Some Concrete Thoughts on Interactive Advertising.

The entire world of marketing, on both the agency and the client sides, seems to have forgotten something.  Something fundamental. Something fundamental about speaking to people. Especially speaking to people on a regular basis.

The best writing or best communications are interactive. 

I don't mean they're online ads or digital or they force you to click them.

I mean that they take into consideration, learn from and react to input of viewers.

I'd bet dollars to donuts that when the blind poet Homer sang the Iliad or the Odyssey to people gathered in the agora or around a campfire, he changed the roles of heroes and villains depending where he was performing. If you heard Homer in Thrace he might be singing a different tune than Homer in Ithaka.

Dickens--the Harry Styles of his day--did roughly the same thing. Dickens' novels were written as "monthly part issues." In other words, a magazine like "Beggar's World," would contract for 20 installments from Dickens. And each month his readers would get another three or seven or five chapters of whatever he was writing.

When Dickens was serializing what became "David Copperfield," a minor character called Uriah Heap caught on with his readers. By the next part issue, Heap had a larger role. That's interactive. People respond so the work responds.

This sort of thing happens all the time in sports. The $17-million-a-year player starts stinking up the court and the coach puts in someone who had been sitting on the end of the pine. It wasn't the plan. But as the Yiddish say, "Mann tracht, un gott lacht." Man plans, god laughs.

If you've ever seen a good standup comedian perform you can feel how they interact with the energy of the audience. They might change their set according to the composition of that evening's crowd. I'd go so far as to say, for the best comedians the word "set" is anomalous. They probably have a framework along with some flexibility.

Pre-Covid I went to a talk at The New York Times building. It was about the digital future of the newspaper. I went for vocational reasons. In my judgment, the Times has done a better job than any ad agency in the world figuring out how to produce meaningful, sharable and sticky work in the internet era.

One of the things they spoke about is that if an op-ed article isn't getting clicks, a writer will change its headline to try to goose its popularity. 

I wondered, why can't we in advertising do that?

I watch thirty minutes of TV five days a week. And I see the same dumb commercials over and again for a long period of time. Even if I started out liking the spot and the brand, after forced exposure of ten to twelve times, I'd stab the CMO to death with a knitting needle if I saw him. 

On every shoot I've ever been on, we shot ten or fourteen alternate endings. The one you edit into the "final" wasn't the only funny one. Why not rotate a set of four or five spots and un-boring-i-fy your GRPs by keeping things fresh. The benefit of freshness must be greater than the additional cost of talent, routing, and finishing.

Finally, turning around to me.

As all things eventually should.

I run about four ads a week. And thanks to the technology at LinkedIn and Twitter, I know how my ads are doing. 

Of course, this isn't scientific. I know I have no control in place. And I don't have a squadron of data specialists and anayticizers to tell me that my green ads perform better than my pink ads and when I post before eight in the morning I get more clicks than when I post after ten.

Some days I see this:

On better days, I see this:

Some days I'll even see something like this:

Some days, more. The point in all this is simple. (Beyond the thrill of just getting clicks.) Somehow agencies and marketers have to figure out a way to keep doing things until those things "catch on." I'm not stupid enough to assert that you can regularly produce work that people love and that makes them smile. 

But if you're not too precious about it, if you find a way to un-bureaucraticize your agency or your marketing organization, you can keep making work until you find some things that are working. 

And if something isn't working, you can replace it with something that might work better. I had a boss once who was a recovering alcoholic. In his office he had a sign: "I try all things, I improve what I can." That ain't a bad philosophy here.

Of course, none of this is science. But if you ever watched someone die from a prolonged illness, you'd realize that not even science is a science.

Most things are not subject to the "one true way." They're the result of trial and error. Trial and error is basically how the world works. Ask Charles Darwin if you don't believe me.

But as an industry, we’d rather than beat viewers into submission. We should try more love and laughter.

Cry January.

It seems like nearly every freelancer in New York, and half of those in LA and SF are nervous about 2023.

I finished 2022 with a bit of momentum and had one fairly nice-sized job booked that will start when I return to New York and/or Connecticut in mid-January. 

But still. 

I'm not sure it ever gets easy dealing with the unknown. Unknown as in it's unknown where my revenue is coming from.

