You Don't Have to be Jewish. And Maybe Shouldn't Be.

Some time in 2032 it happened. Late 2032. Just before the High Holidays.

Fred Zeldin, 34, a copywriter at one of the big former-Madison-Avenue, now Twelfth-Avenue agencies, was sent an invitation to a Zoom call. On the call minutes later, after he had been granted his eleven hours of severance, he was summarily fired. 

His 401K had exactly $401 in it. And since during his nine years working at the agency he had never produced anything more notable than a banner ad, Fred had no corrugated box to fill with his belongings, and no real memories either.

Fred was fired for the usual reasons.

Too old.

Oh, and he wasn't working at the speed of culture. In fact, he had written two headlines over the course of a week that didn't have the word "authentic" in them. 

No wonder Fred was shit-canned. 2032 and he has the gall, the audacity, the utter temerity to write something that doesn't sound like everything else.

What was he smoking? Salmon?
Can you imagine, proffering creative that isn't 'borderless'?

No one realized it at first but when Fred was fired, it marked something. 

The passing of something.

For Fred Zeldin was the ad industry's last Jew. There were no more Jews working in the industry. 

Shalom, Fred. 

May all your teeth fall out except one, to give you a toothache.

Of course, harkening back to the 80s, the industry had been full of Jewish people. That didn't mean meetings or shoots weren't scheduled for the Jewish holidays. It just meant a lot of Jews had to miss their Holy days.

Oh well. That's the way it is. When you're a minority.

Later, in the 20-teens and 20-twenties, when Diversity, Equity and Inclusion became a shibboleth--a bludgeon even, at the Holding Companies, savvy Semites could see the right-to-left writing on the wall. 

Though Jews made up less than .2-percent of the world's population, no agency counted them among diverse populations. 

Diverse schmiverse. 

You have to be the right kind of diverse to count as diverse otherwise, you're non-diverse, i.e. disposable, untermenschen--to bring back an old term that seems everyday, to become more vital once again.

Jews aren't diverse, Fred thought. Though as earlier Jews ascended in business, they were outcasts socially. Limited by quotas. Not in the club. Excluded from whole swaths of Amerika.

Fred remembered hearing a story about a rich Jew, Joseph Seligman, barred from a ritzy resort hotel in Saratoga Springs, NY. “No Israelites,” the hotel’s manager informed him. When his rejection led to public criticism, the hotel boss doubled down. He told the New York Times: “Should the Seligman Jew be excluded from first class hotels? I say emphatically yes.”

Fred remembered reading how certain private universities, most notably Harvard, introduced policies which placed a quota on Jews admitted to the university. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard University from 1909-1933, argued that a "limit be placed on the number of them...admitted to the university." 

At Yale, the Yale Daily News praised Harvard's decision and would "institute immigration laws more prohibitive than those of the United States government." 

What's more, according to historian David Oshinsky, "Most  medical schools, Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania and Yale, had rigid quotas in place... The dean at Yale had precise instructions: "Never admit more than five Jews, and take no blacks at all." 

Fred saw it happening--you could hardly miss it. As more and more more experienced ad people turned 40 or even 34 (like Fred) they were axed. Of course, a large number of those older ad people were Jews. Holdovers from earlier times when the industry had had many members of the tribe.

Soon, fewer and fewer Jews were hired--they weren't considered diverse, remember. And we're all about diversity, or, at least, our definition of diversity, which is firmly rooted in the vapor of non-definition. As the Jews, who had comprised so much of the agency world had aged out, their numbers, and no one noticed, kept falling. They were not being replenished. Not diverse.

That brings us to Fred.

Fired at 34. Fred was the ad industry's last Jew.

There were no headlines remarking on the passing of this cultural torch. There were no editorials in the gossip rags that were all that remained of the ad industry's once-vibrant trade press. The fact is, no one noticed that the industry was now Judenfrei. 

Jew Free.

And, therefore, diverse. 

And Jews, who comprise two-tenths of one-percent of the world's population, aren't considered diverse. 

