Dirt. And Hurt.

About 35 years ago, I worked at Ally & Gargano for a creative director called Ed Butler. Ed was widely-considered one of the best writers in the ad business. Because he had had a severe problem with alcohol, he had suffered a series of career set-backs but now he was sober and he had hired me.

Just two from Ed.

Even the story of why Ed hired me illuminates his character. I had mistakenly put a marker-comp in my book. An ad I did for the New York Police Department who were running an internal campaign on suicide prevention. I had forgotten I had left the ad in a sleeve in my book--an ad the NYPD never bought.

But Ed found it. And hired me because of it. The headline read, "Last year, ten New York City cops were shot to death. Seven did it themselves." 

The account I worked on with Ed was a retail account, and I pretty much had to write an ad a week. That meant that once a week, I'd have to write a 100 or so words of body copy, often on a complex financial product, and get it approved by Ed. 

In those days, getting approval didn't involve pinging someone via slack, sending them three emails, or sending them an IM. You usually knew when someone arrived at work or came back from lunch and you mustered up your courage and cornered them then. I was young at the time and Ed was legendary and 30 years older than I. The whole approval process was intimidating.

One day, I showed Ed a piece of body copy.

"You wrote quicker, I'd say faster. But it's your decision." 

He read some more, "Oh," he said, "You're a 'what's more' guy. I like that. Half the battle is writing a list and making it feel like it's not a list."

Then Ed looked at me with his blues. 

"You know how to write. You don't have to show me your copy anymore. You can if you want to, if you need my help. But you don't need to."

Actually, working with Chris Wall and Steve Hayden was much the same way. They might have a nip and tuck here or there, but for the most part, they were hands off. Maybe they'd read things just to get the little jokes I'd regularly slip into my copy just to see if anyone noticed. Once on something I was writing for Chris, I wrote a sentence, "This makes the Crab Nebula look like small potatoes." After he saw that, my hand was essentially stamped.

One thing I've noticed through the years: the more confident and competent the boss, the fewer rounds of revisions you're put through.

Since I started GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, many of my agency friends ask me how I have the time to handle all the business I handle in addition to staying on top of my social feeds--which get me more business. 

I almost always say, "If you were going to draw a pie chart of your days at Ogilvy, I'd bet 45% is meetings, 25% is wondering why you weren't invited to a meeting, 20% is dealing with 17-rounds of changes on a tweet, 5% is dealing with the time-sheet po-po. That leaves only 5% of your agency life for actual work. (If you believe as I do that meetings hardly count as work.)

When you work on your own, 78% of your time is actual work. 12% of your time is pantomiming to your spouse "I'm on a call," and 10% of your time is chasing clients who think Net120 is ethical. In other words, working on your own it's liberatingly productive.

Even though it's 271-degrees out, I went out for a three-mile walk just after lunch today. I started thinking about this agency vs. self dichotomy. Here's what I got to.

If my job was digging holes--say ten a day, and each hole was made up of 20 shovels-full of dirt, at an agency I'd have to get approval after each shovel was filled. 

I might be told I had too much dirt on a shovel, or not enough. I might be told I threw the dirt into the wrong pile. I might be told I wasn't scoped to dig that hole. Or I should move to another hole because my hole-supervisor noticed a rock in my hole and we had rock-removal people who specialized in this and who billed at a higher hourly rate and we had to bring them in--even if I could do it just fine.

The critiques of my digging wouldn't end there. Someone might say my down-stroke wasn't vertical enough. Or deep enough. Or it was too deep. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Today, all I do is dig holes. I've dug a lot in my life and been making a living at it for parts of five decades, approaching six. I'd wager not that many people are more skilled than I at digging.

So, I dig. With muscle, authority and confidence. Those characteristics are usually synonymous with quality, efficiency and productivity.

That's me.

Dishing the dirt.

Briefing.

Most of my clients do not give me a brief.

If they give me anything typewritten at all, it's a manuscript of fear, things they have to do, and panic brought to a simmer over the low heat of time-pressure and garnished with mandatories that are often contradictory and draconian.

I read brief but all but ignore it. Not in a mean or haughty way. But I listen to clients when we speak about what they need when they call me. I find that more helpful. 

And I ask them a lot of questions. 

Often they're so consumed with fear that what I get as a briefing is a swirl not an approach.

I guess that's why they pay me.

Years ago when I was working for Steve Simpson at Ogilvy, I wrote a short story for a pitch. It was, if you can believe it, a children's book on a technology called Robotic Process Automation.

This was heavy stuff.

I turned it human and funny. And I did it quickly.

Steve has a very intense, tiny hand-writing. He marked up my manuscript like a prisoner sneaking messages to the outside world. He made every scrap of paper count and he wrote his comments in about four-point type.