Because even as I have had my GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company shingle out for three years now, you never know. I have only three retained accounts and while they cover my former Ogilvy salary, they don't cover the work we are doing to unramshackle our ramshackle beach cottage on the Gingham Coast. Including Connecticut's most expensive kitchen, about which the less-said, the better.

The worries about business are not inconsiderable. With giant holding companies chasing after the banner ads for local burrito stands, it sometimes feels like the little guy is pushing water uphill.

However, I have at least ten advantages over nearly every giant agency out there. 

To use a sports metaphor that's like knowing you've got four solid pitches and pretty good control. They'll be days when your curveball isn't and your fastball's slow, but if your pitches are solid you'll wind up winning at least as much as you lose.

Here are GeorgeCo's thirteen lucky advertisable advantages. Of course, all these aren't worth a hill of beans if the work sucks. But anyway...

1. Businesses get to work with the founder. The lack of founderness often means a company has replaced energy and gusto with bureaucracy and angst.

2. I don't tell; I show. Every day, clients can see how I think, how I write--between my 80,000 readers-a-week blog and my well-viewed ads. Clients daily can see my proof. What I do. If they like it, they call me. 

3. I have fans. I've gotten referrals from some of the biggest names in the business. And from clients. Companies buy agencies a lot like you'd buy a contractor. From referrals.

4. I do it myself. I named GeorgeCo. GeorgeCo. because after almost 40 years in the business I finally realized my uniqueness. Clients come to me and get me, not an ersatz George.

5. I over-deliver. That's not exactly right. I believe the only way to deliver is by over-delivering. Clients like when the old notion of a Baker's Dozen applies to the work you do for them.

6. No layers. Clients and I work things out together. We fight, partner, nibble, improve, perseverate and stubbornize. We tear things up and start over again. It works.

7. Research. When I was a Masters' student in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, I was widely regarded as the program's best researcher. I work to find things out that others miss.

8. Laughter. I'm funny and I like to laugh. Most clients do too. I try not to forget that. And if you don't like to laugh, GeorgeCo., is probably the wrong agency for you.

9. I have no overhead. I don't practice borderless creativity with 1,976,562 offices in 1,837,640 cities. My clients' business isn't subsidizing a network. Whatever clients pay me goes to the work I do for them. Life is fairer that way.

10. I don't waste time on fake ads. Or fake awards or fake wins. I have enough to do thinking about the work I do.

11. I hate jargon. I've dedicated my life to two things. 1) writing in plain English, and 2) empathy with my readers.

12. I'm upside down. I have no corporate agenda but to turn things upside down and look at things differently. Not for the sake of being different, but for the sake of waking complacent viewers up. GeorgeCo., LLC, is living-proof that a different perspective is worth 85-points of IQ.

13. I've been poor. In my first job, I made $11,700, had no help from home (or no home, period) and had to make my way in a tough and dangerous New York City. Alone. I worked hard not to be poor--maybe harder than anyone--and I'm not stopping now.

Critical Race Reading.

If you read a lot and you're American, you're bound to read a lot about race. I'd go so far as to say that the history of America (and maybe the world) is the history of conflict between the races. Which, if you haven't noticed, doesn't seem to be getting any less charged.

I've made a bit of an effort, especially on a day when we honor Dr. Martin Luther King, to bring forth some books I've read in the past 12 months that had race as a central theme. I'm not going to review these here. 

However, I can recommend each of the books I've pictured below.

Why racists hate the Federal government.
A 200-year look.

How we destroyed aboriginal America.
It wasn't just diseased blankets.

A homecoming and a reflection.

And the National Book Award winner.

A nine-year-old Salvadoran and his journey to America.

When MLK led the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Which Alabama claimed was illegal.

A Slave ship found in the mud after almost 200 years.

And what happened to those on it and their descendants.

The great Langston Hughes.

And his still-trenchant writing on race and America.

Also, funny.

AI vs. Poetry.

Once again, the Ad Industry (more a pop-gun than an industry, but whatevs) and seemingly the rest of the world is lusting after the new in lieu of appreciating the better.

I'm talking about the subject of about 92.4-percent of everything I've seen in social media for the past month--not counting asinine platitudes about you being you in 2023.

I'm talking about Chat GPT-3 and the even more holy and magnificent and powerful Chat GPT-4. 

Reminder: There's nothing new under the sun. And the Wall Street Journal--The Daily Diary of Eating the Poor™--has just run this 500-word article:

Remember how 5G was going to change everything--and the $10B of commercials that assaulted you with visions of sugarplums in the 5G future?

