Graphing Pastrami.

I had a client call the other morning at 7AM. It was our first substantive meeting, where we talked about work, not how much it would cost, and when I'd deliver. In this meeting we were to talk about the information I needed to do the work they wanted.

To me, it's always a good sign when a client wants a call at 7 in the morning. Especially if some of the clients are out in San Francisco--and they're on the call at 4AM their time. It shows they're not dilettantes. That they want to be there.

When you run your own business--and you're working with clients who don't have giant marketing departments--you look for signs like that. If they're willing to get on the phone early in the morning, it shows they're serious. They regard ads as being important. A value, not just a cost.

If I were a car salesman, I'd look for similar signals. If someone drove in in a jalopy, or with their kids in tow, I'd figure I had a hot prospect. If they came alone in a 2023 Mercedes S-Class with 5200 miles on the odometer, I'd figure I had someone who was just killing time. Likewise if I was a meat-cutter at Katz's, I'd pay a lot more attention to fat people.

Early on in the call, I drew the schematic above and shared it with my client over Zoom. 

I was flying solo on this call and to be clear I didn't really know what my new client did or made or provided or offered. But my Account Director had sent them a nice scope and they signed it within minutes of receiving it. Those aren't calls I tend to be dilatory about.

I said to them, all in an effort to wrap my head around their selling proposition, "most things you engage in--or don't engage in follow this chart. Now, I just drew it, so it might not be 100-percent right. But I'm just thinking right now.

"Say point #1 is your new expensively produced YouTube video or the new restaurant you opened up. It starts off pretty good. It's shiny and new and good-to-look-at and people flock to it."

They grasped the metaphor. Another good sign when you're working with me. Metaphors explain life. They're often how we can make visceral the difference a brand or a product provides.

"By point 2," I continued, "most people are bored. You know all those commercials for expensive cars which have a raindrop meandering down a window for 20 seconds with the reflection of a high-cheek-boned model looking for her kids to run in from soccer practice? It looks good for a few seconds but someone--the agency, the ECD, the CCO, the Global CCO, the worldwide Global CCO of the Americas, the Chief Borderless Creativity Officer, someone--forgot that things--even one-liners have to go somewhere. Otherwise, people get bored. 

People from Atlanta, San Francisco, Austin and Singapore nodded via Zoom. 

"Susan Sarandon, Baseball Annie in Bull Durham, said 'a man will listen to anything if he thinks it's foreplay.' But most messages have the suspense, meaning and payoff equivalent to the instructions on a package of microwave popcorn. They're not interesting."

Again I got Zoom-nodding across 8,000 miles of our planet.

"By point 3, you've lost 97-percent of everyone you started with. Even your spouse and your parents have dropped off by now. You've bored people.

"And by point 4, you're in even worse shape. You haven't just bored people. You've lost them forever. You've pissed them off. You've annoyed them. Shouted at them. Failed to deliver. Lied."

The Zoom was tsk-ing internationally.

"That's what happens in most relationships--with companies, with brands, interpersonally. They don't do what they say they're going to do."

I was warmed up by now and I was cooking with solar-power.

"If you lay on-top of my schematic Gartner's "Hype Cycle," you've really got the nub of the problem. Take software for instance, or your VCR or your car's navigation system. You're told how amazing and transformational it will be. You're told how it can do absolutely everything for you from filing your nails to filing your taxes to walking the dog. Then in about a day, you realize the whole damn thing is a crock and you'd have to be the bastard spawn of Richard Feynman crossed with Stephen Hawking to figure out how to turn it on.

"That's the problem you're solving," I ended. "That's what your company does. You make the things that don't really work despite all the fanfare, you make them work. You deliver the things other people only say they can deliver."

The call ended not long after I finished.

Every once-in-a-while I actually believe I'm good at my job.

No Difference.

In my long days and nights in advertising, I've never worked for a client who thought they had money to squander.

Usually, even the biggest clients lament not having all the money they want to do all the things they want to do to sell whatever it is they're charged with selling. (Or, these days, not selling.)

