A Confession About Fruit

When I was a kid--32 or 30--I went to work for the 1980s

Agency of the Decade, Ally & Gargano.

 

Unfortunately, I began when their salad days were over.

In 1990. I was young then, and the halls were lined with

trophies and gentlemen in their 50s who were the lions of

the industry.

Down in one corner was Hall of Famer, Amil Gargano.
Down in another was Hall of Famer, Mike Tesch. Along

the hallways were offices inhabited by a who's who of

1980s awards annuals. Barry Greenspan who wrote the

great Michelin tire work at DDB. George Euringer, who

did brilliant work for Saab. Tom Wolsey who was coming

off winning gold in every show you can think of for Karastan

carpet ads.

 

I worked directly for a corner office called Ed Butler who was

probably 30 years older than I.

 

Ed was a great writer. By his own calculus and photographic

advertising memory, while at DDB he wrote the 21st best VW ad

ever written. While at Backer Spielvogel, some of the funniest

Miller Lite ads.

 

Ed loved the way I wrote, and about six months into our time

together, he said, "you don't have to show me copy any more;

I trust you."

 

Here's where the story gets to be about aging.

 

I was born fast and Ed was born slow. We shared the writing

duties on a financial account. For about a year, Ed would write

about half the ads and I would write the other half. My goal was

to work so that no one knew which were Ed's and which were mine.

I wanted to be as good as he because I respected him.

 

Then, things started shifting around. The client began to like my speed more than Ed's cantankerousness. After 18 months, I was writing three out of every five ads. By the end our second year together, three out of every four.

 

I began resenting Ed.

 

He made a lot more money than I did.

 

He had three windows and I had one.

 

If there were TV spots, they were his.

 

I was doing more work but playing second fiddle.

 

As time went on, the agency kept taking on water. Prelude to sinking entirely.

Eventually, "management," a term you can only, in advertising ever use loosely, decided I was "the future."

 

I was 33 and they promoted me to Senior Vice President, Creative Group Head.

 

And they fired Ed.

 

Fuck.

 

They fired Ed because I was a dick.

 

Or because he was old.

I lived that.

 

It's like, I think, being a survivor in a car-accident where your girlfriend dies.

 

It should have been me. You carry guilt around.

 

I had lunch with him at a Greek diner across from his apartment

near the office. I couldn't make eye contact and stared into my turkey burger deluxe.

 

About a week after, I found out Ed had cancer.

 

I saw him fairly often. He'd drop by the office to shoot the shit,

or I'd see him in the bagel shop nearby. Each time I saw him he

seemed ten pounds thinner. Like he was prepping for the role

as a prisoner on the Bataan Death March.

 

Ed died about a year after he was fired.

 

Of course, I wasn't to blame.

 

But, I had done something wrong just the same. I didn't understand Ed. What he had done. How he had helped me. How good he was. And all he had accomplished.

 

I did what people do sometimes.

 

Not out of meanness or spite or evil. Out of ignorance, or speed, or the desire to be a big cheese.

 

Old people have always been the other.

 

They're in the way of young people who want to get where they are.

 

As Willy Loman said in Death of a Salesman, "You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit!"

 

That's what ageism does.

 

It treats people like pieces of fruit.

 

I did it.

We all do.

We eat the orange. We throw the peel away.

I'm sorry, Ed. 

Solemn Tuesday.

I wrote this for a client. They didn't buy it. So, it becomes a post.

--

Hello.

Meet an old acquaintance.

Something you encounter every day.

And have encountered every day

probably every day of your life.

 

A box.

 

Most people live their life inside a box.

A box that tells them where to sit.

What schools they should go to.

What classes to take.

A box that pushes in.

Pushes in, sometimes, from all six sides.

Cramping you.

Closing in on you.

 

Boxes don't go away when you get older.

They don't get any more roomy.
Or flexible.

Or comfortable.

You don't get any more used to them.

Even if--
even when--even though you sometimes try to convince yourself it's ok.

 

A box.

That tells you exactly what to do.

And who to do it with.

And how to do it--the way it's always been done.

