George Tannenbaum on the future of advertising,
the decline of the English Language and other frivolities. 100% jargon free.
A Business Insider "Most Influential" blog.
It's not alarmist to say something is rotten in the state of advertising.
Something is mean.
Soul-sucking.
Destroying.
Impecunious, even.
Two "name brands" of the not-so-distant past were just sold by IPG to a New Zealand group of "marketing services agencies," called the Attivo Group. Attivo sounds like a pharmaceutical that treats psoriasis in tropical fish.
If memory serves, and for me, it usually does, in selling Hill Holliday and Deutsch to Attivo, IPG got less than a dime on a dollar. [There's no trade-press that reports on these things--so some of my numbers are conjecture. But I welcome all responses from any bona-fide Interpublic Group representative, if there are any who are not bots.]
The point today though isn't about the crumbling of any particular holding company, or the disintegration of IPG in particular. It's the Atilla-like ravaging of the industry by holding companies who buy high, remove value, pay themselves huge fees and leave nothing behind but a carcass or a shell for in this case, the Kiwis to eat at.
If Deutsch cost IPG $265 million 24 years ago I'd doubt Attivo paid more than $20 million for Hill and the half of Deutsch they acquired.
In short, millions and millions of dollars of "value" were destroyed. Though dozens of holding company executives, while destroying that value, are still able to live on the water in the Hamptons and fly privately. Become knighted. And earn literally millions in compensation and many more millions in "deferred compensation," which they will receive for the rest of their lives.
[By my calculation, WPP, which for now owns Ogilvy has five or six Ogilvy ex-CEOs still being paid, and Martin Sorrell, who was fired for allegedly expensing call-girls on his WPP expense allowance, is still being paid by WPP $500,000/year. More, I'd imagine, than nearly anyone reading this. Again, I welcome rebuttal from any bona-fide WPP representative, if there are any who are not bots.]
The rotten-ness comes from the Private Equity system that now owns the ad industry. The Private Equity system, which is predicated on strengthening companies by finding efficiencies, seldom finds efficiencies outside of firing people.
This is what PE has done to numerous companies in a panoply of industries--from publishing, to retail, to health-care, to veterinary services and more.
Assuming you're too busy to read those reviews, since that involves actual work, read this passage. If you'd like, substitute Deutsch or Hill/Holliday or IPG, or whomever for Toys "R" Us.
Though I've studied a fair bit of economics in my day--both in college and since college--I'm not economist. But I do read books like the ones I pictured above. What's more, I'm a little "red." I believe in out-moded ideas like "regulation," "anti-trust," and even, "progressive-taxation." While my charts below might be reductio ad absurdum, that doesn't mean they're wrong.
Oh, and BTW, two things on Mark Read, WPP, CEO, who libeled me by saying I "harken back to the eighties." And then fired me for being old. I welcome a response, Mark, if you're not a bot.
One morning almost 49 years ago, I woke up early next to my road roomie, Gordo Batista, the Seraperos' starting catcher, in a small hotel room in a second-tier Mexican city.
The room was bare, Spartan you might call it, if you were being charitable or anti-Spartan. There was a small desk, a cushioned vinyl chair and a whirring ceiling fan overhead, better at making noise than at moving the air.
"I forget," I said to the ceiling, "what city are we in?"
Batista thought for a moment. "We could be anywhere from Chilpancingo to Querétaro. What difference does it make?"
"Tonight," I began, "and the next few days, we will play our games, have our showers, get our chewing-outs and then go to another place whose name we do not know."
"Maybe there will be a girl here after the game. Or two."
"But probably just a cerveza."
"Or two."
I rolled to my right out of bed, while Batista stayed in his and scratched at his large middle. I turned the caliente tap in the plastic bathroom and hoped the water would comply. After a couple of minutes I gave up and shaved cold. I was used to shaving cold. It was ok. I was only 17 and hadn't much to shave. To be honest, I still don't. I have to wait a month for a five-o'clock shadow.
Nowadays, I wake up to pee more times a night than there are hours in the night. But when I was young, I was like a reverse camel--not a ship of the desert, more like a cistern of the sands.
