The Insane Brain Drain.

Many many years ago, or even decades ago, I worked at a serious advertising agency. 

How's that for an oxymoron.

Executive management, and even certain creative people, cared about the quality of the work. But they cared even more about how the work helped the client. The client understood that. And didn't regard the agency--as so many clients do nowadays--as the toy department of the marketing world--but instead as drivers of success.

Consequently the agency sat next to their clients' c-suite. And influenced the direction of their clients' business.

It was a rare, serious agency.

Not long after that, the same agency jettisoned virtually all the people who made them great. Maybe they got old. Maybe their salaries got too large. Maybe they got too powerful, threatening and big for their britches. Whatever the case, they were all gone.

Almost overnight, the agency went from worrying about their clients' business to worrying about what phony ads they could produce to win awards that they paid millions of dollars to win. 

One client, their largest, suffered 22-quarters-in-a-row of declining revenue and roughly 50-percent of internal meetings about creative work were about directors' techniques or editorial styles. Neither the client nor the agency were telling the world what the client did or why it mattered. It was more important to say nothing well and in a fresh way.

All that is a prelude to my topic today. My myopic topic. The lack of seeing and seriousness among advertising people.

We talk about awards, stunts, more awards, more stunts. We rarely talk about ideas that could and should guide us to being more important marketing partners to our clients present and future. 

Apocryphally, Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "Small minds discuss people; average minds discuss events; great minds discuss ideas." The same distinction could be made in the agency world today. There are very few real ideas (not just ad ideas) being discussed.

I just recently read an op-ed in "The New York Times," by Peter Coy, a guy who's been covering business for over 40 years. The piece is subscriber-only--but that doesn't give our industry an excuse for missing it. If you're serious about business, you read serious ideas from serious thinkers about business. Honestly, did anyone out there read this? 

You have to wonder how an industry expects to be taken seriously if it doesn't read and think seriously.

In the op-ed I'm speaking about, Coy writes about Sheena Iyengar, a Ph.D. and former professor in the business schools of MIT and Columbia. Iyengar, who is known as "the Jam Lady," is considered an "expert on choice."

[For her Doctoral dissertation at Stanford, she set up two tables inside the entrance of a supermarket in Menlo Park, Calif.: one with six kinds of jam and one with 24 kinds. 

Thirty percent of shoppers who stopped at the table with six kinds of jam bought something, but only 3 percent of shoppers who stopped at the table with 24 kinds bought something. They were overwhelmed by too many choices.]

Harvard Business Review wrote of Iyengar's study, "These results challenge what we think we know about human nature and the determinants of well-being. Both psychology and business have operated on the assumption that the relationship between choice and well-being is straightforward: The more choices people have, the better off they are....Choice is good for us, but its relationship to satisfaction appears to be more complicated than we had assumed. There is diminishing marginal utility in having alternatives; each new option subtracts a little from the feeling of well-being, until the marginal benefits of added choice level off. What’s more, [more choice demands] increased time and effort and can lead to anxiety, regret, excessively high expectations, and self-blame if the choices don’t work out."

Coy's article on Iyengar is about her work on the nature of discovery and innovation--two things that should be important to the ad industry. Iyengar's “New model of the brain is called Learning+Memory.” Eric Kandel of Columbia shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000 for his work on the model. 

"As Iyengar describes the concept of Learning+Memory:
'Neuroscience shows that all thinking is an act of memory in some form. That includes imagination, creativity, innovation and other variations of ‘new’ thoughts. That means the components of the thought are not new. Only the combination is new.'”

You can and should read Coy's entire article here. And for the price of two Gigantrenteoblivattas at Starbucks, you can get Iyengar's new and important book "Think Bigger: How to Innovate."

My point, however, goes beyond any particular book, thinker, or article. It is about our need to think--to study--to not just chase technique and trends and the spurious notion of 'influencing culture,' but to get beyond the day-to-day and into ideas that really matter.

There's no question in my mind ad agencies have geographically relocated far away from the central business centers of cities. There's no question why they no longer command the fees they used to.

