We Fri Harder.

 

Hello.

It's Friday.

As in "Thank george it's Friday."

Not too many minutes ago, I was wandering lonely as a cloud, taking a walk along the waters of the Long Island Sound, during a sunny rainy day in my little Gingham Coast town just two-hours or four (depending on traffic) north of Manhattan.

I had a post written for tomorrow, but then this song, by Thelonious Monk came into my head, "Brilliant Corners." Actually, the song didn't come into my head at all. The first ten bars or so did. And they made all the difference.

I stopped the music after those ten bars and wrote this post.

In fact, I order you to stop what you're doing now and listen to those bars. Listen to Brilliant Corners. 

It's important to.

Why?

Because everything Monk does in this piece is wrong. I'm not going all Julliard-y on you. Just listen. Everything is:

A mistake.

Discordant.

Dissonant.

Off.

Oopsie.

Done in error.

Ear-hurting.

And perfect.

We live in a world and work in a profession and work for putative MBAs and group creative heads who strive for a ridiculous conceit of perfection and precision in a world where there is none. 

They think there's a perfect grin shot, a perfect pharmaceutical dance move, a perfect pizza cheese-pull. There's a perfect ping accompanying a logo. The perfect sixteen lines of legal copy for their auto-lease ad. There's perfect 26-seconds of shouting at you during a :30.

There's a perfect deck. A perfect 728x90 banner ad. The perfect IG post and about 29-thousand other contrivances of purported perfection, that really do nothing but perfectly fuck-up your sense of self.

Dashiell Hammett said it like this, of his great character Flitcraft, in "The Maltese Falcon." (The only part of the novel that didn't make it into John Huston's movie version.)

The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them. It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life.

I'm afraid we've all got out of step, and not into step, with life. 

That's what perfection has done to us.

The Navaho, I'm told, put a weaving error in every blanket they made. Because only their gods are perfect.

But we are souls ruled by hubris. And perfectionism is the reverberation from our own crushing echo-chambers. 

Like I said 300 words ago.

It's Friday.

Listen to Brilliant Corners above. Listen twice maybe.

Then close your laptop. Take a walk around the block. And have a perfectly wonderful imperfect weekend.

Disconnect.

 

Not long ago, one of my many friends in the UK brought the commercial pasted above to my attention. During an age where no one trusts anything the hear, see, smell, touch or taste, the tagline "Does exactly what it says on the tin," might be the most-brilliant advertising expression of our times. It fills a psychic need and swims against the tide of bombast.

The disconnect--we experience it every day, one-hundred times a day--between what brands, or people, say they're going to do and what they actually do is a dozen Grand-Canyon's wide. This is not only a trust problem and a brand problem, it's an advertising problem. It's a survival-of-our-industry-problem.

Because if a brand's advertising says, "we're friendly," and a person's experience of the brand is surly, uninformed and unhelpful, they'll likely not only dislike your brand, but your advertising as well. In other words, you've paid twice for a disconnect between what you say and what you do. To my eyes, it seems that virtually every brand and therefore every ad is responsible for decaying a trust with the customer and the viewer that's already as rotten as a Detroit-area water main.

Again to my eyes, the advertising industry is guilty of extending the disconnect between what brands say and what brands do. 

Because advertising agencies, in the current "we're treated like vendors" client-agency relationship, don't have to strength, courage or bravery to say, "you should fix your customer experiences before you advertise your customer experience."

We take the assignment.
We hire a director who's paid to make people appear real.
We cast actors and tell them to smile and be concerned, like the staff we want to depict.
We take feedback on our script and our edit, to make it more satisfactory to our clients.
We hire and direct the gushy VO that says how much we care.
And then customers are treated like dog-shit on the cosmic crepe-sole of the shoe of life.

Sixteen and a half years ago I wrote a blogpost about a dead telco called Sprint. I said,

"This is from Ad Age: 'Last week, Sprint reported a fourth-quarter loss of 683,000 postpaid customers, those billed monthly for service and who are considered the industry's most valued.' In other words, Sprint lost almost 7,500 customers a day--despite having contracts with their customers that are 'Shylock-ian' in their rigidity.

