Immensity.

As usual, I have my schnozz stuck in another book. 

I read serially.

No, not just when I'm eating Cheerios.  I mean when I finish one book, I barely pause before going on to the next. It seems to me though our species appears to be hurtling into the dark ages, there is an efflorescence of great books. Scarcely a week goes by when I don't buy two or three. 

Accumulation is easier nowadays, too. My New York City apartment--large for Manhattan--is stuffed floor to ceiling with books. Since I finally conceded I had no more space, I switched to ebooks. And though something is lost reading on a device, much is gained. Mainly space. Oh, yeah. And lack of a divorce.

I'm a couple days into Pulitzer-Prize winner Edward Yong's new book, "An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us." You can read the Times' review here. And you can buy the book here.

I have wide-ranging interests which is why I read in such a wide-ranging manner. Everything from the origin of our species to ancient human history to the wars of annihilation that we seem to have fought with such regularity throughout time. But regardless of what they're about, most of the books I read inform not only my world view, but my view of advertising and how people communicate.

Early on Yong references a centuries-old idea put forward by a  Baltic-German zoologist called Jacob von Uexkull. (Bear with me now, this won't end up as strangely as it's beginning.) In looking at animal behavior Yong uses von Uexkull's world "Umwelt." Broadly, umwelt means environment, but more specifically, Yong and von Uexkull use it to mean an animal's sensory bubble or perceptual world.

All animals use their senses differently--and effectively. From dogs, whose apostrophe-shaped nostrils send aromas right to their sense organs, to dolphins who can sense the actual skeletons inside fish, every species is different. For too long, humankind, with our notion of dominion over the planet and its inhabitants, have looked at other species as not just different, but somehow inferior to us.

The key to understanding the world around us is the key to creating good, effective advertising.

The key is empathy.

Every species has its reasons. To diminish a snake because it senses the world with its tongue, or to diminish an elephant because it can't see color is to be patently non-empathic.

I've seen too many people in our business way too often not take the time or have the patience to consider how those other than the cool kids live. They seem to actually believe that Williamsburg is the measure of all things and those with other belief systems, values or codes are somehow risible.

As someone who spent half of a long career working on b-to-b accounts, I heard virtually everyone and his cousin say how they're boring and uncool. Likewise, in our current benighted era I've heard how only men can work on a muscle car, only young people can do something for young people, and only women can work on products for women.

This will probably earn me a fair amount of rebuke, but I believe that this sort of categorization is harmful to us all. It's understandingness that leads to understanding, not just wearing the same clothing, having similar biology or coming from an adjacent zip code.

It's Umwelt--understanding and appreciating and empathizing with another's sensory bubble--that makes a communication kind and real and true and moving. It's looking at people and situations and other species not through your eyes but working hard to see through their eyes that leads to real connection.

So much of what I see in the world is false.

As Einstein is said to have said, "Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

I think as an industry we have for too long looked at people as if they are abstractions--personas, archetypes or focus-group respondents--a portrait in a badly-written powerpoint deck. I'm not sure that we have the compassion we need to be welcomed into people's homes and lives and minds.

Not just advertising, of course, but brands, too. And how we treat each other--especially outsiders, because everyone's an outsider sometimes.

I don't read books on advertising to learn about advertising.

I read books on life to learn about life.

And then I try to apply that to advertising.

That's an odd strategy I know.

But it works about half the time. Or not.

Lost in Advertising.

I'm a firm believer in something much of the world seems not to believe in. 

I'm writing this in the three or four minutes before I get on the phone with a planner I'm working with on an account we share. Thinking about the call, I was going to start by saying that not only am I going to take notes, I'm going to file them properly so I can find them when I have to sit down and write our long-copy launch piece.

I'd say about 99 times out of 100 I take notes and then when I sit down to actually write, I can't find the notes I'm looking for.

That's frustrating, of course. 

But it's also a good thing.

I find a lot of good ideas when I'm looking for something else. I realize that sounds a little like advice a grandmother might have given to the love-lorn circa 1952. "You'll find someone once you stop looking so hard," but I think in many cases this sort of discovery happens.

Maybe it's some version of the Availability Heuristic or what I used to call "The Lower East Side Effect." 

Back when that area of New York was teeming with small retailers, many people like myself would go down there for good prices on the specific item they were looking for. If you were looking for tablecloths and napkins, there were a dozen or so stores that specialized in those items. 