But more and more, to my old and increasingly glaucoma'd eyes, selling and advertising don't seem to be connected. Just like, too often, baseball seems more about obscure statistics than who wins the most games, and politics seems to be more about crowd-sizes than governing, advertising seems to be about stupid human tricks that have little or no bearing on the success of the brand propagating the tricks.

The two examples above arrived in my inbox within minutes of each other on Friday, September 20th. I rolled my eyes when I saw the Hellman's stunt. Then when I saw the goldfish stunt, I checked to make sure it wasn't my eyes or my memory playing tricks on me.

I realize now that the goldfish thing is a quirk of the designer, Kate Barton. While the mayonnaise thing is a quirk of an ad agency. So maybe this comparison really is apples and oranges or, yuck, goldfish and mayonnaise. But the point remains.

Maybe Andy Warhol really did say "in the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." But whether he said it or not is not the issue.

That we in advertising crave 15-minutes of fame for our brand is the issue. In short, we seem to have forgotten that when the ad industry was most valued by those who most value brands, we did not focus on creating brief spasms of notoriety. A brand is not a epileptic seizure--something that gains great attention, is usually harmful, and is something you'd rather not think about.

A brand is meant to be a promise. 
Something you can count on.
Something that "does what it says on the tin."
A brand is meant to have meaning so it can stand out from the scores of products or services or people who do roughly the same thing, usually for less money.

I'd be damned if today there are ten (non-monopoly) brands that actually stand for something. That is, ten brands with meaning. That is, ten brands you can actually count on. That is, ten brands you might feel loyal toward.

There are all sorts of pundits infesting the vast social-media sick ward who will pompousicate about how today's consumer (whatever we're calling them today, GenX, Y, Z, K, GenLSMFT) has no loyalty to any brand.

No one says, wait: No brands are giving people reasons to be loyal. No brands are even giving people reasons why they exist. Instead, they're stunting and handbagging and doing stupid brand tricks.

As an industry, we're confused. We think it's about momentary fame. Not long-lasting meaning. We're not supposed to make "one-hit wonders." We're supposed to make the Beatles.

Covered in my blanket statement about the flaccid condition of most brands, are agency/holding company brands. Like all cars, all QSRs, all ISPs, all airlines, telcos, hamburger places, Caribbean resorts, hotel chains, vacation destinations, movies and broadway shows, no one tells you anything about anything. They just tell you that they're award-winning and won some unreasonable number of meaningless stars. No one tells you what they do and why they might be worth choosing.

Reason why? Naw. 
More like Reason, why bother. 
That's work. 

And it doesn't get press.

It's the work, the training, the rewriting, the thinking, the behavior that makes a brand. Not the stunt.

As Alben Barkley reputedly once said about the Vice Presidency, I'll say about 99-percent of advertising: It's not worth a bucket of warm spit.

Which is how I feel about a mayonnaise handbag. 

Or another triple-play bundle, or another insurance product I don't want or need. With a funny commercial that doesn't make me laugh. Not to mention the hundreds of billions spent advertising adverse-reaction-causing pharmaceutical products that would be superfluous if everyone wasn't between 30 and 75 lbs. overweight.

--

BTW, maybe we should read the copy in the BMW ad above. That ad not only sold me a BMW or two. It sold me an industry.

Considering the number of new cars that look strangely similar to to BMW 325e, the traditional production line is fast turning into a reproduction line.

Being the role model for an entire generation of inexact clones is flattering for us, but hardly reassuring for a driver, especially at 55 mph. Simply building a look-alike requires only a few months. Building an authentic BMW 325e necessitates a heritage spanning 57 years.

The latest example of that heritage can be found under the 325e's hood. There resides an in-line 6-cylinder, electronically fuel-injected Eta power plant that "during cranking...sounds like an expensive aircraft engine." (Car and Driver.)

And the 325e takes off almost as fast. It has a remarkable 0-60 time of 9.4 seconds. That time is all the more remarkable because it's combined with an EPA-estimated 21 mpg, 28 highway. 

All of this muscle is supervised by the same kind of computerized engine management system found in a BMW-powered Grand Prix champion race car.

Disc brakes are standard on all four wheels and are vented in the front to further reduce fade.

