Some Words on Words.

A long time ago in advertising years, more than four years ago, or 300 100-page decks ago, or 1,000 two-hour meetings that started at 6PM ago, my friend Rob Schwartz interviewed me on his "Disruptor Series podcast."

As writers will, we talked about writing. We talked about words. 

Rob came out with this bon mot, which I've heard him since then, repeat many times: "Clients buy words." Taglines win pitches. Commercials with funny titles get bought and made. Headlines often carry the day.

Or as Hamlet said to Polonius in Act 2, Scene 2 of Hamlet:

If you can't stomach listening to Rob, take it from Shakespeare.

When I got booted out from Schmogilvy at the height of my creative powers, my esteem among younger people and my value to clients, I decided to do something very simple and perhaps counter-intuitive. Schmogilvy was hard to "buy" from. I set out to make GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company easy to work with.

Joe Alexander, Cabell Harris, a couple of other people and I did a bunch of ads--conceived by Joe--to fight what was then the virulent spread of Coronavirus. We didn't do three or five as we might have in the past. Or even ten or fifteen. To accommodate the pressures of the Instagram era, we did about 50 or 100.

All this got me thinking.

It would make sense to offer this sort of thing to clients. So, to my three-page list of "buy off the rack" GeorgeCo. offerings, I added this:

Late last week I reached out to a friend and a luminary in the business for a cuppa. I wanted some advice from someone no longer running an agency. Mostly, I wanted a point of view on one of the most vexing issues a business faces: Am I charging too much? Am I charging too little? Either too much or too little is dangerous to your business.

Agencies--and agency freelancers--have so devalued their worth and their work that I felt I had to look outside the "creative" part of our industry. What's more, because I don't just "do" rectangles, like ads, commercials, web-pages and manifesti, I wanted to make sure the creatively-rendered strategic guidance and positioning I offer was earning me what it should.

Soon our conversation turned to, what else, words.

"What do you do?" she asked me. "What makes you different?"

I answered with a tagline I use for GeorgeCo: "Good writing is a business advantage."

"That's not good enough she said. You do more than that. When two people are talking and one knows you and one doesn't, how does the one who knows you recommend you to the other person?"

Just after this conversation, I got a call from out of the blue, from outside of London. 

The prospective client turned into a paying client. He's paying for a Nifty Fifty. I'm on a sharp and barbed hook for fifty headlines.

That led me to this conclusion.

Which is, for now, where I stake my claim.

  

A Pen-Based Blog Post.

I know I'll never work again directly for another ad agency or holding company, at least not for an extended period of time. Once agencies, including Ogilvy, looked for trouble-makers and malcontents. Those sorts of people are usually where creativity and creative environments come from. Not from collegial, collaborative "bridge builders."

George Bernard Shaw wrote in "Man and Superman," (not a Marvel movie) “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

But, unreasonable runs against the grain of the modern ad agency and our medieval backward-looking corporatist state. The putative tagline for most agencies today, or most creative enterprises, might just as well be "can't we all just get along?" Or, as an ex-client of mine once said to me, "fly low, fly slow and try not to crash."

All that said, if I were ever again to enter the agency world again, I'd never hire anyone who hadn't tried at one time or another to make it on their own. Trying to fly solo is a challenge that delivers incalculable payment to the one doing the flying. In the first place, you have to attune yourself to always be on the lookout for opportunity--no matter how wispy it might seem. And second, you have to always be working to differentiate yourself and what you do--and not just say it, show it.

A big part of working for me is walking. I turn over problems as I walk. I see jokes almost everywhere. Or hear snippets of life in the city that break the stucked-ness that sometimes plagues even the most-facile and unbound creative people. 

I think about the assignments I'm working on--and always walk with a notepad so I can write things down. Sometimes I work through an email I have to write to a client--one that has to find that precarious balance between being getting what you need from them and being a dick. Other times, I think about people I need to call to re-energize an account that's gone quiet. 

Most often, however, I think about me and GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company.

How can I get noticed by clients?

How do I differentiate myself from other freelancers and even other agencies?

How do I keep the business coming in and my day-rate in the relative stratosphere?