Finally, Batista shoved over to the sink and I backed up to pee in the lopsided toilet. That's when I would have scared the pants off of me, had I been wearing any.
I peed blood. A long, deep-red stream of blood, bleeding into the toilet water and making it blood, like a tea-bag infusing the liquid in a mug.
I was scared quiet, just about the highest-order of scared. When you can't make a sound because you're waiting for the other cosmic shoe to drop. The former heavyweight champion Max. Baer once described fear this way, "Standing across the ring from Joe Louis, knowing he wants to go home early." Fear, yes, but I bet Baer never pissed blood.
"Gordo. My pee."
He waved me away like I was a pitcher and he wanted a bender not heat.
"My pee is blood." I ignored his dismissal. "Do not tell Hector. He will send me to the hospital in this place."
"I will get Verduzco," Gordo said and he left our room to find Verduzco's, down the hall somewhere.
Jesus Verduzco was a scrub utility infielder, mostly shortstop, who was 24 when I knew him and the sole college graduate on the squad. In the off-season he was a medical student at Tecnológico de Monterrey. We would run together at times, perfectly in-synch, limbering up in the outfield. I once said to him, "we run in iambic hexameter," as our spikes rhythmed on the warning-track scree. He laughed, which made me think he understood.
I peed again before Gordo and Verduzco came back though I had hardly any pee left in me. Like going back to a scary movie for the second time, or talking to my mother, I wanted to see how bad it was. I didn't want any delay in finding out I was dead.
Once, some decades ago, I had a lump where lumps should not be. The doctor gave me a sonogram and then I walked back to work, to wait for the results. I walked through midtown not looking at traffic lights or taxi-cabs. I was that sure I was already dead.
Verduzco came into the little room, with Gordo behind him.
"You peed again?" Verduzco asked.
"Just a little."
"Was it more red or less red?"
"Less, I think."
"And was there any pain or burning?"
"No." I answered with truth. I was too scared to lie. "Just the blood."
Verduzco backed out of the room and I followed. I sat on my bed, Gordo sat on his and Verduzco sat at the small desk facing me.
"You probably took a bad hop in the kidney," he said. "Or the rattle of the bus through the potholes in the mountains broke a blood vessel where you didn't even know you had blood vessels."
"I caught a line-drive in my ribs day before yesterday."
"That's it," Verduzco said. "You watch every time you pee. If it comes back or gets bad, we'll have to go to the hospital. I am not yet a doctor."
"But you won't tell Hector."
"I won't tell Hector. I won't tell anyone. But you must, if it gets worse. If you don't tell, it will get worse."
He looked at me like a doctor does when he tells you to lose weight or to cut down on alcohol. "Yes," I said. "Yes." I looked at my hands like I was a bad dog and had done something wrong.
Verduzco left the room.
Gordo and I dressed. We went to spend our meal-money, then headed to the ball-park to play whatever game needed playing. We never spoke of my bloody pee again. Even when I'd return from the men's room of the diner we ate in, Gordo didn't ask.
Maybe he was as afraid as I was.
Afraid that we're all dying, every day. Peeing blood or not.
If you grew up in what we call ancient Rome, say from about the time of Julius Caesar to about the time of Constantine, if you were watching, if you could find a news source, if you could find unbiased history, if you could find that most precious of all gifts--perspective--you might have noticed something.
You might have noticed that very few emperors lasted very long. During that roughly 400-year-period, Rome swung from one emperor to another, one set of beliefs usually to another very different set of beliefs. There was very little political or philosophical continuity.
As Christianity began to take root, the swings got even more dramatic. In 100 CE, there were roughly 7,000 Christians in the vast Roman empire, about 0.001-percent of the population. By 200 CE, that number had grown 30-fold to roughly 200,000 or 0.035-percent of the population. Christianity was the crack-cocaine of the day. Addictive.
Eventually, Christianity became a major player. And as Rome itself suffered the things all giant social organizations suffer--pandemics, hunger, class-strife, bad economies, wars--more and more people would conclude Rome was following the wrong gods and the next emperor would follow different gods and thereby make things better.