A box that tells you to toe-the-line and keep your head-down.

And don't think too much.

And don't speak up, speak out or speak your mind.

 

A box that says,

stay in your swim lanes.

Protect your turf.

Watch your back and watch out for the other guy.

A box that limits.

Closes.

Shuts off.

And eventually destroys.

Your creativity.

Your spontaneity.

Your love of doing what you love.

 

You know what?

The world isn't a box.

Not when there's a place that lets you breathe.
Breathe.

Breathe deep.

 

Find somewhere that's more blue sky than dead end.

A place that's yes, and. Not, no.

A place that values you.

Your thinking.

Your ingenuity.

Your constant stream of what ifs.

A place that values you because you're you.

Not some homogenized and pre-approved version of you.

Or forced into someone you're not.

 

A place of freedom--not confinement.

Of autonomy not automatons.

A place where people, ideas, enthusiasm, actions, advances

don't end up like everyone else.

 

This box-less

rule-less

border-less

place is yours to find.

With others --diverse, eclectic, nutty and brilliant.
Eccentric.

Or maybe just you.

Maybe sometimes frustrating.

But
who work with clients, with each other, with the world.

To do good work.

 

To bring better products to market faster.

To bring better lives to more people.

To bring advancements.

To obliterate stagnation.

To push and fight and learn and laugh.

And to come in tomorrow and do it again.

And to grow and grow and grow.

Yourself.

Your clients.

But this is bigger than that.

This is about doing something more important.

Pushing full-force against the usual.

Saying NO to the status quo.

This is about destroying that old acquaintance.

That old box.

And imagining the future.

And even more important than imagining it.

It's making it.

An Advertising Lesson I Got From an Annual Report.

When I joined the "Agency of the Decade," Ally & Gargano in early 1990, I was handed two type-written sheets of paper with single-spaced typewriting on them.

It was a list--I think written by Carl Ally--of 'Twelve Things You Should Know About Advertising." 

When IBM Selectrics went out and Macs came in, I typed the whole thing over again--so I'd have the digital file. Along the way, I made small changes here and there--reflecting changing media habits and paying more attention to gender-sensitivities.

I've kept this document longer than most people in advertising today have been alive. I read it a couple times a year. I've printed it in this space before (find it for yourself). And I've handed it out through the years to a couple of hundred people--creatives, account people, clients and planners.

Point number Twelve is the one I'm writing about today. I'll print it here in its entirety.

For just about the entirety of my career, I've followed that advice. It's one more reason so many of my fellow creatives resent me: I read my clients' annual reports. 

I'll repeat that because no one heard me: I read my clients' annual reports. 

Yesterday, I had a breakfast meeting with a distinguished client that could probably buy and sell Mark Read like he's a Pez Dispenser. An empty one.

I wasn't about to fuck this up.

I read all I could about him. And read it again before I walked over to our meeting. My job wasn't to eat huevos rancheros without staining my shirt with hot sauce. It was to connect with this gentleman and to make him think I was on the ball. File that under, "Find out as much about your product as you can."

Some years ago, I read the annual report of a client that was at that time, the biggest ad spender in the world. The client, years earlier, had slipped and was now on its way back. I wanted to learn about what they did.

About ten minutes into the Annual Report, I came upon this page. No one working for that company or working for their agency has any recall of this. Though, they should.

It should be Job #1 in the agency business. But we're too busy "influencing culture," and making hamburger-scented toothpaste.

When I read this, I might have felt like Jean-François Champollion felt when he found the key to translating ancient hieroglyphics. Here in front of me was the answer to all good communication.

To someone you love. To a customer you'll never meet.

I memorized those words.

They're what I offer to clients today.

It's worked.

Since I started GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I've probably helped on average one client a month find their voice. 

It's not easy.

There's listening until your ears practically bleed. 

And that's the easy part. 

The hard part is writing it down. 

So it's honest and clear. 

Differentiating and memorable.

So it rallies the company and the people you're working for.

The hardest part might be convincing the owners of that company that you're giving them "the power." 

The power to be themselves. 

And therefore powerful.