When you got back to your apartment, someone would invariably say, "Did you see any bathmats." My answer would always be the same. "No, not a single one." However, if you went back to the Lower East Side a week later looking for bathmats, that would be all you'd see.

I find ideas that way, too.

Maybe I have a rough thought already in my head. Then while I'm looking for a piece of paper I've misplaced, or the brief I've highlighted or the 91-page deck that has a tab on one valuable page, I run into something else that lights a match.

That's how human minds work when they're working.

You store things and somehow, often subconsciously, they emerge when you least expect them.

This is something the people that run holding companies and individual ad agencies don't understand and never will. They think the principles of "Taylorism" can be applied to what we do, when, in fact, exploration can never be pre-ordained.

Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a lot in the press and all over my social feeds about how AI, specifically CPT-3, is going to displace anyone who writes for a living.

And surely, among those buying writing--the aforementioned Holding Company and agency heads as well as procurement-minded marketers, CPT-3 will be good enough. In the same way bad stock photos and illustrations suffice for most people. No one seems to add anything up that maybe the reason so many people are so disgusted by marketing is that so much marketing is so disgusting.

Mistakes are how we find answers. Or, if not mistakes, then serendipitous connections. 

I read in Walter Isaacson's book on Einstein that Einstein had a flash about time and space and speed seeing a train whiz into the Bern station moving past stationary clocks. Something clicked for him about relativity.

But AI doesn't make mistakes.

AI is a pattern-matching apparatus. It says, I saw this before and it went with this and so that must go with another.

It's not dumb. AI can match things way faster than any human. So it can put together sentences matching words and thoughts that go together based on them having gone together before.

But most things we like, from a joke to a smile from a stranger to a plot twist to a pratfall are based on the unexpected, the strange, the unlikely, the that makes no sense.

Except it winds up that they do.

And that's the beauty of searching. 

Without even knowing what you're searching for,
you're likely to find it

R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

I don't very often read opinion pieces in The Wall Street Journal. Many of their writers--Karl Rove and Peggy Noonan among them--are so viciously reactionary that I can scarcely believe that such thoughts still circulate in the world today. Of course, with the raid on the crazy, anti-Semitic German monarchist movement late last week, I think the rise of doctrinaire hate based on the belief in one's own superiority is blooming like a herpes outbreak in a frat house. One, there's no stopping it. Two, it will never fully disappear.

However, at one time there was a strain of Conservative thought in some precincts that was more values-based and neither doctrinaire nor anti-people of color, non-Christians and even accepting of a mild form of Keynsian-economics, recognizing that the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith did not always deal cards out fairly.

Though I am an extremely liberal person politically, I too, have some conservative tendencies. 

For instance, I think people should be kind to other people. That we should treat others as we wish to be treated. That we should look people in the eyes, say "please" and "thank you," show up on time and do what we say we're going to do. I suppose you could say that my conservatism starts and maybe ends with the word "consideration," a word, in my mind, closely related to "respect," so when I saw this headline and cover art in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, it stopped me.

Further, the writer Adam Kirsch's opening few sentences really sucked me in. They read: "When the ledger is drawn up on the tech revolutions of the last thirty years—the internet, smart phones, social media, crypto—the losses are generally outweighed by the gains....The most important casualty, however, may turn out to be not a particular industry but something more important and harder to replace: the idea that being a leader in business or public life means being respectable."

I'm not going to go further with Kirsch, and I'm not even going to link to it because the Journal has the strictest paywall anywhere west of the Kremlin and I know just a handful of people who bother subscribing to the paper. As I have said many times, reading the Journal gives you an edge in the business of advertising like nothing else. When clients call me up and say, "George will know what to do, George knows everything," it's because I read the business news in the Journal that they so often say words to that effect. (Of course, reading the Journal has alienated me from so many people. I've made a choice to not watch television and to read the paper instead. When the great score-keeper comes to pen my name, I think my choice will be regarded favorably.)

Nevertheless, back to the matter of respect in business.

Giving respect, I think is like having principles. They're both meaningless until they cost you money. When they do, and you have to show who you are, rather than just say what you are, respect and the like have all the veracity of a hallmark card or a Linked In post from a pladituditator like Seth or Simon.

In advertising, where I plow my fields, a lot of hot air has destroyed a lot of ethical ozone layers as every agency and every holding company blathers on about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

To my glaucoma'd baby-blues, those words have about as truth as you'd find in a typical Bazooka Joe bubble gum cartoon.