Of late, there's been an awful lot of yammering about people in our business about generative AI. I don't pay attention to those who pontificate about technology. Mostly because pontificators about technology are wrong about 107% of the time. Look outside. No self-driving cars. No cold-fusion monorails. No hyperloops. No flying cars. 

The people who rubbed my goat the wrong way were nominally the ad people who were rueing the not-too-distant-day when we'll all be replaced by algorithms.

Anyone who thinks they will be, should be.

Because you don't know the Square One basis of all advertising. Differentiation.

If AI does what you do you deserve to be replaced. 

Because you're doing, thinking, creating in a predictable, replicable, same-old way.

Walking just now I saw this sign.

"What the fuck are skillet-baked eggs," I asked myself. "What do I care what kind of pan my eggs are made in?"

Then I said, "That's like me saying, 'pen-based copywriter,' as my Unique Selling Proposition." That, frankly, handed me a laugh. That's not bad, I thought. And that kind of shit is everywhere. Walk through the supermarket, even a crappy C-Town and you'll see, "Steel-cut oats," "Grass-fed beef," "Sun-ripened raisins." And about one-thousand other demarcations that attempt to take the parity out of parity-hood.

Naturally, there's more to differentiation than just saying you're "skillet-baked." But if you're out there hustling for work--whether you're a freelancer, an agency or a client, you have to ask, "what makes me different and special? Why should anyone notice me? Why should anyone care?"

These questions are the sine qua non--the essential essentialness of life itself.

I'll be blunt.

I'll be an asshole.

That's another of my unique selling propositions.

There are about 93 million people who can do what you do and maybe a few dozen trillion machines. Someone will always be cheaper. Someone will always be faster. Someone will always be more obedient.

Why you?

Now, go take a hike. And don't come back until you have something.

New York Brushstrokes.

Small fragments of New York on the last pre-summer weekend in June.

On Saturday, we drove back to the city, having left early in the morning to go to our under-construction Connecticut beach cottage to check up on how things are going. 

Driving north from the city to Old Saybrook, where we slaughtered Pequots in the 1630s then tried (and acquitted)
witches in the 1660s, took us just 100 minutes. Driving back to the city took us more than twice as long.

The Hutch, or as they call it in Connecticut, the Merritt, was bumper-to-bumper for 40 miles. In New York, it loosened up a bit until we got to southern Westchester. There, I veered off the old highway and took the service roads that skirt Co-op City, a Soviet-style housing complex built in the mid-1960s after Robert Moses' Cross Bronx Expressway killed the southern half of the borough and displaced tens of thousands of working-class New Yorkers with the blights of drugs, crime, arson and despair. 

Co-op City was built on what we used to call a swamp. Where in my earliest bloom of youth there had been New York's answer to Disney Land, Freedom Land. It was an amusement park built on the swamp in the shape of the lower-48. It attracted huge crowds until New York's World's Fair opened in Corona, Queens, atop the desolate fields F. Scott called the Valley of Ashes, also a Robert Moses extravaganza. Then Freedom Land became a real estate Ponzi. Then housing for exiled old Jews who were "improved" out of their old neighborhoods.

I'm the last of the New Yorkers who knows those connections from the Hutch, named after Anne Hutchinson, 1591-1643, who was exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for her heretical religious beliefs in 1638, to the New England Thruway, using the service roads that run right by "Syringes R Us" and mini-storage for rat carcasses.

Hutchinson and her followers left English domains for lands that were under the jurisdiction of the Dutch, called at the time, New Netherland, which then as now was the only place in the new world you could get a decent bagel. 

"The Bronx is Burning." (Not Howard Cosell.)

"The Bronx is Burning." (Howard Cosell.)

Hutchinson and scores of her followers were killed in the Bronx during Kieft's War, a bloody conflict between Europeans and Siwanoy first peoples (whom my cub scout den was named after) that lasted between 1643 and 1645. Here's one eyewitness account of a single "skirmish."

"Infants were torn from their mother's breasts and hacked to pieces in the presence of their parents, and pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small boards, were cut, stuck, and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown."

What's even more interesting with regard to that account is that it sounds like the goings-ons in Yankee Stadium when the Red Sox are in town.

