My account is making money. Is there no one

to talk to?

Fiero:         
... THINKING THINKING THINKING

Victim:        
What about my severance?

Fiero:         
While the Sever-O-Matic is preparing your package,

Press 1, if you'd like easy-listening music.

Press 2, if you'd like the contemporary sounds of smooth jazz.

Press 3, if you'd like to hear the latest CEO investor call.

Victim:       
Sever-O-Matic?

Isn't there anyone I can talk to?

Fiero:          
Hi, how are you today. I'm Fiero,
the world's first automatic Firing Bot.

How can I help you today?

         

                 

A tale of three magic markers.

Back when I was a puppy in the business, almost forty years ago, I worked for two Hall-of-Famers who were among the brightest stars in the Doyle Dane Bernbach constellation. Go through a 1960s era award book, and you'll see literally hundreds of ads attributed to Ron Rosenfeld, at the time the youngest writer inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame, and Len Sirowitz, the art director of many of my favorite ads.

Ron and Len were not much interested, by the time I worked for them, in great advertising. But they were interested in making money. In fact, they were one of the first agencies to abandon the high-rents of midtown Manhattan and move their offices to the then no-man's land of lower Fifth Avenue.

Their offices occupied an entire floor of the old Arnold Constable department store building. It ran from 18th to 19th Street and from Fifth Avenue to Broadway. More than thirty years later, they are still the most-beautiful offices I ever had the displeasure of sitting in. With 13-foot ceilings, old cast-iron Corinthian columns and light streaming in from the windows and skylights.

Even back then, I was an ornery son-of-a-gun, and most places I worked would find a room for me far away from the rest of the inmates. They didn't want whatever diseases and toxins I was harboring to spill-over the walls and seep into other offices. In other words, I had an office at the very end of the hallway, back by the freight elevator and a storage room dusty with old veloxes.

There was only one office back where I was and it was kept empty as an act of grace by Ron and Len. If one of their less-successful old friends from the old days needed a place to work, or a place to hang out, or a place to take a meeting, or to decamp for a few days, this space, next to mine would be made available. 

In that way, I would occasionally spend a week or a month sitting next to a 55-year-old ad legend, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip, shirt untucked, bursting with stories about the way life used to be. Late at night when the rest of the agency had gone home or had gone to the city's seamier sides, I would sit with these guys and say things like, "What was Bill Taubin really like?" Or "Tell me about Phyllis Robinson."

One night, it was very late, the office was dark except for the Tensor lamp I had shining on my Smith-Corona word-processor. I heard a noise coming from the next office--the one that housed temporarily the legends from the past.

I walked over to say hi. To shoot the shit.

"George," sit down, the old art-director rasped.

I found a chair that was not a cheap knock-off of a Marcel Breuer.

He stared off through the louvered blinds and began.

"One night, a night late like this, I was sitting in my office alone. Through the haze of cigarette smoke, I saw a phantom standing in the doorway. I brushed the smoke from the day's thousand Chesterfield's away, hoping the apparition would dissipate with the tobacco fog, but it did not. In fact, it intensified into focus."

"An apparition," I said dumbly.

"OK, a spirit, a haunt, a spook."

"Today we call them account people."

That evinced no laughter and my neighbor continued. 

"The spook came over to me. He held up his hand--a bony, Ichabod Crane paw. It was holding three identical Magic Markers."

"Choose one," the spook said.

"They are all the same," I answered, "how do I choose?"

The ghost was hovering now. Its form was pulsating as if it were breathing.

"They are not the same. He held one up. This is the Magic Marker of Beauty."

"Beauty?"

"With it, to your side will come the most beautiful woman in all the world. She will be taken in by your talent and will love you with a love that has never been loved."

At once, he told me, the apparition changed from an amorphous, ghostly figure to living, pulsing flesh. It became the very image of godly beauty. Botticelli's Venus crossed with Rider Haggard's Ayesha with a soupcon of Marilyn thrown in.

"She beckoned me closer. But then as I was about to embrace her she vaporized. The apparition returned and offered me the second marker. 