And Israel, just .0001579-percent of the land on our planet--is colonialist state.

Make sense?

You don't have to be Jewish to leave the agency business.
But it helps.

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company's HQ.

I'm up in Connecticut as I write this, sitting in my half-finished office, ready to conduct two-hours of client interviews for a brand I'm working for.

I suppose if I were still at an ad agency, I would have been on these calls with a coterie of half-a-dozen colleagues. I'm sure I would have had a planner or two with me, probably an art-partner, and an account person or three. Everyone would have had a reason for being there on the phone with me. Even if I were the only one speaking and listening. Some people would have to be there if only because if they weren't there they might feel like they were left out and not in the swing of things.

92 percent of people in offices go to things because it would look bad if they weren't invited. No way it takes 17 people to review a spot or a tweet.

A lot of people in an office do things or attend meetings or whatever not because they're serving a function but because they have to be there or people will realize they're not there and that would be some sort of cosmological demerit--a strike against them. I guess you could say that many people in agencies are like parsley alongside a $66 New York-cut steak. No one wants it. No one eats it. No one needs it. But the plate would feel empty without it.

Sitting in my new office I am halfway surrounded by good books. Halfway because when we drove up here four weeks ago, I could only fit four boxes in my 1966 Simca 1500. I intend to fill the empty shelves as time moves on.

My first batch of books is made up of more books that are pictorial and editorial. 

I like picture books. 

From my earliest days I've been that way. I'd spend hours looking at the artwork in Gus and the Firefly or If I Ran the Circus. I liked the pictures nearly as much as I liked the words. In fact, at one point in my life, I aspired to be an illustrator.

Here in Connecticut, I have books on Roman art and architecture. A book on how to "read" a Greek vase. Books on East German typography and the aesthetic of Austria's Wiener Werkstatte. I have a pictorial history of the computer from Babbage to Jobs. The landmark Thucydides. Various maps from World War II battlefields and more. 

I have books of cartoons, mostly from New Yorker artists. And random things like figureheads from old wooden ships, menus from the 19th Century, books of movie posters and Soviet propaganda. I also have book after book on baseball--statistics from the Mexican leagues and the Negro leagues and half a dozen books on economics.

My point in all this is really simple.

Somewhere along the way agencies stopped surrounding people with interesting things. I remember offices full of reels to look at. And artists' portfolios. And piles and piles of references available for the stealing.

Someone got a pencil and did some figuring. They calculated how much money they could save by getting rid of the stimulus and stuffing more people into less space. They did a cost-benefit analysis and paid attention only to the costs. They didn't worry about the disappearance of benefits.

Just as agencies have forcibly tried to increase productivity by eliminating downtime, they have tried to increase creativity by eliminating serendipitous and random stimulation. The people who make such decisions don't realize--they refuse to realize--that there's an inverse relationship between efficiency and creativity. They think you can be more efficient and more creative both. 

They don't and won't understand the single most effective way an agency can increase creative efficiency is to encourage inefficiency. 

More play equals more work.
Less play equals less work. And duller.
And work is better when work is better.

All the people who hit you over the head with scopes and timesheets fundamentally not only don't understand our business, they also hate our business and you. They want to live in a mathematical equation and a quid pro quo universe. They don't like the imprecision that comes from human heartbeats.

Yeah, sorry. As Walter Brennan said in Capra's "Meet John Doe," "I know the world's been shaved by a drunken barber."

Yep.

Go read a book.

On company time.

What Makes an Ad?

 

I have been in the advertising business a long time.

But I was never really in the advertising business until I opened up my own advertising business.

There's a simple reason for that change.

When you work for someone else, you're given work.

When you work for yourself, you have to go out and get work.

Getting work forces you to think about ads in a way you didn't have to before. It's the difference, I think, between growing tomatoes in your backyard garden and running a farm. The difference between holding a bake sale and running a bakery.

The world looks different when it's sink or swim.

Try it some time.

Surviving, no thriving, on your own.

It helps.

