Peregrinations.

One of the blessings (and curses) bestowed upon me by my creator was what today is called an eidetic memory. I grew up hearing I had a photographic memory. But just as we've fuck-up-ter-ized "shell shock" into "post traumatic stress syndrome," we've taken a visual phrase like photographic and clinicalized it into near-meaningless-ness.

In other words, societally, we've taken the bite out of language, art, communication and nearly everything else. So nothing has meaning. The better to obscure with. 

Even calling jeffrey epstein and his many accomplices "sex traffickers" obscures. They should be called "child rapers." Words should be like shivs. As Carl Ally the advertising man said, good ads "should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

BTW, the democratic party should learn this before the next cycle of elections. tump's $4,000,000,000,000 tax cut for the five-thousand richest amerkins comes at the expense of 42 million americans who need help buying food. Or roads that aren't potholed. Or schools that teach. Or air that's breathable. Or any number of things functioning governments deliver for the people they are elected to lead not bleed.

Here's a free one democratic party: "republican reverse robin-hooding. They steal from the poor and bestow upon the fat and wealthy." Repeat republican reverse robin-hooding eighteen times a day from now to the mid-terms and then 36 times a day through to the 2028 election.

Somehow on Saturday after a rough twelve-day week of work, the title above broke loose from its axon anchorage and knocked on my frontal lobes.

I have no idea how or why. Some sort of cerebral butterfly effect where a sneeze somewhere set off an avalanche of consequences and made me think of an obscure Broadway show from the 1960s that had somehow lived rent free in my brain since Lyndon Johnson was president.

I looked up "Oh Dad, Poor Dad," as we can and do now and came upon these fabulous posters and the even more adroit copy:

If Herman Melville had a child with Sigmund Freud they could not have come up with this.

Switching gears, but sticking with Melville, a lot of people know "Moby Dick" begins with the words, "Call me Ishmael." Very few people know the title of Moby Dick's first chapter: "Loomings." And too few know the power of these words: "a damp, drizzly November in my soul;" 

As the hipsters say, "like wow, man."

Damp and drizzly.
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Again switching gears--

I noticed this caption late last week in the cheery neo-fascist Wall Street Journal. Such is the nature of our era: We herald the "next" big thing. But we can't show a real picture of it because, just maybe, it's not really real. So though the article says Quantinuum is "unveiling its latest system," they can show us a only a rendering.

By that measure, allow me to unveil the latest rendering of me and a rendering of my abs. If you're building something and showing a picture of it, you're obliged by simple human decency to show an actual picture.

--

Again, switching gears:

Ten Things to Doubt.

1. Anyone who says any "thing" is dead.

2. Anyone who says any "thing" is broken.

3. Anyone who accepts awards for work that never ran.

4. Anyone who allows concocted work to be "awards-worthy."

5. Any advertising that doesn't solve a business problem.

6. Anyone who issues blanket statements like "it's a creator economy."

7. Salary ranges in online ads.

8. Products you have to "ask your doctor" about.

9. Anyone who calls themselves a "story-teller."

10. Lists.

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Again, switching gears:

In England in 1609 (around the time I got my first ad agency job) a book titled "Newes from Sea, of Two Notorious Pirates, Ward the Englishman and Danseker the Dutchman, with a True Relation of All or the Most Piracies by Them Committed unto the 6th of April 1609" was one of that nation's best-selling books.

It outsold a little thing called "King Lear.”

--

Again, switching gears:

In 1817, this book was published. It was an immediate sensation, and in a nation with about nine-million people, it sold almost one-million copies in twenty-eight editions. Abraham Lincoln called it one of the three most-influential books in his life. The other two were the Bible and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. 

You can buy it on Amazon for $9 in Swindle e-reader form, or about $30 in hardcover. If you just got paid, you can buy a leather-bound first edition on abebooks.com for just $1500.00 plus $6 for shipping.

BTW, Melville's "Typee" will run you the price of a mediocre C-suite bonus. But they'll toss in free-shipping.

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And this is good. The dulling of the mind courtesy of Linked In. I need affirmations like this like I need to find half a worm in an apple. The Economist article below has a nice spoof of this public masturbatory aggrandizement below. I am currently disconnecting with everyone who posts or likes shit like this.