"No advertising can fill a "bucket" that leaks that quickly. Mr. Kelly (their fired CEO) has been canned because he was throwing money at advertising to continue to re-fill Sprint's leaking customer bucket. I've learned over the years that it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain one. Kelly's $1.2 billion of marketing spend should have been focused on treating consumers well."

Every brand seems to be as disconnected as Sprint was before they were subsumed and consumed by another telco. In a few weeks, agencies and their holding companies will be renting yachts in Cannes. They'll be blowing hot air on how successful they are. Meanwhile, marketing spend as a percent of revenue has fallen to just over six-percent an almost 50-percent drop from where it was five years ago. 

FCB, one of seemingly 27 or 21 agencies of the year just let go a reported nine-percent of their people from their Chicago office--roughly 75 humans. Ogilvy was just named D and AD "Network of the Year," while they fire people left and right and hemorrhage money from even more directions.

Orwell is alive and well. 
War is peace.
Collapse is success.
Dreck is award-winning.
Inconsequence is importance.

One thing GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company will do for your brand that no other ad agency will do for your brand is to help you see your brand as customers see your brand. If you're an airline and you hire me to do your ads, I will book middle seats for myself and tell you how my 'experience' was. I won't then shoot a commercial with attractive near-models luxuriating in that middle seat as if they're Roman emperors.

I will find the truth and tell the truth.

As good brands do.

And I'll work with you not just to make better ads (that's a given) but to make your company better, too. 

That's supposed to be what competition, honest, and good thinking does.

I'll do exactly what it says in my blog. 

(I don't have a tin.)

Giving a Hoot.

For 99.79-percent of the world, it's ok to suck.
It's ok to lie.
It's ok to say one thing and do another.
It's ok to have the morals of a whore-monger.
It's ok to cheat.
It's ok to steal.
It's ok to phone-it-in.
It's ok to treat people like shit.
It's ok to rip them off.
To abuse and abase them.
To use them up and throw them out.
All while picking their pockets and telling them you're on their side.

Just about every interaction in America, with a politician, with an employer, with a company, a product, a so-called service provider bears this out.

The Greek word that encapsulates our era might well be "kakistocracy." Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens. I'll add to that, corporate management by the least qualified or most unprincipled.

In a monopoly controlled world, you can get away with it. There are four basic agency holding companies. It's likely soon there will be three, when WPP sells itself so eight guys at the top, who have already milked WPP-dry get out with even more money. There are a couple of banks left. A couple or airlines, telcos, ISPs, drug-stores. Petroleum companies. Political parties.

In just about any category that matters, capital has consolidate. Control is in the hands of a few. And caring is out the window. The little guy? Shit out of luck.

With or without over collusion (which is nominally illegal though, today, unenforced and unenforceable) outrage gets you no-where. You could switch from Verizon to AT&T, but the differences wouldn't be worth the hassle. So, sic semper tyrannis. And all that Latin jazz.

Of course, there's another Latin quotable, there always is. Since about 400BC till 200 years ago, the educated of the world knew Latin. That died. But I haven't yet. As yet.

Etiam si omnes, ego non.

"Even if everybody does it, I will not."

More poetically, "Even if all others, not I."

There are a lot of tattoo'd people in the world. About two years ago, I was in Costa Rica and a woman by the pool had numbers tattoo'd under each asscheek. My wife asked her what the numbers meant. "They're my angel numbers," she said. 

I've yet to see someone tattoo'd with Etiam si omnes, ego non tattoo'd on their ass or anywhere else. In what remains of our business, we continue to produce blandishments that are completely divorced from the things our clients offer. 

The business bank that rips me off each month is unable to help me solve a simple problem. Yet, they run spots like these. They're so false and untrue and not what I need. They're as fake as a Yelp review.