About five years ago, I realized my Linked In network of about 10,000 people was more than just a bunch of 'connections.' In fact, it was a media channel--or, better, I could turn it into a channel. I could write something funny, or smart, or topical, and as many people would see it as would see a small-town newspaper in the suburbs.

My connections were a property. Like a mini "People" magazine. Viewers would tune in if I gave them something to tune into.

I guess you could call that reach. Frequency is up to me.

And I am frequent. 

I've written a blog post every working day for over 6000 days. And I've probably written about 2000 GeorgeCo headlines. Sure, not all of them are winners. I'm no DiMaggio qualitatively, but I might approach Joltin' Joe-ness with my consistency.

I've written a ton of mediocre headlines, but none of them are as mediocre the Times' headline above. A headline that says nothing. A headline that has no news. A headline that has nothing new, twisted, unique or funny.

A headline, an ad, a tweet, a sneeze should tell you something you didn't know before. Or say something in a way you hadn't heard before. Or make you think in a new way. Or at the very least, or very most, make you spit your coffee out through your nose.

In short, it should be noticeable. Not annoyingable.

Damn, I see a lot of work that is flatter than a plate of piss. Not just on social sites where no one seems to care. But in what used to be print and used to be TV.

Most often I feel talked down to. Ignored because I'm old. Shouted at. Or being forced to listen to a joke for the hundredth time that wasn't funny the first time. What's more, it seems like half the ads on TV are for drugs for people with rare diseases. They're barking at me but not really for me. I'm no media person--more TBH, a Medea person, but targeted ads in a mass media don't make sense to me. Unless you enjoy pissing people off because you really don't like people or care if you irk them.

O-O-O-obnoxious!

It seems like people have forgotten how at a very fundamental level. They've forgotten no one cares. And that an ad's job is to make them care. That's been true since time began. But we've seem to have wholly forgotten it. Or we're so obedient to and afraid of clients--and of being fired--that we produce crap that satisfies them and their bosses. And no one else.

I've been seeing a lot of ads for a horribly-named hotel chain called Crowne Plaza. 

First of all, only a dipshit spells crowne with an e. Second, your name is two names. Be crown or plaza, don't be both. There's no baseball team called the Metskees. Or basketball team called the Clipkers. Or a presidential candidate called a Bidump, though maybe there should be.

Forget that they repeated the anodyne and empty, "This is Crowne Plaza," in one index-card-sized ad three times. That line ain't exactly, "I am Spartacus." It's not powerful. Or in the moment. Or an affirmation. What else would it be in a Crowne Plaza ad? This is Poughkeepsie Convention Center?

Why, in other words, run an ad--a lot--or a headline, that says nothing, stops no one, contains no truth and no reason to read?

It's the sound of no hands clapping and no ass crapping.

Yet approximately 97.8-percent of everything I see is sheer emptiness. As above, flat as a plate of piss.

I don't know what's happening in the advertising business that so much time, human energy, lip-flapping and money is spent on such communications non-entities. People create these things, present these things, design these things, proofread these things, shoot these things, conference room these things. They fight for shit like this and hang tearsheets of them in their beige offices and are generally roused. They publicize their blandness in trade journals.

Having an eyebrow that says "Breaking News" followed by a headline that essentially says, "Dictator for Life declares himself Dictator for Life," is an insult to all involved.

As is "This is Crowne Plaza."

It's hard to do good ads.

But it can't be hard to write headlines better than those.

Or at least try.

The Magic of Non-Magic.

Before you and so many others gush almost continuously about the enormous computing power now at humanity's, or sundry billionaires', disposal, I suggest you spend some time observing a child who's just learned to walk or a puppy that's just come into a new home.

The concept of Umwelt--Dave Trott wrote about it yesterday, and I wrote about it a little over a week ago, is valuable to consider here.

Umwelt is how a sentient creature takes in the world and adapts to it. It's how a living being adjusts to thrive in its environment.

Today, we regard giant computers as brilliant because they can do things instantaneously that might take us years. They can multiply 298465075638 by 4850645882003854383 in nano-seconds. Because we can't, we consider them smarter than we are.

