Face, not laughing.

When my sister Nancy was young, this was maybe 1973, making her 13, and me 15, she butted heads against the American establishment. I was a head-butter, too. But then, as now, there's great value in seeing other people fighting the powers that be. It helps show you what in real life you're up against.

Nancy died 14 years ago in a horrific motorcycle accident. But hardly a day goes by when I don't think about her, wish I could hear her voice, hold her hand, or have a meal with her.

Sometimes I can see her laying on the floor in my little beach home, hugging Whiskey, not caring in the least that Whiskey's just come out of the sea and she smells more like wet dog than angel.

 

I'm on a flight back east from three days of client meetings which can take a lot out of a person with too many synapses. I read recently, that the ancient Greeks had a phrase for people whose minds don't stop even for sleep. They have "Scorpions in their heads." I've got a battalion or two.

 

Trying to catch up on lost sleep, I was listening to music while closing my eyes. The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" came on my pod and so did a gallon of tears. Nancy tears.

 

Way back in the Spring of 1973, Nancy was graduating from 8th grade going into 9th. She always had a musical bent--and like my daughters 30 years later--she loved the Fab Four.

 

Schools back then--50 years ago or so--were rigid and tradition- bound. They had probably played some Classical graduation march for 100 years. It's the way they had always done things.

 

But Nancy listened to the words of Here Comes the Sun. Like many good lyrics, they sound better than they read. And Nancy loved the feeling of the song.

 

She wanted the song as her class' graduation tune.

 

Though never a "popular" kid, she got virtually the whole 8th-grade to sign a petition. Then she presented the petition to the administration of the Middle School. The Vices. Vice Principal and all that.

 

They said no.

 

That's not done. Besides, the Beatles...drugs. Long hair.

 

At this point, I would have thrown in the towel. Too often, my attitude is 'fuck 'em. I'll hear my own music.'

But not Nancy.

 

This wasn't just a song at a ritual for her. It was youth versus staid. It was sun versus darkness. Against all logic, she kept banging her head against the sturdy, thick and reinforced establishment walls. Like walls in 10th-century Crusader battlements, they were 10-feet thick, or 12.

 

At last, they relented. She banged hard enough and they agreed. They would play "Here Comes the Sun," in addition to some John Philip Sousa march.

 

I'm thinking about that tiny victory now--48 years after the fact.

I'm thinking about the will Nancy had. The, yes, superhuman strength. The force. The force that through green fuse drives the flower.

 

I think the world, myself included, needs more Nancy in it.

 

I think the world, myself included, needs more still small voices.

 

I think the world, myself included, needs more pains in the ass. More fighters. More never-give-uppers.

 

I think the world, myself included, needs more believers, more optimists, more 'why nots,' and fewer 'we can'ts.'

 

Nancy wasn't with me during my three days of client meetings.

 

Nancy isn't with me when I fight my business fights, no matter how small and ultimately inconsequential they are.

 

Nancy isn't with me at all anymore.

 

Except maybe she is.

 

Maybe she's leading that battalion of scorpions who live in my head.

--

BTW, three of Nancy's albums when she played with a band called "Moonshine Willy." 

And an obituary by her label.

In Memory of Moonshine Willy's Nancy Tannenbaum

May 17th, 2007 by Rami

On Sunday May 13th, 2007 Nancy Tannenbaum, aka Nancy Rideout, original guitarist in Moonshine Willy, was killed in a motorcycle accident in New York City. She swerved to avoid a pedestrian who mysteriously ran onto the West Side highway, was thrown from her bike and died at the scene.

Nancy came into my life before Bloodshot Records was even a gleam in my eye. It was a thrilling, wide-open time when music meant EVERYTHING. Chicago was a city bursting with new, inventive music and this band, Moonshine Willy, was percolating with some sort unnamed mutant aggro-hillbilly punk sound. On stage right was this diminutive, bashful, tight-lipped guitarist with a fearless sound.

She had the impossibly cool rock and roll last name of Rideout---I don't even think I knew her real last name for a couple of years--I just assumed she was born to play music with that name (and would, without much fanfare, thrown DOWN with a nimble, messy, totally intuitive sound that mashed bluegrass, country and rockabilly into something I'd rarely seen played with such innate energy. At times, she even seemed surprised at some of things she was pulling off.