A 9000-Years History of Humans and Advertising.

In Williamsburg this room would be $4700/month + utilities.

If you can roll back the clock to say about 9,000 years and if you somehow find yourself in Çatalhöyük, one of humankind's first cities, in what is today Turkey, you could probably learn something about advertising that most people today can't quite put their finger on.

In Çatalhöyük there were probably two people selling goats' milk. They were equidistant from your dwelling. They sold milk from essentially the same goats, they charged exactly the same and they had the same availability of supply. 

However you, as a consumer--even back then in the early, pre-money days of commerce--developed a preference for one milk-seller over another. Without really knowing why or even thinking about it, you chose the milk-seller that seemed friendliest. The one most apt to smile and kibitz. The one for whatever reason you seemed to like the most.

If a spouse asked you why you chose one milk-seller over the other you might say, "I dunno. X seems like a nicer guy than Y."

There's a good chance--and I'm not an anthropologist--that for as long as there have been humans we've chosen to interact with people who acted most like people we like. 

If you strip away all the Sinekky Godinisms away from modern marketing pablum, if you shred into a trillion little pieces all the 168-page decks ever created, if you toss all that CD* out, you can get to a simple, I think indisputable, conclusion. 

*CD= Civilizational Detritus.

The primary reason hundreds of billions are spent on advertising is to make corporations, brands, products, services, political candidates MORE HUMAN.

We love certain brands because they seem nice. Friendly. Easy-to-do-business with. Likeable.

Think Different.

Just Do It.

We could hate Apple for not paying tax, charging $59 for a wire and employing ersatz-slaves as assembly labor.

We could hate Nike for not paying tax, charging $350 for running shoes and employing ersatz-slaves as assembly labor.

We could hate them.
But we like them.
Because of advertising.

I got a note this morning from someone inside the "belly of the beast," i.e. a giant consultancy, the sort Holding Companies pay millions of dollars to to revitalize them. I don't know the person, but he/she/they wrote to me re Cindy Rose at :

Let me break this down a bit more.

For Sale. Holding Company. Badly Worn.

Advertising exists to make corporate entities human. 

For the last thirty years advertising has been run by technologists.

If my steak house sucks and we lost 92.79-percent of our business to another steak house that served better steaks, I would not be trying to revitalize my restaurant's business by making our check-out system "frictionless."

I'd hire the best practitioners of red-meat-ism that I could find and say, "Let's sirloin the other guys out of the water."

I wouldn't take a steak business and try to fix it by hiring a gardener. Just like if I were running a baseball club that couldn't hit a lick, I wouldn't hire someone who could kick a field goal.

But that's what's happened.

Having been caught unawares by giant "bionic**" monopolies, FAANG, (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) who today dominate advertising via algorithms and monopolistic platforms, the giant holding companies decided to act like FAANG in the hopes of becoming FAANG-like.

[**As for Bionic monopolies, here's how I understand the term. Old time monopolists, like Frick, Schwab, Rockefeller and Carnegie, dominated markets. You went to them or you went without.

Frick, Schwab and Carnegie sold 95% of the steel in the US--but they could only sell it once. Rockefeller sold 90% of the oil--but only once. Swift and Armour, 90% of the meat--but only once.

FAANG and their ilk sell you products, but own your data identity. They sell it and sell it and sell it and sell it. You and your endless stream of data are their product.]

Trying to "out-tech" a tech company seems as much a fool's errand as trying to out-curveball Sandy Koufax.

About a dozen years ago, I wrote the line above for a client. They looked at me like I was radioactive.

You learn to move on.

Today, I'm putting this out there.
I expect the same response.

Past and Prologue.

Name that Holding Company.
(There are no wrong answers.)

Cindy Rose the new CEO of soon-to-be-picked-like-a-chicken-carcass-by-my-wife's-grandmother, WPP, is just a couple of months into her tenure at the holding company, and though WPP hails itself as "the creative transformation company," 

Rose has already hired McKinsey to help WPP creatively transform.