And we consider them smarter for a whole host of reasons. 

But.

Imagine yourself on vacation. Maybe you've had one daiquiri too many. You've not eaten for four hours, and you've been laying in the sun for a similar amount of time. For whatever reason, slightly drunk, slightly fried by the sun, slightly vertigo'd from getting up too quickly, you leap into the too-cold swimming pool and dive down to the bottom.

In an instant you've changed mediums, temperature and more.

You come up for air, shake the water off your head like Alain Delon in Purple Noon and you go on with your life.

Guess what, through all that, the computer above your shoulders never lagged. It never had to buffer. It kept on monitoring your muscles, your breathing, your heart beating, your digesting, your vision. 

Same thing with watching a kid or a puppy. Especially when they just start to walk. The feats of balance, the awareness of their surroundings, the functioning of all organs and a million things I can't even fathom. It's all, well, unfathomable. 

This is a passage I read on Saturday in Cat Bohannan's new book, "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution." Just about thirty words out of the couple hundred thousand spread over 600 or so pages, but they're worth thinking about.

"Eyes can give you the equivalent of a million trillion gigabytes of information a second. They’ll tell you what things are, and where they are, fantastically quickly."

Reading this, seeing Sparkle my new puppy expand her world with every step, and seeing my 17-month-old grandson Jude walk about five miles at a wedding this weekend brought all this to my frontal lobes.

To put it as bluntly as I can, I think we over-hype the power of enormous machines to do things that we find impossible, and entirely forget about the thousands of impossible things we do every day. Put another way, "you don't know what you've got to it's gone."

In my newly refurbished 105-year-old seaside cottage, the contractors have finished about 73-percent of my office which I paid 109-percent of. I have only a fraction of my thousands of books in the space, but I can reach for things and look at them better here than I ever could while in New York.

An hour ago, I opened a book I bough for $2 from a street vendor. A 1979 book called "The Passport," by Saul Steinberg. I've had the book for a couple of dozen years, but never had the lighting or a table to flip through it before. Just now I had a client call and thumbed through Steinberg while I was listening.

There is more laughter, surprise, serendipity, irreverence, wisdom and magic in the couple of hundred drawings from Steinberg than there would be from a Quantum of Quantum computers.

A wise person, maybe it was me, once said, "pay attention to what you pay attention to." In other words, not the Hallmarkiness of "live in the moment," but really take in what you take in. Really revel in your thoughts and your processes and your progresses and your calculus and your noticing and your synapsing and your Umwelt. 

Before you cede your future and your actual self to silicon germanium chips, look inside your own Umwelt of splendor and excitement and magic and wonder.

And enjoy you.

Aversion Therapy.

A couple of week-ends ago, my wife flew up to Toronto and drove to the countryside to pick up our new golden retriever, Sparkle.

I know there are those among the tin-foil hat wearers who believe that George Soros, Bill Gates, Lex Luther and Alger Hiss are implanting subcutaneous sensors inside us so the same government that needs six months to issue a passport can monitor us with Staasi-like efficiency 24/7 and subject us to all sorts of mind-control, so we willingly follow the corrupt precepts of Big Brother. 

Somehow this would be worse than how most people today voluntarily behave. They watch 44 hours of football a week, eat 44 pounds of new nacho-cheesier Doritos, drink 44 cans of piss-water Budweiser and get their news from blonde readers who sole journalistic capability is nice breasts.

I don't have the data to support this, but I'd wager that a good percentage of people who buy pure-bred dogs these days get a pup that has had a microchip implanted. If the dog ever runs- away, its provenance can be traced and its owner can be found.

Believe me, if you have a puppy, you know they ain't being mind controlled. 

There are other people who have stopped vaccinating their pets because they hold the unfounded belief that vaccinations--the human development that's probably saved one-billion lives--will result in canine autism or early death or barking at cats that the neighbors let run free. Despite that, I've yet to hear of an anti-chipping movement, but I suppose that's because I remain firmly in the thrall of the reality-based community.