Before I go on, let me repeat myself. Repeating myself is a privilege of age, and I deserve it.

We are lauding the new rather than appreciating what we have.

I'm talking about AI versus the human brain. Supercomputing versus the capabilities of your very own grey matter. That spongy stuff you've spent a lifetime ignoring and/or abusing that is orders of magnitude more capable than the most powerful computers ever built.

Yes, your brain.

Your sad, neglected, underutilized, underpaid, underfed brain.

A couple decades ago when I worked on IBM--the International House of Pancakes and Business Machines--their engineers announced Project Eliza. That was an effort to build a computer as powerful as a lizard's brain. Forget about a human brain. A lizard's brain. They're not there yet.

Your brain. 

You can climb up on a ten-meter diving platform, do three twists and two somersaults, splash into a pool, descend ten feet through the water, resurface and wave at the judges and smile. 

You know what your brain never does in all that time? It never says "buffering." Your eyes never lose focus. Your body is never in freefall. You keep your equipoise as you're plummeting at 16-feet-per-second-per-second. 

That's your fukcing brain at work.

You can take small dabs of ochre and cobalt and paint the Sistine Chapel. 

You can even remember 14 different passwords so you can log in and play Angry Birds. Your spouse can remember the socks you left in the living room in 1994--and company was coming over!

We marvel at the trillions of calculations per nanoseconds that AI can perform. We ignore the many trillions of calculations per nanoseconds our brains are performing. Even if they're wasting it on tripe like this.

Somehow a couplet written by a human brain comes to my all-too-human brain right now. From Robert Frost's great poem "The Mending Wall."

I'll see that and try to raise Frost one. For the purpose of ending this thing. What are we ignoring and keeping out while grasping for the unnecessary or over-hyping something deserving of under-hyping.

Before I sing a hymn to a machine I'd ask to know

What I was ignoring above my shoulders,

That ain't poetry. 

But it's good enough for me.

 

Inhuman Resources.

When I was a boy, there was little I enjoyed more than a really good apple. 

Though I've always been partial to a nice crisp Macoun, the truth is I'm not a snob about these things. Many people look down on Red Delicious. They're like the 'flyover' states of apples. But I think their name suits them. They're red. And delicious. 

They might not have the taste complexity of a Jonah Gold, a hearty Winesap, a tart Granny Smith or even a Macintosh, but they're sweet and juicy and yes, delicious. It's stupid to get all precious about things like apples. Just enjoy them as they fall.

That said, one day I was buying apples and saw in those apples the death of all civilization.

To each apple I bought there was affixed a small white sticker with some inscrutable price-or-type-related runes. It struck me at that moment that any society so blithe in disfiguring nature, so complicit in sullying the perfection of an apple, is really beyond redemption.

For almost 50 years, I've kept this sentiment to myself. I've told no one about it, not even my wife, until today. People already have a hard time with my idiosyncracies and judgments without knowing how hardboiled they are. When you're as stiff-necked as I am it's better to keep certain aspects of your stiff-neckedness to yourself. Otherwise you could find yourself in a locked ward someplace in the country. Cue chirping birds.

Until early this morning, I've always regarded stickers on apples as the nadir of humanity. 

Until early this morning.

Then, in short order, I saw three things online that lowered my tolerance and evoked a damp, drizzly November in my soul. These three things were all from different sources, but to my eyes, all related.

The first was an ad for the University of Pennsylvania who announced that they now have an HR-academy. I don't really understand this. Good HR should revolve around treating people with kindness, respect and honesty. Visit people at their desk when you need to see them; don't have them come to you. Always send out a note announcing new hires the day they're hired--not later. Praise people for jobs well done, both with words and with money. In other words, be Human. It's in your name, after all. 

Instead, I saw this:

The second came from an agency I won't name and that I've never heard of. Here's a list they have on their site of their "perks." Perks are supposed to be extras. To me this list seems list the barest minimum of decency--including one-whopping-meetingless hour a day. 

Seriously, if you have to remark on giving employees a one-hour mental health break every day, it's like the engineers managing a nuclear power plant saying that between 11AM and 12PM every day they'll release no strontium-90.

Finally, I heard from a friend who, after ten years of working for 30-hours-a-week at Disney was recently let go via Zoom. (They kept him working as a freelance part-timer so they didn't have to give him either benefits or severance when they fired him.) The background on the Zoom call was stolen by the Disney person from the old Warner Brothers' cartoons. It said, "That's all folks!"