I also can't get help from Marriott hotels. In fact, their "customer support," "Is there anything else I can help you with?" isn't just bad, it's literally abusive. But they own this many hotels, and anyone else sucks just as loudly.

However.
But.
Etiam si omnes, ego non.

Not long ago, I got an email from Taschen, a publisher of good, artful books. I spend approximately 81.9-percent of my disposable income at Taschen. Because they care.

I think some people with money still care about companies that care. They're tired of lowest common denominator service, products, answers and everything else. They want value--and a little bit of humanity--for their money.

Yes, this is as rarefied as shit gets; $10,000 for a limited edition book. My guess is, however, that Taschen customers see something like this and say, "wow, Taschen is something. Look at this Ferrari book. Their $49 book must be worth it, too."

That used to be a principle of marketing. 

Treat people well. Give them something extraordinary. Make them feel special. Not only will they be rewarded--you, the brand, will be rewarded as well.

I'm afraid those days are all over. 
From the people you buy from.
From the people you work for.
From the people you vote for.
Even the people who heal you when you're sick.

It's no longer 'let's do something beautiful that makes people feel good.' It's 'let's fuck 'em and move on so we can fuck someone else.'

P.S. You really owe it to yourself to watch the 95-second video below on the making of this book. If only to see that chasing minimal viable products is an emblem of sickness in culture, advertising and the world. It's "how much can we get away with?" as opposed to "how can we do it right?"

When you're done with the Taschen video, watch the two-minute Saul Bass video below it. 

It's more important than anything else you'll do today.

Etiam si omnes, ego non.

Because I'm Your Mother That's Why.

Just about every commercial I see being trumpeted on LinkedIn or Agency Spy (I never see anything on real TV that isn't for a telco, an ISP or for a pharmaceutical) seems to be built on the premise that we should believe what brands tell us. That we should trust them.

I don't understand.

They give the viewer no reason to believe. They just expect us to be believe. Without a reason why.

It seems the underlying strategy is "believe us because we're a brand, that's why." Most people--newsflash--distrust brands. All those commercials that open with a brand's logo, just turn people off. 

If you start with the premise that there's no difference between brands so why try to find one, you've just, as far as I'm concerned, thrown in the towel and said, "I believe style is more important than substance." You've also just negated the fundamental core of just about every great ad, commercial or communication that's ever been made.

I just saw this new campaign for Wilkinson Sword, a razor brand I haven't even thought of since the early 1970s, before I started shaving. The commercials aren't bad. But I'm not unhappy with the blades I use. And you've given me absolutely no reason to, in the words of Adam Morgan, upset my dominant complacency. You've given me no sense of doubt that there's something better out there--and why. You've given me no sense that I might be missing out on something.

I'd guess, there's a habitual aspect to buying blades. To some extent, you buy the blades you've always bought. You barely think about it, you barely question your own behavior. Without giving you a reason to question, the Wilkinson Sword commercial above, is as flat as a plate of piss. 

In the words of Carl Ally, it "neither afflicts the comfortable nor comforts the afflicted.

Here's another example. 

Another nice-looking ROE (rectangle of emptiness.)

This is not a great ad. 
It's a nice-looking ad.
But when I go to the store to buy pasta, I will never say, give me the fireworks pasta. Because any pasta could do that ad. Any pasta can wish you happy new year. And any pasta can say--with no ballast--'the choice of Italy'. Generic.

This is a great ad.

And a nice-looking ad.
It's an ad only Porsche could run. 
It has the same essential elements as the Barilla ad above. 
A good photograph. Just a few words.
These words, though, are true. Ownable.
They reinforce the specialness of Porsche.
They separate Porsche from every other car. 
Cars grow old. Porsches appreciate.

Wow.

The essential idea here is simple.
Your ad can have a gimmick. A funny actor, a nice bit or art-direction, a song. Or it can have a soul.

If what your ad has is merely a gimmick, to my eyes it falls under the heading of "because we're a brand, that's why." 

It's buy a Verizon triple-play bundle because we say so. Or Speculum high-speed internet because we say so. Or anything else because we say so.