(Nasty parenthesis: You're often judged by the company you keep. Since the year 2,000, McKinsey has been fined over $1,700,000,000 for a consistent pattern of mis-deeds.)

Including $650,000,000 for helping a pharma company get people addicted to opioids.

And $122,000,000 for ethical boo-boos in Africa.

This is all after Ms. Rose's predecessor hired McKinsey to help WPP shift into "growth mode." 

That sounds like me shifting into "dating Jennifer Lawrence mode."

I'd betcha a tainted press-release that over the last five years WPP has spent more on a) McKinsey and b) Awards entries than they have on c) creative salaries.

I read the Rose/McKinsey news with more than a modicum of disbelief. I know you're supposed to get back on a horse quickly after you're thrown by one. But unlike McKinsey, horses don't usually charge you $20,000,000 to knock you to the dust and cover you in manure. 

Decimation, desiccation, death in three book covers.

To me, it all seemed to fly in the face of even the smallest iota of common sense. 

When I think about common sense, I think about the Oracle of Delphi. The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece (none of whom worked for McKinsey) boiled the Delphic Oracle's precepts down to seven from their complete known list of 307. They are:

Chilon of Sparta - "Know thyself."
Solon of Athens - "Nothing to excess."
Thales of Miletus - "A pledge comes from madness."
Bias of Priene - "Most men are bad."
Cleobulus of Lindos - "Moderation is the chief good."
Pittacus of Mitylene - "Know thine opportunity."
Periander of Corinth - "Forethought in all things."

Even if you, as I do, charitably cross out the wisdom of Bias of Priene, you're still left with six pretty good thoughts on how you should run your life and your business.

I've annotated the above for today's world. IMHO, all the wisdom you need to succeed in the world, no matter what it is you do.

Know thyself--Be a good person and true to what you regard as good. Be generous, but uncompromising if it compromises your self.

Nothing in excess--Don't go all in for the latest trend, the latest buzzwords. There are no panaceas.

A pledge comes from madness--don't lie or overpromise.

Moderation is the chief good--Very much like nothing in excess. As they used to say in OTB commercials, "bet with your head, not over it."

Know thine opportunity--Strike when you're hot and the opportunity, too, is hot.

Forethought in all things--Don't be rash and lurch after shiny objects. Plan and trust your planners.

When Rose and the Oracle collided in my mind, naturally the collision yielded a headline. A synthesis of all this. 

The headline summed up to me how supposedly the smartest people--the biggest salaries, controlling the most revenue and the greatest number of jobs and, therefore, a large number people's lives--often have the least wisdom and, even worse than a lack of wisdom, have learned least from what's happened before.

Onto the headline that formed in my noggin:

She lives Defying Delphi.
Not just Rose, to be fair.
All of the pot-takers, pocket-fillers, and integrity-killers.

Defying Delphi.
Ignoring logic.
Not knowing what business you're in.

Trusting specious experts.

Ignoring legacy, history, heritage, tradition.

A bit like the dissolution of Doyle Dane Bernbach. 
Or Y&R. Or JWT. Or Scali. Or Ammirati. Or Needham.
Or one-thousand other companies the Defying Delphi-ers destroyed.

Good luck. And speaking of the Ancients:

Eleanor and Me.

There's a quotation attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt that, no matter who said it first, I've always liked.

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

For my two cents (a valid measure until the tump misministration decides to take all the dollars and feed the pennies to the poor) we could easily re-write Roosevelt's words for today.

Allow me:

The spillage of digital ink over AI is among the most staggering onslaughts I've witnessed in my almost-68 years. It's like an avalanche wrapped inside an earthquake covered in a tsunami.

You'd think, given the hype we've heard, the intelligence we're supposed to be harnessing, the breakthroughs and advances that are just about to cascade through every aspect of life on earth--and into the outer reaches of the solar system, you'd think we'd all be able to cite chapter and verse of all the great things that have happened or are on the cusp of happening.

Like even a good coffee Heath bar ice cream from a company that isn't anti-Israel. Oh, and won't make me fatter.

But I can't name one.

I take that back. 

