Stakanovite.

For most of the seventeen years I lived under my father's roof and under my mother's borderline personality (or whatever the latest DSM calls 'a nasty old hag') my older brother, younger sister and I had to tiptoe around their tilted little house.

First, any noise might set my mother's hair-trigger to 'extra-hairy,' and two, my father almost died of a heart-attack in 1967 and again in 1974, and we, as children were told it was the noise we made which was largely responsible.

I grew up knowing my father could die at any minute and my mother could explode. As I learned about my parents when I left home for good, age 17, no one is entirely useless; they can always serve as a bad example.

Even Joe Louis couldn't take a punch like a time-clock.

One of the examples I learned from was my father's work ethic. Except for his non-stop schtupping of various secretaries, he seldom took a break. There was hardly a moment he didn't have a yellow legal pad and a black Pentel pen.

At an early-age, I vowed I would be more moderate than he. In fact, in an attempt at moderation, I set out for a career in academia. I incorrectly thought the ivied halls of some leafy campus somewhere in say Maine or New Hampshire--somewhere suitably out-of-the-way-and-fray, would be much more benign than my father's martini-fueled Madison Avenue hallways. I quickly learned that the only difference between advertising stiletto knives and professorial stilettos was that at a university the stabbings come fully annotated and with copious footnotes.

So, mostly because I had rent to pay and no visible or invisible means of support and I was tired of getting my furniture from ratty piles on city sidewalks, I went to the School of Visual Arts and after some years of working at it (I think I dropped my portfolio at 41 agencies) I finally started my advertising career. 

I vowed, however, not to cardiac my way to an early death. While I always worked hard, I never got into the practice of staying all hours to show my fervor. I'd get in early, work hard, and go home at a reasonable time. Peer pressure be damned.

When my first ACD (when that was a big title) had a heart-attack virtually right in front of me when he was just 37, I redoubled my efforts not to redouble my efforts. 

In short order, I convinced myself, I was not a hard-worker.

It's now forty years later, and I have two daughters, 36 and 32, who are fast making their ways in their careers. My 36-year-old is a Clinical Psychologist and runs a Harvard-affiliated clinic specializing in helping children and their parents. My 32-year-old is a Marine Biologist and helps run the University of California San Diego's Master's Program in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. It's kind of funny and fascinating to me that in a sense they have the academic careers that I wasn't able to pursue.

The Stakhanovites (стаха́новцы) modeled themselves after Alexei Stakhanov, a coal miner, 

and took pride in their ability to produce more than was required by working harder and more efficiently, thus contributing to the common good and strengthening the socialist state.

My daughters, touch wood, often call me. And, as children do, they excoriate me for having worked so hard. They chastise me for giving them a Stakanovite work ethic.

They tell me about the late nights they work and the 5AM wake-ups. They tell me about the pressures of living in a world where nearly everything that tries to uplift others is under-funded and understaffed and under-pressure. They say, with some anger, "Dad. Why'd you teach us to work so hard?" Their voices are not without rancor in these moments.

I look at them and I have a simple answer.

The same answer Joe Louis, the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time, uttered when assessing his twelve years as champion and holder of a fight-all-comers 66-3 record. The same answer Philip Roth quoted when he evaluated his career and more than thirty novels: "I did the best I could with what I had."

In thirty or so years, lord willing, my kids will say the same to their kids.

Facing Faces.

About three hundred years ago, somewhere in Mittel Europa, what we now call German and Austria, there was a popular sculptor called Franz Xaver Messerschmidt.

He sculpted bronze busts that were very popular for a time, particularly among nobles, people with Vons in their names. Not the skate-boarding cool-kid sneakers.

Consider this, the creepiest thing you'll see all day.

Messerschmidt's busts showed heightened emotions. There's an exaggerated and even grotesque aspect to them. I wouldn't mind seeing them in the Getty Museum in LA, or in various galleries in Vienna. But I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want one in my home. I don't find ventriloquist's dummies scary, or even clowns, but these might keep me up at night. Especially if I saw one move--or convinced my wife that I had.

It's less than a week since the commercial, political, violence and sports phenomena we call the Super Bowl has ended. I'm still thinking about the commercials I saw during the game and which are so ardently debated, critiqued and praised by advertising people in the wake of the event.

