DOA.

I read somewhere, I believe in the New Yorker, some years ago, about a famously-aggrieved writer, who like many writers--or creative people in general, held a grudge against the world.

That's not an unusual feeling among certain people--like New Yorkers, for instance. Maybe we feel more so more seems more unfair to us. Add to that sense of injustice a heaping helping of paranoia and there, I've just described your creative department, or at least 93% of the creatives you've ever met.

This particular writer had an epigram that I remember, though I don't remember his name. "All I want is a personalized apology  from everyone I've ever met."

That's funny.

As well as painful.

As well as seminal.

Years and years ago when my best friend Fred was alive, we talked a lot and on a pretty deep level. Before Fred died almost two years ago, we had known each other through thick and thin for more than half-a-century. We had gotten a lot of normal, silly conversations, "ja seeda game lass night?" and "wowshes reallihot," out of our systems. 

I'm not for a minute saying we were on the order of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. But we were serious talkers and thinkers with enough mutual regard for each other that we were honest about our feelings, even ones we knew would be refractory. You know, the ones most people don't say out loud.

Fred was African-American and I'm Jewish and we grew up during a time of racial upheaval in Amerika when the old order was beginning to crumble. We lived through a lot together and we talked about it with more candor and openness than most people can muster when talking about things as loaded and fraught as race and racism.

One day Fred and I were talking about Diversity Equity and Inclusion and Fred came out with something that I've been turning over in my mind since he said it--a good decade now.

"I didn't grow up rich. I was a lot poorer than most of the kids in school." (We had each been sentenced to an elite private school in the leafy suburbs of New York. About one-third of our classmates were name 'Pendergast.') Fred continued, "But we had all the things we wanted and I knew my parents loved me and cared for me and they encouraged me."

"Yeah," I said, thinking of my own parents. My father we was mostly drunk and my mother who was a borderline personality and would beat me when she was angry, which was always, and one time she came at me with a knife. "Yeah, from the outside looking in, I had the privileged background," I went on. "But," I joked, "I never even knew food could be served hot until I got to college." My mother "served" frozen TV dinners in their frozen state. It does what it says on the tin.

The tragedy, to my eyes, of so much of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is that it paints with such a broad and undistinguishing brush. 

All people of this sort are privileged.
All people of this sort are less-privileged. 

As if we were rocks.
And that one there is igneous, and therefore has these characteristics.
And that one is metamorphic, and therefore has these.

People aren't rocks. They can't be sorted like they belong in a periodic table or a spreadsheet.

I admit, I am not educated in the disciplines, codes and strictures of DEI, so there's a good chance I'm wrong. But it seems to sort and classify people with the same kind of blanket generalizations as its predecessors. It seems as loaded with agenda as anything that's gone before it and seems to be continuing the propagation of brusque judgmentalism with the same rigor of what it's supposed to have replaced.

Most of the people I know--whether I know them well or merely ephemerally--have spent some time at the college of hard knocks. Everyone carries a burden. 

I know, I've said it myself, the line Molly Ivins wrote about George W. Bush, that "he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple."

That statement might be true of a lot of people. But it too might be bullshit.

Everyone has their demons.
Society has its demons.
Bureaucracy, infrastructure, hr departments and tradition have their demons. 
Demons will exist and go on existing as long as humans, their machines and the rest of our detritus exists.

If you can bring yourself to read a serious history of the world, like Simon Sebag Montefiore's "The World: A Family History of Humanity," you'll quickly realize that most people in the world have been folded, spindled, and mutilated, mutilated, mutilated. 

Hundreds of miles of city walls were built in countless cities literally with the skeletons of the conquered. At one time nearly every race and every culture and every tribe has been decimated, burned, raped, beheaded, cannibalized, inquisitionized, stolen, sold into slavery and worse. It's all there and in the past, the not so distant past it's happened to everyone.

We're all carrying burdens. Every single one of us.

Or as The Colonel said in Capra's "Meet John Doe," written by Robert Riskin, "I know the world's been shaved by a drunken barber." And just about everyone you meet, no matter what the occasion and what the circumstance has a billion little bleeding cuts to prove it.