Trying to get help through a bot has decreased my "time-to-scream" by 48% and my personal NPS score by about 1900%.

All I really see from AI is that somebody made another crappy commercial for 29-cents that's been seen only on LinkedIn, had no revenue consequences and none of us can even remember the brand it was for. I'm not feeling that the inevitable "parachuting gorilla" commercials are worth all the mucky-bushwa we've had to wave through.

I also can't help but be reminded that not too many hours ago

we were hearing the same cacophony of blather about bored apes and NFTs and fake money. And google glasses. And a thousand other things that have had the salutary effect of a bucket of warm spit.

We're all gonna be rich!

The number of people, panels and pomposticators who promulgate and proclaim that "this will change everything," and "everything else is dead" is in itself practically deadening. And 99.79-percent of these non-entities pass like a banner ad in the dark of dumbness.

Two ships passing in the night. (Artists rendering.)

In 1916, just over 100 years ago in the country formerly known as amerrykaka, the poliovirus infected more than 27,000 Americans and killed more than 7,000 people. This in a nation of 100-million, not today's 340-million.

About 40 years later, say 1955, Drs. Sabin and Salk raced to bring the polio vaccine to the world. When they did, they fundamentally changed life on earth. 

Their discoveries and their science made a provable, empirical, non-adjectival difference in the (longer) lives of billions of people. They didn't have to fake-name their potions "super-intelligent," or "claude," or "anthropic," or any other concoction to re-label a stock manipulation to package financial ponzi-ing and legerdemain as progress.

They didn't have to have their product pretend it was a person and use human pronouns. Their product didn't presume to address you by your first name as if they're a friend, not a surveillance bot looking to steal your soul, the better to sell you crap.

They had actual data that showed the difference they were making. And none of the difference they were making involved an unhelpful, inscrutable chatbot, another shitty commercial and answers praising nazism excused as an purportedly benign ha-ha-hallucination.

Salk and Sabin and real advancers of life on earth often employ this increasingly rare side-dish. I call it "real data." (Not we got 458,570,485,948,472,409 trillion earned views and created a verb out of Q-tips. 'Dude, are you q-tippin'?' ie. we became part of culture. Which to my mind is like becoming part of a Superfund site.)

In fact, imagine if the vaccine "hallucinated." "Sure it eradicated polio, but people grew a second head." Heroes don't hallucinate. And real progress is not based on press-releases and things that will happen and spurious predictions by the unaccountable class who shoulder no consequences for their lies.

Last week, GeorgeCo's 2025 revenue officially outstripped that of WPP, according to Form 10K which this particular Delaware Company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

All of the above might be biting the well-manicured hands that feed me, because much of GeorgeCo., LLC's revenue come from various technology companies who are working on various AI advances. Some of them could read all this and decide that I am a traitor in their midsts, a veritable eggs benedict arnold. 

The truth is, I tell them and wrestle with them, is no one really cares about AI. They care about what AI actually does. That's what we should be talking about. Not the purported "gold in them thar hills," but actual gold you've sluiced out of a mountain, taken to the assay office and converted into cash (not crypto.)

I'm tired of small minds dominating large news feeds. 

I'm tired of small minds issuing blanket statements with no accountability or follow-up or scrutiny.

I'm tired of small minds promising big things.

How about big minds making big progress small-step by small- step by small-step--the hard-work way, not the 'next-round-of-funding' way.

Here's one Eleanor Roosevelt didn't say but could have.

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BTW, if you think of progress as an inevitable march toward the better, please consider this:

Way back 2,500 years ago or so, the Greeks discovered that building curved fortifications was smarter than building forts with right angles. Spears, javelins and the ballista from catapults would do less damage to rounded walls than flat walls. A missile that hits obliquely and from an angle is not as powerful as a dead-on hit.

The Greeks conveyed that information to the Romans. And for about 1,000 years, curved fortresses were all the rage throughout the Roman world. This got carried over to a lot of the Medieval world, too. Look at the 13^th Century Cathedral Basilica of Saint Cecilia in Albi, France and you get the general idea.

Except, people decided to stop building things that way. They forgot what the Greeks had discovered and the Romans had executed.