We don't have the brains we used to.

We don't even miss them.

Data, Buckets, Bullshit.

Hand me a very broad brush. 

I'm about to paint in some very unsubtle strokes.

I spent my first twenty years in the advertising business never hearing the term "customer relationship marketing," or the word "bucket." Around 1980, with the rise of the computer as a marketing tool, direct marketing emerged and became a major force in the advertising business.

Direct marketing and customer relationship marketing were based on a simple notion. 

We could use data--the stuff of surveys, open envelopes and nascent surveillance marketing--to tailor copy and offers to people based on their preferences. The use of this data and the placing of "targets" in their appropriate "buckets" was supposed to give us the ability to market to people one-to-one. 

Not only would I know you were in the market for a new sedan (as opposed to an SUV) I had data that said you valued performance but had two kids and also cared about gas mileage.

All that data allowed a copywriter to write a variable field letter that might read like this:

Dear George,

You recently told us you were looking for a new sedan and that you wanted to buy it by the end of the summer. Mercedes-Benz has four performance-driven sedans that average over 20 mpg and have room for four.

Somehow, the sincerity, acuity and perceptiveness of that letter was going to build a customer relationship between George and Mercedes-Benz.

No one seemed to notice or care that the same computers and data that were supposed to build customer relationships based on their discernment, were sending me, an inveterate apartment-dweller, emails on getting a new roof, self-cleaning gutters, or insulated windows. 

No one seemed to notice or care that despite my full-head of hair, I received thousands of cures for baldness. Or despite my parsimonious nature, hundreds of emails beckoning me to buy a $1400 synthetic down vest with a dead-animal fur-fringe.

No one seemed to notice the hollowness of the promise of data and intelligence.

Right now, as I type this, half the advertising world is salivating over the marketing capabilities of Artificial Intelligence. Very much as we've been salivating for the last thirty years or so over synthetic intelligence.

We think that more powerful chips and more yottabytes of data will unlock better and more effective marketing. We'll have so much data and so many data points on so many people that marketers will be able to target me with ads for a handkerchief every time I sneeze. 

It reminds me a bit of the persistent military assertion that there is such a thing as precision bombing. Bombing so accurate, it will strike the bad guys right between the eyes without any danger of collateral damage. 

"Et occidit matrem irrumator praetor!"

You can go back to Thucydides or the Achaemenids or, more recently the Romans and hear them talk about the accuracy of their ballistas.

You can read reports from the Royal Air Force, or the 8th Army Air Force or the Strategic Air Command in Vietnam and chuckle through their claims of pinpoint bombing. More recently, US accuracy claims in Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran have proved similarly risible. And deadly.

Marketing, past, present and future is no different. And here's why.

According to data provided by scientists at The Museum of Natural History, the DNA of humans, chimpanzees and bonobos has 98.8-percent of its genetic material in common.

From a direct marketing, data and bucket point of view, we could stick us all together. Statistically, there's no genetic difference between any of us--though I may be a little hairier.

The problem in using data for marketing is that no matter how much there is, there's never enough to provide real accuracy. The number of synapses, cells, connections, and circuits in a human cell is practically beyond the calculus of even the most modern technologies.

The promise of data-based marketing has always been the same. 

The right message to the right person at the right moment. 

In my entire life, I can't think of one circumstance where anything remotely resembling that series of rights has happened to me. 

We are too complicated, too busy, too variable, and too unique to be utterly predictable. Imagine how much wiring is inside me if I share 98.8-percent of mine with a chimp but presumably have completely different purchase desires and customer journeys.

I'll be the first to admit I'm just a copywriter--not a direct marketing expert, a media expert or a data scientist. But I do know something of brain chemistry and neurological constructs. That being said, I'd welcome an informed response from a professional data person. Or a military scientist.

Someone who could give me assurance that precision bombing and precision marketing are possible. That it will do what's promised. And people will like it.

Or not.

So long as it's billable.

Norman Is an Island.