BMW's innovative Service Interval Indicator informs the drive when service is recommended under real conditions, not just when the manual indicates. And its onboard computer can be programmed to even provide anti-theft protection.

All of these innovative systems demonstrate the basic difference between an authentic BMW 325e and a genuine copy. One is a finely tuned, evolutionary machine with parts and pieces created by some of the automotive world's greatest innovators.

While the other was created by some of its greatest emulators.

Writing. Writing. Writing.

As I wrote about late last week, on Wednesday, September 18th, I had breakfast with my last official boss in the business. And less than three hours after wiping the egg off my face, I had a two-hour zoom call with my first official boss in the business.

There's something marvelous about that symmetry. Having been first hired by a great advertising writer in the early 1980s, and fading into the fog with another great advertising writer in the mid 2020s.

Marshall, my first boss, went on to write best-selling novels, TV shows, even feature movies.

He called me because he has a new book coming out--in about six months--and he wondered if I can help come up with an ad campaign for it. Marshall's had a #1 New York Times best-seller with his name alongside James Paterson. Now he wants a number one best-seller sans sidekick.

Steve, called me a few weeks ago to help on an assignment. One of those all too typical contemporary assignments where the client needs a ton of work and they have an ounce of time. While there's more to me than being a crunch-time kind of writer, I'm a crunch-time kind of writer. 

Chris Wall used to say the best way to rate a creative person is to pose a question: It's Friday and the pitch is Monday. Do you want them in on the weekend. I've always been one of those people you call in that situation. 

It bothers me somewhat. Just like if I were in the army, I'd hate to be the guy who always gets stuck with 33-seconds to defuse a bomb. But you generally get well-paid for that particular skill. Or maimed. Whichever comes second.

It's been a full 40 years between the time I started working for Marshall and the assignment I just wrapped up with Steve. 

40 years is a long time in any business.

My baseball hero was Minnie Minoso. He wound up playing five decades in the major leagues. I've decided to endure my way and try to make it to six decades in advertising. I've made it five: the 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, 20s. In six years, 2030, I'll be 73, I'll make my sixth decade. Don't bet against me. 

Though you could bet against the world surviving that long.

When I think about my difference between me as a writer when I worked for Marshall and me as I writer when I work with Steve, I can't help but think about this information graphic that breaks down how Beethoven apportioned his days and nights.

When I worked for Marshall, I was scared.

Unlike Beethoven--as indicated by the green arc above--I rarely had a skein of eight hours when I just wrote. I was too young. Too nervous. 

I relied too much on others. So I sat with my art partner and tried to come up with ideas.

It would take me a week sometimes to come up with the requisite ten headlines it took to make a meeting. 

Since my Steve era I have learned a lot.

First, I've inculcated the old carpenter's mantra. "Measure twice, cut once." In other words, I don't consider a job briefed, or started or worth working on until I can say in six or eight simple words anyone can understand, what the product or brand I'm working on actually does and does better or differently. 

If you can't do that, you're wasting time. 

Along the way, my friend Rob taught me a discipline. Try to work out for whatever you're working on an F.O.B. A First. An Only. A Best. 

That's hard-work and should make you sweat. But it helps the client. It helps the agency. And it helps make better ads. Also, to be dumb about it, once you've worked out an FOB, you've got your copy, the website and half-a-dozen client powerpoints 90-percent doped out.

Once I have those six or eight plain English words written down, I go to work. I no longer have to think about the brief. Or the 91 people telling me the 191 things my ads have to do and the 1191 different demographic types they need to reach or the 11,191 ways I'm out of scope and haven't done my timesheets.

No, with my six or eight plain English words I can rebuff that second-guessing nonsense and fear.

Then I just start writing. 

I take the words and I rewrite them.
And I rewrite them. 
And I rewrite them.
And I rewrite them.

I rhyme them.
I write them backwards.
I write them upside down.
I rewrite them funny.
Scary.
Silly.
Punny.

I rewrite them as many different ways as I can imagine rewriting them. I rewrite them incomplete. I rewrite them in acronyms. I rewrite unrequitedly. 