Moonshine Willy signed the first Bloodshot contract in 1994 (suckers!) and we packed a good deal of camaraderie into the next few years. It was a time before it all became a business, before true adulthood and responsibilities wrung some of the pure exhilaration out of our creative endeavors. All of us went to the same clubs, ate breakfast at the same places, saw the same shows, hung out in each others backyards or on each others porches, played softball every week (she was quite the second baseman), soaked in our respective sweat on a drive from Dallas to El Paso in 118 degree heat with a busted AC in the van during the first Willy national tour, and developed a closeness that only comes from such time together in the trenches. We were all essentially living together, we just happened to have different landlords and mailing addresses. I cannot imagine all those shows at Lounge Ax or Wednesday nights at Crash Palace/Delilah's without her.

Our time together was emblematic of a simpler, more fun time--full of close friendships that transcend geography. For me, her passing is a heart-breaking reminder of just how special that time was.

Mostly, though, when I think of Nancy, I remember how so very happy she looked when she was playing.

Rob Miller
Bloodshot Records

A short course in Semiotics.

If you believe as I do in the seminal power of semiotics--that beyond words having meaning, signs and symbols have meaning too.

So an agency that says, for instance, "we're all about creative," and then decimates its creative staff, or leaves them penned in long-rows like un-free-range chickens, or has them working for six years without raises is semiotically dishonest. Or an agency that says, "diversity is everything," and then fails to materially improve diversity, fails to provide training, and fails to provide regular progress reports is saying the right things, but they're semiotically lying.

Many years ago--New York's monument for the ages--Penn Station--was brutally torn down. Watch the short video above and shed a tear for what was.

Vincent Sculley, the Yale architectural historian said this about the Vandal's act: "One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat."

That's a statement about semiotics.

It's about how a couple of brands--in this case the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the States of New York and New Jersey, and the Pennsylvania Rail Road (who owned the station and the land) saw their customers.

Are they gods?

Or are they rats?

I'm doing some work now--and trying to do more--on what my business partner calls "Brand Dissonance." The vast gap between saying and doing. The "we're spending $50 million to tell you we're spending the $1 million on going carbon-free." Or just the nasty, shrill and shoddy way of speaking so many brands use.

But that might be pretty complicated for a dopey blog.

We might be better off being more bluntly antipodal.

Are your people rats? Or gods?

Are they users? Or humans?

Are they buckets, targets, markets, shares of wallet?

Or your mom and dad?

Your choice.

You made me hate you.

At the age of 63 and a half, I'm still somewhat amazed at how tone-deaf, or dumb, brands can be. 

I've pasted just one example below. 

Maybe it angers me because for so many years baseball was sacrosanct to me. And the All-Star Game most holy of all. It was a gathering of the baseball gods on Olympus. A place of dreams and brilliance, of combat and conflict.

Baseball, in more naive times, belonged to us. 

Just like the Opera did.

Or a rock concert.

Or an art exhibit.

Sure, shows on TV were always "sponsored by..." but somehow this email subject line below goes behind that humble claim. 

"Presented by" makes me feel like you, Mastercard, believe you own this event. That you're doing me a favor letting me watch something I've watched every July since John Kennedy was President and Mays, Mantle, Musial and Snider roamed the outfield.

It makes me think of a land grab. 

Better, a usurpation.

I don't much like bullies horning in on other people's turf. I never much liked credit-stealing bosses who chirp "I. I. I." when presenting others' work. 

I've always believed that the best barometer for gauging brand behavior could be found in this simple sentence: "People like brands that act like people they like."

For the life of me, I can't find a good way to shoot that belief down. Yet every day, the modern ad industry brags, boasts, trumpets and takes credit for things they haven't done. Or they shout, exclamation point, exaggerate and more. Or they put their name on tax-payer-funded stadiums and arenas.

I'm big, you're little. I'm strong, you're weak. I make the rules, you follow them.

I understand Mastercard is a sponsor of the All-Star Game. They are NOT giving me anything. I am paying for their sponsorship with my eyeballs.

There are two ways people, governments, management and brands can go through life.

Most say YOYO. 

You're on your own.

The good ones are different.

They say WITT.

We're in this together.

Mousification.

You've probably seen a realtor come into a home and in an instant, size it up, understand its value and find two or three little things that make it special, make it easier to sell.

"Get rid of that sofa. Put a plant here. Remove the small table from the eat-in kitchen. And great rid of those ferstunkeneh vertical blinds."

