Paths of Gory.

When you're busy--and touch wood I'm busy--sometimes I seem to go weeks without organizing the 97 or 102 files I have open. Though I'm blessed with a prodigious memory--and have lost maybe ten files total in the twenty years I've been using a Mac--sometimes I have to do a little sleuthing to find exactly what I'm looking for.

Slobs--and I count myself as a member of that fraternity--will tell you that one of the great advantages of having to look for things is that you never know what you'll find. Serendipity is a writer's best friend. Just as it is an archeologist's. You never know when a stray shard, a small sentence fragment, a verbal fly encased in amber will bestow upon you the bit of an idea that an orderly mind would have no chance of locating.

I'd guess that more things have been found when looking for something else than when looking for what you set out to discover. Columbus setting out for the Indies and landing in the Caribbean might be a good example. 

Not long ago as I searched  for some long-forgotten set of phonemes, I came upon this quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. A note I wrote to myself almost four years ago, when--in another homage to Edgar Allen Poe--I had already heard the creaking of the beams in Ogilvy's House of Usher and I knew before long the place would burst into metaphorical flames and tumble--as Trotsky, not Poe said, into the ash-heap of history.

I don't keep a diary--I have my memory, and this blog. But on occasion, it's nice to see what you were thinking at a particular moment. This was from a rainy day in November--"a damp, drizzly November in my soul" no doubt, when I was thinking about leaving Ogilvy on my own before they booted me out. 

So return to me to November, 2017. Sit and think.

-

It was raining hard-enough this morning, raining and cold when I left the house at 7:20. I left early because I had scheduled my dentist appointment for 8AM. The thinking being I could see the yanker and still get to work without too much of my day being sullied.

 

It’s now sometime around 11, and most-everyone who will be in for the day is finally in. There are the usual no-shows. Stomach aches, meetings at school, or the kid has the sniffles. But most people have made it in. Most mornings I’ve been in at this point for about three hours when they’re just arriving, but like I said, this was a late morning for me, having had the dentist.

 

In any event, sometime around 11, I was just handed, or sent, or emailed my fourth or ninth asinine request of the day. Can I attend a meeting with an unappreciative client who would rather write the social tiles themselves? Can I cut new end cards onto 13 spots with a new line that the client doesn’t quite agree with? Can I look at this drooling copy that is 40% too long and the writer can’t seem to cut it. Can I somehow meet on a brief that seems destined to lead to work that is mediocre at best?

 

This kind of morning doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. And it seems to be happening with more and more regularity. It seems that due to a recent creative reorganization more and more of the thankless and crappy work is landing in my camp. Crap, I understand, is a fact of life, but I seem to be getting more than my fair-share of bullshit, garbage and abject stupidity.

 

In one of my favorite novels, “Bang the Drum Slowly,” Red Traphagen, a wise-old catcher on the club, an anchor, has his finger split open by a fastball he catches wrong.

 

He returns to the bench, “his nail hanging off,” and says to the manager, “That is sufficient.” He then “stepped out of his gear and never even went back east with us but went to San Francisco and taught in the college there.”

But I don’t have another place to go, no college to teach in.

Though I have a reputation second to none, a stellar portfolio of recent high-quality and visible work, and a vast network. Which means, while I have no college, I could probably freelance steadily.

 

The question is, could I adjust my head to freelance—subsistence freelance, not ‘make what I was making freelance.’ So could I?

--

The agency business is a funny one. And not just because, right now, it seems to be just about done. It seems like a fuse still sparkling but about to die for lack of oxygen. Or a clown at a kids' party when you're too old to be amused by clowns.

No one actually asks anyone in an agency how they're doing. Certainly no one in management asks anyone who's not in management. And the discontent reminds me of a scene from what might be Kubrick's best movie, "Paths of Glory," when the HQ-generals tells the trench-bound soldiers to charge.

The men in the castles--safe and brandied--don't know what's happening down in the trenches. And they don't much care to find out. They don't ask. And most don't even take a swing around to see for themselves. The Holding Company nabobs are even further away. They don't come from where you come from. They don't know the stink and the death and the terror.