Mostly I rewrite those six or eight plain English words until I get them to a place where no one has ever arranged words in that way before. Until I get someone to laugh about something like Robotic Process Automation. Or until I've squeezed them so tightly, they become succinct and memorable.

Often I think of a short poem by Ogden Nash that in four syllables explains the descent of man better than Charles Darwin ever did.

Fleas

Adam
Had'em

Or a poem by David McCord about dying. It was taught to me by my oldest closest friend who died almost four years ago. What a way to say goodbye. With a memory, a laugh, and a heart-ache.

Epitaph on a Waiter 

By and by
God caught his eye.

If you can write about evolution and death with such brevity and memorability, most advertising shouldn't be that daunting.

I've also got a passel of great ads I love to check myself against if my head needs whacking. Things by Trott, or Abbott, or McCabe, or Puris, or Hayden. Things that are so smart and good they're almost cruel in how they make you want to live up to them.

I go through all that.

I look at my six or eight plain English words and I keep writing. And rewriting.

If I feel I'm writing too much, I stop myself and say, "you're a writer, write." And I keep going.

Other writers, I'm sure, do things differently.

This isn't a guide.

It's nothing but how I've filled this space for almost 7,000 days in a row.

Twenty Questions Pitch Consultants Never Ask but Should.

As a life-long denizen of the ad industry, I've never seen the industry in such a parlous state. The work we do seems more and more inconsequential. It seems less and less important to the people who pay for it or who nominally are supposed to be paying attention to it. And while the industry contracts, it seems bent on awarding itself while it fades away. 

Yet none of this is talked about, much less addressed. And when there is a pitch, pitch consultants seem to guide agencies from same-old to new same-old, perpetuating our demise. 

What if we chose new agencies differently? What if we thought about the business--and what it's meant to do in a way that was liberating, not vise-like.

Nah. Collect your bonus. And your grift.

1. 
   
   
   What is your agency's attrition rate?
   
   
2. What percentage of your creative department has more than five years of advertising experience?
   
   
3. What percentage of people who attend pitch meetings wind up working on the businesses they pitch?
   
   
4. How many people stay with your agency more than three years?
   
   
5. How many clients stay with your agency more than three years?
   
   
6. What is the average number of agency people you bring to a client meeting?
   
   
7. What is the percentage of people in your agency over 50?
   
   
8. How does that jibe with the Inclusion part of DEI?
   
   
9. What is the ratio between CEO pay and the pay of your median employee?
   
   
10. How does that jibe with the Equity part of DEI?
    
    
11. Most often you're hired to help clients grow. By what percentage is your business growing?
    
    
12. Do your executives have offices and your workers sit out in the open like 99-percent of all other employees?
    
    
13. How many CEOs does your agency employ, please count all your constituent parts?
    
    
14. How many Presidents does your agency employ, please count all your constituent parts?
    
    
15. How many CCOs does your agency employ, please count all your constituent parts?
    
    
16. How many agencies a year does your agency purchase?
    
    
17. How many people do you employ today versus five years ago?
    
    
18. What is your revenue today versus five years ago?
    
    
19. What percentage of your creative department is freelance?
    
    
20. Do you have more project managers than people actually doing the projects purportedly in need of management?
    
    
21. What is your agency most proud of?
    
    
22. What percentage of your employees deal with the "Sunday Scaries"?
    
    
23. When was the last time one of your employees had a good day?
    
    
24. When was the last time one of your employees got a raise by not threatening to quit?

22 Stupid Random Thoughts.

1. I spend more time updating my Zoom than I spend on Zoom. That's probably a good thing.
   
   
2. Calling Zoom 'Zoom' is like naming your pet snail "Rocket." The time spent to things accomplished ratio ain't great.
   
   
3. Why has every day, every month and almost every square inch of amerika been given over to some sort of promotion? As I write this, I'm told it's National Cheeseburger Day.
   
   
   
   
   
4. Firing 10,000 people and calling it "furloughing" isn't fooling anyone.
   
   
5. Firing one person and calling it "furloughing" isn't fooling anyone, either.
   
   
6. I wonder if Harris-Walz would cinch the election if they came in pumpkin spice.
   
   
7. You really owe it to yourself to spend 90 minutes and watch Preston Sturges' 1940 movie, "The Great McGinty." This is the prologue. Which should convince you. Below, the cover art. Which should convince you.
   