 

In the military world, they call it Coup d'oiel. General Patton had it: he could see the battlefield at a glance. He could immediately find the strategic high-ground. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book about it. He called it "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking".

When I worked with Ridley Scott, he talked about what he sees when he enters a space. "I immediately know where the lights go and the camera. I have it all set up."

In advertising, people have it, too.

Or at least they have an immediate sense of what everyone else is doing, and so, a determination to do something different.

I remember once listening to an interview with Gerry Graf. The interviewer asked, "How do you know if something is good?"

Graf said, "If I've seen it before, it's no good."

Pytka sent me a treatment once saying, "I don't do treatments. Why should I send you a bunch of stock photographs showing how my work will be different."

Unfortunately, our world today--marketing and otherwise--is too often stricken by a giant cosmological regression to the mean. There's a set of about 500 similarities, conceits or tropes that everyone uses to show how different they are.

Over the weekend, I got asked a favor.

A non-paying favor for someone I've known, but not closely, for more than a quarter of a century.

Would I write her a couple of emails introducing her to new clients? 

Yeah, sure.

So I did the job. And a damn good one. The things I wrote were human, real, friendly, thoughtful and even funny. 

In about an hour at got hit with a double-barreled blast of buts. 

But my clients don't like funny. 

But my clients won't spend any time.

But my clients want to know we survived the pandemic.

They don't like funny--so they don't watch "Curb," "Seinfeld," or "The Office."

They won't spend any time--so they don't watch 29 hours of the Sopranos.

And, they hadn't realized we survived the pandemic.

Nothing is ever gained by being a mouse. Unless you’re a mouse.

But most people mousify their creative.

Sometimes I show my wife the notes I send to clients. 

"Wow," she'll say. "That takes balls. You just sent them a fairytale rather than a proposal."

I wrote some fables for the World Bank.

"It gets the point across, doesn't it," I'll ask, with more than a soupcon of defensiveness. "You get it, don't you."

We've been trained by Steve Jobs to say "Think Different."

But we've been trained by Keep Jobs to say "Think Same."

I'm going to keep trying.

Just to be different.

Simplicity. And duplicity.

A lot of the work I now do is fairly simple. 

It's simpler than the work I was doing when I worked for giant clients at similarly giant agencies.

Most often I have clients coming to me with an ontological shrug. 

"What do I do?"

In the parlance of the business today, they have built a lot of decks. But they have no hull, no keel, no rudder, no masts and no ballast. 

In the apocryphal language of the even-more apocryphal Old West (which probably emerged from the typewriter of a Jewish Bronx-born Hollywood screenwriter 80 years ago) most of life seems all hat and no cowboy.

In the equally apocryphal words of Gertrude Stein, most people, corporations, promises have "no there there."

A lot of times I'll have a CMO call me and say, essentially, "we worked for seven months with a large international branding firm. They gave us 16 decks and I'm left with the word 'aspirational.'" 

They have no idea what they do, what they do differently, why they do it and how they speak and act. 99% of people don't even know what aspirational really means. I used to think it was something to eat with Bernaise sauce.

I have a confession.

Since I moved into my new old second home up here in Connecticut, I watch virtually no television. I used to enjoy watching television. It was a nice way to unwind at the end of a pressure-filled day.

One of the reasons I've given up on TV is that TV itself has gotten too complicated for me. I don't know what it does anymore. Does it provide entertainment or confusion? A baseball game or surveillance capitalism? 

I literally don't know how to scroll through stations. There are thousands of them. And it seems there are at least 259 featuring overly cosmetic'd women selling plastic trinkets for $129 that they say look like the real thing. Sometimes it seems to me that channels multiple like Strega Nonna' s pasta pot which overwhelmed Big Antony. Eventually, a surfeit of pasta took over their entire town.

It feels to me that sometimes the channels are chasing me as I try to skip away from them. The last thing I want to spend one micro-second hearing is Pat Sajak uttering banal bromides.

There's nothing that makes TV simple and uncomplicated for me. As easy as it was 50 years ago when there were three networks, two channels that played either the Mets or the Yankees and one that played "The Million Dollar Movie." In other words I knew where to get what I wanted to get. Now there's so much that I can't find anything.

But back to advertising.

Advertising has forgotten the basics.