If you hold, as I do (and I agree with Journal writer Adam Kirsch here) that "respect is rooted in the idea of equality; being respectful in outward, visible ways--for instance, by giving someone your full attention when they're talking--is a signal that you regard them as a peer."

The words Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in most cases in our modern world are nothing more than placating subterfuges for upholding the primacy of the one-percenters over the masses.

I won't go into excruciating detail, like how WPP, the world's largest communications company has less than two-percent of its employees over the age of 60, when the population of the world is about 20-percent 60+. I've covered that ground before.

But how can any company talk about equity when very few companies actually share equity (like say, through an employee stock ownership plan) or through a fairer allocation of wages. Whereas in the 1970s, the average CEO made about twenty-times the wage of an average worker, today advertising holding company CEOs (all white men) make about 300 times the wage of their median employee. 

Seriously, seriously, seriously. Can any holding company DEI person--I know you're reading this--explain where the equity is in supporting that sort of non-equitable compensation infrastructure? If any DEI person responds, I'll give you this space--without any of my editorial oversight--and my audience of roughly 80,000 readers a week, for free.

My experience in holding companies and from the views of associates who are still in holding companies says that there's no diversity, no equity and no inclusion. The big wigs get offices far from the hoi polloi, with working doors and windows, take black cars home when they leave at five, and generally know no one's name outside of the handful of people they come into contact with. I can't possibly think how a system that allows this sort of behavior, embraces it, in fact, can be thought of as inclusive.

I'll end with a personal anecdote.

About 15 years ago I was interviewing for a giant job at the holding company level. It was an idea I hatched to make work better across some of the giant accounts the holding company shared across ten or 15 different companies they owned.

Roughly 30 minutes into the conversation, the CEO I was interviewing with got a cell-phone call.

"It's from my daughter," he said. "Do you mind if I take this?"

I have daughters, too. Of course not.

After a few minutes, he hung up the phone and returned to me. But first he said, "She was thanking me. I bought her a $3,200 handbag for her birthday."

That $3,200 handbag, by the way, is closer to the median salary of the holding company's employees than the salary of this CEO was.

Diversity--except for people we can get away with not hiring.

Equity--except when it comes to distribution of revenue.

Inclusion--except when it comes to people who aren't us.

We're all for it.

HANDBAG                    MEDIAN                        CEO COMP

$3,200 x 20        =         $64,000 x 275      =       $17,600,000

 

Three Years Axed.

It's been almost three years since the head of HR at Ogilvy called me on my cellphone at 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon and asked me to come down to his office.

The other major firings that day had been completed by 10AM--including two ECDs who ran IBM before my arrival and my ex-partner who had been at the agency for parts of four decades. I had already attended their beery farewells before I got the call.

"You're firing me, aren't you?" I asked. (As a true New Yorker, I ask questions in the form of an answer.)

"Yes."

So, I caught my breath and walked down a few flights to the domain of the un-fired. You know, the floor filled with people who were essentially over-head, not income producers. I entered that domain angry and three years on the anger still burns.

My visceral-ness is a weakness, I know. 

But it's also a strength. I feel things. Those things make me a better writer, a better worker, a better thinker and more. Also, I hate bullshit. So how could I not be pissed at the lies the firers told, and the lies they continue to press-release about the agency the holding company milked to near-death.

But none of that is my topic today (not that I ever really need a topic.)

Since I've been a free-agent, I've never in my life been more challenged. I've never felt a greater sense of my own talent and capacity. I've never made more money. I've never felt more needed by clients. And I've never felt more optimistic about my own career longevity.

I've also never felt more alone.

I decided when I went out on my own, that it was going to be me. I didn't want to build an infrastructure. I didn't want to hire staff. I wanted--for once in my life the largest aspect of my life, my career--to be all about me. My success or failure would depend on me and me alone.

Of course, I have hired people. And I work with great art directors, designers, account directors, planners, producers and even financial people. But I do that in an ad hoc manner. GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is about me.

I had a long talk with my older brother late last week. He's just-less than two years senior to me and has been at the same law-firm in Chicago for almost the entirety of his career. I thought, being kin and all, he might understand my triumphs and travails of being on my own.