Yes, rules and legislation are needed to help offset cruelties of all sorts. 

But more, kindness and seeing people as individuals is needed. 

Don't kill 30 million people because you deem them, as Stalin did, Kulaks. Don't assume people are ok or not because they "look" a certain way.

And so it goes.

Try seeing people as people, not archetypes or stereotypes.

And so it should go.

A Real Lion.

If you're a certain age or younger, you probably grew up with Leo Lionni, even if you don't recognize his name. Outside of Dr. Seuss, or Jack Ezra Keats, or maybe Beatrix Potter, I can't think of another creator of kids' books who's done more for the art form.

Friday's Wall Street Journal with its great book section had a review of a new biography of Lionni called "Leo Lionni: Storyteller, Artist, Designer." You can buy the book here.

The Lionni book that was biggest in my household when I was helping to raise two aggressively brilliant daughters was "little blue and little yellow". It had the mature childishness that equates to wisdom. My daughters each loved the book. And if either of them ever slowed down long enough to be questioned, I'd bet they could recite the book today virtually from memory.

This isn't a blog post about children's literature, however. Or even design. Or even my daughters, whom I love above life itself. It's about the power of creativity to get you out of trouble and transform bleakness into triumph.

The review itself was written by Meghan Cox Gurdon who's written a book our world might pay more attention to. It's called "The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction.” Maybe it's enough just to consider the title. 

Conquering distraction. 

What was I saying?

When I was back at Ogilvy, Maya Goldberg, a planner and dear friend organized something for the IBM team called "Story-time with George." 

George. As in, me.

Story-time started at 8AM. That weeded out the lightweights and phone-checkers and half-listeners. During story-time, I'd read aloud. "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn," by Thomas Wolfe. And play Marion Hutton's rendition of the great melody, "Brooklyn Love Song," with one of my favorite lyrics in all of songdom: 

"You can watch da barges

Tow da garbage

Out to da sea..."

Or "The Cremation of Sam McGee," by Robert W. Service. 

I suspect productivity and job satisfaction was unsurpassed on those days.

In any event, I'm going to paste a long portion of Gurdon's review on the Lionni book here. She does a better job than I can do.

By the 1930s, he was in Italy pursuing the life of an avant-garde painter; by the 1940s he had moved to Philadelphia to work as an ad man; from 1948 to 1960 he was Fortune magazine’s art director (while designing for clients on the side). And then, in 1959, came what he called the “little miracle.”

Lionni was on a commuter train headed out of New York with his grandchildren, Annie and Pippo, and needed to keep them entertained. Casting about, he seized on a colorful page in a copy of Life magazine. “Wait, I’ll tell you a story,” he said. Writes Mr. Marcus: “The simple act of tearing the page from the magazine and ripping it into monochrome bits and pieces worked like magic to rivet the twosome’s attention.”

On the spot, Lionni concocted a tale of two disc-shaped friends, whose colors combine to make green when they hug. The story was such a hit with the grandchildren (and others on the train, apparently) that he turned it into what would become his first children’s book, “Little Blue and Little Yellow.”

In Mr. Marcus’s essay, he presents Annie Lionni’s belief that the tale fit with her grandfather’s progressive politics, and writes that the book allowed the artist “to restate his belief in a common core of humanistic values that transcended race.”

What I like about this story is simple. Lionni had two distracted grand-children and had to keep them entertained. He had to "rivet their attention."

He used simple materials at hand--ripped from a magazine--to do so.

He used creativity, ingenuity, invention--a little miracle--to win them over.

Regardless of what happens in the world, regardless of the floods and filth and fascism that seems to be descending on our benighted sphere, those who can do what Lionni did--entertain, amuse, teach with simple tools will rise, and in rising, help others rise.

There's a spate of information and misinformation about the power of machines and algorithms and ones and zeroes that will change everything and return humanity again to dust.

Fine.

As the kids say, go for it.