   
8. 
   Chances are the Fed's rate cut will induce the holding companies the "furlough" more people.
   
   
9. A rate rise would do exactly the same. As would leaving rates alone.
   
   
10. As politicians ask are you better off than you were four years ago, is your ad agency? Is your agency better than it was four minutes ago?
    
    
11. The world was better before everyone had to signal their politics via a cheap enamel pin on their lapels. 
    
    
12. Years ago I believed New York had one Chinese kitchenthat was connected to thousands of restaurants via an underground labyrinth.
    
    
13. That's how I feel about agency Chief Strategy Officers today. There seems to be a central clearinghouse for generic insights.
    
    
14. 
    
    
    If Agency Spy calls a new campaign "wacky" you can be sure it's not. 
    
    
15. I don't think you're supposed to use the word wacky without irony. Wacky is a level beneath madcap.
    
    
16. Anyone who says "I'm excited for where that's going," or "That's a good question," or "We're on a journey," is full of shit.
    
    
17. I trust no one who has a strong feeling about the Oxford comma. Or candy corn. 
    
    
18. Or anyone who says they work at an intersection. Unless they're a traffic cop.
    
    
    
    
    
19. For those of you not interested in toning your upper body by toting around Robert Caro's 1975 Pulitzer-winning 1,298-page biography of Robert Moses, "The Power Broker," it's finally available on Kindle.
    
    
20. On Wednesday, I had breakfast with my last advertising boss and a two-hour zoom call with my first advertising boss.
    
    
21.  I just finished an assignment with one and I'm starting an assignment with the other.
    
    
22. I count that as good fortune.

What Color is Your Mongongo Nut?

I think a lot about work. Not just what we're working on. But how we actually work when we're working.

Some years ago, I pie-charted how I spent my days when I was within a giant ad agency. Sure, you can say I'm bitter and angry and have an axe to grind.

That doesn't mean I'm not right. 

It seems to me--and this is based on a lifetime of seeing and living--we spend more time perseverating about work than actually working, actually getting things done. Fear eats our souls and sucks our creativity and saps our daring. 

That's on a good day.

Now and then, I'll read something by real anthropologists about how they might measure the affluence of a society. Often they don't calculate how many Mercedes-Benzs they have in how many driveways. They measure affluence by calculating how many hours a day it takes to gather the sustenance the people need to live.

By that measure, seemingly with more and more people working more and more hours for a more and more shaky livelihood, something is rotten in the state of the State. Last week alone there were a couple dozen articles about declining birth-rates, the pressures on parents and the rise in numbers of people living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Then there are the !Kung-San. 

They for live in what we would regard as an extremely adverse environment--on the western edge of the Kalahari desert. Yet they spend only a few hours a day gathering food. Mostly they sleep, chat with each other, gamble, tell stories and visit friends and relatives and carry out trance rituals.

The !Kung-San have such luxury, because they are blessed with something called the mongongo nut (Ricinodendron rautanenii schinz). An average daily intake of just 300 nuts provides 1,260 calories and 56 g (2 oz) of protein per person, five times the calories and ten times the proteins per cooked weight of cereal crops. They don't have to eat a lot or gather a lot to nourish themselves.

Lately, I've been working on a new client and I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how people work. Or, more specifically, how people spend their time at work. 

There's so much talk about innovation and productivity, but very little measurement of how much time we spend on either.

Microsoft tries to give you a calculus of how much time you spend writing whatever it is you're writing, but they're almost invariably off--usually by a factor of ten. I've never written anything this fast in my entire career:

These days, it's my belief, that the innovations in our world and in our business, don't come from the giant companies we grew up with. They come from the thousands of start-ups that are starting every year who are trying to breakthrough by breaking the hold of the status-quo.

Most everyone else spends their days not thinking or creating or gathering mongongo nuts, they spend their time fretting, worrying about when the footsteps down the hallway are coming for them, when the potentates who make an average of 300 times their median salary decide to toll the last ding-dong of doom and they're out on their adipose with no social safety net to break their fall.