Without a believable truth, your ad is just a say so.

There's no reason for it to lodge in your brain.

Take it from me.

I've won 16 Effies.

--

By the way, if you still don't get what I mean, not long ago, Dave Dye had a post that included about 100 ads created by Roy Grace. 

This is what I mean.

World on Fire.

If you've read a decent amount of history in your time, you learn things about the world that they don't necessarily teach in history books. 

I should clarify, I don't read history so I know when the War of the Roses was or to learn about Lord Nelson's missing eye.

While I remember dates and treaties and successions and assassins and wars, and while I like knowing the details of history, what really matters--if you're using the past as a tool to understand the present and the future--are trends that are sometimes apparent only if you've read a lot--yes, a lot--of history.

For instance, take the centuries of wars Rome fought against the Carthaginians. Like the European wars in the 19th and 20th Centuries, they happened every thirty years or so. There'd be a grudging peace for a time, and then things would get incendiary again. 

Basically, regardless of Hannibal, the Alps, elephants, Cannae, Scipio Africanus and more, Rome and Carthage were each competing for world domination. Their rivalry was as intense as two tweenage brothers in the backseat of a station-wagon in 1969. It's not going to be quiet in the back, no matter how often dad threatens to stop the car and come back there.

Likewise, Germany fought the rest of Europe three times in 70 years. In 1870, in 1914, and in 1939. Despite massive carnage and literally millions of deaths, the fundamental causes of war remained. Even after defeat, those causes weren't really removed.

You could probably say the same for Israel and whichever middle-eastern state they're currently fighting. Regardless of the deaths, the costs, the anguish and the despoiling, the reasons for fighting don't disappear just because the fighting is over for a time. 

Weirdly, as destructive as war is, peace is also a killer. 

In the case of Rome and Carthage above, once Rome utterly annihilated Carthage, Rome was no longer on their toes. They no longer needed to be at-the-ready. That led--over centuries--to hubris and Rome's decline and demise. 

(Hubris, by the way is not a ritual Jewish circumcision of boys.)

The same is probably happening now to amerika. Without the Soviet Union as a counter-balance, as a nation we've gotten complacent and flabby. We have let our guard down and will eventually pay big time for it. We've grown arrogant and mean. We are bullies without a counter-balancing big kid we have to reckon with.

You can see similar hubris having an impact on Israel. And should Israel be wiped out, without having Israel as a focal point, my guess is the Shia and the Sunni nations will before too many centuries annihilate each other. As Protestants and Catholics tried to do, for so many centuries in the West.

Now, the advertising point.

I'm on the Amtrak to Connecticut as I write this, a monopoly rail system that is antiquated in part because it has no real competition. The roadbed I'm riding on right now as we pass Port Chester, New York, a blighted formerly industrial city on the fetid Long Island Sound, is the same roadbed Italian and Irish immigrants built in the 1840s. It's the same roadbed that the early railroaders built on stolen Indian trails.

Were there competition, Amtrak would have to improve. Even if route 95--built about 75 years ago and hardly widened since then, were somehow adjusted, Amtrak would have to improve. Right now, both ways of travel suck, so neither eats the other's lunch. That's the good thing about nausea. You eat less.

Now we come to the ad industry. What's left of it. Another monopoly controlled industry that is in worse shape today than it was 60 years ago. And because there's no external existential threat, there's no impetus for the moguls who control the industry to revitalize the industry. Besides, the guys (it is all guys) who run the holding companies and use them as their ATMs are all about 60 and all have about $60 million. Or more.

Further, a quick search of WPP's 2023 annual report reveals the report contained 31 mentions of the word "creativity," and 194 mentions of "compensation." It's clear to me where their priorities sit. And frankly, if I had made it to one of those ivory towers, yeah, I'd be the same. I'd grab for all the Mammon I could post-rationalize,

Why rock that gravy boat?