I think we're better off reading Lionni.

I think we're better off feeling the pressure to create and by creating improving. 

I think we're better using our hands, our heads, and our hearts than replicas made by silicon. I think we're better off imagining what might appeal to other people at a human level than hoping for an equation or a white paper that will lead us someplace.

I think we're better off spending time with real lions than computer-generated ones.

They might teach us to roar.

Fractals.

We used to be about making good ads that sold our clients' wares.

We used to be about simple, timeless human truths. Appealing to those truths. That was Bernbach. 

Many of us listened. We revered him. And the work his agency did.

Not everyone was so human, so invested in the quality of the work and the importance of creative thinking. But there were dozens and dozens of agencies. And if you worked hard-enough, you could get to one that gave a shit.

Then, a couple of decades ago, things seemed to change. Dramatically. And not for the better.

We decided that different mediums needed different skills. And some media were hot. And some were dead, or dying. In a rejection of a seminal Einsteinian-notion, we rejected the idea that there was a unified field theory. That humanity was built around core principles and physics.

Nah. They told us. New generations were radically different from old generations. People consumed differently. Lived differently. Thought differently. There was no longer a common core. Atomization had won out. And we leaned in. Which was new.

I remember a planner at R/GA saying people want to lean in. I said to her, "Andrea, I'm older than you. And I'm tired when I get home. I've had a long day of running about putting out fires. The last thing I want to do is lean in. I'd like to be leaning back on a chaise in Turks and Caicos."

Eye rolls.

As an industry, no longer were truth-finding, empathy and craft important. Marketing was about technology and interaction design. It was about finding new ways to reach fundamentally new human behavior. It was about science. If we put a learn more button in the right place, magically people would want to learn more. If we put a golden sparkle on that learn more button--we'd be internet trillionaires.

It was that simple.

Why bother understanding humans. Why bother with Alexander Pope or Isaiah Berlin? The proper study of mankind ain't man. It's skate culture! It's drinking PBR in Williamsburg. It's Foursquare!

So instead of hiring the best people we could find, we began seeking the best of a certain sort. We didn't need the best anymore. We needed a type. The right type.

The right type that knew the secrets of reaching the right people.

The right type was more important than the best type.

The casting had to be good. Exemplary. The trade-press would eat it up. And it would say to the industry that that particular agency was hiring the right type of people. So it must be the right type of agency. It must be cool. Clients asked for it too. I don't want old white men on my business anymore. I heard it. I saw it. I had it said to me.

The industry complied.

Soon it wasn't about hiring people who were good at making ads. Soon it wasn't about hiring people who were good at reaching people. Good at being real. At thinking. At understand the pains, the loves, the desires of others.

Who needs 'em?

We don't need those people.

We've got the right types.

They understand today.
They understand the need to be agile.
And stand-up scrums.
They're good at white-boarding.
They're digital first--no matter what the marketing problem, it can be solved by one orthodox way of thinking.

The ability to make ads was no longer what was needed to make ads. You had to be something you weren't. You had to be the right type.

If you were old, or a dozen other adjectives, you were eleven ways to Sunday shit out of luck.

You weren't. 

You couldn't be.

No way.

I had a friend who put it this way, "I never learned the lingo."

Fractals is a weird concept. They're shapes that start out complicated and the closer you get to them, the less you know about them, the more complex you get.

A map of a seacoast is like that. If you look at the Great Lakes for instance, they look like five inter-locking sausages. Up close, the nice straight lines and parabolic arc disappear. 

In "Life Between the Tides," Adam Nicolson explains succinctly: "Fractal theory suggests that the closer you look at something, the more it remains unknown." Somehow we got so close to advertising and marketing, so MBA-i-zated, so professionalized that we forgot advertising is about humans. Emotions. Worries. Wants. 

Technology today makes the same mistake. We think with super-powerful computing machines we can equationize human-behavior. We're ignoring fractals. That humans are more more variegated than they can be interpreted by binary code. We try and try. But long-haired men like me still get baldness cures. 