All those spots and all the chatter about them has gotten me thinking, as I so often do, about advertising. 

Whatever you think of Messerschmidt's art--and I'm sure nothing I do will come close to lasting 300 days, much less 300 years--his busts capture human reactions.

Do a bit of a Google search and you'll see each one of his heads has a title like, Man Yawning, or The Vexed Man. His depictions match his descriptions pretty well.

I thought of my face. 

On Monday, I had a drink with a friend. She described my visage as "resting cranky face." This is a friend.

I thought about Messerschmidt and advertising and the faces our work contorts.

I'm 99.7-percent sure my face on Sunday during the game could be described as slack-jawed. Sort of like the illustration by Thomas Lea in Life Magazine in 1944 of an unnamed marine at the Battle of Peleliu. The 2000 yard stare. A marine in the wake of the entrenched Japanese enemy during World War II, one of the most horrible of all battles in a horrible war.

I looked at the waste.

The noise.

The incomprehension.

The adjectival gushiness.

The buy-me-now Bacchanal.

I thought about Carl Ally, whose agency I worked at for five years. He said, "advertising should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." The advertising I saw on Sunday neither comforted or afflicted. 

It victimized.
It assaulted.
It was a pipe-organ gone mad at a carousel spinning out of control. Dissonance rampant.

I know everything is tested.
I know we track eye-movements.
And we heat-map pupicks and apply our learnings.

I wonder if we do what Messerschmidt did.

Look at people.
And say, why do they feel like that?

That's Not What I Saw.

Living for so many of my days up on the Gingham Coast, and living up here with a five-month-old golden retriever, I find myself talking to people who live near me. The issue is, they know me but I don't know them.

Though I have a scary-good memory, it's only scary-good about some things. When it comes to names and faces, I have the absorbency of a discount one-ply sheet of paper towel. I can't tell you how many times I have a meeting with Mark and call him Matt one-third of the way through and then hang-up by saying "talk to you soon, Mike."

Around here in Connecticut, my wife knows all the neighbors, their children and grand children, their dogs, favorite recipes, their approximately monthly heating bills and a Stasi-like amount of miscellany. I have conversations with people who know my name and my golden-retreiver Sparkle's name and sundry other things about me, but if you'd ask me, I'd swear I never met them before.

In any event, it often comes out that my real home is not the rocky littoral of "the shoreline," but the rat-paved streets of the naked and teeming city. Every once-in-a-so-often, I'll mention, distractedly, that I'm heading back for a meeting, a laugh, a good bagel or the grit that passes for real urban sinew. None of which anyone up here understands. 

"Oh, be careful," they warn. "I heard the city is gangland. A hellhole, a madhouse."

"Murder!"

Someone else will say, "Didja hear about that thing on the subway? It's out of control."

"And the gangs are rampaging, clearing the shelves in the CVS. It's out of control."

I was about to write that I look at these people like they're from a different planet. But they are from a different planet. They're sifting whatever news they get through a series of screens that confirms their belief in the danger of elsewhere and the absolute genius of living up here.

The biggest crime in this fairly elegant section of the world is someone either not picking up after their dog or putting their dog's waste in your garbage pail. Yet all over the neighborhood their are signs with distended eyes painted on them that say in capital letters, "NEIGHBORHOOD CRIME WATCH." That's like posting a sign in the middle of the Sahara that reads, "Bridge freezes before road surface." Sure, it does. But that matters not a bit.

In our riven era it occurs to me that there's little "truth" anymore. Just opinions shouted at the top of our lungs with utter resolve and conviction.

In the wake of the Super Bowl, according to the self-aggrandizing-ness of the ad industry, you'd think people actually gave a shit about ads. It seems to me, yes, I view things with some critical cynicism, that according to one ad meter or another, virtually every ad won "best ad" recognition from someone--probably some rating entity that collects millions in revenue in return for stellar grades. 

Bey and Verizon. But I'd bet Verizon is still one of the most-hated brands in Amerika.

BTW, I remember launching a campaign for high-end business technology equipment and having the client boast, "In one week we doubled sales." They had gone from two machines sold to four.