Now that I'm on my own, about five people a week ask me what it's like. If they could do it. If it's safe to do.

Each to her own destiny, is all I can say. I can't tell anyone that because things, so far, are working out for me, that they'll work out for you.

I can, arrogant as it may be, give you two thoughts. 

ONE: A good ratio at work is 3:4:3. Three days where you like it. Four days where it's meh. Three days where you hate it.

That ratio probably works for almost anything. From being on a ball-team in the Mexican League to being married to being a lighthouse keeper during a bad one.

If your ratio is 2:5:3 or 2:3:5, well, it's time to do some thinking.

TWO: For $3.99 and in just 87 minutes you can watch the entirety of Paths of Glory.  If you write me a note about it, I'll consider reimbursing you if you need the money. 

Then, it's also time to do some thinking.

 

Epiphany.

About twenty years ago, over the phone, I met the 'headhunter' Christie Cordes.

I had heard great things about Christie, and even though she was on the wrong coast, I decided I had nothing to lose in speaking to her.

Most headhunters circle around you like a cagey boxer when he first sizes up an opponent. They keep their distance. They poke and jab to see what you have. Maybe they let go a roundhouse to see if you can take a punch.

Christie really did none of that.

I suppose she assumed from the places I had worked and the money I had made and the years I had spent in the business and the positions I had achieved, that I could answer a brief, sell a spot, and deal with a dilemma.

Christie had something different.

Soldiers call it coup d'oeil.

Christie saw the strategic high-ground in the career battlefield that no one else was able to see.

In the stroke of an eye.

She busted me pretty quickly.

"It's not just about your portfolio anymore," she smacked. "Everybody has a great book. It's about doing something every day, working in real-time. Making a name for yourself. Treating yourself as something people will want to buy."

My ex-partner Tore was the one who told me to start a blog before I even knew what a blog was. But Christie gave me the reason why.

Because if you're a writer and you're selling your writing skills, the best way to sell writing skills is to show how you write.

We're not football prospects who are evaluated by people via a raft of computers, coaches and statistical calibrations. There's no codified writer equivalent of the 40-yard dash or how many reps I can bench press 225 lbs or my vertical leap.

There's just the writing I do.

Eighteen months ago, Christie called me.

I was new to the ranks of unemployment. And though I was working in-house and had no great financial worries--I was scared. Being scared is the most natural thing in the world. Doing something about being scared isn't.

"You have 96 Twitter followers," she chided.

"I'm not a Twitter person," I answered. As if that was an excuse.

"People look for people on Twitter. You don't have to like it. But you can't ignore that."

I tried.

After 40-years in advertising, we've all gotten very good at self-delusion. But I conceded.

This was March, 2020.

I gave myself the goal of having 500 followers by June and 1000 by the end of the year.

Today, I've got over 3,800. 

That's not Vaynerchukian. 

But it's ok.

My point today is four-fold.

One. Find people like Christie. Listen to them. Learn.

Two. Sell by showing, not telling.

Three. Do it every day. Every day.

Four. Pass it along. 

Let someone try to beat me at my own game. Let out-write me, out-wit me, out-kibbitz me.  

That's ok.

The competition will only make me better.

Recounting my war years.

There's a death-camp story I know that probably made-up but it rings as true as the ocean's waves.

One gloomy day in Auschwitz--a typical holding company imperium--a kapo, a guard, a brute sees an old, near-death Jew praying.

"What are you doing, Jew?" The guard says, poking the bedraggled man harshly with a bludgeon.

"I'm thanking god," is the reply.

The kapo laughs. "Thanking god. What could you be thanking god for?"

"I'm thanking god that he didn't make me like you."

-

The holocaust and the metaphor of the holocaust, huge, heartless, evil forces designed to crush and annihilate humanity is alive in my soul. It always has been.

This isn't a game with me.

It may be received memory, it may be from reading too many books on World War II and the death camps, it may be my leftist feelings regarding the concentration of capital and its effect on the masses. Regardless it's as there and as every day as life itself.