Meanwhile, Disney's ousted CEO Bob Chapek wafts to Valhalla on a golden gossamer parachute.

All of a sudden, putting stickers on apples seems positively quaint.

Atelic on the Mountain.

I learned two new words the other day that I've been spending a lot of hours thinking about, because woven within the meaning of these words are, to my eyes, important concepts.

The first word is Telic. It means when you do something and expect an outcome. When you are acting in a telic manner, you are moving toward a goal.

The companion word I learned is the opposite of telic: Atelic. It when you're doing something you can't readily complete because it's ongoing.

Here are a couple ways to think about Telic and Atelic.

Teaching your child the alphabet is a telic task. Being a good parent is Atelic. Getting a job in advertising is a telic task. Having a career in advertising is atelic.

When you look at life through a telic lens--as I believe most people do--there's a lot of failure that comes with the territory. Using one of the examples above. I began looking for a job in advertising during a Reagan recession. I looked at 40 agencies and was turned down before I got a job at the 41st I visited.

That means I failed 40 times before I succeeded. My guess is many people roughly my age had a similar experience.

However, when you look at life atelically, the day-to-day measure of success changes a bit. Because you're building over the long haul--a career that might last 40 years or longer.

Talking about telic and atelic is not just me being weird.

The distance between the two modi operandi I think have a large impact on our business, both the work we do for clients, how we treat clients and how holding companies judge success.

Right now I'm at a resort in Costa Rica.

It's not cheap.

Yet the first thing that happened when we arrived was they sent someone to "upgrade" us. To get another $70/day out of us for "preferred access," to special pools, better booze, and ostensibly an upgraded room.

That's pretty damn telic.

Let's get all the money we can from these suckers now. Let's not worry that we might be pissing them off. Let's not think about how offering someone a level called preferred makes them feel like shit because what they spent a lot of money on is "unpreferred."

I wondered what my clients at GeorgeCo, LLC, a Delaware Company would say if we signed a scope and then I said, "For $5,000 more, you'll get GeorgePreferred™ which includes free spell-check, George's complete Ivy-League vocabulary and three joke-free hours of Zooming."

Thinking atelically is thinking about the long-term ramifications of every action you take. How will what I do today strengthen the relationship tomorrow?

When I worked in an agency, I used to bellow, "there's a difference between doing the assignment and doing the job." 99.999-percent of agencies do the assignment. 

In fact, in today's dying holding-company schema, 99.999-percent of agencies will punish people for over-delivering. It cuts into margins, you'll be told. That's why 99.999-percent of agencies have more people managing work than doing work. So you do the telic and don't hemorrhage margin on the atelic.

From a "human resources" pov, I think agencies also confine their thinking to the telic. How is that person doing their job today. As opposed to how can they grow? How can we add value to their "portfolio," so they add value to ours?

As humans and as members of various social organizations like an ad agency we care too much about the telic and transactional and not enough about long-term, sustainable and sustaining growth. 

That's one reason at WPP, for instance, fewer than 2-percent of employees are over 60--as against 25-percent in the population at large. They care only about the here and now. Not long-term value. The telic. Not the atelic.

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company loves the telic. I like getting things done for my client. And I like cashing their checks. 

But I even more love the atelic. Because the only thing better than business is repeat business. Repeat repeat repeat business.

And that takes atelic behavior.

What's Last is First.

I'm reading a book right now that ain't exactly a beach read. In fact, though I'm at the beach for another week, it's as challenging a book as I've ever read. It's not that it's abstruse, it's that it deals with big complicated life issues and you can't plow through it like you're reading a torn-bodice page-turner.

A lot of people when they praise a book say, "I couldn't put it down." My belief is opposite. When a book really makes you think, you have to put it down to consider what you've just read. For better or worse, books that give me pause are the kind I prefer. I'm not sure if there's any causality involved, but I am getting more out of my brain at the age of 65 than I did at 15 or 25 or 35. I think that's because I read things that upset me into questioning what I know.

 

Right now, I'm about 35-percent through "Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way," by Kieran Setiya, the head of the philosophy department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You can read The New York Times' review of the short (240-pages) book here.