It seems to me that the entire ad industry and its accomplices now behave like first-time parents in a Type-A suburb. "Jennifer lost a tooth! She so advanced." "Billy," at age four, "can count to three in Spanish. He's gifted." "Little Jonny farted! Can you believe it!"

Yes. That is our world.

Every thing is an -est.

The best. The funniest. The hardest to have accomplished. The importantest. The influentialest. The est-ti-est, apologies to Werner Erhard.

Every agency has won at least a dozen agency of the year awards or is shortlisted for a shortlist of shortlists.

There are more people on Linked in who describe themselves as award-winning than people who don't.

Here's a tip, if everything you see on TV sucks, yet every creative and every agency has about 3289 awards to their names, something is really wrong.

Subject-object split anyone?

What we're being subsumed by instead of a flat telling-of-the-facts is grandiose posturing, axe-sharpening and agenda-propagating.

Those who proclaim the death of the city have an agenda. Those who give someplace that sells artisanal mac-and-cheese three Michelin stars are being paid. Those who proclaim every thyroid-case with an outside jump shot as the GOAT are trying to sell tickets.

Most of what I saw during the game and afterwards was as noisy as a four-year-old's birthday party during a Ritalin shortage and about as lucid. 

I never once uttered the phrase, "I wish I did that." I say it when I read a book, a poem, see a Billy Wilder movie or even something with Laurel & Hardy. 

And I don't care if any of that stuff won awards.

That's someone else's agenda. 

Not mine.

Or Die.

Let's start with a time-worn truism.

Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.

We've all heard that.

We've probably all said that.

My experience tells me something. Nearly every product being sold today sucks. Nearly every product being sold today is bad.

Every airplane seat is too cramped. The flights are late. The personnel are nasty. I'd say you're treated like cattle, but cattle is probably treated better.

Every telco is unreliable. And loads up your bill with hidden charges. And makes bills impossible to decipher. And drops about three calls in five. Beyonce my ass.

Same with every ISP.

Every hotel room is pubic-haired. And full of hidden charges. And filthy. And near the noisy elevator. And the rattling ice-machine. Even expensive hotels. Some MBA sold them on the idea of cheaping-out on every courtesy.

Every automaker has crappy service departments. If you can get an appointment, you can't get a loaner.

Every fast-food place strews its trash everywhere. And service is slow and surly.

Every soda spot shows thin people while causing a nation of diabetics.

I can't be the only one who feels mistreated at every "customer interaction experience."

Customer service is more aptly customer disservice.

Or disrespect.

None of this is advertising's fault.

But what happened to our higher Bernbachian order? 
What happened to guiding clients, not just being their vendors?

What happened to being agents?

To saying, 

fix your problems rather than sweeping them under the rug.

What happened to substantially helping a brand, not just polishing is turdiness?

What happened to Love thy Neighbor?

And believing the consumer isn't a moron.

I've been in the advertising business literally my whole life. 

I was born into it.

I never saw myself as a flack. A whore. A liar. A mouthpiece.

I saw myself as someone who was meant to improve a client's business. Not just from ads. From actions. From candor.

The ad below is more than half-a-century-old.

It might be half-a-century since anyone read it.

That's a mistake.

It should start every meeting, every presentation, every new business pitch. 

The commercials I say during the Super Bowl didn't reflect the reality of the world I live in. Everyone of them--no matter how entertaining and pyrotechnically adroit--struck me as dishonest. 

We seem to be a Potemkin industry.

All facade. No foundation.

How was your blogpost experience today?

😃        😐        😠

Do this or die.

Is this ad some kind of a trick?

No. But it could have been.

And at exactly that point rests a do or die decision for American business.

We in advertising, together with our clients, have all the power and skill to trick people. Or so we think.
But we're wrong. We can't fool any of the people any of the time.

There is indeed a twelve-year-old mentality in this country; every six-year-old has one.
We are a nation of smart people.

And most smart people ignore most advertising because most advertising ignores smart people.

Instead we talk to each other.

We debate endlessly about the medium and the message. Nonsense. In advertising, the message itself is the message.

A blank page and a blank television screen are one and the same.