 

Pulitzer-Prize-winning op-ed columnist, Maureen Dowd had an opinion piece in The New York Times on Saturday that made me think about advertising. Advertising and leadership and how higher-ups talk to the people who work for them.

The piece was titled "Requiem for the Newsroom," and if you can get through the Times' flimsy paywall, you can read it here. 

Dowd begins with how a lot of writing on advertising should begin. I'm not going try to improve it, I'm going to do what ad people do; I'm going to steal it. My only emendation is a simple one. Where Dowd says "newsrooms," substitute "ad agencies."

"I don’t want this to be one of those pieces that bangs on about how things used to be better, and they’ll never be as good again. But, when it comes to newsrooms, it happens to be true."

Here are the two quotations from Dowd that got me thinking. I am a solo-practitioner now and I've always been something of a solo-act at work. But just because I tend to work alone doesn't mean I didn't like the clamor of people around me, and that I didn't check-in with people to weigh-in on my work and/or to encourage me. 

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company employs someone today because I've known her for a quarter-of-a-century and she is unfailingly straight with me. ie. She tells me when something sucks and suggests how I can make it better.

Onto the two quotations:

Mike Isikoff, an investigative reporter at Yahoo who worked with Dowd at The Washington Star back in the ’70s, said this: “Newsrooms were a crackling gaggle of gossip, jokes, anxiety and oddball hilarious characters. Now we sit at home alone staring at our computers. What a drag.”

And Mark Leibovich, a writer at The Atlantic, added: “I can’t think of a profession that relies more on osmosis, and just being around other people, than journalism....There’s a reason people get tours of newsrooms. You don’t want a tour of your local H&R Block office.”

Dowd continues, "Now, Leibovich said, he does most meetings from home. 'At the end of a Zoom call, nobody says, ‘Hey, do you want to get a drink?’ There’s just a click at the end of the meetings. Nothing dribbles out afterward, and you can really learn things from the little meetings after the meetings.'"

Since the Covid pandemic when agencies fired or furloughed half their staff (no wonder that last week two of the big holding companies have press-released their positive financials) we normalized 'working from home.' As much as management orders people to return to the office, as far as I can gather from people who are still paid by agencies, they've done little to encourage or remind people of the electricity that used to spark when people worked with others.

In short, there's much to be said for Kibbitz Kulture. 

In fact, on Friday afternoon, I fielded a phone-call from a friend, who happens to be at the tippy-top of a highly-regarded holding company agency. He was working on a global pitch and he needed a question answered and a sounding board.

We didn't have an hour-long meeting accompanied by a 77-page PowerPoint presentation. It was, instead, ping-pong match with machetes.

Question.
Hemming.
Re-framing question.

Stab at a response.

Response to that response.
Building on response.

Countering response.

Consensus and more building on response.

Glimmer of epiphany.

All that happened in less time than it takes to watch a :30-second spot. And in less than thirty-seconds, we got somewhere--somewhere good.

In the McKinsey-spurred, MBA-motivated mania for productivity, we have, it seems to me, forgotten what makes work work in service of improving the quality of the work. 

There's a lot we do to drive efficiency. But very little we do to drive enjoyment, passion and pride in what we do.

I've been in a few agencies since I left the agency business. When they're well-designed and well-peopled--they are spaces I envy. Where there's an encouraging buzz and an energy. As an industry, we can't let that go. We can't forget about that.

On Saturday, despite a chilly and steady rain, my wife and I headed to Joe's Shanghai, the great restaurant at 46 Bowery in New York's Chinatown. When we left with our leftovers, the rain had abated and we could finally take a walk without getting drenched. 

The rain was keeping the usual throngs of people down and we were able to walk up the Bowery without too much jostling. Before long, we headed over to one of the world's great bookstores, The Strand ("18 miles of books") on 12th and Broadway.

The floor of the place was as crowded as Grand Central or Penn Station during rush hour. Literally hundreds of people shopping for and, yes, talking about books. I, myself, gave about 3,200 recommendations in a little over five-minutes. 