Dave Trott, er, the brilliant Dave Trott, breaks down the essentials of communication to their most elemental. Every successful utterance can be parsed this way.

First, you have to have impact. You need to get attention. Or what's the point.

Second, you have to communicate. You have to say your message clearly and emphatically. So people understand.

Finally, you have to persuade. You have to tell people, "what's in it for them." The au courant notion of a "Call to Action," isn't persuasion. It's an affliction based on the spurious belief that shouting gets results. Hurry in!

Taking a step even further back, when I start with clients, I usually focus my work on two very important baby steps.

1. Who are you/what do you do?

2. How do you do it?

To my jaded eyes and ears, most people and brands fail on these two measures.

Telcos generally spend billions a year on advertising. Because everyone needs a cellphone and telcos are an oligopoly, they spend more than anyone else.

I have no idea what Verizon is or AT&T.  I'd betcha fewer than one person in ten knows what AT&T even stands for.

No one tells me why I should like them.

And since half of the calls I make wind up being dropped, I regard every one of their tens of billions of dollars of messages as lies.

I've never heard a telco say, what they're doing to make calling more reliable. I hear a lot about 5G. There's a new Verizon spot running around now, saying that with 5G there's no lag. I've heard about lack of lag since the 33 rpm long-playing record was introduced by RCA in 1948. Guess what, there's still lag.

Most communicators are playing a game of smoke and mirrors. They do so little to provide real information and hope their abundance of useless information will snow you into nodding. To fuck with Descartes, "I'm overwhelmed, therefore I am."

For instance, there's not a climate-destroying oil-company in the world that tells you what they're actually doing to fix the problems they've created.

They hope to soap you instead with banner ads that say "We're going carbon-zero by 2040." Most people can't imagine life next Thursday. 2040 is all but meaningless. Even agencies are saying they'll be carbon neutral by 2040. I had no idea they weren't.

This is a roundabout way of saying do the same thing with your advertising that you'd do if you were trying to meet someone in a bar.

This is who I am.

This is what I do.

This is why you should like me.

And let me prove it to you by doing something special, like giving you a laugh, or a compliment, or some useful information.

Try it.

Friday is Pie Day.

 

The fleeing and the fleecing.

For as long as I've been sentient, or relatively so, I've been able to divide the world into roughly two camps. The "that will change everything-s" and the "human nature is persistent and invariable-s."

I came of age during the Vietnam war--the Vietnam debacle. A war that killed 60,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese. A war that lasted about 25 years. When America abandoned its so-called mission there--when America turned and ran, there were huge swaths of people who said we would learn from our many mistakes. Yet, now we are ending another futile twenty-years' war that achieved no discernible aim and cost us trillions.
Another March of Folly.

Likewise, when the internet came into being, the that will change everything-s became ascendant. Human behavior ingrained in our DNA not unlike the "flight or fight" instinct would be abrogated thanks pop-up ads. All at once people, we were told, would lean-in, interact, and enjoy advertising, which would somehow become indistinguishable from the shows we were watching. 

The internet, like Google+, Snapchat, AOL messenger and dozens of other dimwitted dirigibles would forever alter the world in ways, say, the Communist revolution or the Irish potato blight wasn't able to. This will change everything was the refrain.

Everything that ever worked in the past was declared dead. A new world odor was upon us.

Of late there have been a spate of articles, there are two below, about how workers, millennials and slavatars are leaving the workforce rather than having to return to the office.

There's nothing wrong with these articles except they miss the most salient reason people are fleeing the ad industry.

People are leaving the industry not for any new virus-related reason. Or due to some Gen K sense of entitlement.

They're fleeing the ad industry for the same reason so many "Jack Tars" fled from Britain's Royal Navy. In fact, in order to staff ships, hundreds of thousands of sailors had to be impressed. That means taken against their will and forced to work, ie they were enslaved.

Here's why: From roughly 1650 to 1800, wages for common English sailors stayed the same. They didn't go up one ha'penny, whatever a ha'penny is. 

I have only anecdotal information on this--and there is no independent press that looks into the advertising industry anymore--but my guess is that since the Robert Jacoby/Martin Sorrell/Saatchi brothers era--since the rise of holding companies, salaries for 85 percent to 95 percent of people in advertising are lower, in adjusted dollars, than they were almost half-a-century ago.

Advertising pay is less than it was in 1980. (For those who like short paragraphs.)