"Fred," I said to him, "when you get down to it, what's hard about this is I have nothing to sell but my brain. Clients come to me to get a portion of my brain--the way my brain sees the world, makes sense of things and the way my brain helps me express a company's role in making the world a little better.

"If I were working for an agency, I'd have people around me. If I were a bullfighter, I'd have a rapier and a cape. Picadors would be on-hand if I found myself in trouble. But, I am on my own, I suppose for better or worse, or more accurately for better and worse."

Of course, that could all be a very ego-centric way of looking at this final act in my life story. And if you've just said to yourself, "George, lighten up a bit," you wouldn't be the first to tell me to do so.

And that's fine.

My tendencies run toward the solipsistic.

However, there's a point here. 

The goal of learning who you are, of relying on yourself, of marketing yourself, of zeroing in on your strengths and underscoring them while trying to lessen your weaknesses is powerfully important. 

It's something--when you're working inside a larger system or organization that you can get away with not thinking about. But I think it's good to think about.

Whenever someone calls me--regardless of their age or occupation and tells me they've been fired, I usually tell them the same thing. Think about what you do, uniquely, better than anyone else in the world. 

You might not be able to throw a shot put further but maybe you're the world's best ambidextrous shotputter. Find that thing: for me, it was a combination of being able to simplify complexity and do it very quickly and express it with a bit of empathy or humor. Of course, there are people who are better than I. There always will be. 

But I tell clients I specialize in the dump-truck assignments. When they back an 18-wheeler up to my brain and unload 32-tons of decks--you know most briefings, that I can handle better than anyone.

You have good days and bad days. Work through them all.

That's what I've learned so far.

Requiem for a Species.

Of all the ding-dong devastating lines William Faulkner ever wrote, perhaps the most telling and knelling is this one: The past is never dead. It's not even past. 

Of course, that's more than just a helluva piece of writing. It's a helluva thought. 

A lot of what we see, feel and hear disappears like your fist when you open your hand, but that line could be the stuff of every graduate course in whatever discipline you choose to follow. It could be a trillion Talmudic conversations. And the riddle of the Sphinx. It could be the subject of every conversation until the chiming of the last ding-dong of doom.

Faulkner wrote that sentence in his novel Requiem for a Nun, which, amazingly you can download here. For free.

The trick in our era of course is that it's far easier to download things from the internet than it is to upload them to our brains. I'm not sure why the chieftains of world authoritarianism haven't yet banished, expunged and made illegal free, liberal thought. That's coming, I'm sure, but for now, you can find stuff like this online.

I'm thinking about the past never being dead, or even past because I am thinking about hate.

Faulkner was talking about the sins of our fathers. 

The foundational sins of slavery, rape, murders, lynching, cruelty, and more.

The enduring foundational sins of America.

But he could also be the sins of all the world--including one of the oldest and most-enduring, anti-semitism. 

That the past isn't dead or even past does not mean--not for a second--that we can't do anything about the evil mankind does. It does not excuse us thanks to Martin Heidegger's concept of "Thrownness." That we are thrown through the universe. We have to find love, foundation and stable. How we started is no excuse for how we wind up.

Maybe that's another way of saying what Dr. King meant when he said that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

In other words, the road to hell is paved with Kanyes. 

Haters. The doctrinaire. The blamers rather than responsiblers.The cosmologists, who attribute all evil and hardship in the world (as it's defined by them) on a people or a force or a belief they don't like.

If only __________ was eliminated, the world would be great again.

If only everyone believed in __________ like we do, the world would be great again.

That holocaust-ish myopia will never be dead. Or even past.

Read Faulkner.

That's one way of fighting back.

If you can't read Faulkner, at least read this, by Faulkner. It's about the length of a two-minute web "film" on furniture polish or a hamburger topped with mac and cheese. From Faulkner's Nobel Prize Banquet speech. (And, please, no allegations of gendered. Man here is a proxy for humankind.)

"...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."

That's hard to say with false teeth.

An Old Train Chugs On.

When I was a little boy, the development my parents ascended to the middle-class in was plopped down with forty other houses in garish colors in the middle of what had been a field, or a copse not so many years earlier.

Each house was the same or the reverse of the same and each, smack dab in the middle of the little plot of sod it was centered within, had a single, spindly Charlie Brown tree struggling to grow against the vicissitudes of Cold War suburbia. I was eight before I ever saw a tree taller than me.