As a society, as a culture, we've forgotten the glue that kept life cohesive. We've forgotten the warmth and the glow that used to come from the flicker of the communal fire. We've isolated ourselves and squeezed the soul from our souls. When you see evidence of the world as it was, as I saw on Saturday night in the Strand, you remember how good it was. Yes, as Dowd said above, things used to be better.

That world is gone now.

It's been optimized out of existence. 

Smiles are not cost-effective and kindness never gets a billable job number.

So we grind through bland work and blander days, leading, as Thoreau wrote, lives of quiet desperation. Dying with the song still unsung inside us.

Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.

Dull. Dull. Dull.

I can forgive my father for all the things I wasn't taught by him thanks to one or two or three things I was taught by him. 

He was absent most of my childhood. Aside from the occasional catch or some early-morning failed fishing escapade, we seldom did any of that Hugh Beaumont stuff you can still watch on TV if you tune into an episode or a hundred of Leave it To Beaver or some other kaleidoscope of black and white suburbia. 

My father had never had a father and he passed that lacuna on to me. He worked, as I tried to, to overcome that deficit--but pluck only takes you so far. 

And so my entire sex talk and girl talk was just three words long. "Don't be wild," he said one night as I was preparing to go out and be wild. I'm still not much good with girls, or anyone else for that matter.

Be that as it may, my father taught me how to read and how to enjoy it. 

For that I am indebted. I regret I never let him know that.

That started when I was top-bunk-young in the tiny rectangle I shared with my older brother, Fred. My father, when he was home and sober, would read us a book by Dr. Seuss, carefully pausing just before the rhyme word of each couplet or quatrain. Fred and I would race to answer with the missing rhyme.

Not only did that force an appreciation of listening, rhyme and rhythm, it heightened my already acute competitive sense. I had to fight for the word at the end of nearly every other line.

The second thing I was taught by him was to revere the book reviews in The New York Times. Most people (this is dataless conjecture now--so you can consider me a pundit) don't read book reviews any more than they read books. But reading the book reviewed in a book review is not the sole point of reading a book review.

As my father pointed out, they're usually written by some of the best writers in the business. Staff book reviewers uphold a pretty high standard--at least at the Times and The Wall Street Journal--but outside help often comes from leading lights in the various fields they're writing about. It's not unusual to have a noted novelist or politician reviewing a book and getting their perspective. As computer pioneer Allen Kay once said, "A change in perspective is worth 80-points of IQ." And good book reviews give you that change.

Just now, it's Friday afternoon as I write this, I was reading a New York Times book review with a headline so good I don't know how any sentient person could pass it by.

We used to write good headlines in advertising and they did a job we've forgotten about. They stopped people. They led them to the body copy. They might even have handed people a laugh or something to think about and remember.

The review above looks at three books about warfare past and present. I was most stuck on the review of the book pictured below, which you can buy here.

In the review, I found a single clause that stopped me. It made me think about my father, about reading and about slogging through complication while wielding an intellectual machete. Sometimes you have to cut through a lot of vines to get to the pithy core of the matter. That's called life.

Here's the passage that stopped me, with the key phrase highlighted. 

It's sad, I think, how much our species skips over because it's not as exciting as a football game, a fireworks display, a performance by Siegfried and Roy, or a pharma commercial. 

While I am not by nature a patient person, I have a certain resolute ability to slog. As Baseball Annie Savoy says in "Bull Durham," "...a guy'll listen to anything if he thinks it's foreplay." That is, an overture to the opera that's coming.

Much of our world, I think, is sullied because we have a societal addiction to bright lights, fanfare and banality. Sometimes we have to deal with intellectual foreplay. We have to sit on our hands and pay attention to the tough stuff--intelligent thoughts diseases, climate change, the criminal justice system, the tax code and more. As a culture, we don't have patience anymore--if we ever did--for investigations that don't yield immediate spectacular results while splattering mud and blood along the way.

I think maybe my father taught me that, too. That dull is tough but importance makes dull worth it. I think, we've forgotten that. And because we've forgotten that, a lot of what is important is currently under threat if not completely lost. 

Thank you for reading this far.

I hope it wasn't too dull.