Yes, I kibbitz about it. If the local supermarket is out of bologna, I'm likely to mutter something about the "evil cabal of big deli suppressing humanity's innate need to nitrate." But, in a sense, I'm really not kidding.

I grew up during the greatest "compression," in human history. Thanks to the Depression and the "Thirty years' war" (WWI and WWII) my youth was spent believing that there were rich and poor--but the distance between the two could be bridged and life was not all that unfair. That's when CEOs made on average 17 times the median salary of an average worker.

Today--that CEO makes of the order of 300 times as much.

That compression in terms of world history, was an anomaly. The Reagan-inspired unequalization has only gained steam since the 1980s. And today income disparity in the US is beyond what it was prelude to the Great Depression. Our nation is more unequal and more unfair (that means you're subject to more cosmological schtupping) than Latin American military cabals or even Middle-Eastern sheikdoms.

When one of the sheikdoms that controls the modern ad industry (WPP is one of four companies that control roughly 70-percent of ad jobs worldwide) decided to go whole hog into wage peonage and fire me because of my age and my salary, I did not go gentle into that good night.

No, my friends, we rage rage against the dying of the light.

Remember?

In military parlance, they call it asymmetrical warfare. Remember Vietnam? When homemade rifles and hand-rolled bullets and heroin killed 58-thousand American boys. Remember Bushistan? When a $1.29 improvised explosive device could take out a $2 million "HumVee" and its occupants.

That's the battle we are fighting, if you're awake.

A lot of people tell me not to dwell in my anger at being ass-schtupped for so long so do-nothing to-the-manor-born potentates could collect $100 million annual paychecks.

Why shouldn't we be angry?

More important, why shouldn't we fight back?

Why shouldn't we use our superior skills to win accounts away from them? To embarrass and show-up our mighty once-masters? Why shouldn't we publicly mock the PR-bullshit-onslaught that diarrheas from their silver-plated uvulas?

You tossed me out. You misused me. There's a price.

Why shouldn't we call out their Orwellian destruction of truth? Where bad is called good. Firings are called meeting client exigencies. And diversity is an all white, all male c-suite. More: Data is called omnipotent. And people--fittingly--are deemed targets. Bang.

When I was back at Ogilvy, I worked with two ECDs, younger than I (who wasn't) but guys you could have lunch with. They went through some of the same shit I did. When they could stand it no longer, they would sneak to my desk and unload their pain on me.

Finally, I had enough.

You keep absolutely quiet. You say nothing. Then you whisper to me. Complaining.

That's feckless.

Standup. Speak up. Or shut up.

I can't solve your problems.

You can.

In my high school library where I spent many an hour reading great books and not going to class, there was an inscription high-above the checkout desk. The words of Abraham Lincoln.

They're gendered now. Maybe I'll be lambasted for citing them

But, WTF.

'To sin by silence when they should protest, makes cowards of men.'

Don't shut me down.

If you're under the age of 50 or 80, you've probably never read anything by the great Budd Schulberg. If you've seen anything at all--and the generations who have are rapidly dying out, it's probably "On the Waterfront," which was nominated for 12 Academy Awards back in 1954 and won eight of them. (Why people who have never seen "Waterfront," decide instead to watch Marvel's "Green Sphincter VII--Revenge of the Bile" is way beyond my limited imagination.)

Take two hours and watch this.

Mr. Schulberg when I knew him.

Take four hours and read this.

I worked with Mr. Schulberg back when I was a 21 year-old-graduate student in the late 70s and became an acolyte and an aficionado. I went on a spree of sorts, reading everything he ever wrote, the pinnacle of which, after Waterfront, is "What Makes Sammy Run." It's a novel you can read in four hours and think about for four decades. 

There's a line in "Sammy," that's stayed with me since I had abdominal muscles. "Going through life with a conscience is like driving with your brake on."

Sure, it's about the lack of morality, caring and decency in every day life. But more, it's about living within a dominant complacency and in short order adhering to the rules of that complacency, no matter how little sense they make.

Here's an example, as we near Labor Day.

About 120 years ago, when enlightened municipalities and social-welfare organizations started building public swimming pools for the masses, it used to get cold after Labor Day.