I downshifted my 1966 Simca 1500 onto the Bruckner, over a couple of draw bridges over the Hutchinson River and up to the Sheridan Expressway, which again in the grand style of Robert Moses lords itself high above the neighborhood it divided, remaking both sides in the process from working class to ghetto. We got off the Sheridan at Alexander Avenue, skirted the projects in a gentrifying south Bronx and took the free Willis Avenue bridge onto the FDR and into Manhattan.

Once I parked underneath our co-op, I collapsed into a sweat dream of Siwanoy revenge, until my wife woke me for Chinese food and then an evening of seeing Hamlet at the Public Theatre with rapping Rosencranz and Guildenstern in Central Park.

New York is New York is New York.

More so than ever, in mid-June, as the world continues and continues to collapse to its end.

Juneteenth Thoughts.

The Radical Reactionary Right as represented by horrible humans like pence and desantis are making a political issue about nine US Army forts that are having their names changed by order of the Biden administration.

The very idea that military facilities would be named after traitors to the United States in the first place is abhorrent. That they were named after virulent racists, grand marshalls of the kkk, and other white supremacist appurtenances only deepens the sin around the deed.

Around 1900, many cities, towns and states in the South began rewriting the history of the south. What was a traitorous rebelling against the country in support of the cause of white supremacy and black enslavement was rebranded. The insurrection became the "lost cause." Hatred of the other became an issue of States' Rights. The reflying of the confederate flag, and its incorporation in the state flags of the eleven traitorous states arose at the turn of last century for fear that Black people in the south were gaining too much political power. The commemoration of the south's heroes didn't happen for about four decades after the Civil War. It happened when the south felt powerful enough to rewrite the history of the war.

Fort Bragg, renamed Fort Liberty, was named after confederate general braxton bragg. ron desantis said, "It's an iconic name and iconic base, and we're not going to let political correctness run amok in North Carolina." Former vice president mike pence said, "We will end the political correctness in the hallways of the Pentagon, and North Carolina will once again be home to Fort Bragg."

Neither said who bragg was. As a general, Wikipedia says, "Bragg is generally considered among the worst generals of the Civil War. Most of the battles he engaged in ended in defeat. Bragg was extremely unpopular with both the officers and ordinary men under his command, who criticized him for numerous perceived faults, including poor battlefield strategy, a quick temper, and overzealous discipline." As a human, he owned 105 other humans. According to "Duke Today," "Between the Mexican War and the Civil War, Braxton Bragg lived the life of a genteel planter on a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana where slaves put in back-breaking labor in unspeakable conditions to bring molasses to market and earn Bragg a profit. He met any Northern criticism of slavery with harsh criticism. After Lincoln’s election in 1860, he was a proponent of Southern secession....He was a slaveholder who fought against the U.S. Army in order to preserve the South’s 'peculiar institution.'

In all, there are eight U.S. Army bases, all located in Southern states, named after Confederate generals: Fort Bragg (NC), Fort Benning (GA), Fort Gordon (GA), Fort Polk (LA), Fort Hood (TX), Fort A.P. Hill (VA), Fort Lee (VA), and Fort Rucker (AL). In addition, several National Guard facilities, such as Fort Pickett (VA) and Camp Beauregard (LA), bear the names of Confederate generals.

If you're interested at all if why people like trump, desantis and pence and their followers--no matter their reasons for being followers--sicken me, let me recommend four books, or five. 

1. Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. The 2021 Pulitzer-Prize winner. It's the true story of a duly-elected government in Wilmington, NC and the white supremacist-led coup which murdered the elected officials or drove them out of town. If it sounds like a more successful version of the January 6th insurrection, you get an A.

2. The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives by Naoíse Mac Sweeney. It brings a more-complete perspective to history than the Greco-Roman one so many of us--myself included--have been inculcated with. The West as heirs to the ancients paved the way for colonialism and white supremacy--and is yet another reason so many are so fearful of history as it is taught.

3. Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power by Jefferson Cowie. 2022's Pulitzer-winner and history and a book that explains how white supremacists believe that anything that impinges on their right to be white supremacists is government interference and must be resisted--completely and violently. Read with Mac Sweeney, above, you'll get a chilling understanding of the pathology of hate in America today.

4. Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street by Victor Luckerson. One story of the thousands that could be told of the hate and depredations perpetrated in "the land of the free and the home of the brave," against the unfree and the braver. 