Today we get so deep inside advertising that truth and humanity became unknowns. We spent more time was shaping culture, harnessing influencers, cool-spotting. And writing fake case-studies. I've never seen 92.7% of the breakthrough ads everyone in advertising talks about. Except in the trade press. On TV I see ads for diseases I don't have, Medicare Part C and $49 triple play bundles from telcos so domineering and evil to provide the services they over-charge you for.

As an aside, I'd wager the word Zeitgeist has been said more in the last five years than it was in the previous 5000. Zeitgeist became more important than timeless.

People no longer need to know what made one $70,000 car different and better than another, they just had to know that the cool car was built for "all their yous." "Doctor, what's wrong with me? I'm 66 years old and have only one you."

Years and years ago I was very close to a client. They ran two ads a week, almost every week of the year and I wrote most of them. So I was down at their offices selling work almost every week of the year. I was good at it.

They liked me. I liked them.

Once I presented some ads that made them nervous. I don't know why. They just did.

I remember their feedback like it came yesterday. Even though it probably came 35 years ago.

"George," my client said with client-gravity, "that's great advertising. But that's not what we asked for."

I think that somehow is what's happened to our industry.

It's no longer interested in doing great advertising.

It's looking for the right type. 

Ticking the right boxes.

Filling in the right forms.

Following the right au courants shot by the right director imitating the work of an even righter director.

We're no longer interested in doing something great. We'd rather do something purportedly cool. 

I don't need a cool washer-dryer. 

I don't need a cool frozen pizza.

I don't need a cool nacho chip.

Give me a nacho chip, it's up to me to supply the cool. 

I dunno. 

I'm just glad I'm off the bus.

Or run over by it.

Whichever hurts more.

King. And Advertising. A Repost.

 

In the small portion of our universe that still cares about books and which, somehow, still prefers books to the pseudo-wisdom of social media, or the abject offensive dumbness of the musk-zuck cockfight, there's been some fanfare of late about a new book. It's Jonathan Eig's recently released biography "King: A Life," an exhaustively-researched 841-page volume on the 39-year-long life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Buy it here. 

The book got some of the best reviews I've ever read. Read the Times review here. Read the New Yorker's review here.

The point of today's post, however much I am "enjoying" Eig's book (enjoying, of course, is a difficult word here) is not to flog this particular volume. It's to flog the very idea of reading. 

Frankly, I'm more than a little fed up with people selfie-izing themselves at this tradeshow or that, talking about this fake ad or that, or hopping around like they're dancing on hot-coals while blathering about AI and its impact on advertising.

As Senator Claghorn might have barked three-quarters-of-a-century ago, "Your tongue's wagging like a blind dog's tail in a meat market." 

And here's where I round into my point.

I don't want to hear any more excuses.

If you want to be better at advertising, a better creative, a better account person, a better planner, a better leader, a better listener, a better follower, more compassionate and emphatic, you ought to read as avidly as you consume more contemporary forms of media.

Here's a short passage I read last night about Martin, Jr.'s father, who at the time used the name, "Michael."

Michael was about twelve years old when his mother sent him on his mission that bright summer day around 1910.

 

As he carried his bucket, he paused in front of a sawmill where he watched burly men and oxen at work, hauling timber. 

A voice snapped him to attention. It was the white mill owner: “Say, boy, run get a bucket of water for my men from down at the stream.” 

Apologizing, Michael told the mill owner he was on an errand. He needed to go. The mill owner grabbed Michael by his shirt and kicked over his bucket of milk. As Michael bent to pick up the bucket, the white man’s boot connected with the boy’s ear.

 

He tumbled. He tried to rise, but a fist smashed his face. Blood poured from his mouth. Everything went hazy.

 

Michael got up, ran home, and spotted his mother in the yard, washing clothes in an iron tub set over a fire. Delia scanned her son’s blood-crusted face and torn shirt.

 

“Who did this to you, Michael?” she asked, voice low and tight. The boy didn’t answer.

 

“Michael!” Delia screamed. “Who did this?”