Remember cold? It was destroyed by Exxon-Mobil. And republican science-denialism.

It stays warm in the northeast now through at least mid-October. Nevertheless, on some 97-degree day in early September, the public pool up in Harlem, over in Astoria, in McCarron Park, Brooklyn, will be drained and rodentified because, well, we've always closed the pool after Labor Day.

That's a dominant complacency.

Accepting things as they are because you've stopped questioning either their wisdom or their efficacy. There are hundreds of examples.

Now that I am more than a year and a half gone from the Holding Company Hegemon of Big Advertising, I see how I was hobbled for so long. I was calcified by accepted ways of doing business.

I sit in Zoom meeting attended by 44 people each of whom talks over the other ones in an asteroid-belt of jargon from which no one emerges unpelted. I see agency ossification as a best practice.

Most people, to my eyes, are most productive when they're running at about 120-percent of capacity. But agencies ignore that. In the best of cases, they hire people who are ambitious and eager and rebellious and then subject them to systems and practices that are stultifying, low-pulse and that demand a slavish conformity.

The most irksome thing about abiding to a dominant complacency is you don't even know that or how you're hobbled. Think of the old Yiddish joke about the man who's banging ceaselessly his head against a wall. When someone asks him why, he answers "because it feels so good when I stop."

Or David Foster Wallace's conversation between three fish. An older fish sees two young fish swimming by. "How's the water, fellas," he asks. One young fish says to the other, "What's water?"

My point is after 20 months or so away from big-time Madison Avenue agency life, I'm beginning to realize the straight-jacket I was in. 

I'm more aware of Rich Siegel's Seventeen Rounds than when I was in the middle of them. I'm more cognizant of the blatherers and the no, but-ers who pick at scabs and get work to the point where it says nothing in such an anodyne way that it's as successful as a communication as putrid puddle-condom water is to Zabar's mushroom barley.

It would be wrong and impolitic here to enumerate how many clients I have, my "hit" rate or my projected growth and annualized revenue.

It wouldn't surprise me, however, if one-person GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, is bigger than agencies one-thousand times my size. Producing more, helping more, getting more and earning more.

Oh--and mostly--having more laughter, more fun, more  meaning.

Agencies subscribe somehow to Newton's Third Law of Motion. They won't admit that, but I've been in the adjoining cell.

For every ambition, there's an equal and opposite amount of molasses. For every agile process, there's an equal and opposite number of stand-up daily scrums with 19 people, two listening, one writing, 16 saying 'don't call on me,' or 'what am I doing here?'

That's a dominant complacency.

Whatever you do, don't do anything.

Give me death, or give me Liberty.

In March, 2020, I was working for Steve Simpson at PayPal's creative lab. Steve knew me as a bit of a workaholic--and as Covid raged, he ordered me to begin working from home.

By mid-March, it seemed that the foundations of the world had cracked and we were all going to die. My wife wanted out of New York. 

Accordingly, I was sent to a site called VBRO and I found a house to rent in small, dumb seaside town called Old Saybrook. I've been up there--in a ramshackle house we've bought--for 18 months now. I spend five days in Connecticut for every one I spend in New York.

Some time ago, as GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company began growing, I decided I had to get a trifle more serious about things. I called a lawyer, filed papers, incorporated, registered, got a federal tax ID and opened a bank account.

I opened that account at a local bank. Just a couple miles from my house. We had gotten our mortgage from them, and opening a business account there seemed like the smart thing to do.

Since then, this dopey little bank in this dopey little town have been running a commercial that says, "Kindness starts with us."

So far Liberty Bank has expressed this kindness exactly how you'd think a bank would express kindness. They don't smile when they see me. They don't help me unload my groceries. Or rake my leaves. They don't look pensive and earnest and concerned when I have a question.

They've expressed their kindness by charging me money for things that should be free considering the amount of money I've been depositing there.

They've expressed their kindness by charging me $265 for 500 business checks I can buy from Costco for half the price. They've expressed their kindness by charging me $10 every time I receive or make a wire transfer. 

I don't know how clients and agencies get here. Though they get here a lot.