This chateau in Angers, France was built in the 13th Century"

This Palais in Avignon, one-hundred years later.

As Holding Company potentates call 58-percent drops in revenue "negative growth," you might call this change in design "backward progress."

There was no material reason for this architectural shift.

But it became the style.

The old way, rounded walls, though superior, was rejected because because. And because. And also, because.

I fear this is happening today globally.

We spend time talking about the miracle of AI.

When as a species we've virtually forgotten the miracles that come from actual thinking, laughter, and hard work.

Three Words on Media. Or Six.

There was an obituary in last week's New York Times that I think those of us in the communications business really ought to think about. You can read it here. 

The obituary was of John Cleary. 

Fifty-five years ago when he was a 19-year-old freshman architecture student at Kent State University in Ohio, Cleary was shot by one of the one-hundred M-1 carrying National Guard troops Ohio governor James Rhodes ordered onto campus. This was after students burned an ROTC building on campus, protesting Richard Nixon's illegal expansion of the Vietnam war into neighboring Cambodia.

Four students ("four dead in O hi O as Crosby Stills Nash and Young sang) were killed. An additional nine were wounded.

I remember sitting in 7th Grade English and hearing about this. Cleary was just seven years older than I, a seventh-grader.

The M1 rifle like the ones carried by troops on the Kent State campus in 1970. General Patton called the rifle "the greatest implement of battle ever devised.

General George S. Patton, hardly a pacifist, famously praising the rifle used by government-directed US soldiers on college campuses as "the greatest implement of battle ever devised." The M1 has a muzzle-velocity of 2800 ft/second (it can travel a mile in less than two-seconds) tremendous penetrating power and an effective range of five-football fields, or about six city blocks.

Currently in cities across the United States, including Washington, DC, Chicago and Los Angeles, National Guard troops are wielding significantly more ballistic power: an M4 rifle and a M17 9mm handgun. The M4 can fire about 800 rounds per second, has about ten-percent greater muzzle-velocity than the M1 and about 10-percent greater range. 

The relatively benign M17 pistol today's soldiers are carrying has a muzzle energy of a mere 395 foot-pounds. That's considered ideal for hunting large game and long-range shooting.

The troops occupying amerry-cant cities today carry M4 rifles and the M17pistol.
These ain't cap guns.

In 1970, Life was "America’s ‘favorite magazine’ and had over 8 million subscribers.

Hold your horses, and your gunfire, I'm getting to the advertising point of today's post. And yes, despite all the gore, there is one. And you can find it reading an excerpt from Cleary's obituary in the Times.

I want to focus in on the two sentences I've underscored above. 

Today no photo, no image, no boom of gun-fire has impact. No news provokes anger. When Life Magazine was around the news had stopping power.

Stopping power today has been supplanted by "scrolling power."

As I've written many times before, in advertising, we used to strive for impact. We now make do with inundation. Thousands of dumb little ads rather than one powerful one.

They are not and never will be equivalent. 

Last week, I was talking to my good and wise friend Rob Schwartz about a campaign I was doing for a client who's important to my business. I must have blurted something about today's 'advertising a la mode's' practice of plastering the walls with messaging before the definitional message is established and woven together with an indelible image or an "etched in marble" set of differentiating words.

Rob said this. 

I wrote it down and tried to make it more memorable.

I even thought of a companion piece.

If John Cleary, or some other 19-year-old on a leafy campus were shot today, we'd scroll right by. 

Look! A cat video.
Look! A recipe.
Look! Sydney Sweeney in a tight-fitting dress.
Look! A banality.

Look! An outrage.
Look! Topeka State beat Fresno A&M by 12.

Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!
Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!

Look! At everything and see nothing.

All the looking has stopped us from stopping.

Stopping people is our job.

Instead we decry diminished attention spans, scattered media channels and keep on making invisible ads by the literally thousands. That's what we're choosing rather than concentrating our communication forces and trying to be big somewhere.

Today, we'd know nothing about John Cleary.

Just like no one knows anything about your brand.

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PS. If you work in media and you'd like to debate this, I welcome the discussion. I'm not a media person and maybe I'm wrong.