The Scots' poet Robert Burns said it like this: 

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us 
To see oursels as others see us!

It ain't much really.

You can't stick it on a resume: 

Objective: To help companies see oursels [sic] as others see us.

But it's all that really matters.

"Dentsu’s median age is 27." -- Wendy Clark, Chief Executive Officer. Dentsu International

 

Dora, 6, never stops exploring new ways to push the boundaries of the new media-eco-scape and connect with lucrative pre-natal consumers in preternatural style. Nothing can stop her--except lunch.

Don't be fooled by his Jack-o-Lantern grin and his post-hipster haircut, Al Falfa, 7, has been winning awards since last Tuesday. Cannes Lion Bronze winner for best drawing of a rocket ship.

Patti Mayonnaise, 12, and Doug Funnie, 12. Big marketing problems? This Dynamic Duo knows Instagram and gets to Insta-Answers--instantly! They're simply Insta-mazing!

Brooklyn "Red" Hook, a tough, talented art-director who, luckily doesn't have one diaper tab stuck in the 2018s. A tireless worker who burns the mid-night oil starting around 2:15. "Sure he's cranky," said one CEO, "but he gets the job done. Especially if you cut up his food for him. In bitsy witsy wittle pieces."

Gary Coleman, 7. Fast, feisty and a firecracker. A deep well of ideas and executional brilliance. Coleman holds high standards and terrorizes account people and clients alike. His famous "What chu tawkin' about, Willis?" raises everyone to a higher standard.

"The Smurfs," 6. After nine grueling hours auditing classes at Miami (Ohio) Ad School, the "Smurfs" as they're known are ready to work on your multi-million dollar ad budget. "Their lack of experience," said OPP's Mark Readbetweenthelines, "is only matched by the fervor of their unfounded convictions."

"'Spermy' doesn't have one foot stuck in the '80s, because his feet haven't developed yet," say OPP OB/GYN Mark Rude. "Spermy is the future. He's not stuck in the past. In fact, right now, he's stuck in the ovaries."

How Creatives Work.

There's a lot that the financial interlopers into the advertising business fail to understand. It's why they've been so successful in destroying the industry.

I'm "internet friendly" with the English ad legend, Dave Trott. Dave's done more notable work than just about anyone alive today. And even if he did nothing more than give the occasional lecture on "how advertising works," his contribution to the industry would be nearly unmatched.

I've never met Dave, or even spoken to him. But we share some background and some interests. And in the age of pixelized long-distance connections, I count Dave--despite his inevitable protestations--as a friend.

Dave and I are both World War II buffs and we often share esoteric little bits about colossal battles, Winstonalia, the desert war and brewing up and whatever else strikes our fancies.

This morning, I ran across an article in The Wall Street Journal that the home of a decorated RAF pilot--who lost both legs during the war and was a POW at Colditz for four years--was being offered for sale at just under three-million pounds.

This sort of item is of interest to probably 400 people around the world. But it struck me and I thought of Dave--so off it whizzed to his flat way off in London.

In less time than it to takes me and Whiskey to attend to her morning ablutions, I returned and found the item below in my inbox

It struck me--though Dave and I don't work together that this is how creatives work together when work is working. Someone finds something interesting and taps it over to his partner.

His partner chews on it a bit, a synapse synapses and then something is sent back. From there, if you're blessed, the exchange becomes like Borg vs. McEnroe.

I think it was Roy Grace who described working as coming in in the morning and saying to your partner, "One." Some time later, she says "Two." Around lunch, you say, "Three."

After lunch, you might trade four and five. If you're lucky, you get to ten before the great timekeeper calls your name. And you have something special.

There are a lot of circumstances that have seen the human connection of the most-human of processes be surgically removed by the scalpel of nasty modernity.

Not only do we seldom have time to talk to partners today--those of us still toiling in offices seldom have space to be stupid, to throw pencils at the ceiling or draw bawdy grafitti on the sheetrock. 

Everything is so serious today. As if our job isn't to make people think, laugh, cry, crave, get upset. No, today we act, professionally, as if lives depend on our fucking banner ads. 