What we have here is a perfect storm of greed. 

The best people in advertising--in any business--have always been ambitious and competitive. They've always wanted a raise every year--not just a cost of living increase--a genuine improvement in their standard of living. That's human nature. That's relatively immutable. That won't change.

Cave people wanted nicer caves. Better mammoth skin frocks. A nicer ocher cave painting.

Human nature.

Probably Neanderthal nature, too.

Ad people want the same things people have wanted since the rise in American liberalism which emerged from John Maynard Keynes and his influence on Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. They've wanted to own a home. They've wanted college for their children. They've wanted good healthcare. A night off now and again. Maybe a week in St. Kitts every so often. And maybe four or five years of retirement before they die. Oh, and some work they could be proud of.

None of that is really plausible in today's ad industry. In fact, it's not economically feasible as long as the Chieftains of the industry earn 200 to 300 times what the median worker makes. There's just not enough money to go around.

I agree people are burnt out.

I agree people want to work from home more often.

But those two conditions are partly the result of inadequate pay, inadequate advancement, inadequate fairness.

Why spend two hours on a train (your commute is long in part because your salary is low) to work for a dead-end job that where the profit of a few demands low-wage unpaid hours from many?

I don't love working on my own. It's tough. Way more arduous than anything I've ever done. Like Derek Walker writes, running your own thing makes you "chief instigator, janitor, secretary and mailroom person." It's unrelenting. 

But when people ask, I tell them this. "It's nice to have restored for myself the relationship between hard work and pay." 

What's more, when GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company does hire planners, account people, producers, art directors, editors, colorists, designers, writers, etc. I pay them top-dollar because my clients deserve the best people. Not just the cheapest. People flee from me all the time. They're not fleeing from the work I offer. Because I try to treat people well and pay them what they deserve.

I think that's what's missing today.

Not a buzzword.

Back when I was a puppy in the industry, way back in the early 90s, I worked for a gifted eccentric and brilliant copywriter called Ed Butler.

Ed probably had twenty years on me or more, but he had more enthusiasm for advertising than practically anyone I've ever met. In Ed's obituary in Adweek from 1993, his friend, the great Tom Messner wrote this about Ed, "Like all who come to a vocation late, Ed was a true believer. He told you his headlines; he told you his last lines; he told you his opening lines; he told you his middle lines; each of which would have been insufferably obnoxious except that he also told you your headlines, opening lines, last lines and middle lines."

One thing Ed did that I'll always remember, if he saw an ad on TV or in the newspaper that he liked--really liked--he would find out who the writer was and type him a note. Ed didn't make the transition to Apple computers. He still worked on an old portable typewriter and it suited him just fine.

In fact, Ed hired me not because of what was in my portfolio, but because of what I had almost taken out of it. I removed a marker comp from my book, and stuck it in a sleeve in the back. I was afraid having a non-produced ad in my book would tarnish my credibility as I was looking for work. But somehow, I had mistakenly left the ad in there.

It was an anti-suicide campaign for the New York Police Department. The visual was a service revolver with all six chambers empty. The headline said, "Last year ten cops were shot to death. Seven did it themselves."

Ed hired me because of that.

My point here is not nostalgia. It's reaching out to people you like. Even if they're big, famous and hoity-toity. That's something I learned from Ed.

I have always been an extremely shy person. If you're an independent contractor or if you're looking for work, timidity can be inhibiting. 

For the past eighteen months or so, I've been following Ed's lead. When I see something I like I send a note to the people who had a hand in it. I thank them for their work. We play advertising Kevin Bacon. If you do that, you'll likely find that you're no more than two or three degrees away from most people.

You'd be surprised who you can meet. Who you can learn from. Who you can bend an elbow with. Who you can get work from. Who you can do favors for.

Like I said, I'm extremely shy.

But I feel like I know a good 50 percent of the leading lights in the industry, both here and in the UK. Mostly because I said "good ad," or they wrote a comment on one of my blog posts that I thought was smart, so I wrote back.

You don't do this for money's sake or anything to do with gaming the system. You make these connections because all of us, no matter how acclaimed, successful, popular or whatever are stretched, stressed and, at many times, lonely. 

Ours is a tough profession. There's cutthroat competition. Disappointment at every turn. And you can find yourself tossed out for no good reason other than someone above you sees you as a cost, not a value because you're over 40.