Over on musk's naXi-obeisant website, my former agency Schmoe-gilvy keeps posting quotations by the old white scion of the patriarchy who happens to be their founder. These quotations--though old--remain seminal. Many people of my vintage in advertising, particularly those lucky-enough to have worked at Ogilvy, have committed many of them to memory.

But here's where the topic of chips comes in.

Just as I recoil when the republicans today refer to their mutant politics as "The Party of Lincoln," I get nauseated when I see the current rendition of Ogilvy quoting the old man. It's sinful. It's the appropriation of the spirit of his words when, as an institution, David would be disgusted by his anonymously eponymous organization today.

Today's Ogilvy is as far from traditional Ogilvy as the Party of Lincoln from the golden showers of trump.

Mr. Ogilvy would be disgusted by the slavish trend-chasing. The even-more avid awards-mania. And the derogation of all people who don't fit this week's definition of human as propagated by this week's effluence of DEI people. How any agency could bang its DEI chops while systematically firing everyone over 45 is beyond me. It is the height (or depth) or Orwellian New Speak. 

He would be disgusted by the whole kettle of rotten mackeral.

"Diversity is Exclusion," seems to be Ogilvy's "War is Peace.  Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’" 

And here's where I close the loop.

We are entering "Prognostication Season." Every agency, every pundit, every tech company, every creative director, every planner, every agency executive will soon be issuing and publishing some blather on what we are to expect in 2024. 

Soon, if not already, we will be besieged by articles with titles like: 

"2024, the Year AI Becomes Simply I." 
"Top Media Trends in 2024 that Will Still Be Trending in 2025."
"2024 Tech Trends that Will Change Everything. And Nothing."
"In 2024, Comedy Will Return--That's Nothing to Laugh About."
"Gartner on Navigating the Future and the Plu Perfect in 2024."
"16 Major Trends of 2024."
"McKinsey on 2024 Trends that Will Trend in a Trendy Way."

I've circled the sun enough times to know that these sorts of articles have been around since time begun. As it was writ by some goat-herder in Ecclesiastes some millennia ago, "There's nothing new under the sun." But saying there's something new gets you business.

The worst thing about all this blather is that it is all made utterly without consequence.

Ogilvy sullies its founder by coopting and mis-using his words.
Prognosticators are usually wrong.
Politicians are always wrong.

And here's where we need chips implanted.

I may be Draconian, but the world would be better off if all these cosmic spouters got zapped with 19,000 volts every time they issue one of these asinine "I can see the future statements."

Or the one that really gets me, the phrase "future proofing." In a country that falls apart in a heavy rain, when no one knows what the future is we're ostensibly capable of proofing against.

We live in a world where nothing happens when you make a false statement, when you lie. Sometimes companies like WPP pay $19 million fines for bribery, but "admit no wrong-doing."

Let's zap people.

Aversion therapy.

Next time someone at Ogilvy or any other agency blathers on about hiring malcontents and the irreverent to mask what's really the wholesale droneification of their workforce, it would be nice if someone in the C-suite got a jolt of electricity. Say ten volts for every thousand dollars of bonus money. They'd quickly stfu and the world would be a better place, certainly quieter.

Maybe then we can re-introduce the notion of doing some thinking before we start spouting.

Sometimes I Cry.

I'm just about to start my fourth year of running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company.

While my business is better--more spiritually and financially rewarding--than I ever imagined, it's lonelier, too. 

While I have an Account Director I work with daily, bonafide decent people as clients, and the occasional art-director, producer or planner to interact with, most of my days and nights I'm alone. Digging ditches. 

There's no pals a couple of desks over. No people to kibbitz with in the elevators. No hijinx to engage.

It's me and my shovel for the most part.

There's also a certain degree of relentlessness to my life now. Though I still harken back to the 80s, I maintain the energy to field new business requests, write proposals, sell the proposals, do the work, revise the work, send my invoices and actually collect my money. All while getting more business.

The worst part about project-based work is that there's no annuity aspect to it. The work doesn't keep paying--like an AOR relationship. When you're done, and the client's happy, your revenue stream dries up.