Three and a half years ago, I urged my readers to read Neil Postman's 1985 book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death." Now more than ever, I urge you again to read it. Read it with our current conditions in America in mind. Read it again.

I don't know of any better way to show respect for Juneteenth and for humanity itself than to read. Reading is a revolutionary act--spreading the word, is even more incendiary. 

Postman compares Orwell's "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." It seems as of this moment in both the world and our industry, Huxley was the better prognosticator.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. 

What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. 

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. 

Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. 

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. 

Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. 

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. 

Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

Thanks, Dad.

For the entire time that my life and the life of my father over-lapped, 43 years, we had a fractious and fractured relationship. And that was on the good days.

It's not that we never got along. It's that we butted heads twice as often as we did anything else. We went more years scowling at each other than smiling at each other. And more years not talking than talking. I guess you could say we were both hard-headed. And stiff-necked.

By the time my elder daughter was born in 1987, he and I had somewhat patched things up. We had reached some sort of uneasy peace. But I don't think that's even close to being accurate. We still butted heads. If we were throwing types, we probably would have hurled the dishes at each other. Linguini, not spaghetti.

When John Le Carre's posthumous novel "Silverview" came out, it was entrusted by Le Carre to his son, Nick Cornwell, to edit. In the afterword, Cornwell wrote these words about his relationship with his father: "We made space for one another’s flaws and we had fun. You can’t ask for more."

I underscored those words then and above. I think about them in my own life. Could I reach such peace with my wife and my daughters? Were I still running a group in an agency, could I make space for the flaws of those who work for me? Or would I hold them to the same parsimonious standards I hold myself to? In other words, could I ever be a decent guy? Or will I always be an austere and rigid muthafucka?

This morning I was up early--5:15 AM--because I have a lot going on at GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. I am clearest-headed in what Sinatra called "the wee small hours of the morning." And that has nothing to do with frequent urination.

As I was posting my Monday blog, I realized I had not written a Father's Day blog. I had something funny planned for Friday--but no thoughts on growing up, growing old, and fatherhood and son-hood. 

In past years, I had quoted grey-eyed Athena from Homer's Odyssey, saying, "Few sons are the equals of their fathers. Most fall short, all too few surpass them.” That posited, I usually traipse into some fractured fatherly fairytale, and leave life’s story good and ambiguous.

But this morning somehow was different.

As I was writing, I interrupted myself and said aloud to the empty room when I was working, "Thanks, Dad."

Thanks, Dad, for waking me up early and telling me to work harder, lest I become a bum. 

Thanks, Dad, for introducing me to a hat salesman at Saks Fifth Avenue who used to be a copywriter but somewhere along the way gave up sweating blood and jumped the (career) tracks.

Thanks, Dad, for teaching me to read the Sunday Times' Book Review--the home of some of the world's best writing.

Thanks, Dad, for those baseball games on the broken asphalt with the sewer as first base, a manhole as second, and a dead tree as third, where you stacatto'd like a runaway jackhammer on a caffeine-high telling me to keep my eyes on the ball. 

Thanks, Dad, most of all for the most of all incalculable 'gift of quip.' Another drumbeat into my cranium of always being ready with a joke, a one-liner, a story or an aphorism whenever faced with something that seemed to beg for a comment, moreso if no comment were needed. 

Here's one example. 

I was 17 and my father took me to tour one of those small private colleges where professors still wore tweed and had patches at their elbows, all without discernible irony. We were shown the football field and stadium and the tour-guide said something about Coach So-and-So, who had led the Fighting Abcess' for 33-seasons and was so dedicated to the college and the team that he was actually buried in the endzone.

My father, of course, never met a quip he didn't like. "That must do a lot for the school spirit," he said.

I was angry and embarrassed when he said that 48-years ago, like my own daughters are angry and embarrassed about 94-percent of the clothes I wear, the things I do, and worst of all the things I say.

Someday, if the gods still preside as they did on Olympus, my daughters will learn. As, maybe, I am beginning to learn about my father.

Too late, of course. I'll be long gone and the world will be better for that.

But as the great boxer Joe Louis said about his own career, I say about my life and my father's.

"I did the best I could with what I had."

I did the best I could with what I had.