"Now the shape changed to look stern and austere--roughly like a ghostly Helmut Krone, if that's not redundant. 'The second marker,' the apparition said, 'is the power of art direction. With it you will win one-hundred awards, one-thousand. Ads like Think Small, will be consigned to the classified pages.

"Then that shape disappeared and a third showed up. A bearded, distracted old man. He handed me the third marker. 

"He said, 'This is the marker of wisdom. When you hold it you will think strategically. You will know how to out-fox your clients' competitors. You will know how to communicate with clarity and impact. You will know how to have the strength, not to win riches for yourself or acclaim for your work, but how to achieve things for your clients and your agency. How to make them powerful and important to consumers. You will see all that, with the marker of wisdom.'"

The old man reached into a lower drawer and poured himself in a small dusty glass a shot of Chivas. He filled another dusty glass for me.

"The apparition returned now in its original form. 'Which do you choose?' I was 25, George, a young man in the business. I was sweating and afraid. I thought of the woman, of the beauty, of the pleasure she would bring me, of eternal love and bliss and more. I chose the first marker."

"The marker of beauty."

"Yes," he said solemnly.

"And what happened."

"The woman of beauty, of pleasure, of desire, perfection and lust was a Creative Director's wife. She left him for me. She came to me. She transported me.

"But I was hated. I became a pariah in the industry. I had some years with her. But..."

"Like all things, beauty fades."

"Awards turn too to dust."

"Yes," I agreed. 

"But...the third marker," he said. "The third marker."

"Wisdom."

"That one ran dry years ago."

Like an apparition, he disappeared. 

And I did too. 

Down the freight elevator and into the night.

An ode to light. Told by darkness.

I stumbled upon a line by Oscar Wilde the other day that for no apparent reason made me think of advertising as it is practiced in our current advertising "Dark Ages."

Somehow, and for whatever reason, it seems that the entire industry--which includes client-side marketing people--have convinced themselves that the viewing/reading/clicking public has the collective intelligence of a barn-swallow. One that was recently dealt a severe blow to the cranium and has been rendered essentially senseless.

We have basically convinced ourselves that nothing is important except (maybe) a moderately-attractive-looking piece of film, a callow folk singer singing a song writ three-decades before she was born, sinuous twenty-somethings dancing, and some sort of grandiose declaiming. We have forgotten the verities of advertising that existed since advertising began--way back in Sumer, Mesopotamia, some 6,000 years ago.

If you have a camel to sell, write "Can go four days without water." Or "Extra eyelid to keep out sand." 

People want to know things about what they're buying.
They want to know why what they're buying is better.
They want to know what they're buying actually does.

They also want to feel those things that humans have always cherished in interpersonal relationships. 

People want to feel they're special.
People want to feel they're cared for.
People want to feel they've made a smart decision.
They want to feel heard and respected.
Not shouted at or lied to.

Advertising, at its best, used to convey all that. We didn't go into every assignment saying:

People don't care.
People don't read.
Every product is the same.
No one believes anything.
The only thing they care about is being cool.

In fact, to be obdurate, I'd argue, 

It's our job to make people care.
It's our job to create things people want to read/watch.
It's our job to find product differences.
It's our job to find and propagate and communicate truth.

The Oscar Wilde line I found was this: "I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement."

Today's prevailing and all-too-frequently used advertising equivalent is this: "I must decline to do something good owing to the fact that no one cares."

Just now I came upon this spot by the German agency Jung Von Matt. "Agency Spy," usually so snarky, was fulsome in their praise of Jung Von Matt's commercial drivel.

"Hyundai is utilizing some slick camera work and editing to highlight its new Tuscon SUV. Its latest ad, created by German agency Jung Von Matt Neckar, showcases the SUV in various driving conditions—on picturesque desert roads, modern cityscapes, nighttime vistas—in vivid color and jaw-dropping cinematography. Sure, the car might be secondary in the film, but it’s a minute well spent for your eyes."

This is advertising criticism 2021 style. There wasn't a single unique shot or idea in the minute. And frankly, a disquisition on "light" is hardly the means to sell anyone a car, except maybe a photon. 