And above all, the messages we put on those pages on those television screens must be the truth. For if we play tricks with the truth, we die.

Now. The other side of the coin.

Telling the truth about a product demands a product that's worth telling the truth about.

Sadly, so many products aren't.

So many products don't do anything better. Or anything different. So many don't work quite right. Or don't last. Or simply don't matter.

If we play this trick, we also die. Because advertising only helps a bad product fail faster.

No donkey chases the carrot forever. He catches on. And quits.

That's the lesson to remember.

Unless we do, we die.

Unless we change, the tidal wave of consumer indifference will wallop into the mountain of advertising and manufacturing drivel.

That day we die.
We'll die in our marketplace. On our shelves. In our gleaming packages of empty promises.

Not with a bang. Not with a whimper.

But by our own skilled hands.

 

Six Things the Internet (and Holding Companies) Don't Understand.

About two times a year, the great publisher, Taschen has a sale that's really a sale.

So many sales today start with artificially high-prices and knock them down to meh. Or, they trumpet products that are always on sale. Either way, they're phony. Their ginning up some excitement to get you to act.

Taschen, to me, seems different.

When I get their emails announcing a sale I am fairly agog. I don't know what Balboa looked like when he first saw the Pacific. Or Ada Lovelace when she unraveled the mysteries of computer science. But when I get notice of a Taschen sale, I jump onto my phone and look to tell every friend who might care that "it's here."

It's an event, the Taschen Sale.

Unfortunately, I know virtually no one who cares about it as much as I do. As my therapist of 40 years or one-million-dollars says, "I need to widen my circles."

A lot of book mania has been superseded by the wonders of the Internet. And the Internet, for all its cockeyed, sold-to-the-highest-bidder search mechanisms is wonderful. Like, here's a site that lets you page through and zoom into a Shakespeare first folio. That's downright amazing. And brings to mind this, also from Shakespeare: 

But back to Taschen and the six things no longer understood by nearly anyone.

For under $200, these six books just arrived at my Connecticut cottage. A 1,500 sq. foot shack girded with eight statute miles of bookshelves.

You can find all this stuff on the internet, I suppose. But not so large. Not so touchable. Not so vivid. Not so organized. Not so mine.

I'd say about 99.7-percent of all people in the advertising industry are more "creative" than I am. But 0-percent are more curious. And (high-end refrigerator joke) sub-zero read and remember more than I do. Finally, maybe 0-percent work so
sedulously. 

I might never reference a single of these books in an ad, or a meeting, or even having a drink with a client. But they help me, nevertheless, think different. They're synapses made legible. 

When ad people get together--I get together with some doyens of the old school once every few weeks for a casual cholesterol infarction--the conversation often turns to the dearth (and death) of creativity left in the business.

I betcha it's directly correlated to the dearth (and death) of agency libraries.

If you don't learn, you can't lead.

Super. Stupor.

As I get farther and farther away from the standard utterances and issuances and masturbatory mania of what used to be the advertising industry--as Jerry Della Femina called it, 'the most fun you can have with your clothes on,'--the more clearly I can see it.

Sorry, Jerry.

Maybe this is jealousy on my part because I don't, again, have a spot running on the Super Bowl. In fact, I never did.

Even when I was at the pinnacle of my career, my commercials never ran toward the mainstream. And I was more about expressing an idea--heaven forfend, a reason to believe--than I was about constructing a spectacle with celebrities, too-loud rock 'n roll, or some faux touching story of a love regained.

Not that ideas and spectacle can't be blended. Carol Reed was no slouch. Though I think he'd be a second-tier creative these days. Restraint. Subtlety. Intelligence. No high-decibel dancing.

But more of my view of the industry is colored by the incessance of our chatter around the spots that will air and our hubris in promoting these things clients spend millions on and people care little about.

Soon, someone smart in the industry will have an idea. They won't merely have teasers for ads next year. They'll create teasers for the teasers for the ads. And the year after that, teasers for the teasers for the teasers for the ads. And so it goes, as Billy Pilgrim dirged.

The industry is like a CVS drugstore. The Halloween candy will come out right after Memorial Day. And it will all be stale by July 4th. Like the rest of our trumpian wet dream.