Someone says, "Rhona over in Cessport, was so nice when I went in. I borrowed a pen and she let me keep it."

Someone replies, "I had something similar happen to me. They let my seven-year-old use the toilet."

Someone poses a thesis, "Maybe it's kindness that makes our bank different."

An intern speaks up, "We do the little things. Small-town things."

The wise old man adds, "Important things, like a smile when you come in."

And someone else adds to that, "The things other banks have forgotten."

That's how you get to shit.

Wish-fulfillment is really shit-fulfillment.

And I suppose as a tagline "Kindness starts with us," is better than "Slightly less nasty and extortionate than other banks. Or not."

There's a reason most advertising is shit. Four reasons actually.

One: The truth is too painful.

Two: Finding truth is too painful, too.

Three: If we play it enough, maybe someone will believe us.

Four:  Rhona over in Cessport thought it was good.

Thinking and Loving. And Sid.

My ex-partner Sid and I had a too-short conversation the other day. I say too-short, because all our conversations stretch twice as long as scheduled and are much shorter than I wish they were.

Sid's back in London. But in our interconnected world, we still get chances to work together, or at least, talk about the work we are doing.

I called Sid the other day because I needed help designing an end-frame on a 90-second film I wrote for the World Bank. one thing led to another and I went over to Sid's website and saw his logo:

We're happiest as humans when our brains are given something to do. To fill in with our synapses what's been left out specifically to challenge us.

Even my dog enjoys this sort of challenge. She likes when you hide a treat or a toy and she has to find it. It's the kind of work that leads to meaning and as Viktor Frankl told us, humanity is always in search of meaning.

Probably most living species enjoy a similar search, a similar kind of challenge.

We talked about it for a bit--I said it reminded me of this work from one of Britain's best graphic designers from days of yore, Tom Eckersley. 

For about five cups of Starbuck swill (how I resent the corporate takeover of a Melville character) you can have the book for your own. I can't conceive of why anyone or any agency wouldn't want it. 

Some years ago, Sid and I were asked to help name an Ogilvy spin-off. I desperately wanted to employ this "fill-in-the-blanks" ideology and name the agency Kanizsa, as in Kanizsa's Triangle. Nobel-prize-winning neuro-scientist Eric Kandel wrote  wonderfully about Klimt and Schiele and Kokoshka and Kanisza in his great book (which I can get no one to read) the "Age of Insight."

Not too long ago, I read an article in the Harvard Business Review about "The Ikea Effect." Basically, it's about the satisfaction people get when they make something with their own hands--the affinity they, accordingly, feel for Ikea.

The article starts this way: "The “IKEA Effect”: When Labor Leads to Love.  

For people who believe in the immutable composition of the human brain, below is the phrase that pays:

"When instant cake mixes were introduced in the 1950’s as part of a broader trend to simplify the life of the American housewife by minimizing manual labor, housewives were initially resistant: The mixes made cooking too easy, making their labor and skill seem undervalued. As a result, manufacturers changed the recipe to require adding an egg; while there are likely several reasons why this change led to greater subsequent adoption, infusing the task with labor appeared to be a crucial ingredient."

In advertising, in communication, in saying 'I love you,' making things too easy makes them seem worthless. People like to add one plus one to get two.

They like when their brains are challenged.

They like feeling smart. Fast. Clever. In on the gag.

There's a lot of blather about brands making emotional connections to people, usually via some platitude that says, "we care."

These brands and these advertisers and these agencies are forgetting that a connection can be made in a cognitive manner with more resonance than when it's purportedly made in an adjectival manner.

Maybe, in short, the best way to create an emotional connection with people is to make them actually think.

Which ad is emotional?

That's probably why millions of people would grab pitchforks and torches if the New York Times dropped its word puzzles and crosswords. And many fewer people would be outraged if they dropped one of their op-ed writers.

One tells you he's smart.

The other tells you you're smart.

I know which I prefer.

Foolishness writ large.

About 100 years ago when I was in college, I had my mind set on becoming an English professor. One crisp Fall afternoon, I was walking across the still-leafy quad and I was approached by a student. He stuck a microphone in my face and asked me a question.