 

Delia marched to the mill, squeezing her son’s wrist as she tugged him along. She found the owner. “Did you do this to my child?”

 

She locked eyes with the man.

 

“Woman! You lost your mind? Get the hell outta here before I—”

 

Delia screamed: “Did you do this to my child?”

 

“Yeah…” 

She lowered her shoulder and rammed the mill owner in his chest, knocking him into the side of a shed. She forced him to the ground and hammered at his face with hands and arms hardened by a lifetime of manual labor. When one of the mill workers tried to pull her away, Delia punched him, too. The others backed off. “You can kill me! But if you put a hand on a child of mine, you’ll answer.”

Maybe I'm wrong here. 

Maybe this is just interesting to me because I have academic seasonings and I love history.

But to my eyes, as far as it is from writing copy for Saran Wrap or a new, plusher toilet tissue, there is much to learn here. Much to learn about parents and children. About love and duty. About what drives people. The realness of real lives. Not merely the quest for a new cheesier Dorito.

I often use the 57-year-old Volvo ad above as an example of what I'll call "reality-based advertising." It seems to me it deals with life and its difficulties--car payments, planned obsolescence, keeping up with the Jones'.

To me, as heretical as it may seem, the story above about Dr. King's father and McCabe's Volvo copy have a lot in common.

Sure, what happened to Michael King and what Delia King did could have gotten them killed. It's a story of life and, almost literally, death. 

The Volvo story, too, is a story of life. Sure, not the same import as the tale told by Eig. But a story told with emotion and empathy. A reality-based story that resonates because it's true or it happened or could happen.

If I were asked to write a Volvo ad, or any ad, tomorrow, I'd hear the usual bushwa. People don't read. There's nothing about the ______ that's any different than anyone else's __________. But I don't believe that. I refuse to believe we are undifferentiated carbon-based bipeds who dance because the Tostino pizza rolls are done.

Much of my incredulity comes from being a reader.

I've learned there are volumes within volumes.

And humanity in every life.

That's something to shoot for.

Being human.

Valuing Values.

About 2,000 years ago when I worked for Ogilvy the first time, there was a line that floated around the place that I haven't been able to get out of my head. 

I don't know if Ogilvy back in the late 1990s was in its heyday, but if it were ever better, more creative, more helpful and important to their clients, I couldn't imagine it. 

What's more, there was talent and dedication in almost every corner of their badly designed office space. People who you could learn from. People who challenged you. Even assholes who inspired you, if only because you wanted to bury them.

I'm not sure if the line I'm referring to was even written down in any place more permanent than a powerpoint. I'm not sure if it was a "vision," a "mission," or a "value." I'm not even sure if anyone else noticed it, or if anyone today remembers it.

Finally, I'm not sure who wrote it, though I think it was attributed to Shelly Lazarus who was the CEO of the joint back in the day. Authorship or attribution ain't really important. If I were sick I wouldn't care who came up with the treatment protocol to cure me, just that somebody had. And that it worked.

Speaking of sick.

There's a certain sickness in our industry now. 

We seem to be an industry that's been shunted to the fringes of business. We seem to do work that has the lasting effect of a fart in the Lincoln tunnel. We seem to have forgotten what advertising, or marketing is supposed to do. Worst of all, we seem to have chosen to forget who we do it for. Not for our glorification. Not for our plasticine trophyizing. Not for our pompoustification. But to help clients sell and to help people buy.

I don't want to go down a purpose rabbit-hole. Advertising exists, and always has, to tell people about things for sale and why they need those things.

Everything else is wankery of the lowest order.

So, onto the line. Onto the "phrase that pays," as DJs used to glib on AM radio in the '60s.

"To be most-valued by those who most-value brands."

Our goal ain't to create culture. Movements. Harness data or technology. It's not to produce a torrent of always-on crap that assaults people with asininities at every turn.

It's to do work people value so they can value the brands we're helping to promote.

What's more there's a certain "syllogistic symmetry" to the line. You can use it for a lot of topics and brands.