Further, and maybe most pernicious, is the gutting of the trade press and independent journalists who used to look at matters such as these. If no one's around to call you on your bullshit, if you can get away with it, if no one's watching because your shell-game is so well constructed and the haze of fear so impenetrable, you can basically do what you want to do, say what you want to say, and get away with it.

Every statement they issue is a lie. Every thing they do is gaudy over-compensation.

There's no accountability, no competition, no--so-to-speak--celestial book-keeping.

Like the sybaritic Roman empire, like defense contractors who charge $2700 for a hammer, all of this will, someday after I'm dead, collapse under its own weight--as, say, Boeing seems to be doing right now, (though defense contractors never suffer penalties.)

But with no real integrity, it will all be swept under a $72,000 Persian carpet, and no one will be the wiser. Remember John Thain, former head of the New York Stock Exchange and the outrage--or stink--emanating from his interior design? I believe he and his wife, whom I went to high school with, own 25+ acres on the water in Rye--just two miles from the aforementioned Port Chester. They ain't suffering.

But remember the corny words of the great Grantland Rice, a writer no one reads anymore. Who kept things in perspective:

For when the One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name,
He writes - not that you won or lost -
But HOW you played the Game.

Throwing Bricks.

I often say that I'm a lot of clients second call.

They don't call me first because I'm not a normal agency. Or not their normal agency. I don't have legions of texting account people setting up meetings and starting them late.

I don't do 96-page decks.
I don't sit on panels and panelificate.
I don't even have lunch with people. 

They don't call me first because I'm not the easiest person to get along with. I'm fractious, captious and obstreperous. I know that sounds like a Latin law firm, but you get the idea.

They don't call me first because they find me intimidating. Maybe because I use words like fractious, captious and obstreperous.

Mostly, they don't call me first because I'm expensive.

But people do call me.

Out of the blue.
When they're in the red.
Oe their prospects are black.

In fact in the five years since I was shit-canned from Ogilvy for being old, I've tripled my revenue while my guess is they've seen theirs reduced by two-thirds. And during those five years, I haven't made one out-bound new business call.

That's good.

I get one-half of my business through the Ogilvy diaspora. One-half are referrals from current clients. And one-half I get from my blog-posts and ads.

Yeah, I know that's three-halves. Most proper businesses run at 150-percent.

Too often, however, I do get calls that go something like this.

George,

I'm in a jam.

I had a pitch last week and the client loved the work but the work needs work and I need your help.

I don't have a brief.

And the client meeting is in two days.

And I have no money.

Let me take you through this. Though I didn't book any time with you do you have time now to follow my peregrinations as I try to talk you through a 91-page deck and try to tell you what I'm looking for?

Oh, and did I mention the work is due in two days.

I mean I really need it tomorrow.

And I have no money.

But I can't do this and I need your help. It needs your touch. It's really important.

Do you have some time?

Can we talk about this?

Did I mention it's due tomorrow and it's coming out of my pocket and I really have no money?

-- 

I read the book show above not long ago about life on the western frontier of what became the United States back in the late 1600s and early 1700s. 

It was hellish out there in the land of the silver birch and home of the beaver.

The Dutch were nearby. The French were attacking from Canada. And everyone was trying to win the manpower of the thousands of native peoples to tilt the balance of power in their favor. Behind almost every tree--and there were billions of trees--lurked existential threats. No wonder apparitions appeared and so many people started believing in witches. Shit happens when you think the end-times are coming. Shit and tomahawks.

Almost unfathomable to us in a world where waiting one-day to get something you don't need delivered right to your door all the way from China seems unendurable, was the scarcity of everything. Houses were made of wood and mud. Even chimneys were made of wood. Bricks were a luxury good. And if you read about the about of effort that went into making one-thousand bricks you'd understand why.

Bricks were fireproof, but difficult to manufacture and too heavy to transport in sufficient quantities: a single chimney, with adequate foundations, required several tons.... 