There are those finding different courses. They're starting their own thing, or joining a start-up. There's a burgeoning of such companies, journals like the Economist report.

Many of these start-ups--not thousands, but dozens--call GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. Maybe because I seem to be working a little harder, a little faster, and a little more incisively than so many other agencies. 

Maybe I've found, somehow, somewhere, my own advertising mongongo nut. That's not to say I work only a few hours a day like the !Kung-San. But somehow, I have mongongo'd my working style.

I don't spend hours at a stretch worrying about the seventeen rounds of reviews I have to endure. Not to make work better, just to have the work under the control of a higher-up who's threatened. I don't spend hours on energy-sapping tasks that add nothing but an impecunious parsimony to the world. I don't spend days on end making fake work to win-over a fake jury in a fake award show and then spend more days on end making videos to promote the concocted videos that started the whole charade.

Further, somehow with the absence of fear, constipation--the bane of so many creatives--has disappeared. If earlier in my career I was tapped out after three ads or five, today I can sit down and write 50 or 100. I can keep trying something new, something upside-down, something different without the fear of being larfed at.

Somehow, lack of fear turns into a mongongo nut.

It's highly nutritious. It's tasty. It's satisfying. It's energizing.  

Those psychic mongongo nuts have sprouted since I started  working for myself. And they've allowed me to gain the ears of CEOs and CMOs and focus my energies and help dozens of companies figure out what makes them different, what makes them interesting, what makes them kick-ass. 

Maybe at the ripe old age of 66--almost five years after I was fired for making Ogilvy too much money--I've discovered not the Fountain of Youth, like the one de Soto searched for, but instead, the tree of mongongo of the !Kung-San.

I'm sticking with that for now.

Just call me !GeorgeCo.

The Fault Lies Not in the Goldfish, but in Ourselves.

As a creative person and a copywriter, I have a terrible belief. 

Unlike so many clients and so many of my colleagues, I don't blame people for their short attention spans. I don't blame people for not reading. I don't blame people for not caring. 

I blame us.

Not to terribly long ago I read this book: "The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction." 

The book covers a period known to people even more esoteric than I, called Late Antiquity, roughly between 300AD and 900AD. That's so long ago, they didn't even have bagel Wednesdays or casual Fridays. 

Back in those days a lot of people were seeking connection with their god through contemplation. Interruption was dangerous; it kept them from the divine. It didn't merely keep them from buying your client's brand of mayonnaise, it kept them from salvation and potentially dropped them instead in a burning lake or perdition.

Your timesheets are late

.

Monks worked hard at learning to concentrate, to banish thoughts of all things unholy, even food and cleanliness, from their daily lives.

Concentration = salvation.

In other words, attention spans were not just a matter for powerpoint proclamations and ad agencies. Attention spans were a matter of (eternal) life and death.

The elite (in the Late Antiquity, holy people) have always decried humanity's susceptibility to distraction. In monkish parlance, "Habent operam spatium hippurus." People have the attention span of a goldfish.

Today, it seems that every commercial I see, no matter where I see it, seeks to overcome mankind's purportedly recently-arrived attention deficit disorder by having the VO shout at people, by employing asinine stuntification, or via a too-hot mix and a music track that tries to ear-inveigle its way into your frontal lobes.

WE HAVE TO SHOUT AND PANDER TO THE LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR BECAUSE OF THE FAULT TO OUR AUDIENCE WHO HAVE NO ATTENTION SPANS!!!!!

No one says,

IT'S OUR JOB TO DO SOMETHING INTERESTING AND IMPORTANT ENOUGH SO THAT PEOPLE WANT TO PAY ATTENTION.

So no one is kind to the viewer anymore. No one gives them something interesting to look at, savor, enjoy, learn from.

Our job can be simply described.

It's to create lust for things people very often don't think about. They don't have time to think about. Or they don't know why they should think about.

Our job is to find things that make things--even seemingly unimportant things--interesting. It's the same job a movie director has. Or a painter. Or a war correspondent. 

It's not the thing. It's how you tell the thing.