"I'm with the college radio station. What do you think of Greeks?"

I was waist-deep in the Greeks at the moment, bouncing between Aristophanes, Euripedes and, mostly, Homer. I answered as plainly as I could.

"I'm wary of them," I said, "Even when they're bearing gifts."

It didn't occur to me until hours later that the reporter was asking about Sigma Nu, Delta Psi, and Kappa Tau.

Some years after that, I got a job on the 4PM to midnight shift as a cashier at a downtown Chicago liquor store. Adjacent to the old barn of a place and across the street, were a few bars that sold, along with their liquor, women of dubious repute. The way the skin trade worked in Chicago--the way they got around the cops was, you could buy a bottle of cheap whiskey for $150, and a woman came with it. That way, it wasn't prostitution, which was illegal.

Today in advertising, maybe for the last decade or so, there's been a silly and misguided tranche of people who want to create ads "that don't look like ads." They want people to think their Doritos commercial is entertainment. They want to think they are doing work on a higher-order, that it's culturally relevant and so much fun you'll want to engage with it.

Like my Greeks and prostitutes above, you can call these things what you will. You can concoct all sorts of subterfuges, but as for fooling people--there's only you, and probably your mom.

If it's in a commercial break, no one is fooled.

If it's surrounded by 14 other ads, no one is fooled.

If it's mixed too loud and ends with a logo, no one is fooled.

If it says, 'professional driver, closed course,' no one is fooled.

Just as a whore is a whore and a frat is a frat, an ad is an ad. 

Our business is dying.

For many financial reasons but mostly by self-delusion. Mostly because people are embarrassed to do the work we're paid to do. Which is to impart useful information in an executionally brilliant way.

Instead, we're ashamed. 

We want to puff out our chests, instead, and say we are influencing culture.

Everyone knows you're making an ad.

Sure, I wish I were writing the next Moby Dick or Citizen Kane or even an episode of the Dick Van Dyke show.

But I'm not.

I make ads.

Ads that treat people with respect.

That try to help them make smart decisions.

I don't manipulate people. 

Or make them buy things they don't need.

I help them learn about things they didn't know about.

The sooner you breathe that in, the better off you'll be.

The two questions are--

1. Are you being honest with yourself and your profession?

and

2. Are you making good ads that help people and brands or pretentious crap that never runs for coked-up juries?

Advertising is only something to be embarrassed about if you make embarrassing ads.

Stop fooling around.

Stop fooling your clients.

Stop fooling yourself.

Make good ads.

Marshalling wisdom.

The world is, for all its almost comic horror, an amazing place. Even social media--which has done so much bad and caused so much hurt--is at times, amazing.

It's amazing in that you can be in touch with people in ways you could never have been in touch with them before. And while I often fall-behind in my not-losing-touch, I know that people I care about and who care about me are out there.

About four years ago, when I turned 60, I got an IM from my first boss in the advertising business, Marshall Karp. Marshall is a real writer now and has been called "the Woody Allen of the murder mystery."

Marshall hired me in his pajamas when I was just 26 or so. Our wives had met and I was asked to bring my portfolio over to his apartment. I did so sheepishly. He was a big schmear. With chives. Extra chives.

I knocked on his door, sheepishly.

And there he was in his pajamas.

I handed him my portfolio. It was already ten at night.

He called me 20 minutes later.

And hired me.

Marshall read a blog post of mine around the time I turned 60 and wrote a sentence to me that is up there with the great lines of advertising history.

"At 60 are you still chasing the advertising dreams you had as a 26-year-old?"

A sentence like that can knock the wind out of your sails. It can literally make you gasp. And get defensive.

At that point I was firmly ensconced at Ogilvy. I knew the place and the industry had deteriorated almost to the point of unrecognizability, but it was the devil I knew. Ogilvy looked like forever--the way a pitcher might think he'll never lose his control or a point guard never losing a step.

It would be like someone coming up to you and saying, "You still breathe oxygen? Switch to ozone."

You can't. 

It's a discombobulating idea.  

How do you walk away from all you've ever known? 