For a couple centuries Rome would shift seismically from pagan emperors to Christian emperors. Of course the above list of societal woes occur regardless of the religious and political orientation of political leadership, so Rome would shift again.
It went like this:
"Under pagans life sucks. Let's switch to Christians."
"Under Christians life sucks. Let's switch to pagans."
That's how the world works. It works that way today.
Now, finally, at last, and wtf, I get to the point.
At 1:11.
I am 66 years old, and an old 66. I was born old and have stayed that way forever and will forever more. I grew up believing that rote memorization was a good, maybe painful, but necessary discipline. There were just things you had to know, had to have at your fingertips.
I can still decline bonus bona bonum and hic haec hoc in under ten seconds as I was trained to do as an eleven-year-old in 7th-grade Latin. (I can decline them in under seven seconds; Connie Jacobs was class champion and came in under five, though she didn't remember doing that when we Facebooked- back in touch after 55 years.)
I still know all the state capitals and most of the world-wide ones. I still know the Great Lakes, city populations, all the US-presidents and their terms of office, much of the Gettysburg address, the Preamble to the Constitution, the highest and lowest points on various continents and in various oceans &c.
All this memory training, though needing to know the capital of Nigeria (Abuja) or the name of William McKinley's first Vice President (Garrett Augustus Hobart) is never needed and can be supplied instantly with the press button, has served me well.
It's not the obscure information at my fingertips that helps me in business meetings, in writing, in recalling client-conversations, etc. but it is my ability to recall things that were said, past marketing examples that might be relevant, even songs and jokes from days of yore that might be useful in today's current end-times.
It's not the what. It's the how.
It's not what I was taught, it's how my brain was taught.
The point in all this is that it's easy to reject everything that came before. It's easy to throw out experience, age, old-fashioned ways of doing things and even things no one has to be able to do anymore because we don't do those things anymore. But a lot of those "came-befores" were based on an understanding of the underlying physics of the world. How to get a stain out of a white shirt, how to change a tire, how to find a detail (what today we call an insight) that could separate the prosaic from the profound.
My guess is that many of these little things were never screaming at us--they weren't found on 48-sheet billboards. They were picked-up inter-generationally, they were on page 96 of an obscure and excoriated book by Toynbee or they were just found through trial and error and somehow retained. My wife for instance, when she makes matzo balls always adds an ice-cube to the mixture. She tells me they come out softer that way.
As humans we will always do things the old way, then abjure the old way and adopt a new way. We'll do this over-and-over during the course of our lives from the time we're born until the time we no longer have decent healthcare. You will always raise your fourth dog differently than your first, or approach a client in 2024 differently than you did in 1984.
The trick in trying to grow as a human and to succeed, whatever that means in life, is to be judicious, measured and rough on what you decides needs throwing out.
We're always, as a species, going to bellow, "The King (or emperor) is dead; long live the King." Or we'll divorce our first wife and choose a second one more like the first one than the first one.
As Dashiell Hammett wrote in the only chapter John Huston left out when he brought "The Maltese Falcon" to the screen:
Or, as maybe Robert Frost said even more succinctly in his 1914 poem, "The Mending Wall,"
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Or as Marcus Aurelius said even more more succinctly, "Same play, different cast."
It's 6AM on Thursday morning a few days before New Years'. I am writing this in my head.
It's early and dark and my wife is still asleep. I'm too tired to get out of bed to get a pencil. So, while I'm think-writing, I'm also hoping I'll remember this when I finally get to a computer to scribble it down.
It's just before the end of yet another Amerikan annus horibilis, where facts are no more, gun violence and drug deaths are out of control, the world rages in wars and hatred, and the prospect of a dictator taking over the country is more feasible than laughable.
Oh, and it's raining like katz and schwartz outside. A rain that would have Noah pulling on those ugly LL Bean boots. A rain that inside-outs a trillion umbrellas and leaves the city streets strewn with the ribs of broken Chinese-made two-dollar rain-blocking contrivances that work about as well as a customer-service bot from a cable company.