Of course, I get a lot of referrals from clients current or past. And a lot of new assignments from existing clients. But you have to keep your ear to the ground and listen for the far-off rumble of new business, then go and get it.

There's no smooth sailing in life. No coasting.

I heard through the grapevine that when Sisyphus is frustrated he says he's engaged in a Tannenbaumian Task.

There's more. 

Some of it good.

Some of it less-than-good.

Because my brain and typing fingers and, I guess, age-old-old-age wisdom is so prized by clients, I am paid well by clients. Touch wood. 

With all that remuneration comes a ton of responsibility. I'm not just writing ads for people--I'm helping company owners shape their companies. Without a lot of direction from them other than, 'I wish we could give you more help.'

That's tough like you can't imagine.

Did you ever see the great French movie directed by Jacques Becker, 'Le Trou'? It's three cons escaping from an unescapable French prison, essentially with nothing but their wits and a spoon.

A true story.

Life is like that sometimes.

There are times when a meeting is over and I have just been handed the advertising equivalent of the riddle of the Sphinx that I go off and find some place where no one can disturb me, where no one can see me and I cry. 

I cry and I scream. Sometimes I dream and I scream.

BTW, all the holding company bushwa about treating diverse populations with equity and respect doesn't add up to a hill of beans if you're not the right kind of diverse. Or you're outspoken. Or you're old and fat. Or you make a high five-figure, or even six-figure salary.

That hurts. Yes, it does. And it's not something you'll 'get over,' or have to accept or anything else. When you give your life to a company and they toss you away to the ravenous gulls of ageism like you're fish-offal, it's awful. It's doesn't matter much that you're happier now. Jilting sucks. (How's that for a t-shirt?)

There are many times during my nearly 66 years when I've felt the weight of the world on my arthritic and torn-rotatored shoulders.

Like Atlas, I sometimes feel I am at the center of every battle, and in the words of Stephen Fry in his great book, "Mythos," 

Atlas had been "rousing his fellow Titans into combat, shouting for one last supreme effort even as the Hecatonchires were battering them into submission. As punishment for his enmity, Zeus sentenced him to hold up the sky for eternity. This killed two birds with one stone. 

Zeus’s predecessors, Kronos and Ouranos, had been forced to waste much of their energy in separating heaven from earth. At a stroke Zeus relieved himself of that draining burden and placed it, quite literally, on the shoulders of his most dangerous enemy. At the junction of what we would call Africa and Europe the Titan strained, the whole weight of the sky bearing down upon him.... In time he solidified into the Atlas Mountains that shoulder the skies of North Africa to this day. His straining, squatting image is to be found on copies of the very first maps of the world, which in his honor we still call “atlases.” To one side of him lies the Mediterranean and to the other the ocean still named “the Atlantic” after him, where the mysterious island kingdom of Atlantis is said to have flourished.

That's a helluva row to hoe. 

When I first started emerging as a baseball player, I was two-times the youngest player on my team, or even youngest in the league. That was an Atlas-like weight, too, for a guy who takes even dumb games seriously. First when I made my high school varsity at just 14. The second time when I played for the Seraperos de Saltillo when I was just 17. In both instances, I felt over my head.

There's a certain heavy psycho-analyzed bit of my psyche that feels always like Moses' son, Gershon, a "stranger in a strange land." 

That unstrange stranger feeling, that sense of un-belonging, however, could be a weakness--a liability--unless you have the wherewithal to turn it into a strength.

Strangeness becomes a strength when you can use your outsiderness, your differentness as a perspective from which you can view with heightened awareness your surroundings. 

You have to do that, maybe, when you feel screaming and crying.

The most awarded film-maker in American movie-making is probably Billy Wilder, a hero of mine. Wilder was born in Galicia, in what was Austro-Hungary. Such a strange land that it's been wiped off of virtually all maps. Wilder emigrated to the United States during early Nazidom, in 1934.

Wilder spoke no English when he came to America. But as he learned the language, he saw the language as an outsider. He saw the foibles, comedies and idiosyncrasies of his adopted land, as only an outsider can. 