Before I even got through the Preface, Setiya had drawn me in because he began by writing about the difference between theory and living in the real world. Setiya was talking specifically about the academic discipline of Philosophy but I was quickly able to make the leap to advertising as it is constituted today.

Setiya writes, "As a teenager, I loved the abstract theories of metaphysicians, plumbing the basic structure of mind and world. Philosophy was, for me, an escape from ordinary life.... 

"But philosophy is, and can be, more than that. To study the discipline is to become an artisan of arguments...Yet I’ve come to want a philosophy that can speak more intimately to life."

Satiya goes on to tell a story about an evaluation he got from a professor having taken his qualifying graduate exams. He did well, of course, but his examiner remarked that Satiya's ideas, had not been “tested in the crucible of direct moral experience.”

The crucible of direct moral experience hit me as being like the exact place advertising must make an impact if it's going to work. 

Most academic practitioners, dilettantes and award-aficionados don't base their work on real life. They can ratiocinate their way into telling you why something is brilliant. They can judge the judges and tailor work directly to them. They can make the perfect Petri-dish communication. It can be beautifully crafted with all the precision of a sensitive watch that breaks the minute you wind it.

But that's not the crucible in which advertising must work in. Philosophy and advertising are meant to be tools that work in the real world. One helps you handle the everyday horrors of life. The other helps you sell stuff.

I fell out with sports about three decades ago. And I never got interested at all in "Fantasy Sports," where people draft teams and play games based on things that never happen.

It seems to me that the prefix "Fantasy" can be applied to many spheres today and without exaggeration. They're things that could happen under circumstances and events you happen to set up and agree with. 

I have a more guttural view of life.

I worry about how advertising will affect the living. Not decks and personas.

When I was an ECD at R\GA more than a decade ago, a planner started criticizing some scripts I had written for a retirement company saying that they didn't make her want to "lean in." (Sheryl Sandburg's book was all the unread rage at the time.) I got up, I'll admit on my elevated equine and said something very close to this:

"I don't know what life is like in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but when I get home from work, I sit in my favorite chair and turn on a ball game. And I lean back. 

"I'm tired," I said, "exhausted, beat. The last thing in the world I want to do is lean in."

That's how I see what's happened in advertising. It's theoretical now. It's academic. It's pundit-ed. Impaneled and therefore enfeebled. We no longer believe it has to be “tested in the crucible of direct moral experience.”

It's no longer created to (in Carl Ally's phrase) "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." It's created to give its creators a sense of their own importance. 

That should be about the absolute last criterion for judging work. 

But I'm afraid it's first.

A Journey through Time.

As Heraclitus said 'You can't step into the same river twice," neither can you step into the same city twice. As someone who's lived in New York virtually the entirety of my too many years, I often feel like a walk through the city is a walk through four cities or five or seven.

There's the city of my young boyhood, where until I hit the ripe old age of ten or eleven I was almost always in the tow of my old man rushing someplace or my mother scowling at people walking in her direction. This was a city of giant checker cabs and elevators run by elevator operators. Where the girders of the subway platforms supported penny gum machines where you could get two Chiclets in a little paper carton or a small stripped bag of warm peanuts for a nickel. This was a city of dark smoke, filthy and black with soot from the leaded gasoline of a billion cars that befouled the skies and sullied the granite and left your eyes feeling like you'd just swum in a too-chlorinated pool.

Then there was the city of my teenage years. A noisy bebop cacoc of car horns, boomboxes and switchblades snapping open. The city that ran at 78 when the rest of America was running still at 33, and at any speed seemed always in danger of jumping off the rails and careening into a crowd of pedestrians as Kitty Genovese screamed in the background. This was the city of bankruptcy and riots and the burnt-out Bronx, where a cuppa coffee cost 32-cents at Chock Full o' Nuts and actual PhD.'s worked in bookstores--not to help you find things but simply to make you feel dumb for not having read that. This was a pre-chain store city, with social security widows living in classic-6s on the Upper West Side and waiting for bruised fruit Tuesdays at Fairway, where an assaulted and battered cantaloupe could be had for 19-cents, supplementing their too-small pensions.

There there was the city I adulted into when I began my advertising career in the early 1980s, making $225/week--$11,700 annually and having a cheese sandwich and an apple for lunch because everything cost too much but there was no place else in the world to live. In those days, when I was poor, the ad industry was rich. The pre-holding company days, when Wells Rich Green was on W. 57th Street between 5th and 6th and Leber Katz was on Fifth Avenue at 60th Street in the GM building. This was a city of tall women in short skirts and an even taller boy trying to make his way in the shiny-shoed mess of a maelstrom, working hard to get a job and sell a spot and get a job and sell a spot.