Despite having hundreds of Soviet missiles aimed at us and aiming hundreds back from a nearby Nike missile installation, I was free to run around, like a bindlestiff or hobo. Though I was just four or five, I ran as free as a bearcub, and as free from natural enemies as a human could be.

Though most of suburbia was fully suburbia-ized by 1962, there was, about half a mile from my parents' 1500 square of linoleum, the abandoned railroad tracks of the New York, Westchester and Boston Railway Company which ran straight and rusty to nowhere. That line was put out of business during the Depression by the New Haven line, leaving me a great place to wander and throw rocks. To this day, two of my favorite past-times.

There's a bit of dialogue in the classic Frank Capra movie, "It's a Wonderful Life," that is too-often overlooked. Ever since I first heard it, it's rattled in my head. Maybe it's my burning bush.

In the anodyne 1960s, I used my imagination to conjure those sounds and those abandoned tracks were like something out of an industrial-age Poe. Haunting. They beat for me like a telltale heart.

Coming into my mother's house, of course, was always a trial. Seeing me cut and scraped and sweaty and filthy, one article or another of clothing torn, and probably just wearing a t-shirt during a more-decorous era, brought out the virago in her. To be precise, the virago was never very far from the surface.

I think if I walked through the door to her home 3,000 times during the fifteen bipedal years I lived with her, I heard 2,997 times, "curiosity killed the cat."

I never understood that statement then, and today, so many years later, I understand it less-than-ever. 

In today's modern world--especially the Fall of the House of Usher world of Holding-Company-Advertising, curiosity--the very foundation of discovery and human advancement--seems to have vaporized. 

We hear (since I went out on my own, I don't hear it any longer) about "best practices," the antithesis of finding a better way. We follow do's and don'ts and most advertising practitioners know exactly how narrow the aperture of acceptable client-buying work is and exactly how to get their spot through the eye of that ever-constricting needle.

Challenging ourselves and our clients has become too challenging.

Even the current mania for project-management--in my last job there seemed to be more people managing the projects than people creating them--puts limits on curiosity. You have a set amount of time to "think." There's a briefing at 10 and a first tissue session at five and so it goes. There's no time to be silly, dumb, counter-intuitive and curious.

So many years ago when I toiled under the desert sun in Mexico, playing baseball for the Seraperos de Saltillo, my manager, Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla, aka Hector Quesadilla, said to me "pay attention to what you pay attention to." 

I've taken that phrase along with me since I first heard it when I was 17. I am 65 now and I rarely don't pay attention to it.

Sorry, Mom. Curiosity has killed not half as many felines as tired acceptance of best-practices and 'that's the way we do it’ have.

I'm lucky, I guess, or cursed. Sometimes they’re the same thing.

I'm reading now "Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America" by Pekka Hamalainen." So around every corner, whether I'm in the concrete of Manhattan or the littoral of my little corner of Connecticut, I try to imagine the life of the people who were here first, how they lived, how they died, how they fought back and were ultimately cast-aside.

There's no advertising point in doing that. Except for one. 

An important one.

Whether wandering down abandoned train tracks at five years of age, or seeing on the turbid waters of the Long Island sound a small fleet of Pequot canoes spearing cod, my imagination is working. I am seeing things, hearing things, piecing together shards and slips of information and trying to form what happened--back then or never, it doesn't much matter.

What matters is thinking.

Seeing.

Walking through life like an old waiter with your head up, scanning the horizon for a hungry diner or for a tip. That's how to go through business, too. With your head up.

And paying attention to what you're paying attention to.

That keeps this old train chugging.

Let's Not Learn.

For about the last ten days or so, my social feeds have been abuzz about the "writing" ability of some new and breakthrough AI.

People seem to be cheering-on the demise of people.

I don't understand that. Of course, there's very little I actually do understand. The newer it is, the less sense things seem to make. It's like watching TV with 1000 channels. We were better off with seven channels. We could settle faster or decide there was nothing on faster. Now people spend hours looking for crap.

We used to spend minutes.

Since the beginning of recorded story-telling, roughly 4,500 years ago, story-telling has needed two attributes in order to be effective. While the earliest writing known in the western world was essentially spreadsheets in Cuneiform, foundation myths, adventures, morality tales and the like have leaned on these two components. 

I'm not a neuro-scientist, but I'd imagine from a Chomsky-ized perspective, these two requirements are universal and imprinted in the neural-wiring of our species. Hilary, who runs my business, is also a clinical psychologist, as is my daughter Sarah. I'd bet dollars to diodes they'd agree with me.