Besides, I'm pretty sure no brand can make a case for being the brand that "owns" light. And copy that says things like, "Light can turn a shadow bright," well, that's copy on the order of this: "Air. It's what we breathe. Through our mouths. And our nostrils. It sustains us. It gives us life. And it's what surrounds, embraces and holds the new Hyundai Snotrag. Air. Three letters that mean so much."

I look at that expensive monstrosity and it makes me hate Hyundai, the actors, the agency and additionally the industry. The spot is so chock full of cliches, it actually sullies everything around it. It is a blight of light brains and unthinking creativity. It told me nothing I didn't know and certainly nothing relevant to me.

And I can hear all the praise and back-slapping and corks-popping and self-congratulations echoing through Jung Von Welcome Mat.

I've always looked to the VW ad below--not an especially famous one--as an example of great advertising. It made me like the brand. It made me want to know the brand. And it makes me want to be one of the people who drove the brand's product.

There's not an ounce of bs, pretense of cliche. Solid and useful information. With warmth and wit.

And I'm not going to discuss this any longer, even if you want me to. I have a subsequent engagement.

More philosophical reckonings.

If you want to scare the shit out of yourself, and there's no better way to improve or maintain your cardio-vascular health than a good bout of apoplexy, you'd be well-served reading Nicole Perlroth's new book, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race. You can read the review in "The New York Times" here.

Through the years, especially those years when I was working on one-time tech behemoth, IBM, I've read quite a bit on security. All of it's been frightening. 

You get the sense that you're on a hyper-loop roller-coaster through hell, run by a coked-up eric trump and rudy guiliani's cut the brakes because william barr and the federalist society agreed that was the originalist interpretation of safety as aborted by amy coney barret in a see-through apron. That said, Ms. Perlroth's book was by far the most-detailed, most-comprehensive, most-damning of the trump-putin cabal and the most-frightening.

There's not much you as a person can do to escape the peril we all live in. Virtually everything we come into contact with is connected to the web and the web has more viruses and infections than donald trump's paid-girl-friends and mar-a-lago's unpaid-staff.

If you have a computer, you're screwed.
If you have an ATM card, you're screwed.
If you use the internet, you're screwed.
If you have online financial accounts, you're screwed.
If you're connected to the electrical grid, you're screwed.
If you're connected to the water supply, you're screwed.
If you travel by car, bus, train or plane, you're screwed.
If you need a hospital, you're screwed.
If you live near a dam or nuclear plant, you're screwed.
If you own stocks, you're screwed.
If you're paid electronically, you're screwed.

That's just for starters.

Part of our screwiness comes from modern technology thinking as encapsulated by the world's most dangerous dweeb, mark zuckerberg.

He famously mouth-farted "move fast and break things."

That absolute anti-human anti-safety anti-earth mentality has been regarded as prevailing wisdom in the world for about the last twenty years. I've even heard it in agency creative meetings and media presentations.

The idea is to get places fast, the devil take the hindmost, and somebody else (usually lowly tax-payers or everyday workers will be left to clean up the toxic detritus.) General Electric, for instance, moved fast and broke things. Like the entire Hudson River, which will be sullied by carcinogens forever and a day. 

It's not hard to think of close-by Holding Company examples who destroyed every great agency they came into contact with from Abbott Mead Vickers and Ally and Ammirati all the way practically to the Zs, with Young and Rubicam, now an unholy mess of initials that resembles mange on the skin of a neglected dog.

Most things, businesses, ideas, relationships even meals aren't about moving fast and breaking things. Sure serendipity happens and old, ossified business practices are good for no one. But woven within "move fast and break things" is Oscar Wilde's definition of a cynic: "a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

zuckerberg's mantra, taken up by others, was all about market- first mover and not at all about security or privacy. The holding company interpretation is about doing something fast, cheap and "always-on" for clients, without delivering long-term value.

By the end of Perlroth's book, she, unfortunately, offers no solution to the security problems created by zuckerbergism. I've read all about lattice-cryptography and quantum-derived passwords. They'll give you a glimmer of optimism like the first taste of cotton candy. They melt away just as quickly. 