The Super Bowl is the only time the industry feels vital to the business community. We'll look at it like a new born baby set loose in a topless bar. It's the good ol' days.

But as I see ad after ad--before the game--and teaser after teaser, before the ads before the game--it all feels like a high school production of Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues." 

Our fanfare about what we do and the noise we make about it is solipsism not with just a capital S, but a 144-point capital S. In other words, the importance and influence of our work is minimal.

Sure, we've created an analytic industry to prove the creative industry is still viable. But I'm not sure who all that data convinces except for people whose jobs depend on believing all that data.

I saw the homage to bygone America from VW. I saw the paean to mayonnaise. I saw a repellent 90-foot dorito in Las Vegas, and can barely imagine another thing more likely tp produce vomit enhanced by artificial coloring.

I saw the Christopher Walken spot for BMW. And this might be part of the problem.

BMW dealers--BMW is a hot brand now, they're selling more cars than ever--so their dealers suck worse than ever. I can't  find anyone to repair my car and give me a loaner--which they're obliged to do.

I think part of the issue with advertising--and the world--is there's a giant and ever-widening gap, a subject-object split--between the world portrayed in ads and the world we live in.

You see this in politics too. A divergence between truth and the party line. 

In Norman Lear's New York Times obituary, I remember this bit:

Believing in advertising today, or politicians, is a bit like believing in the salutary effects of crack cocaine. It's not smart to focus on only the highs without the inevitable lows. Look at TV spots and it's "which Tina do I want to be," not the world is burning, my kids are on tranq and my neighbors are neo-fascist wannabees.

"The message that was sending out was that we didn't have any problems."

I dunno.

We're living in a post-trust world. A world riven neatly in two where one-half cannot even fathom what the other half says, believes or how they live.

We have no agreed upon truths. 

Fair is foul and foul is fair. The battle is lost and won. 

Truth.

The re-establishment thereof is all we should be examining. Not the effects of gamma rays on man in the moon corn chips and piss-water beer.

Commitment.

Serius est quam cogitas.
It's later than you think.

As I've written before in this space, I have a near photographic memory. I don't remember everything. But I remember much of what I read and hear. Forever.

It's a blessing, having a memory. And a curse. It's why, for instance, I want a handwritten apology from everyone who's ever wronged me. I remember.

About five years ago, the phrase 'photographic memory' fell out of vogue. The correct term was now eidetic. Though in all my years I never heard the word eidetic from anyone but me, and only since I learned that it's replaced photographic memory as the preferred term.

I don't know who put forward this change in language. If it was the American Psychological Association or the Funk and Wagnalls Institute of the Obtuse. I just know I'm not supposed to say I have a photographic memory. I still say it, however, because if I started this post by saying "I have an eidetic memory," half my readers would likely drop off before they got to the end of the sentence.

Having a good memory posing some challenges in today's modern world. 

Pre-cell phones and caller ID,  I never wrote down a single  phone number. There aren't that many people who call me and when people would they'd say, "Hi George, it's Jill. Can you talk?" Or I'd simply remember.

I'd be ok. I'd know who I'm talking to and no skin off anyone's ass.

Now that I run a business, I get a lot of calls from people I don't know. When I get those calls, I have to make a decision. Do I add the number to my contacts, or do I rely on my memory to "store" it.

There's a lot to consider before you clog either your brain or your phone's contacts with a number. First, will this be a person you're likely to speak to with some regularity? If not, why bother saving the number. If they're likely to be a transitory acquaintance, I usually decide to just let things go and not store the number anywhere.

That's fine until you get a text message from a number you don't recognize. "George! Will I see you next week after work?" 

Shit. I have no idea who wants to see me. I never marked down who belonged to that number.

I'll try to be cagey about things. But cagey has never been my strong suit. "It would be great," I lie. "Who else will be there?" I hope through that sort of slight subterfuge to at least figure out what sphere of my life I know the unknown number from. Many times, I let a couple hours go by before responding. I hope they'll get annoyed and say "George, it's Patrick. Are you there?"

More often than not, I have to lie.

"I transferred my data to a new phone and my contacts got wiped. Who is this?"

That clears things up, with a minimum of embarrassment and just a soupçon of prevarication.