Well, some of us get pushed. Kicked out. Thrown out. Disposed of. Treated like someone who's eaten an orange and thrown away the peel.

About seven times a day I get a plaintive call or a plaintive email from someone in the industry.

They might be old. 

They might be young.

But they've been assaulted.

They're hearing the overture to the opera that's coming. The account loses. The lack of raises. The firings. The inhumanities so the Ponzi-afied Holding Company chieftains can make their $16 million salaries, "return shareholder values," collect an in-perpetuity stipend, on the backs of their low-wage workers.

They sense, like the Sioux could sense distant herds of buffalo, the disasters that are coming. The waters crashing against the un-reinforced walls of the Johnstown dam. They know the whole thing is going to collapse.

But they can't get out.

They're stuck.

They're chasing the same dreams at 2X that made sense when they were aged 1X.

As Richard Nixon used to say, "Let me say this about that."

Despite all the new-age mumbo-jumbo you hear, and the data-dicks who think ones and zeroes will get to hearts and souls, the business of persuasion and of human-interaction has not really changed. And until we are finally and fully authoritarian and plutocrat controlled, niceness, intelligence and empathy will still have a place in our world--and a place in selling goods and services.

That dream you dreamed of doing that for an agency, that dream might have vanished like your fist when you open up your hand. 

But the need is still there.

The need to create work that respects people. The need to articulate what you're selling, why it's better, what it does. The need to say please and thank you. And to reward people who do the work--not with a two-percent bonus every 18-months. 

The need for humans will always be there.

If you can figure out a way, as I seem to have done, to hang out a digital shingle that reads "human spoken here," you'll find, with that assertion, new dreams to dream and new goals to accomplish.

The world did not begin and will not end in the lavish expense-accounted offices of money-manipulators who have remade most of the world's commerce into an extractive industry. They take and take and take and destroy, leaving nothing behind but slag and despair.

But don't despair.

There's a market for people who can talk to people.

There are dreams for those who keep dreaming, which might be the most human of human qualities.

--

It's not Marshall Karp--whose book I am reading and to whom I owe a note--but a lesser light, William Faulkner, who was fighting his own anti-truth vendetta.

We need to read these words, too.

"Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

Things we say.

Sometimes as I walk half-a-step too fast through life, I wonder if I am an alien life-form dropped on this planet, in this city, in the advertising industry as retribution for a raft of terrible misdeeds I did in a previous life.

So much of what I see and hear makes zero sense to me. The way English is misused today, listening or reading makes me feel like I am walking near the dumpster of a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant in 90-degree heat with 90-percent humidity. Just about everything turns my stomach.

I guess a lot of this is due to laziness or a generally slovenly use of language. For instance this headline from last week's Forbes magazine. 

What gets me with the above is the use of the word "Could." Has the editor or writer ever been in an ad agency? Dissent among the ranks is rife. Maybe no one cared enough to check--or to blue-pencil the headline into:

"Dissent in Ogilvy Ranks as Leadership Turmoil Continues." 

At least my version makes an assertion, and the only word I could object to would be leadership since there is none.

I did a quick scan of LinkedIn, and I find almost every ad or message indecipherable.

This may be the worst. Or even the worstest. 

When I started at Ogilvy there was a lineage to uphold. You wrote with precision because David was watching. You avoided pretentious language and bushwa. You were standing on the shoulders of giants. Now you're standing in a ditch, your eyes barely at the surface.

1. You've been growing brands? No, you help brands grow.

2. Why brands and businesses? Can't you choose one?

3. What is borderless creativity? How does it compare to bordered creativity?

4. Operating, innovating, creating and nauseating at the intersection of talent and capabilities. What about ambition, determination, effort? I think your intersection should be a cloverleaf or a roundabout.

5. If you have experts in Growth and Innovation why are you retrograde and shrinking?

6. You work fluidly? Is there an agency swimming pool?

Then there are these.  The following words confuse me or dull my brain.

evidence-based (as opposed to guessing.)

quality at scale (there's no quality when you're small?)

real-time data (dissimilar from fake-time data.)

connected devices (that rules out my nose-hair trimmer.)

powerful insights (I charged my insights overnight.)

active learning (preferable to active puking)

and so it goes.