For a cyber-security company: To be most-valued by those who most value safety.

For an ice cream company: To be most-valued by those who most value cold treats.

For a university: To be most-valued by those who most value education.

As a person who helps brands for a living, that's a good starting point. Now I just have to beat it.

At a time when it seems that the industry has fallen and can't get up, when it's been-strip-mined of its usefulness and spread-sheeted out of viability and importance, as an industry, it might make sense to consider those words. Again.

To 
be
most
valued
by those
who
most
value
brands.

I don't know if the Lower Trenton Bridge is still lit up with this slogan in neon. I suspect the sentiment is no longer true, since virtually everything today is made by pseudo-slave laborers in Southeast Asia, but to me, such sloganeering--especially when it's true--is important.

It helps define what people do. 
It helps give people pride.
It tells people something important.

I kind of wish the four holding companies who have done so much to devour the hand that fed them so fat, would get together and place a sign over Madison Avenue.

Most people would mock the sentiment. Pigeons would shit all over it. Vandals and delinquents would probably huff the neon, if that's a thing. But maybe it would make people start to think.

Contempt.

About ten years ago I heard a quotation by the Yale University art critic, Vincent Scully (not the Dodgers' former announcer) that had a major impact on my life and my life in advertising.

It helped clarify for me brands and advertising and what we do.

The semiotics of advertising. The signaling we do that transcends words and pictures, sight, sound and motion.

In talking about the 1963 destruction of one of New York's grandest public spaces, the Mead, McKim and White-designed Pennsylvania Station and the monstrosity that replaced it, Scully said, "One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat."

Maybe it's a function of being old and aggrieved but today at 66, I feel more and more brands, companies and people treat others not like gods, but like rats. More and more, the companies that buy our hours, the brands that take our money (they're usually in an oligopolized industry) treat us with contempt.

Think about, for instance, trying to get help with your cable bill via a bot. 

You, a customer who pays thousands of dollars a year are held in such contempt by the near-monopoly cable company that you can't find a way to talk to a human (they employ no humans), you can't get a straight answer about what they charge, and you can't have an interaction without them hitting you with yet another near-extortionate "promotion." 

Contempt.

Think about flying somewhere. You are stuffed in a seat smaller than your ass. The plane is 40-percent over-booked, 40-percent under-staffed, 40-percent under-maintained, and usually late by about 40-percent.

Contempt.

Think about being employed by one of the oligopoly holding companies. You are lied to repeatedly (there are no raises except for the very wealthy), you have no 'room of your own,' you are a cost, not a value, and the only interaction you with the holding company itself is a shrill all-caps email that you're late on your timesheets, and there's no acknowledgement that much of the reason you're late is that they've made the timesheet system (surely the product of corporate kick-backs) so Byzantine, that it's nearly impossible not to be late.

Contempt.

Fouling the earth is contempt.
Not paying a living wage is contempt.
'Your call is important to us' and then a 90-minute wait is contempt.

Contempt is baked into nearly every action, reaction, motion and emotion.

Contempt is so wide-spread it's become normalized, 

acceptable, expected.

There's a reason for that contempt, of course. 

Humanity costs money.

Contempt is the minimal viable product. And giant corporations and the MBAs that run them find contempt more cost-efficient. Better for their corporate bottom lines and therefore their year-end bonuses.

Contempt is the lingua franca of the world.

Contempt is the coin of the realm.

Contempt is the good enough that's good enough. 

This is contempt.

A public trust that runs as a public fleecing.

As far as I'm concerned, I refuse to treat people with contempt. 
I refuse to treat clients with contempt.

I refuse to treat the people I work with with contempt.

That's why I was kicked out of a contempt-led industry.

It's also why, when holding companies are printing scrip in the form of fake awards for fake clients, or jettisoning properties they bought for hundreds of millions for pennies on the dollar, GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company grows month after month, year after year.

Contempt. A product of the contemptible.

The Ad Industry Explained by Bagels.

For a pessimist, I remain optimistic.

Optimistic about advertising.

Or at least GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company.