It's late December, and we're having our third giant rainstorm in as many weeks without having had even a trace, even a downy flake of snow. My little horse must think it queer.
It will never snow again.
Though in my little seaside house we have three or four shovels, a bag of salt to help melt the ice that no longer collects on our stone walkway, and my 1966 Simca 1500 has two or three plastic ice-scrapers rattling about its tin-trunk, it will never snow again.
Humankind--we, you, me, all of us--broke the planet. And it will never snow again. It will be 70-degrees in winter, 120-degrees in the summer. Storms will come from nowhere. Tropical diseases will descend upon Canada. Seas will swell and rivers will dry. Food won't grow where it's always grown and the sixty-percent of the planet's population that lives near water will be displaced by that water, forced to drown or move and hated for having to move, and therefore starting more hate and more wars and more of the human-made gasses that started this all.
It will never snow again. We broke the planet.
Of course, it will snow again.
We'll have four inches or twenty-four and blizzards will sweep the streets and the idiots that wear their politics on a hat and proffer their philosophies on East-Asian made t-shirts will scoff and snort and laugh and say through their coke-laden noses, 'global warming,' as if one now-anomalous freak snowstorm proves they're right and science and a million points of data prove reality wrong.
It will never snow again. We broke the planet.
We broke it by being cheap. We broke it for fun and profit and shareholder value. We broke it by not paying for what we bought. We broke it convincing ourselves it was ok when it wasn't and we gave ourselves trophies as reassurance. We broke it by making a mess and refusing to clean it up. We broke it by ignoring and ignorance. We broke it because we denied it. We broke it because because responsibility is hard and we prefer easy.
I think about all this as the rain cascades on my expensive solar-paneled roof and I think of what I know best, the ad industry.
We will never see a good commercial or print ad again.
Oh, maybe one will escape somehow from a giant holding company advertising gulag. One commercial for a real product, like a detergent, a computer or a car will get out. Or one will emerge from a couple of people who live in Greenpoint and still give a shit and somehow convinced a client to. Or we'll see something somehow in the wild that doesn't suck and we'll say:
OK, it's all right. See, we over-reacted. See, good-advertising can happen.
Except, those little blips on the radar screen of advertising are anomalous. They're somehow not some reality.
We'll never see a good ad again. We broke the industry.
We broke it by being cheap. We broke it for fun and profit and shareholder value. We broke it by not paying for what we bought. We broke it convincing ourselves it was ok when it wasn't and we gave ourselves trophies as reassurance. We broke it by making a mess and refusing to clean it up. We broke it by ignoring and ignorance. We broke it because we denied it. We broke it because because responsibility is hard and we prefer easy.
A lot of people look at me and my prodigious blogging output and ask a simple question.
How.
There's no secret.
No magic.
No, like Robert Johnson, deal with the devil at a crossroads.
Here's how.
1. If you're in the "content business," be in the content business. Make content your job. Make being interesting, thoughtful, controversial, provocative, dumb, funny your job.
Most of what's important in life is not something you can do as a dilettante. You can't be a friend on a part-time basis, or a partner, or even a co-worker. I'm pretty sure the Cubs' Hall-of-Fame short-stop Ernie "Let's Play Two" Banks, never phoned it in.
Creativity and commitment to readers, viewers, customers, clients is about commitment. All of the time. Not when the mood hits you.
2. Put your readers up on a pedestal.
Dilettantes care more about their perceived performance than what they do for others. Serious people care more about their audience than they do their egos.
That doesn't mean you pander to them. Ever.
It means you do your best always.
In fact, I'll go a step farther. The central issue in communications in the era of artificial intelligence, the central issues for communicators, brands included, is this: "How much do your care for your audience?"
It is surely easier and cheaper to press a button and have a machine produce a skein of cliches, hoary images and banalities. If you doubt this for a moment, look at all the brands that are perfectly OK with running a video with "auto-generated" captions. 99.999999999999-percent of the time there's a major subject-object split between what's said and what's captioned.
Who cares, right?