In other words, if they stop Putin, or the Iranians, or the Israelis, or anyone else, it will only be a short time before the USA (NSA/CIA and others) use such defenses offensively and our weapons are discovered, decoded and used against us by others. This is what's happened with just about every weapon system ever developed from rocks to trump's space-farce cosmic flatulence.

Perlroth did however note this. Near Facebook's headquarters (where they quarter people's sense of ethics in exchange for mammon) someone had graffitied, "move fast and break things."

Some Molotov-throwing rebel graffitied the graffiti, writing "Move slowly and fix your shit."

For all things large and small, business and advertising, micro and macro, those ain't bad words to live by.

Advice for living. From the dead.

One way of assessing what kind of effect I've had on the universe happens when someone I know--and even love--knocks me in the head, or sends me a text, or mumbles in my direction and says, "Did you read so and so's obituary?"

I was born into an admiration of death-notices--and at the near-constant behest of my sporadically-energetic father--often had one ripped out of the morning Times and insistently placed in front of me.

I was just trying to eat a piece of toast. I often ended up with a life-lesson.

The Times does an amazing job with their obituaries. They cover all creatures great and small. They have their lives condensed and intensified--80 years or so turned into a two-minute read. Their life story is theirs, their successes and set-backs, and more often than not, a joke, a story, a lesson that enriches your life.

The fact is, I have become, over my many years, something of an obituary connoisseur. I've read whole books of them--reading the Economist's obituary on John Maynard Keynes, or The Times of London's account of Winston Churchill, or closer to home and less political, the New York Times' recent obituary of David Mintz, the man who invented Tofutti non-dairy ice-cream.

While there are many who decry my love for obituaries and see it as evidence of my lugubrious and dour mien, all I can say is an old New York-ism: "Don't knock it till you've tried it."

I can also recommend the greatest one-volume collection of quirky obituaries ever compiled, "52 McGs: The Best Obituaries from Legendary New York Times Reporter Robert McG. Thomas." 

If you buy this slim book and don't get handed a laugh or ten, I'll refund your money. Assuming you can find me.

Last week, important in ad circles, The New York Times ran the obituary of legendary headhunter Judy Wald. Wald's selling ability might have led to the rise of the primacy of creatives in the ad industry--at least before the entire industry was subsumed by petty CPAs and cost-cutting Holding Companies. You can read the Times' obituary here. 

Here's one anecdote from the Times that might just indicate how comparatively impecunious the agency business has become. [Wald] "loved to tell the tale of how she had once collected a fee for moving an executive from one job to another within the same agency.

“I wasn’t about to give any freebies,” she told New York magazine.

However, what prompted today's post was my wife, Laura. I had read the Times' obit last week when it came out. But she pours over the Weekend Wall Street Journal (arguably the best newspaper in the world if you can ignore the fascist opinion pages) like Champollion de-coding the Rosetta Stone.

"Did you read the Journal's obituary of Judy Wald," she lovingly asked me.

"No, I read the Times'. It was good."

"Read it," she demanded. She was, in that two-word sentence, more Lavrenti Beria than the woman I married, so I complied within about four seconds.

To be honest, I was a little pissed. I had been in the middle of something, and the Journal retread a lot of the same ground the Times had covered. Then I got to the obituary's crescendo, neatly tucked where it belongs, in its last line. 

"In her interview with New York magazine, Ms. Wald summed up her philosophy this way: 'Love many; trust few; always paddle your own canoe.'”

We live today, it seems to me, in an elder-less universe. Wisdom--and the experience of living--is most-often subordinated to the splendor of the photograph of the grilled scallop you've uploaded or a badly shot short-film of a random person dancing or something equally banal.

One of the reasons--perhaps the main one--I read obituaries is that they contain the wisdom of the ages--often from the mouths and minds of those who have had long and illustrious lives and are asked to reflect. 

A good reporter knows how to listen to those reflections and, with skill, can turn them in the epigrams that in some cases would not be out of place among the 147 maxims attributed to the Oracle of Delphi.

I've highlighted two of these pearls above. I'll put them here again. Because I think they're that good. My guess is, if you follow them--as the Ithakans followed their Oracle, you'll probably have not just a better career, but a better life, too.

“I wasn’t about to give any freebies.”

“Love many; trust few; always paddle your own canoe.”