Because I have formulated something I call 

"the Bagel Shop Theory of Economics."

I grew up in a world where you were never more than three blocks from a good bagel shop.

There were hundreds of them. 

Then tastes changed.

98-percent of them closed.

Rents were too high. 

People left the city.

There were health scares related to sesame seeds. They called it Sesamegate--a few people still remember the fallout.

In a 20-square-block area
where there used to be seventeen bagel shops,

now there was one.

Bagel consumption went down.

Like I said, tastes changed.

However, there was still a demand for bagels.

People who switched to frozen, or supermarket bagels, 

or conglomerate-made bagels,

or muffins or smoothies

remembered how good a nice, hot bagel was.

I remember when they'd come hot out of the oven at H&H.

I've never done drugs,

but I'm sure the high is better from H&H than heroin.

So the one bagel shop left got busy.

There were lines out the door. 

Literally, down the street.

They raised their prices.

The lines remained.

They stretched down the block.

Around the corner, even.

Soon, other bagel shops opened.

Not as many as there had been, but more than there were.

Nevertheless, the lines remained.

Customers beget customers, after all.

There was business for everyone.

Higher-priced, steady business.

Now cross out bagels and substitute "real advertising."

The agencies closed. Or switched from a good product

to ads that were frozen and conglomerate-made.

However, a few people remembered.

How good a nice, fresh-baked ad was.

That's why my phone rings.

That's why I get so-many calls.

And so many clients who stay with me.

That's why I'm optimistic.

There's a need for bagels.

Learning from the Dead.

When Norman Lear died a little over a month ago, much of my generation mourned. Lear was the progenitor of the TV baby-boomers grew up on. From "All in the Family," to the almost-morbidly deadpan "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," Lear's shows provided entertainment based on life. His shows were the antithesis of the "nothing school" of Seinfeldian comedy. They reflected the turmoil of the in-the-moment world.

I read Lear's obituary (link above) with what today passes for perspicacity. I specifically remembered these sentences. They impelled me to reflect on advertising as it exists today, as opposed to how it was when Lear's shows dominated Prime Time--during advertising's so-called "Golden Age."

What Lear brought us--admittedly through a commercial filter--was television that reflected life. I think the best advertising of the era did the same.

DDB's VW ads didn't show a slinky lady on a thoroughbred next to an Oldsmobile in front of a manor house. They reflected a semblance of humanity and human concerns. The high-cost of living, the obsolescence built-into Detroit's products, the folly of trying to keep up with the Jones.

Scali's ads for Volvo did the same. As did myriad ads from Carl Ally for a variety of clients. All of the ads below are from the Carl Ally agency. I worked at Ally & Gargano for five years--and studied ads like these. For $15, you can buy Amil Gargano's book on the agency. About two days of Starbucks.

The point in all this isn't to bemoan the good old days of advertising. It's to lament that the ads we do are no longer "reality-based." As in the Lear quote above, they don't contend that today people have no problems, rather that their problems are there are two guys in the apartment, and only one beer, or I'm dying to switch phone carriers or cable companies even though there's no differences between any of them, or that paying for a soda with cash is hard--thank god I have a card that lets me tap to pay.

What's more, people are so thrilled how today's products, service and offerings improve their lives that they high-five their friends, break into song, or, usually, start dancing.

What's happened is that as an industry we have stopped seeing people as people. 

We have abandoned empathy.

We advertise to archetypes or personas or, worst, targets.
We don't understand candor and honesty.
And we have such disdain for people that we think they're too stupid to realize how avidly and actively we treat them like idiots and talk down to them.

Perhaps the greatest commentary ever on modern Western society was by the Stones. They certainly created the best song ever about advertising.

The song is an indictment of what we, as an industry, do way too often. Dull gleaming overpromising pablum with no product truth or emotional resonance.

It might not be bad to use "Satisfaction" as a brief. Even though it's sixty years old. It understands more about truth and honesty and that people have real problems and real worries that go beyond whiter-whites.

I'm sorry that's news to so many people.