Except semiotically--that is, what such performance shows--is an utter disregard for people. If you don't care, it shows.
And, again, 99.999999999999-percent of communications show they don't care. No matter who, what or how they're written. Whether it's Bob or Bot.
3. Read. Read. And read some more.
The key, the one key, the only key to being good at writing is reading. Reading.
Not the Boscov's circular. Or something from Twitter. Or the greatest hits of Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Green and Jared Kushner, but real writing. Writing that's the product of genuine thinking.
I just read these sentences from a book review in the weekend Wall Street Journal. I learned some things. And enjoyed the writing. I like a good list and a good nickname. I'll probably steal from this someday.
"The trouble with Times Square dates to the late 1960s crime sprees that threatened the very future of the area as a commercial office zone. The downward slide continued through the 1970s and early ’80s. In early 1978, Ms. Sagalyn reports, there were 40 pornographic-movie houses, 54 bookstores, 30 topless bars and live sex shows, 63 massage parlors and 33 'prostitution-prone' hotels. In 1981, the police started patrolling the pavement west of Seventh Avenue, deploying helmeted tactical patrol officers wielding batons—the feared Hats and Bats unit."
Try reading. It will usually improve your writing. Or at least give you "Hats and Bats".
4. Understand that what you do is important.
What you say matters.
How you say it matters, too.
Not long ago, Frank Bruni wrote an important article in The New York Times called "Our Semicolons, Ourselves." If you care about communication at all, you ought to read it.
If I ran a holding company, or even something as picayune as a global ad agency, or even a department or a group within an agency, or if I were involved in a client relationship, I would make it required reading. Assuming anyone can read anymore--or blithely (and stupidly) doesn't remark TL/DR, which essentially means, "it's too much work to get smart."
All that leads me to believe that of the roughly 80,000 readers this blog gets every week, about 12 people will read this. That's how much the modren world cares about reaching people and influencing them.
Bruni quotes University of North Carolina professor, Molly Worthen. (Agencies, take note. That is if you're not to busy with your latest lust of self-congratulation for yet another $49.99 Triple Play Bundle commercial, or Winter Sale-a-Thon.)
Worthen notes that “transmitting ideas into written words is hard, and people do not like to do it.” [But] "someone who performs that task gladly, quickly and nimbly in most cases ends up the default author, the quarterback to whom others start to turn, out of habit, for the play.”
In terms of advertising and brand communications, if you communicate well--people begin to listen--and respect you. Think Apple.
However, agencies, and most clients (those who don't hire me) forget this part: "The clarity, coherence, precision and even verve with which you do that — achieving a polish and personality distinct from most of what A.I. spits out — will have an impact on the recipients of that missive, coloring their estimation of you and advancing or impeding your goals."
In other words, Bruni writes "Good writing burnishes your message. It burnishes the messenger, too." Or as I've used as my tagline since 2020 when I was fired from Ogilvy for being TL/DR or TS/TM (too smart, trouble-maker) "Good writing is a business advantage."
I'll say that last bit again because good writing also bears repeating: "Good writing is a business advantage."
If you're a potential client reading this and you're not working with me, call me. I won't repeat my tagline for a third time.
If you're an agency and you're not working with me, nyeah nyeah nyeah.
5. Give yourself a brief. A hard one.
In our currently boundary-and-hierarchy-less era, so much writing is 'anything goes.' There are no rules and for much of the 'page,' no end of the page. What's more, so-called responsive design (which isn't responsive to either the needs of readers or writers) doesn't even allow for proper line breaks.
It's up to you to force a discipline on yourself. The almost-daily ads I do for GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, are a good example of what I mean.
They follow a format.
They have to tell a joke in about eight words. That's the length that works according to their design.
Writers used to know things like this. Approximately how much time people are willing to waste without a pay-out. Today, most writers make the giant mistake of thinking people care. It reminds me of trying to watch sports on TV. There's so much announcer-blabberating that you can hardly see the game.
In other words, pay attention to how you're treating the viewer.