It's hard for an old person to live in this world. Things like writing down a number say 'commitment' to me. And I'm loathe to commit to anyone I know for fewer than 41 years. Storing a brand's email? Not sending it to spam? Whaddaya nutz?

It's a generational thing, I suppose.

Forget about trying to change me. 

Systems Collapse.

Reading my Linked In feed and talking to friends who are also in the industry, I can't help but think about the concept in historiography of "Systems Collapse."

This ain't the kind of thing to talk about on a first date. Unless you're a freshman at Columbia in 1977 and everyone you meet is a budding anarchist looking around the city for discount Molotov cocktails. BOTO. (Buy one, throw one.)

It also ain't a perfect topic for a post. Usually, I try for a little lightheartedness, in general. But somedays I can't grin and bear it.

Between seeing Mark Read spend $319 million on AI systems (surely more than WPP has spent on people since the first wire fucked the first bits of paper and plastic). He's spending that $319 million so he can shit-can $320 million of salaries. Add to that new that private equity has concocted ways to award stock to CEOs and then offer it to them at deflated prices before it hits the markets, and you'll see why I am feeling pretty blue. Add to that the $300+ million fine to be paid by Publicis for promoting opioid use.

That's not a bad week. That's a normal week.

The barbarians aren't at the gate, they're at your dining room table and they're eating all the good bits and farting into the upholstery.

Just in the past 72 hours, I've seen quips like these.

"Recruiters: Everyone is available."

"You make over $250K. You don't have a target on your back. You have a target on your front, your sides, your ass and everywhere else there's you."

And then seeing a temp job at Saatchi NY for major P&G brands where the pay they're offering is $680/day. No benefits.

Back around 270 years ago, after literally centuries of wars, the British Empire was a bit shaky. Rich people in the American colonies realize this and sensed it was time to start a rebellion. People in Iran, Russia, North Korea and god knows where else are probably sensing this sort of thing today about amerika.

It's no wonder a ragtag group of yeoman with 17th century muskets and no arms industry of its own was able to defeat the British.

It's all a little inconceivable that a mouse can kill a lion in hand-to-hand combat. Or whatever it is mice have.

It's always puzzled me.

Then I stumbled upon a fact.

In roughly 1800, the last pay rise given to British sailors had occurred in 1650. Their pay stayed the same for a century and a half. No wonder they had to "impress" troops--forcibly abduct them to serve. No wonder they (sorry for the period racism) had to Shanghai people. Drunk them, clunk them, and abduct them.

In the ad industry, I'd imagine in real dollars, people today earn far less than people did when I entered the business. The location of agencies today and their (lack of) decor speaks to this decay. Most agencies today have the aesthetic charm of a Home Depot in a tier three market.

That brings me around to Systems Collapse.

There are scientific definitions of systems collapse but it was explained to me like this.

When cities first started forming on, say, Crete, a group of people would begin to live near each other. Their concentration and breadth of skills and location led them to prosperity. To keep others out and to protect themselves, they built a wall around their conurbation. 

Of course, more people wanted in. The original settlers said, "Fine. More means more. And we'll all get richer and all be safer." So they spend the money to build more walls. The population grew and the walls expanded to encircle more space and more people.

Eventually, however, the city said "enough is enough. I've got mine and don't want to pay taxes to grow more. I don't want to let others in because that costs me. And I'll do all I can to pay for anything now that I'm rich."

Before long, the protective walls begin to crumble. Leaders can't keep people safe and everything seems to decline.

Here's the above in tattoo length: No pay; all decay.

This is essentially what's happened to what was the ad industry. The people who are rich because of it or through it no longer invest back into it. They don't invest in people. They don't invest in clients. They don't invest in ideas. They don't invest in new ways. And they accept the same cheapness from their clients.

The moguls have their $137 million.

If they pay a writer on one of the world's largest advertisers $680/day, rather than what they paid ten years ago, they'll soon get to having $138 million. 

Myopia.

Or Me-me-me-opia.

That's the schema today. The dominant complacency.

When older ad people get together, the topic quickly turns to "whatever happened to creativity?"

Back to my tattoo.

No pay; all decay.