How is the prevailing onus of career terror helping anyone do anything that's interesting? Why do corporate entanglements get so successfully in the way of the connection with another human's brain and the joy that comes from that.

Maybe the metaverse will make it all better.

But it's my guess that the metaverse will also be bought by giant capital interests and our virtual sex-acts will be sponsored by 5G messages from telcos while you're in virtual flagrante delicto.

That makes sense.

The SEO said fuck.

--

BTW, Dave and I are still "being creative." 

Yesterday, Veteran's Day, we searched together for a poem I had sent him years ago--about WWII bombers dropping death from planes decorated with images of beautiful women.

I haven't found the poem.

But I'll keep looking.

That's how it goes.

Things Go Better with Press Releases.

My well-worn baseball cap is off to my old compatriot, Rob Reilly and my recent nemesis, Mark Read for winning "Coca-Cola Co.'s massive agency review."

According to what passes for today's trade press, "[WPP] Ad Age, beats Publicis in final round, will form a bespoke unit called ‘OpenX’ to handle media, creative and data in some 200 countries."

The article--surely written by a slo-bot (even a computer could write more clearly, and with more precision) continues. For the convenience of my trillions of readers, I've highlighted and annotated Ad Age's reportage, pointing out lazy and unclear language that in better days than our own, would have been clarified by a professional journalist.:

     

"The holding company will form a bespoke team (what does bespoke team mean. And why have individual agencies only to form units made up of other agencies?) called OpenX (is that X a letter ex or Roman numeral 10? And what are they Open to? I presume they'll be open to working all weekend with 62 other teams generating storyboards of which fewer than two-percent will ever be produced) to handle the account, assuming a role Coca-Cola describes as “global marketing network partner.” (What does this mean?) WPP is charged (is WPP paying for this opportunity? That's what 'charged' usually means) with overseeing end-to-end marketing solutions (that means it lasts until Armageddon?) across Coca-Cola’s entire beverage portfolio, which includes some 200 brands (why would any company sell 200 different drinks. 90 percent of Coke sales probably come from Coke itself) including sodas such as Coke and Sprite, as well as sports drinks, juices, coffee, tea and plant-based drinks. 

“Consumers respond to an entire experience (sure they do. I had a great soda-drinking experience once. I called it a straw)—they don’t separate the message from the medium (how McCluhan of you)—and that’s why we’ve designed an agency model (a male model or a female model or a fluid model) to be truly consumer-centric (as opposed to possum-centric) and silo-free,” (I am so tired of Silo-ism. This discrimination against grain-storage must stop!) Manolo Arroyo, Coca-Cola’s global chief marketing officer, said in a statement. “This model is about seamless integration (oh. What if I prefer seamed integration?) of the power of big, bold ideas (in the past, presumably Coke bought small and timorous ideas) and creativity within experiences, (as opposed to creativity devoid of experience) amplified by media and data (could you speak up, someone's amplified the media and data too loud and I can't hear you.) It will enable us to create end-to-end (can we leave my end out of this please?) experiences that are grounded in data-rich insights (my name is Rich. Data Rich) and optimized real-time, at scale, as we learn from consumers.” (can't we ever pessimize something in non-real-time that's tiny and ignores consumers?)

OK. I still don't know what's been won.

Who's doing the work.

Where it will run.

How much money is involved.

And mostly, will I ever again see a good soda commercial?

Killing snakes.

When you're just 17 and laying in bed in the deep of night next to your mostly-unclothed first inamorata, there's very little about the scenario that's not steeped in the seamiest and most-unleavable prurience.

I was in such a state, in the small bedroom I shared with the girl in the white dress, Karmen Rodiguez. The room was as dark as a nun's closet. The street outside of Hector's tidy cinderblock home was as yet without streetlights. They hadn't yet arrived at that part of the still-small city of Saltillo. This is before Chrysler built a giant assembly plant in the as-yet-smoke-free town, and before all those  whose family had lived in the mountains for one-hundred generations left the homes of their ancestors to make American wages.

The only sound in my small room beside the soft mechanical monotony of the cheap electric fan I had bought to cool things off, was a symphony of a trillion cicadas just outside my window vying for orchestral prominence against a similar-sized cacocph of hand-wringing crickets. 