6. Do something. Do something different.
I sat in many a casting session with Academy Award-winning director, Errol Morris. During my first, I expected to witness genius. What I heard were those to sentences over and over again.
So much of being interesting is actively doing something different. But it's not enough just to be different. I don't think mustard-flavored ice cream or a gingerbread ATM makes a lick of difference in the real world. Different has to be substantive or it's just a stunt.
And substantive takes thinking, invention, creativity and meaning. Not just standing on one foot and whistling Dixie. That takes work.
I dunno.
It makes sense to me.
7. Basics.
If you want to be like, if you want your brand to be liked, "do exactly what it says on the tin."
Make a promise. Keep a promise.
Don't rely on an algorithm to keep people happy. They never will and they never can.
Don't call people targets. Or saturate them with so many dumb messages that they feel they've been marketing cluster-bombed.
26. A nice glass of really cold seltzer. So heavily carbonated that it hurts when you drink it.
27. "Gooseberries," a short story by Anton Chekhov.
28. "A Walk with Elizanne," a short story by John Updike.
29. "It Looked Like Forever," a baseball novel by Mark Harris, about a left-handed pitcher turning 40 and trying to hang on one more season so his youngest (of five) daughters can see him play in the Big Leagues.
30. My favorite short story of all, "A&P," again by Updike.
31. Having time to actually read.
32. When Dizzy Gillespie ran for president. I wish he had won.
33. When people under 80 ran for president.
34. When the subway had news-stands on the platforms and you could go out through one door, get a paper, go in through another door before the train left.
35. The Halal chicken and lamb combo from the Egyptian guy in front of the Toyota dealer on 11th Avenue across from Ogilvy. I said thank you to him once in Egyptian and we were friends for life.
36. One-liners. Like "my wife's nickname is 'the widow-maker.'"
37. abebooks.com, where you can find just about any book you can find on amazon at about 1/10 the price.
38. Really good New York coffee shops where they bring you your order--correctly--before you even order it.
39. A good cup of coffee from an independent coffee shop--not Starbucks or the like.
40. A good piece of apple pie. On a clean plate.
41. The theme song to "Car 54, Where Are You?" "There's a hold-up in the Bronx/ Brooklyn's broken out in fights/There's a traffic jam in Harlem that goes onto Jackson Heights/There's a scout troop's lost a child/Krushchev's due at Idlewild/Car 54, Where Are You?"
42. When Kennedy airport was still called Idlewild.
43. And cabs still had mechanical meters. That went up in 10-cent increments, not dollar by dollar.
44. A good milkshake--and the "dividend." (When you were given the extra that was left in the stainless-steel mixing cup.
45. Howard Johnson's. (The restaurant. Not the third baseman.)
46. A two-hour baseball game. And 20-game winners.
47. To that end, Warren Spahn. He won 20 games 13 times, including six seasons in a row.
48. Skee-Ball with real wooden balls and a 'trip' so you can play all-day for free.
49. Ideal Coffee Shop, an old German diner on East 86th Street in Germantown, where you could get a good knockwurst with red cabbage and sit on a stool at the counter. And enjoy yourself.
50. The last post of 2023. An annus horribilis for much of the world and while much was good for me, including my wife, daughters and our new puppy, it is a sad time for lovers of humanity.
2. Clients who tell other clients about your work.
3. Clients who send you a cinnamon babka in the mail, thanking you for your work.
4. Cinnamon babka.
5. Writing a good piece of copy.
6. Taking a two-mile walk, returning to that copy and making it better.
7. The connections I have with people from the industry, all over the world. How we share, encourage and learn together. And laugh. And laugh some more.
8. Shelley's Ozymandias while thinking of trump, musk, mcconnell, ryan, jordan, greene, boebert and a thousand others who think they're gods. Including agency people.