There's a lot, in other words, to life that can make life fairly unbearable.

Meeting others, having friends, having, even, strangers who might understand, is important. Important for you. Important for others you might never meet except through a digital chat.

Kindness is au courant right now. 

It's a buzzword like brave was a few months ago.

And bold a few months before that.

But kindness works. As a way of life, not just a fad.

Try it.

A new word. An old way.

If, for whatever reason, I decide to make myself dyspeptic, it's an easy enough task to accomplish. All I have to do is read the op-ed page of the Murdoch-owned, eat-the-poor, hate dark-people, violence against the planet, Wall Street Journal.

The paper is so good in so many ways--with the best books section in Amerika and some of the best investigative journalism--that I put aside my boycott of Murdoch-owned properties, including the Stupid Bowl LDIV, on lie-filled Fox, and continue to subscribe. 

Frankly, subscribing goes against many of my principles. (I try to be anti-hate) but reading the Journal is so good for me professionally and intellectually that I grudgingly send my annual subscription fees to Murdoch, though I hope he burns in the pre-heated oven of hell--my mother's kitchen.

The reason behind what Paul Simon once called this "simple desultory Phillipic" is that of late I am seeing similarities between the advertising industry and the Journal's editorial page. Both are in existence based primarily on the denial of reality.

Much of the ad industry's demise comes from the ad industry today being run by people who don't believe in, don't trust, or don't abide by the power of advertising.

I learned this first about two decades ago when I was recruited to lead a consultancy and help make it become a creative entity. What I quickly discovered is that the Harvard MBAs and the Wharton MBAs and the Bains and McKinseys simply could not understand how creative is made or how and why it works. So to be blunt, they denied it worked.

The things they did understand--if/then propositions--were the coin of the Realm. If we did this, then that would happen. Even if it never worked outside of a powerpoint like, say, in real life.

Effectiveness was to be derived from targeting, re-targeting, re-re-targeting until ads followed you around like Marley's ghost followed Ebenezer Scrooge or Ahab the White Whale. 

What's more, if you colored your click now button orange and placed it top right and put an iridescence on it, you were sure to be a rousing success. And if you could data capture by means of an ultimately brand-destroying contest or loyalty program, all the better. As long as you NEVER looked at successful brands like Nike and Apple and NEVER concluded what made them different and successful was work people actually enjoy watching.

All this intellectual speciousness reminds me of the rampant denialism (denial of truthism) found throughout the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. On Friday, the paper ran an editorial called, "Yes, Trump Really Did Lose Michigan," as if the voting results from that state really were open to dispute. 

The editorial links to a 35-report produced by Michigan (imagine what that cost taxpayers--some of whom don't even have clean running water) concludes this way:

Conclusion

The Committee can confidently assert that it has been thorough in examination of numerous allegations of unlawful actions, improper procedures, fraud, vote theft, or any other description which would cause citizens to doubt the integrity of Michigan’s 2020 election results. Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan.

The Committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain. We also conclude citizens should demand reasonable updates and reforms to close real vulnerabilities and unlawful activities that caused much of the doubt and questionability to flourish and could, if unchecked, be responsible for serious and disastrous fraud or confusion in the future. Further, we commend the innumerable clerks, canvassers, staff, workers, and volunteers across Michigan that make the enormous complexity of elections operate so smoothly, so often.

The complexity of the work and the dedication we discovered are astounding and worthy of our sincerest appreciation. We also commend the diligent citizens that took time to report problems and concerns they saw because they want and value fair and free elections above party or personal gain. If all citizens remain vigilant and involved, we will emerge stronger after any challenging time.

As of this writing, 97% of the ad industry is working late and nefariously to circumvent new proposals that would reduce cookies and return people's stolen privacy to them. Senior executives are hand-wringing themselves down to the bone.

How will we ever assault people if we can't subject them to SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM? How will we ever reach them, find them, keep them in our beady-eyed sights, if we don't track their every movement--through their smart phones, their door bells, their smart refrigerators, their home-security apparatus, baby monitors, electric smart toothbrushes, tap and pay and so forth? 

They are ours--we own them They're a target, in a bucket, low-hanging fruit, a captive audience and other phrases that semiotically reveal that much of our industry considers people victims. In the parlance of the man who lost two presidential elections by a combined total of over 10 million votes: "suckers."