The insects called and responded, as orthoptera do. They woke all the sad Mexican ghosts that lived in the empty fields that abutted Hector and his wife Teresa's small plot.

I looked over at the ever-provocative Karmen, my eyes straining to find a bit of light to see the full splendor of her nubility, all sixty-one inches and 110 pounds of it. Most nights when we were together after a game, in flagrante delicto or out of it, I felt twice her size, all sinew and long muscles like rebar. There were times when I thought despite all my attempts at gentleness and gentility I would fairly crush her.

"You should live in a tea cup," I would say to her. "You are just the size to live in a tea cup."

"A cracked tea cup," she would laugh. "With a chip on the rim where I bumped my head and a broken handle. An excuse for you when you drop me."

When you're born left, the notion of being left again is never far away.

I heard against the plateglass by my pillow a rapping against my rest.

Taptaptaptap.

"Jorge," said the voice from the dark. "Wake up and let me in. I need to talk."

"Who is this," I said sotto voce, so as not to wake Karmen. She stirred despite my best attempts.

"Who is it, Jorge Navidad?" she rasped. "Come back to bed."

There was knocking now at the door. Insistent.

"Jorge," came a voice from Hector's small front step. "It is Abreu. I need to talk with you."

"Fernan, it's two in the morning. What do you need me for?"

"I need to talk with you." I opened the door and Fernando Perez-Abreu, the ninth-string utility infielder on a team with just two strings came into the house. He was carrying two well-pine-tarred Louisville Sluggers. He wiped his thin soles on a welcome mat.

"Let us go into the desert," he said, handing me a 34-ounce bat. "Let us count the stars and see the lights and wait for the rattlesnakes and when we see them we can kill them with our bats."

"Fernando, I don't kill snakes."

"You must come with me. I cannot kill them alone. A man on some nights needs a friend."

"And you chose me." In my bad Spanish, I worried that my sarcasm wouldn't come through. 

"Yes. I choose you."

I kissed Karmen and threw on some clothes I had left crumpled up on a chair on the side of my bed. Fernando and I each carried a bat and walked into the loud silence of the desert. It was lit by a Long Island Expressway of stars, each screaming against the dark.

"I saw my father tonight in a dream, a dream of a million nights, a dream of my father the snake coming to me out of the darkness like a thousand deaths."

We walked saying nothing, our ears alert against the jazzband shake of the rattler's fanged ass.

"My father, when I was a boy, would drink and drink and drink and then he would return home and beat me in my bed. He would drink anything he could find. Turpentine. Anything.

"He would beat my face bloody with fists the size of pig's feet. My mother would not help me. My brother would not help me. They said he did it because I was dumb and lazy. It happened twice a week."

Fernando heard a snake and saw it slither against a boulder. He leapt after it and smacked at it with his bat, raising a cloud of sandy dust, but missing by a yard. Then he walked backed over to me.

"He beat me twice a week, until I turned fourteen and started sleeping with a bat next to me in my bed like it was a woman. He came one night and I swung hard with the bat and hit him in his left knee. He fell like a shooting gallery duck in an amusement palace. I held the end of the bat against his forehead and pressed his forehead red. I left my home that night at fourteen and never came back."

We walked in silence deeper into the dark. Now I heard a snake in front of me. It sounded like an old loose-limbed Black tap dancer practicing his soft-shoed craft on sand spread on the stage floor. Brushes on a snare drum. 

I swatted at the ground in front of me and scared it away. "On purpose, you missed," Fernando said. "You would not miss if you were me. In my dreams at night, I see snakes with the tongue of a viper in the head of my father. He is hissing with his fists."

There were times when we rode on the team bus, helmed by Gordo Batista, our driver, mechanic and third-string catcher, when all on the bus but Gordo, Hector and myself were asleep. We would drive through the darkness through the mountains through the night and out of the diesel click-ping-click-ping of the old bus' engine we would hear a scream like an air-raid siren. 