Robert Capa, maybe the most-noted war correspondent ever once said, "if you're pictures aren't good enough, get closer."

He never said, "Jeez. This is such a boring war."

He got closer.

Consider that creative direction.

What follows are not too long to read:

Everyone's heard the story before. 

How do you find a different way to tell it?

When John Kennedy was assassinated, there was, as you might expect, a lot of coverage. Every creditable newspaper covered it. Every news magazine. Every television network. 

Here's a brief synopsis of what New York Herald Tribune writer, Jimmy Breslin did to get people to read him, not anyone else. Update Breslin by 60 years, this is what he did to get clicks. Or eyeballs. Or to combat "goldfish attention-spans."

It's not the thing. It's how you tell the thing.

He thinked.

He angled.

He was interesting.

My Morning [_______________.}

The increasing usage of the phrase "Artificial Intelligence."

Even in what used to be called the advertising industry, which is not supposed to be about intelligence, or data, or science, or technology, we all spend too much time talking about talking about those things. 

We'll do everything we can to try to reach people more effectively, except focus on what reaches people, which is things that are interesting, funny, beautiful or, simply, different. The same things that have always reached people. A bonafide interesting story, well told.

It seems that WPP is buying seven new agencies a week and hiring a CEO for every day of the year so they can pretend they still have a viable business. Let me clarify, so they can pretend they still have a viable business after firing all the creative people who at one time made their business viable.

They invest more in data than they do in art. The entire industry does. And then they say, "there's a flaw in the algorithm. That's why people are blocking our ads." Or they say, "Generation G abjures advertising." They never say, "our ads suck, that's why no one pays attention." Or "our ads are as flat as a plate of piss."

More creative people, more agencies, more clients, more brands are talking about artificial intelligence than about laughter or a good joke they heard or even a rainbow they saw one afternoon. 

I don't understand why we're not talking about the amazing, stirring, 'holy-shit-did-you-see-that' things that are all around us.

As Joyce Kilmer never wrote:

"I think that I shall never see,

An ad made interesting algorithmically.
Unless, in fact, we use our head,
The industry is wholly dead. "

On Monday, September 9th, I read about this book below, "1001 Movie Posters." On Monday, September 9th, I ordered this book below, "1001 Movie Posters." On Friday, September 13th, I received this book below, "1001 Movie Posters."

I suppose for some it might be considered prohibitively expensive. It cost me about $70. Roughly, in my estimate, what the average hipster pays per week for chain-store coffee. Or what they pay for two drinks at an expense-account private-banker bar in New York.

I throw nickels around like manhole covers but I couldn't see any good reason for not buying "1001 Movie Posters." If it extends my useful career for ten minutes, it's paid for itself.

Three points here today.

One. Human intelligence trumps the artificial sort. Laughter trumps almost everything. 

Two. Books, which organize and make tactile information, trump digital renditions. You can hold beauty in your hands, not see it through a veil of pixels. And

Three. From a communications point of view, 99-percent of advertising and marketing practitioners have forgotten what is evident in the 1001 posters, some of which I've pasted below. Effective communications generally are made with:

a) Stunning design--you haven't seen before.
b) Memorable type/copy.
c) Design hierarchy.

About 99-percent of the websites and ads I see online have none of the a,b,c I've written above. They're just a hodgepodge of A.I. spin-art that made a committee of degree-holders happy. They're a tale told by a committee-iot, full of compromise and bad taste, signifying an abuse of  the viewer.

Why is every online ad--and every TV commercial--so devoid of the a,b,c above. Oh. It's gone through seventeen rounds of approval and it's enhanced by research, data, best practices and AI. Even ads by ad agencies advertising for creative people look like they were designed by a short-bus bot. See above.

If you want to do good work look at good work. Not just what won purported awards from a purported award show. Work that lit fires and stirred souls.

Usually if I have a call early in the morning, someone on the call says, "I haven't had my caffeine yet." 

I wish I heard people say, "I haven't heard any Brückner, yet."

Or "I haven't looked at a Klimt, yet." Or "I haven't read any John O'Hara, yet."

Those things can wake you up, too.

And should.