This is just as dreadful. From the awful stock photo to the horrible use of initial caps to the bludgeoning of the meaning of language. I have no idea what they do or what they sell.

This is my favorite.

Thanking employees via salted snacks.

Utz-standing.

"Yeah, I haven't had a raise in three years but pretzels 20% off."

I've been doing this advertising thing for a long time now. Each one of the messages above probably took four-to-six weeks to get through the meandering digestive sphincter of a dozen different departments.

There are a lot of reasons the business has decayed. 

Not thinking is one.

Over-thinking is another.

Just not giving a shit about the product you make is the most egregious.

A day in the ball park.

I've been to thousands of ball games in my life. The vast majority of them before I was 25. I don't know if it's the games that have changed or me. But I no longer care the way I once did.

Baseball, I think, is a bit like running an ad agency. To be in it--to really be in it. You have to know all the players, all their quirks, all their moods--everything about them. You have to know who you're playing. If the grass was cut and grounders will run hot, or if the wind is blowing out and the homers will be flying. 

I think it was Casey Stengel, whose teams won ten pennants in 12 seasons and who won seven World Series who said, "The trick of managing is to keep the ten guys who hate you away from the 15 guys who are undecided."

The Ol' Perfesser.

With agency C-level staff at places like Ogilvy being replaced, ousted and quittified as often as drunken department store Santas, no one knows anything anymore. If I were a copywriter, I'd quip, "they ain't agencies, they're entropies."

Citifield and Ebbets Field.
Which was not named after a bank.

But on Sunday--a fine New York summer afternoon, I went East for my first game ever in a baseball stadium paid for by tax payers and named after a tax-avoider--Citifield. The Amazin's hold court there, when they show up, and this year, despite a fairly mediocre win-loss record, they're in the catbird seat, in first place in the watered-down National League east.

I arrived early, as I always do when it involves baseball. I thought I'd walk around the ballpark--which I was told resembled Ebbets Field and get a sense of the place. 

Before meeting my friend Rob, a big-deal in the agency world and as nice a person as you'll ever meet, I took two laps of the big ballpark--and I averaged exactly one Nathan's frank per lap.

Lap one got me a boiled dog from a wall-eyed black man with a sense of humor. I slathered it with Gulden's mustard and stood at a tall-top table and downed the affair in about four bites. Lap two got me a broiled Nathan's and another unopenable-package of Gulden's. I downed that almost as quickly, though it being frank two, I was more than a little bit nauseous from frank one.

I found my friend and my seat. Rob had catered the afternoon, and my seat was accoutred with a $14 plastic-encased bottle of tap water, a $12 bag of crackerjacks and another $12 bag of plastic-wrapped peanuts. Things don't come wrapped in paper anymore. It's ordained by some divine petrochemical law that the food you eat in nine minutes has to be wrapped in packaging that lasts nine decades.

The game pitted the first-place Mets versus the first-place Reds of Cincinnati. For three innings it was a close-fought battle, but eventually, the Reds kept hitting, running, hitting and scoring. The game ended with the Reds up 7-1 and going away.

Rob and I did what ball fans have been doing since Casey was originally at the bat. We talked about the game. About sneaky fast righties. About big swingers who make little contact.

Also, of course, being old-time New York ad people, we talked about the changes in the business, who's doing what, who's no more and so on.  Then of course, our long-suffering wives, our thriving children, and the vagaries of the business of life that has, at times, gotten way too vagaried.

After all the times I've been to a ballpark, and all the games I've seen, there's something magical about leaving the innards of the park and entering the light and seeing the verdant Elysia of the playing field.

My younger daughter is a professional scuba diver--she gets a thrill still, every time she sees a dolphin or a shark or a whale. My wife is the same with the opera. The spectacle, the orchestra, even the beauty of the curtain and the sets.

No matter how old and cynical I get, I gape when I see the game.

Somewhere in this favored land, 
The sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere 
And somewhere hearts are light.

Somewhere men are laughing,
And somewhere children shout,
On Sunday there was joy in Flushing,
Rob and George had one day out.