So the problem persisted: Springfield needed bricks to prevent fires and upgrade homes, but even securing an irregular supply meant reliance on other towns, whereas Pynchon’s overriding aim was independence from Connecticut and, so far as possible, New England as a whole. There was nothing else for it: Springfield would have to make its own bricks.... This solution was consistent with Pynchon’s methods to date. Whenever the town needed something the Old World took for granted, be it a barrel or a door or a horseshoe, Pynchon would persuade a tradesman to settle there...

Men already in service could be released from their indentures in exchange for a fee or favor offered to their masters. But decent brickmakers were few and far between. Brickmaking was a delicate, almost mysterious art, requiring special skill and years of experience.... 

Most people were about forty steps from even reaching the lowest tier of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Today, so many of my clients--or potential clients--seem to be without bricks and without foundation.

They come to me for bricks. But they take bricks for granted. They want them to be free.

Meanwhile, over at the frighteningly prescient "Economist" magazine, we're told about 400,000 small businesses are opening a month. Sure, plenty of them are probably selling refurbished Tupperware online, or rendered second-hand pastrami fat, but many of them are credible. And they're doing something they can't quite explain. And nobody knows their name. And nobody knows they even exist.

A lot of these 400,000/month seem to call me.

That's good. I appreciate your interest.

Pony up, biyatches. Bricks ain't free.

 

    

40 Minutes.

I arrived, startlingly enough, in Manhattan yesterday afternoon ten minutes early. That's right, the Amtrak pulled in early to Penn Station, slightly ahead of the urine smell which was running fetid. I beat the throng to the escalator and made it out onto Eighth Avenue, just before the drizzle started getting serious.

About nine men hiding behind mustaches got me as I ran to the cab line. 

"Oooooober? Ooooooober?"

The cab line was as still as an oil painting. I scanned down the avenue and saw no cabs coming. They disappear the minute the rain comes.

A guy turned to me.

"The woman at the front of the line said she's been there 30 minutes and it hasn't moved."

I turned to one of the mustasches.

"How much to 83rd and York?"

He typed some numbers into his handheld and turned it around for me to see. It was close to $100 for the four mile trip.

I turned from him.

"I give you twenty-percent discount."

I walked away. 

"How much you want to pay?"

I kept walking, figuring I could grab something dropping a Long Islander off at the Garden, or a Knicks fan since there was a playoff game in just an hour or so. But Seventh Avenue was as jammed as a lower intestine in Boca, so I kept going east. 

"It'll thin out," I assured myself. Not sure, really, if my extraordinarily good kab-karma had been hexed since I was sentenced to the littoral life on Connecticut's Gingham Coast. 

I made it up to 35th and was still heading east toward Fifth Avenue. An empty cab steamed by and I gave him my best Yankee Stadium hotdog vendor, a deep diaphragm bellow, but he missed me. He must have been listening to some over-produced auto-tuned shit of someone screaming hotdog, because he missed me like I had hit 110 decibels.

I cursed myself like Job. "That's probably the last cab between here and Yonkers," I Chandlered. "I might wind up walking home."

But seconds later, I summoned Luciano Pavarotti again selling hotdogs during a twin bill and a Ford Transit van stopped mid-block.

The cabbie had dreadlocks but rather than Ska on the radio, some Coltrane was playing. I gave him my address, repeating it three times so he'd get it once, and he meandered his way against traffic like a disoriented salmon looking to spawn against all odds. After three blocks heading east we hit Park Avenue, and against my better judgment he took it up town.

"Is this WBGO?" I asked him. Not realizing mentioning a terrestrial radio station's call letters put me closer in age to Napoleon than to Taylor Swift. 

Now Ella was singing "Birds Do It," as we inched into the 40s. The streets, not the decade.

"It's Spoootifiii," he said with a lilt. "You pooot on Jazz, you get beautiful."

Sinatra came on next, "My Way," if I remember right. Then something by Chet Baker with a lot of falsetto and even more trumpet. Before too many blocks passed, Dionne Warwick was ironyizing me. She was singing "Just Walk On By," as we moved at about four-miles-per.