Today is the last city I think I will see. Where I am sciatica limping and hip-replacement-needing, where every storefront used to house another kind of store that meant more to me than the ones that are there now do. 

It's just after Christmas as I write this, and my wife and I are walking through the misty tourist-filled morass, the stench of pot wafting from a million fathers, the high-end holiday glitz of European fashion merging neatly with identical Chinese knock-offs sold by hollow-cheeked Nigerians from folding card tables on Fifth Avenue, transporting their Prada/schmata in giant black Hefty garbage bags, the rat-resistant kind. She's hieing me to Nordstrom's, my wife is, their music 200 decibels of clamor, for a French plastic handbag named after a French horse track--one for her and one for each daughter, setting me back what would have been four cities ago a month's paycheck.

"There used to be Colosseum Books there," I'd say. "And Doubleday's on Fifth, and Rizolli's and Scribner's and Brentano's and Madison Avenue Books, and Books and Company." "There's still a store down here," she parried. "Argosy," I answered. "Used books. And completely unorganized. A great store when a rainstorm and a lunch hour collide."

We stopped at one of the old Greek diners run now by a crew of husky Puerto Ricans whose hands move like wild birds as they bring you your order before you even decide what you want. Cash only and $49.90 for her omelette and my over-easy. "What did you think it would cost," she jabbed me like Joe Louis. "Four bucks," I said. "Not since Louis fought Braddock," she roundhoused.

She left me alone after that. In the decades I prefer and often still live in. We took a cab home--$18 for the mile--and sat staring out opposite windows. Thinking thirty years apart.

 

Spinning, Spinning, Spinning.

This could be my age talking--because I'm old. What's more, I have an old-way of thinking about things. A very non-modern age way of thinking about things.

I started noticing something in advertising about thirty years ago. More and more clients thought they could get something for nothing.

They thought through the magic of interactive or the magic of hyper-targeting or the magic of a click-now button that could get people to interact with their brands without spending much money. They didn't need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a tv spot, or tens of thousands buying a page in a magazine, for pennies on the dollar, they could have an effective ad. 

Magic.

For about thirty years I've been calling such thinking "digital alchemy." The idea that you could turn base-metal into gold. That you could run a successful company without spending considerable money attracting customers. That there was a way to do this at a low cost.

As a society, we seem to believe in alchemy. A new alchemical motivator seems to arise every couple of years. With data, you can reach people for cheap. With Chat GPT, you can make ads for nothing. I'm sure before 2023 is over, there will be some new miracle that will change everything. 

Something-for-nothing-ism seems to have taken over much of our industry, and yes, unfortunately, much of the world. 

So many businesses under-invest in marketing, in customer service, in virtually every aspect of their business. For a time, somehow, they get away with it.

Like Elon Musk's Tesla. Like Southwest Airlines.

I used to have fights with my wife who never minded leaving for a 10AM flight at 9AM. 

"You can't live your life," I used to holler, "as if every light is going to turn green the moment you pull up to it."

I holler similar advice to brands.

But nonetheless, that seems to be what so many people and businesses do. When the national rail strike was threatening, it came out that the giant railroads, despite making record profits, had cut their staffing to the bone. 

[The big national railroads employ something they call "precision scheduled railroading" or "PSR." The 115,000 rail workers in this country get zero sick days. Yet last year, the large freight railroads tallied net profits of $27 billion, double their profits just nine years ago.]

PSR denied any of their workers even one day of sick-time. They punished you for being sick because one sickness--now that they were staffed so lean, threw a monkey-wrench into their entire operations. 

Imagine "just-in-time"-procurement but applied to human beings. In an effort to squeeze every bit of profit from everything they do, companies have essentially eliminated all fat. Most people recognize that living creatures--even highly fit ones--need a little fat to live. 

You can call, I think this sort of leanness Economic Anorexia. And it's every bit as fatal as dietary anorexia.

An airline like Southwest ends up canceling a trillion flights, losing ten trillion pieces of luggage and stranding trillions and trillions of customers--all because when their front line couldn't make it to work, there was no backup. I'd guess the same happens when a plane needs repair or a tire needs replacement. There are no backups.