Good writing needs two things.

1. Truth.

2. Empathy.

99-percent of all human writing you're likely to see lacks both of these qualities. If there's any non-adjectival truth at all--if there's any objective, not subjective evaluation--it's usually divorced from empathy.

All Ye need to know about communication you can learn from studying these three ads. One made focus groups happy and put clients at ease. One got through to real people who were fed up with being force-fed pablum. One is the au courant triumph of machine-based non-thinking over humanity.

Maybe this is a permutation of one of John Long's "How it Started/How it's Goings/How did it All Go so Wrong."

What do I care that new Downy keeps clothes smelling fresh between washes? Keeping my clothes smelling fresh between washes has never been a problem for me. I'm way more concerned with the global rise of authoritarianism and 15,000 year-old glaciers crashing into the sea as our planet becomes uninhabitable.

It's easy to see no empathy in the way we communicate today. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is thin. Most people break into dance. No one has any real problems. Other than maybe running out of Doritos.

Meanwhile, back in reality-ville, millions of Americans are suffering from diseases of despair and are one paycheck or one broken bone away from insolvency.

When I think about humans talking to humans in advertising in a moving way, I usually go out and find something written by Ed McCabe. He seemed to get it like few have since.

I worked on AI for a long time: IBM Watson. I was Watson's "voice" for five years.

I know its capabilities.

I also know its limitations.

We should stop wishing for machines to become more human. We should start working on being more human to each other.

As they say at TBWA\Chiat\Day:

Those are my thoughts on AI.

And life in general.

Bounce.

I'm turning 65 in two days. 

Every night when I'm done reading, I take an inventory of my joints. I check-in with each of them. They tell me how they're feeling.

My shoulders in particular are complainers.

I try to talk them off the edge.

But every once-in-a-while they hit me right between the eyes. Nothing can hurt you the same way a loved one can. And my shoulders pain me. They don't hold back. I think they hate me.

My right shoulder is the more aggressive one. He said to me the other night, "George, I've been in pain since you went to play baseball in the Mexican Baseball League in 1975. For almost 50 years, it's been painful for me to put on a tee shirt or take off an overcoat. All because you made those throws from your knees to nail those speedy runners during those meaningless games you played so ferociously."

I don't let my right shoulder off the hook that easily.

Listen, I said. 

Life is pain.

Dealing with it. Shaking it off. Overcoming it. Performing well despite it. Keeping on.

Life isn't painless. 

I don't know anyone whose knees haven't been scraped. Whose noggin hasn't been concussed. Whose eyes haven't been blackened and shut from swelling. 

I just heard a podcast called Dismissed hosted by a guy I don't know called Hugh Elliott. Hugh interviewed my friend, Debra Fried. 

Debra said something in the podcast that woke me up. That made me think of my nightly dialogue with my joints. 

Debra said when she was fired (I hate euphemisms for pain. Fired is fired. Just like died is died. Not passed on) people told her she would "bounce back." In reflection, Debra said the most profound thing I've ever heard from a podcast. 

She said, "I haven't bounced back. I bounced higher."

God bless Debra Fried.

God bless everyone who keeps fighting.

God bless everyone who lives knowing that life isn't a beautiful little home with a white picket fence on Primrose Lane. It's merging onto the Cross Bronx Expressway with a psychotic convoy of 18-wheelers bearing down on you. Oh, and potholes that could swallow a side-of-beef and still be hungry for more.

Life isn't about bouncing back. 

Sure that's resiliency. 

But true resiliency hugs too closely the status quo.

Bouncing higher leaps past where you were. 

It rejects limitations.

It finds headroom where there used to be ceiling.

Hear that, right shoulder?

Let's get with the program.

Let's bounce higher.

Like Debra.

Allen Kay, 1945-2022.

I opened "The New York Times" on Saturday morning, early, and Allen Kay's obituary popped out to me. 

Through the magic of Linked In, Allen and I had become friends. It happened as these things seem to with a comment Allen made on one of my posts. 

One comment followed another, and before long we were emailing each other and even talking on the telephone. In a short while, Allen, Rob Schwartz, the Chair, TBWA New York Group, and I were crowded into a table at Joe's Shanghai when it was still down on Pell Street and eating about 37 soup dumplings each. 