These days, the meter drop in a New York City cab, laden with about 17 different covid and gasoline and green-related and congestion-pricing surcharges is close to ten dollars. They try to hide the fare from you. You can't really see the driver's meter anymore. The screen in the passenger section displays the price but not in a logical place, and in about six point type. The old mechanical meters probably used 90-point type and you heard a loud mechanical click every time the enamel numbers spun a turn.

I spent the first 58-years of my life never hearing the words "user interface." Now, at least in advertising, it's all you hear, and as far as I can tell, every such user interface is about 97.6-percent illegible.

We finally made it to my neighborhood. I got out, as I almost always do, a block away from my house. An old hoodlum trick, lest someone know when you live. The fare, with a nine-dollar tip came to a ludicrous fifty-dollars. Pre-pandemic, it would have been half that. Pre-21st Century, it would have been seven-bucks.

"Thanks for the Jazz," I quicklied, as I got out of the car mid- block.

"Spoootifiii," he answered and laughed a laugh.

The rain was coming harder now, and I walked into my building. One of the tiny doormen was there, asleep on his stool, even though it was only seven pm, ostensibly a busy time for doormen. 

I made it to the door before he made it to his 38th-wink. I picked up the Chinese I had ordered as my Amtrak creeped through Long Island City, Queens. It was still hot when I got upstairs to my apartment, and it was almost time for the Knicks, who won last night going away, in something of a rout.

In a minute, when I'm done writing this post, I'll microwave the leftovers for lunch.

Thanks for reading.

And not just walking on by.

The Comedy of Tragedy.

It's sad to me that there are people who really really love movies and they don't know Preston Sturges. 

That's like loving theater and not knowing Shakespeare. Or admiring vapid and missing kardashia.

Sturges made more great funny movies than anyone this side of Billy Wilder, or Mel Brooks, or Woody Allen. Don't go all triggery on me. As a society we have to learn to separate the artist from the art.

Preston Sturges made a handful of my favorite movies. Four out of the AFI's top 100--a list afflicted with a severe recency bias:
Sullivan's Travels.
The Palm Beach Story.
The Lady Eve.
Hail The Conquering Hero.
Christmas in July.
Miracle at Morgan's Creek.
The Great McGinty.
The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.

The last, Diddlebock, contains what I consider are the greatest 25 minutes in American movie history. And the greatest "bar scene" ever, below. That conviction is worth approximately the same as the value Alben Barclay put on the Vice Presidency. It's worth a bucket of warm spit. Only he didn't say spit. He used a word that rhymed with spit.

But that ain't the point today. 

The point is the clip above and its line of dialogue: "That's one of the tragedies in this life that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous."

There's a malady in business today.

Everybody wants advertising, but no one wants to pay for it. 

My solipsistic translation of Sturges' line above is this: "That's one of the tragedies in this life that the clients who are most in need of advertising are always the poorest."

If, god forbid, I was ever again to have a senior role in an ad agency, I'd derive a certain rule. 

I'd never hire a senior person who hadn't spent some time running their own business. Now that I'm five years in, and so far, not failing, I've learned that doing the creative work is only a small part of being important--even vital--to clients. The toughest part of running your own agency is proving to clients that for every dollar they spend on advertising, they get at least a dollar and one cent back.

We're living, we're told, in an entrepreneurial era. As the giant oligopolistic holding companies come tumbling down like Poe's House of Usher, more and more veritable non-entities like myself are opening up their own agencies. That's good and adds to the vivacity of the world. It's like back in the 15th Century when Portuguese explorers opened new routes to the Spice Islands.

However, what makes the independence thing hard--and in twenty or fifty years when we reflect on this benighted era--some MBA will say, "virtually every business underspent on marketing."

Look for that on the cover of HBR or Inc. in 2070. The problem is, it's gnawing on my bank account now.

1. No one can buy what they don't know exists.

2. About ten-million brands and twenty-million agendas are      competing for peoples' attention.

3. See #1.

4. Without advertising, no one knows you exist. But, those most in need are most unknown.

5. See #1 again.

6. Call me.