How can we monetize those suckers pre-natally and post-demise? How can we be there with a Aloe-fresh Puffs ad everytime a pollen spore enters a neighboring state?

In other words, like the WSJ's editorial board, how can we lie, cheat and steal our way to continued profit maximization. How long can we lie, cheat and steal so our corporate overlords add to their $150 billion bankrolls? (BTW, if you have $150 billion like Messers Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos, you can spend $411 million a day every day for a year and still have billions left.)

I'm a human.

My readership, which hovers about 80,000 viewers a week, is at least 51.7 percent human. As a representative of that 51.7 percent, I know I don't like stupid ads that shout at me while listing off bullet-point after bullet-point. I don't want ads to follow me around. I don't want my intelligence insulted. I don't want to be screamed at and to be told to hurry in because supplies are limited because I know there's no real reason to hurry in, because supplies aren't limited.

Further, I don't need to be told how much you care. How you're helping quadipeligic ducks return to the wild unscathed by their infirmities. I don't need to hear hackneyed testimonials from "real" people telling me that they prefer a shitty carbon-spewing Chevrolet over a shitty carbon-spewing Toyota.

Advertising, and life, is about truth.

Not some version of truth that emerges after seventeen rounds of an anti-truth commission. 

Tell me the truth.

Make it memorable.

Remember, I'm smart.

Maybe once in a while, hand me a laugh.

Fuck becoming part of culture. 

92% of culture is laser-focused on Britney's IUD and I don't want any part of that.

Fuck influencers who anyone who's not housed in a home for the criminally stupid knows are paid endorsers (they're influencers because they've been influenced by a sponsor's money.)

In other words, try to live by facts as they are. 

Not as you want them to be.

If brands and newspapers and holding companies did that, instead of foisting an alternate reality on us, perhaps I would be less dyspeptic.

Of course, to re-write George Bernard Shaw, "the power of accurate observation is often called dyspepsia by those who haven't got it." 

Sorry, George.

--
And sorry everyone.

Hell is Empty and All the Devils Are Here.

WE OPEN ON THE GIANT MASSIF OF THE ROCKY FACE OF A LOOMING, YET EXTINCT VOLCANO. 

THE CAMERA ZOOMS IN ONTO THE SHEER FACE OF THE BASALT, THEN WINDS THROUGH THE ROCK INTO A CAVERNOUS UNDERGROUND LAIR. 

AROUND A GIANT CONFERENCE ROOM TABLE SIT DOZENS OF SEVERE AND MONOCLED MEN, THE UNSEEN TITANS OF THE AD WORLD WHO TREAT US ALL LIKE PUPPETS ON A STRING.

ABOVE THE TABLE IS HUNG A BILLOWING POSTER, IT READS: "ANNUAL HELDING COMPANY MEETING."

TITAN 2:
Vats mit der Helding Company?
Vee ist der Holding Company, jah?

TITAN 1:
Gentlemen, order!
We're a Helding Company...

TITAN 3:
Rhymes with Gelding...

TITAN 1:
We're not a Holding Company, 

TITAN 4:
Because all the companies we used to Hold
we drove out of business. 

TITAN 1:
So, our company is a Helding Company. 
Made up of companies we had held before 
we forced them into receivership.

TITAN 3:
I held Backer Spielvogel. 

TITAN 5:
I held Wells Rich Green.

TITAN 6:
NW Ayer.

TITAN 4:
Hal Riney. Ted Bates. Ammirati. D'Arcy Masius.

TITAN 7:
Benton & Bowles. Kenyon & Eckhardt. Messner!

TITAN 1:
We used to HOLD them all. 
Bloom. Temerlin. Scali. Marschalk. Bozell.

TITAN 3:
Cliff Freeman. Lord Geller.

TITAN 4:
Lord Einstein.

TITAN 1:
Papert, Koenig, Lois!!!

We held them. We sucked them dry. We took their cash flow and spit out human lives.

We held them.
Then we dropped them.
All that glitters is not hold.

As our progenitor Martinus Gaius Sorrellus
said, 

Veni,
Vidi,
Eviscerati.

I came, I saw, I stripped out all assets, transferred the money to Switzerland, fired all employees and Eviscerated.

ALL:
Veni,
Vidi,
Eviscerati.

To the Helding Company!
There's no greater creator of destruction.

Veni,
Vidi,
Eviscerati.

EXEUNT