9. Hearing a storm at sea while you're on land.
10. My new puppy Sparkle swimming for the first time.
11. The end of a long year.
12. Pressing "end call for everyone" after a Zoom meeting.
13. Raphael Soyer. I bought a signed print twenty years ago.
14. Rainy days and Mondays.
15. Friends who are glad to see you. Or at least fake it.
16. Net30 that comes in 20.
17. Stan Laurel using his thumb as a lighter. Which makes sense to me.
18. Fundamentals.
19. The best sentence in all of American literature. "Shut up," he explained, by Ring Lardner in "The Young Immigrants."
20. And maybe the second best, also by Lardner in "Golden Honeymoon." "Mother set facing the front of the train, as it makes her giddy to ride backwards. I set facing her, which does not affect me."
21. Laughter at inappropriate times. (And in advertising today--which is today so serious--laughter is always inappropriate. And never more needed.)
22. Good Roman mosaics. Which is redundant.
23. A Macoun apple from the tree. As crisp as a hug from your therapist.
24. Good lighting. It helps even me.
25. An honest, withering put-down. Like this from Mary McCarthy, writing about Lillian Hellman: "Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'"
And this by Fred Allen: "What's on your mind? If you'll forgive the overstatement."
69. The general acceptance of laziness, like hands-free driving.
70. Any commercial that includes wireless speeds.
71. Any person who believes that any wireless system has ever delivered the wireless speed claimed by the system.
72. The batteries in Apple products. If Apple made pacemakers people would die after about three hours.
73. Corporate logos on sports uniforms and digitally imposed on the pitcher's mound and the wall behind home-plate.
74. Brands and agencies that turn viewers into victims.
75. People who don't turn off the set when they're being victimized.
76. Billionaires who want to fight each other. And who don't do it with chainsaws.
77. Shrinkflation. A pint of ice cream that's three ounces short of a pint but priced 20% more than a pint.
78. Airline commercials where people look comfortable and there are no crying babies, surly flight attendants, two-hour tarmac delays and broken equipment.
79. Commercials where two slackers have a problem: only one beer, soda or bag of chips left.
80. When a mediocre actor dies and it seems that half the world proclaims what a big part of their lives that mediocre actor was.
81. Anyone who says something is genius or brilliant. Especially if they're talking about an ad, a brief, or a social post.
82. People who drive alone in giant pick-up trucks or SUVs, leave them idling for twenty minutes to 'warm up', and then complain about gas prices.
83. That it's good to call someone a bad-ass.
84. Stadiums named for corporations that pay no taxes.
85. Car commercials where cars drive on traffic-less roads. ie All car commercials.
86. Self-help and housekeeping hints from what used to be 'the paper of record.'
87. Megan Kelly.
88. People who make a big deal about their feelings about the Oxford comma.
89. People who don't give a rat's ass about the Oxford semicolon.
90. Those who extol machine-learning while ignoring the greatest tool for learning, thinking, creating and inventing: the human brain.
91. Statements like the above. Tautologies masquerading as wisdom.
92. People who write things like, "tautologies masquerading as wisdom."
93. People who say they're in "talent acquisition," as if talent is something you can acquire, like rat poison.
94. Likewise, people and companies who refer to people as "human resources," or ideas as "content" or something worthwhile as an "asset."
95. Bad search.
96. ie, all search.
97. Companies that pledge to be "carbon-neutral" by some faraway date. It's like saying, "I'll be over pederasty by 2037." If it's important to do, do it now.
98. People and companies that pay giant fines and are allowed to "admit no wrong doing."
99. End-of-year articles when you're pretty-well out of ideas.
37. 68-page PowerPoint briefs rather than one-page 12-point briefs.
38. Brainstorming.
39. Ideating.
40. Work sessions.
41. Tissue sessions.
42. People who talk about mindfulness and 'the art of being present.'
43. Politicians who call the republican party 'the party of Lincoln.'
44. Billionaires who don't pay taxes.
45. ie Billionaires.
46. Meetings after 4 on Fridays.
47. Lateness.
48. When you get a new client and they only have 30-minutes for meetings, because their days are a series of twenty 30-minute meetings.
49. Expecting good work to result from clients like that.
50. Track-changes with conflicting feedback.
51. Being expected to make sense of track-changes with conflicting feedback.
52. Pantone's color of the year.
53. Discussing Pantone's color of the year.
54. Superhero movies. And the idea that there are more than twelve people on planet earth who would look good in full-body tights.