By 1938, his outsiderness helped him become one of Hollywood's top writers. He went on to amass twenty-one Academy Award nominations--thirteen as a writer and eight as a director. He won six Oscars. I remember seeing a portrait of him many years ago on the TV show "60 Minutes." He was using one of his Oscar statuettes as a doorstop.

What's more he created great movies in more different genres than I can even name. Rom-Com (Sabrina.) Noir (Double Indemnity.) Black Comedy (The Apartment.) Comedy (Some Like it Hot.) War. (Stalag 17.) Mystery (A Foreign Affair.) Social Cause (Lost Weekend.) Movie-making itself (Sunset Boulevard.) And if you stretch a bit, even a western (Ace in the Hole.)

Listen to the language in the clip above. Wilder, a non-native speaker, hears things, like a bat or a dolphin, that you and I can't. 

More than just hearing them, Wilder was able to turn his outsiderness into a career.

I miss having people around to work with. People to joke with or flirt with during the day. Someone to bounce and idea off of or, rarely, get some reassurance from.

It's hard playing solo.

Sometimes, the loneliness of the long-distance writer makes me lachrymose. Even lugubrious, I'll admit.

Oh well.

It leaves me time to write.

And be me.

Such as I am.

Happiness.

My friend and fellow advertising denizen, Rich Siegel, has a blog he calls Round Seventeen. Rich's title is a reference to the creative constipation and nitpicking that goes on at virtually every business, virtually every day, virtually forever. 

It's a funny name for a blog, but only because it's not funny. Only because Rich says aloud what the rest of us are retching over.

Just a few minutes ago, I read the article above in The Wall Street Journal. The Journal is a great newspaper if you can ignore its politics and get over sending money to the WSJ--some of the leading lights of crypto-fascism.

I'll make this simple: Work sucks.

And: When work sucks, the work sucks.

It only takes watching about four-minutes of television a night to see the parlous state of advertising creativity. About 50% of commercials seem to have been shot on a discount iPhone. With badly lit bad actors screaming bad copy. 95% seem to be an assault on viewers' senses. And virtually all of them seem to have forgotten the old gendered Ogilvy-ism, "the consumer isn't a moron; she's your wife."

Nah. Treat everyone like an idiot.

It tested well.

In America today everyone is treated rudely. Customer service, brand communications, instructions, websites, the inundation of black Friday emails or whatever show absolutely no care, consideration or kindness. You are just a pocket to be picked. A bank account to be raided. An email list to bludgeon with.

To steal from Arthur Miller, to America's monopolies (ie all of America) you are just a piece of fruit. Once the orange is eaten, that is, your money is extracted, the peel is tossed away.

Years ago, Robert Townsend was the CEO of Avis Rental Cars. When he was choosing an agency he'd ask a question of agency leaders. 

"My competitor has five times the cars, five times the counters and five times the money I have. How can I get advertising that's five times as effective."

Reportedly, Bill Bernbach replied with this advice. "If you approve, disapprove but don't try to improve work, everyone in the agency will want to work on your brand. And will work weekends and nights for the chance to."

Approve. Disapprove. Don't try to Improve.

Today agencies do the opposite.
And clients might be even worse.

They disapprove.
Redirect.
Reredirect.
Rereredirect.
Then full-on wreck.
Dreck.
What did you expect?
Here's your last check.

The article I cited above included this graph. And my guess is that is exaggerates the amount of employee satisfaction. I doubt there's an agency anywhere where 36.5% of people are satisfied. 

That seems very high to me. 

It ain't nice furniture, or ping-pong, or stale bagels on Wednesday that will improve work and work conditions. Consistent raises might help. Job security might help. Treating people as partners--and as valuable might help.

Every once in a while a large employer will threaten to leave a community because that community makes it hard for its employees to live there. They'll say things like, fix the trains or face an exodus of tax-payers. Occasionally some change will occur.

OK. I lied.

But at least we could try Improve. Disapprove. But don't try to improve.

It doesn't get much better than that.

And work doesn't get much worse than it is today.