That's somewhat what happened to America's supply chain during Covid. Using my anorexia metaphor again, as an anorexic can't afford to miss one meal, America's supply chain couldn't recover from one hiccup. All at once, things that used to work stopped working. Next thing we know our entire continent is acting incontinent.

Most businesses today as well as the federal, state and local governments seem to work this way. I'm sure someone at the Passport office or the Department of Motor Vehicles has an econometric model that shows how they can run leaner and leaner with greater efficiency and lower cost. I'm sure Southwest airline has someone who convinced senior management of the efficacy of this kind of thinking.

Magical thinking.

Agencies have done so too. Today agencies are staffed so leanly they're often robbing staffing from one account to work on another account to work on another account to work on another account.

Institutional knowledge is gone. Experience is gone. Robbing Peter to pay Pauline is our modus operandi.

When you go to the circus, a juggling act or a really good plate-spinner is almost always fun to watch. There's nothing intellectual about it. But keeping everything going goes against logic. The impending peril is what makes these acts so popular.

But in real life, when companies, jobs, our well-being, our advertising or our very livings are run in the same manner, it's no longer fun to watch.

Because inevitably something falls.

And something breaks.

A Reflection on Tannenbaum.

Like a lot of Jews born during the "Golden Age of America," my parents, who were first-generation Jews growing up in households where English was scarcely spoken, hardly talked to "the kids" about where they came from or what they went through to become Americans.

They were hellbent on becoming Americans. On looking forward to creating lives and identities in the "greatest country on earth." They didn't dwell on their shtetl past, their impoverishment, American anti-semitism or even the Holocaust. 

Like Willy Loman, they set out to succeed with a smile and a shoeshine. Not much more.

And because, like me, my parents were each essentially private people, they never imparted any sense of family or sense of their past. I know a little about my father's two brothers, Uncle Oscar and Uncle Sid, but nothing at all about my mother's four siblings. I met only one of my four grandparents--and she, my father's mother, Ida, died when I was just eight.

In fact, I'm not entirely sure what my last name is. 

My mother took Freedman. But some of her siblings spelled it Friedman. And my father's Tannenbaum was also rendered variously Tanenbaum or even, royally, Tenenbaum. The one heirloom I have from my father is a book that I guessed was given to him on his Bar Mitzvah in 1941. "American History in 100 Pictures." That book is signed in his best handwriting, "Stanley Irwin Tanenbaum." Yet to me, he was always Stanley Irving Tannenbaum. Go figure.

Once in a while, I come across a Tannenbaum in my travels or in my reading. Even the Nazis were liberal enough to co-opt the name. Operation Tannenbaum was their planned takeover of Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

I also ran into Tannenbaum about three years ago when I went to an exhibit on the Holocaust, "Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away." at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan. My wife ran to the lady's room and I sat waiting on a bench and this came on a monitor. I couldn't breathe for an hour.

 

Last night, I read an obituary in The New York Times of a photographer I had never heard of, called Tony Vaccaro. If there are any copywriters reading this, you have to hand it to the Times. They know how to write a headline and a subhead.

I began reading the piece and by the time I was halfway through I had again lost my breath. 

Mr. Vaccaro’s 1945 photograph“White Death: Photo Requiem for a Dead Soldier, Private Henry I. Tannenbaum” shows the remains of a soldier whose body was partly covered by snowfall.Credit...Tony Vaccaro, via Monroe Gallery

Of course, there's nothing profound in either of these instances. There are a lot of us Tannenbaums, a lot of wandering Jews in the world. As Samuel Goldwyn might have said, "In New York, every Tom, Dick and Harry is named Tannenbaum."

But still, as someone whose past is all question marks, it makes me think. It also, frankly, makes me sad. 

For all Jews have been through in our 6000-year-history--not to mention my mother's cooking--and the fact that worldwide, only two people out of 1,000 are Jewish, somehow Jews are no longer considered a minority or even considered in the math used to calculate 'diverse' representation.

Ok. I get it. Of the 900 Nobel Prizes ever awarded, Jews have won 20-percent of those. And 24-percent of the total prizes in science and medicine. Among American winners in those fields, Jews take home 37-percent of the awards. They display them on their kitchen tables, right next to their abridged copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and their handbooks on world domination.

That last bit might be considered stiff-necked and inflammatory. You get that way when you're privileged.