53. Connected TV.
54. Any thing, anyone, any brand that promises 'cash back.'
55. Any thing, anyone, any brand that promises to give one to charity when you buy one.
56. Any thing, anyone, any brand that asks you to round up your purchase and the brand will donate it to charity (and get the tax deduction.)
57. Self-checkout.
58. Big box retailers with no sales-help, low quality, undifferentiated products that have driven independent shops out of business--especially ad holding companies.
59. Commercials shot on iPhones with crappy acting, crappy scripts, crappy direction, crappy offerings, and a general level of crappiness. They're proof the client thinks their customers are also crap.
60. Announcements of senior level job changes where someone is said to be spending more time with his family.
61. People who announce they're off on their next adventure.
62. Any thing any brand calls a journey.
63. Commercials with Kevin Hart. Unless they're funny. Which means they don't feature Kevin Hart.
64. Mayonnaise commercials where it's claimed that mayonnaise has a hand in saving the world.
65. Any commercial where you don't know what's being sold for more than 20 seconds. Unless the drama is so well-conceived you actually care, and then what's being sold is actually good.
66. Ads that let you skip them after five seconds. If your ad is that skippable, it sucks. And you're advertising in places people don't think you belong.
67. Recency. That is, people with no historical perspective who believe, essentially, a classic is defined by age, not quality.
1. Those online posts where people take famous comics, like Peanuts, and put fake words into a character's mouth. It's appropriation, it's desecration and it's a lie.
2. Id est, lack of fact-checking. When people say things like, 'no one reads,' or 'Barbie changed everything,' or 'gas under Biden is $8/gallon,' or 'Blank is agency of the year' without any scrutiny or examination.
3. Verizon commercials.
4. Verizon commercials where 'talent' blathers about 120 words in 30-seconds, about twice what used to be accepted as ok.
5. Verizon commercials that feature people Christmas caroling. I'm 66-years-old, I've never encountered a door-to-door chorus.
6. The advertising trade-press, which has become nothing more than a 'bought-and-paid-for' PR organ with no investigative function. They accept everything and criticize nothing.
7. Pharma commercials. They should be banned, like cigarette commercials were. But the ad industry would go bankrupt.
8. Political commercials. They should be banned. They are not even subject to network approval, which means they can say anything with no backup required.
9. Commercials where people dance. Even if dancing is just moving fists side to side like trump dancing.
10. Local news promos which 91% of the time are blithering on about a tenement fire, the storm of the century, or the horrific bludgeoning of an eighty-year-old.
11. The inverse ratio of awards given and the quality of what's being awarded.
12. Anything that's now 'nacho-cheesier.'
14. People who avoid the number 13 because they're superstitious.
15. Stickers placed on grocery-store apples. A desecration of nature for commerce.
16. Automobile commercials where 'talent' refers to their car as 'my Buick SUV.'
17. Automobile commercials for vehicles with convoluted names like 'the Acura SJy67n' in which the voiceover then says, 'the first-ever Acura SJy67n,' as if that is something remarkable.
18. Rye bread without caraway seeds.
19. Sports seasons that are 40% longer than they should be. [Baseball: April 15-October 2.] [Football: October 2-January 15.] [Basketball: November 15-March 31.]
20. Daily emails from politicians who write to me as if they know me. And always needing money.
21. Agencies that trumpet diversity and then show photos of their new leadership team who are always all-white, under 33, unshaven, wearing the same clothing, all-male, and angry.
22. Agencies that think people need a new kids' book from an agency.
23. The idea that I would eat something called a 'Whopper.'
24. Articles that purport to be serious about Anderson Cooper, who purports to be serious.
25. Anything about the royals, who aren't worth a capital r.
26. Commercials that rhyme.
27. People who announce they're 'open to work.'
28. Elon Musk.
29. Elon Musk.
30. Elon Musk.
31. Gifs. Repeating something that isn't funny doesn't make it funny.
32. Companies that announce they're updating their terms and conditions.
33. Terms and conditions that are more than 20 words long.