"Basta. No. Basta." Fernando screaming at the snake-father-ghost that stood over him the moment he would close his eyes.

I saw far in the east the beginning tiptoe pink of rosy-fingered dawn. 

"We must return to our beds. I have my woman to kiss awake. And tonight we have a game. Torreon, I believe. Occento is on the mound--he is sneaky fast."

"We return to our beds. You to your woman."

We walked quietly until the sky was light and we reached the crooked edge of the erupting city of Saltillo.

"We return to our beds," Fernando repeated slowly, each word taking a minute. "We return to our beds. You to your woman. Me to my snake."

We walked in quiet through the desert until the sun began to warm the air. When we arrived at Hector's home, Fernando hit the asphalt street in front of Hector's house with his bat. And then again. He felt the recoil through his arms and shoulders and felt powerful, like Thor.

"You to your woman," he repeated. "Me to my snakes."

Extrapolation. And more.

About two decades ago, I picked up historian Niall Ferguson's great book, "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire." You can order the book here.

At the very start of his book, Ferguson does what "big thinkers" do. He looked at myriad examples of invasions--not just American invasions--and extrapolated a set of stages that in many ways seem applicable to most military invasions.

1.        
The ginning up of support for the invasion. Usually, the            assertion that the enemy possesses some sort of existential threat.

2. 
The overwhelming power of American forces carries the day.

3. 
The oppressed people will greet Americans as liberators.

4.
The enemy is defeated but isolated elements remain intractable and wage asymmetrical warfare against American troops. America slowly realizes the isolated elements aren't isolated and can no longer abide the cost of the war in blood and treasure.

5.
America declares our mission victorious and over. Our troops leave. And the invaded country goes on about its business much as it would have had we not invaded.

I read those summary steps just as the United States invaded Iraq. I quickly checked when Colossus was published--how did Ferguson get the path of our engagement so right so close to that war. It was then I realized Ferguson had been writing about the US invasion of the Philippines in 1898.

A couple nights ago, I finished another excellent history, written by someone who has a view as nearly as large as Ferguson's, English Historian, Tristram Hunt.

Hunt writes the story of the rise and rise and rise and then collapse of the Wedgwood company. Its path from a small kiln to one of the world's leading luxury brands to receivership.

It occurred to me that Hunt was setting out the steps of economic greed and collapse that could be extrapolated to include the pattern followed by most modern collapses--and the let's say de-fusing of the modern advertising industry under its current holding company masters.

All of this to my mind is very "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."  That is the life and death of one organism resembles the life and death of an entire species or ecosystem.

1. 
The industry is successful, unique and profitable. The revenue from the industry not only created a thriving industry, it accounted for the financial well-being of thousands of employees.

2.
Giant capital enters the scene and convinces industry owners--usually not the founders (they've died or retired) of how much richer and more important they'd be if they merged with like-minded companies. 

3.
Major industry consolidation happens. But the quality of work plummets. Workers who had been the industry's prize asset, are treated with disdain. They cost a lot. They're skilled. Consequently, the workforce shrinks dramatically.

4. 
With giant capital in control, the search is on for more efficiencies. That means more mergers which almost always promise 1+1=3 and almost always result in 1+1= .72. These consolidations are less and less sensible--and result in even more reductions in force. Meanwhile, with little corporate oversight, the leaders of giant capital treat their conglomerate as essentially an ATM. They pay themselves and their cronies unaccountably giant salaries while reducing costs everywhere else.

5.
These companies no longer provide a high-quality product or service (they've de-skilled.) Demand drops and those in control say the industry itself has outlived the times. Giant capital goes home with millions. They often default on pensions. And the hoi-polloi find jobs in other industries.

This is what happened to Wedgwood, which was at one time the global gold standard in luxury housewares. It was merged with Waterford crystal and half a dozen or more other china companies, then production was relocated to Thailand, destroying an industry that had been viable in the United Kingdom for most of four centuries.

Of course, as Alben Barkley was said to have said, "The vice presidency isn't worth a bucket of warm piss."  Extrapolation, as I am engaged in here, might be worth even less.

Sorry for getting all toity in my hoity-ness.