To people of my generation, Allen was an advertising legend. His agency, Korey Kay, never really rose to the national scene, but for feisty, punch-above-their weight New York advertising, they were one of the best. The best comparison I can think of is this. Korey Kay reminded me of the legends of New York school yard basketball. Where at the Rucker playground in particular, there would be local players superior to those stars in the NBA, but for whatever reason, they never made it to the NBA.

Guys like Goat Manigault, Jumping Jackie Jackson, Joe "the Destroyer" Hammond and Pee Wee Kirkland.

That's not entirely true, of course, because Allen, while at Needham Harper and Steers (a great agency destroyed by merger mania) created one of the most famous commercials of all time, "Brother Dominic," for Xerox. The Times gives that spot credit for establishing the Super Bowl as a commercial showcase.

Today, 48 years after it first aired, it's difficult for people to understand the impact that spot had. 

The day after it ran, everyone was talking about it. And every business saw the importance of spending money on copiers, which were then not ubiquitous.

Allen seemed to do that "stop everyone in their tracks" act over and again. His campaign for Tri-State Honda, "The Car that Sells Itself," was probably the strongest car dealer campaign ever created--with not a sexy spokeswoman and cascading balloon in sight. Or anything like $199/month deals.

Given the "recency heuristic," Allen is probably most-well-known for writing the now seminal line for the Metropolitan Transit Authority: "If you see something, say something." That line saved lives--and it started as a subway car card.

Dinner with Allen and Rob was good. 

We kibbitzed. We talked about the business. What it's done. What it can do again. And our belief in its dignity, power and importance.

Allen and I ate again at some Italian place up near Grand Central. And for pretty much the rest of his life, he and I exchanged notes and Linked In bon mots.

Nice little ways of showing each other that someone else was out there, who just maybe, understood something most people don't. When I was kicked out of Ogilvy and was thinking of one of King Henry IV's speeches from Shakespeare's "King Henry, IV, Part Two," that is, "How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!" Allen helped me ignore the chimes of midnight.

Till his very end, Allen was hustling for business. Doing work, leading, helping smaller clients get bigger. Allen's sleight of hand is the sleight of hand of great advertising. 

Taking a small amount of money, mixing it with an unusual idea, adding in humor, wit, humanity, empathy and love for the underdog and doing something that changes hearts and minds and in so doing, fills pocketbooks.

The industry is a lesser place today.

Unless we remember, and learn, from the likes of Allen Kay.

Not Net.

There was something in Adweek earlier this week that was actually reporting. Usually the trade press prints nothing but press-releases. But here, they printed something relatively contrary. (I think they call it the trade press because they trade their integrity for your ad buys.)

They wrote a story about a PR RFP from the Keurig Dr. Pepper company, demanding 360-day payment terms. In other words, you submit a bill on December 2, 2022 and getting paid around Thanksgiving, 2023.

I've been trained to write NET 30 on all my bills. And all my arrangements with the clients I work with are supposed to be on that basis. I get paid in 30 days.

Most often that stretches to 45 or 60 or 120.

And, me, the little guy can do very little about that. They're supposed to pay a vig of 1.5%/month once they're late. But I can't imagine having my lawyer trying to go after that money.

One, it would cost me more than they'd get me.
Two, it would piss off the client.
Three, they'd never pay the extra anyway. 

Something has happened in the world today. I think it might be worse now than it's ever been.

I think for a time, the American spirit was to root for the underdog. To take the people born on third who think they hit a triple down a peg. 

We used to cheer Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or It's a Wonderful Life. Or Gary Cooper in Meet John Doe or High Noon. Or Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock. Or William Powell in My Man Godfrey. We used to root against bullies. That's why there are so many Yankee haters in the world.

But today, generally speaking, we see to take the side of bullies. It explains so many people supporting doonot trump, wealth-transfer reverse robin-hood-republicanism (steal from the middle-class and give to the rich) and Koch-industry-backed planet-destroying initiatives.

When you root for bullies, you become a bully.

And bully-ism becomes the method a la mode.

If the inflation rate is eight-percent a year, taking a year to pay someone is taking one-out-of-every-twelve-dollars from them. That's eight percent.

Even giving your employers Net 60 allows them a 1.3-percent discount. You and I don't get to do that. Why should companies?

The power, in other words, is far from the little guy.

Net 360.

Is that how a human should treat another human?