I knew what I wrote was relatively unassailable. Not only was the idea fairly good, I wrote it very well. I went through all of Steve's comments and "yepped" them. 

Yep, that makes sense. Yep, that makes sense.

But I got to one and I was floored. He made the thing immediately better and funnier. 

I ran down to his office.

"How did you do that," I threatened. "You make it so much better in one sentence?"

"That's what editors do," he answered, hardly meeting my blues with his.

"You did all the work, I just had the perspective."

Of course. 

That's what we do in advertising that clients can't do.

It's what AI will never do. Can never do. Can't.

It's judgment.

One of the issues with AI and the data on which it's based, like the data upon which CRM is based or the surveys companies are constantly besieging us with, is that we think they allow us to paint an accurate portrait of a person because we have so much data. That's about the wrongest thing in all of marketing and has been since marketing began.

No matter how much data you have predictability is unpredictable. Predictability is unpredictable.

This isn't going to be exactly accurate, but you'll get my drift. Think of how different a human is from a pig. Yet from what I've heard, we share about 98.1-percent of our DNA with pigs. If merely 1.9-percent of DNA is what makes us so different from a wallowing pig, think of all the data we represent. We are made of complexity that is unfathomable. 

I've read that the human brain has about six-trillion connections and synapses. That's far more firings than we can ever codify.

We also have memories that have such a layered complexity that they defy machine or even quantum replication. You can be walking down the street, for instance, and smell tar being poured by a road-crew. It's a common enough smell, especially during an election year when politicians pave roads to win votes.

That smell for me brings me back to a hot summer day when I was four in the Bronx sitting on a green vinyl seat in a school bus on the way to the zoo, in traffic, as burly men fix a broken road. I have a brown paper bag in my lap and a jelly sandwich on Arnold white bread from my mother. It's been in the summer heat and wrapped in cellophane and the jelly has soaked into the bread. Accompanied by a six-ounce glass bottle of warm Welch's grape juice, it is the most delicious thing I will ever eat.

At the zoo, I'm given a nickel for a machine that dispenses pellets of brown deer feed. A deer eats it out of my hand, his whiskers like an old man's.

On the way home the bus driver has the radio on. The announcer says it's "83 double you a b c degrees" and then I hear a commercial for Hoffmann's soda and think of my Welch's grape juice. I still hear the song. "The prettiest girl/I ever saw/ Was drinking Hoffmann's/ Through a straw./ The prettiest girl/I ever saw/ Was drinking Hoffmann's/ Through a straw."

That's our job, in a way. 

To take all those nutty inchoate words and turn them into something that appeals, persuades, impacts.

Machines can cut grass.

Humans can be Breughel.

Elder or Younger, it doesn't matter.

Though Elder is more likely to get fired.

He's cranky.

"I Do."

One Saturday night many many years ago, I went to a wedding of an account person I was friendly with who was getting married to another account person she was friendly with.

We were out in Brooklyn somewhere and sitting at our table as we watched our friends tie the knot, jump over the broom, enter nuptial bliss--or nuptial blister--whichever comes first.

There were about eight of us at the table at which I was sitting and I recognized the guy sitting across from me. He was a very prominent creative having risen very high up at BBDO and then after stops at some other giant agencies (BBDO was a giant agency once) opened his own place.

He was a big name in the business, famous for very funny spots and famous for winning awards.

I'm not sure what he's doing now or even if he is doing. That's not the point.

I introduced myself.

"Hi, _________. It's nice to meet you. I'm my name here. I also work in advertising."

"What do you do," __________ asked. He seemed, for a moment to actually give a shit.

I was at Ogilvy on IBM at the time and said something like, "I help run IBM for Ogilvy. I take all that shit no one understands and I make it understandable."

__________ looked at me for a moment. I think he might have closed his eyes, then he opened them and said to me, "Oh, you do real advertising."

What struck me that evening is the stratification of the advertising business. If the industry is comprised of say, 200,000 people, probably 2,000 win 97-percent of the awards. The same 2,000 who are posting from Cannes right now, drinking Rosé in bare feet and feting work that I've never seen except on LinkedIn, agencyspy and the last remaining trade journals, which are really nothing more than press-releases bought and paid for giant agencies.

About five years ago I was asked to go to Cannes. Actually various Ogilvy "Cs" put a decent amount of pressure on me to go. I got out of it by saying "I'd look shitty in pink linen shorts." I left the room and they left me alone after that. 

Essentially, that's how I also got out of doing pharma work. I was asked to once by a C with no small amount of pressure. I said to him, "Hi, I'm Joan Lunden for anal leakage." He said, we'll find someone else, and left me alone after that.

When I was a boy, my older brother, Fred was an all-county golfer--all country in Westchester, NY. That's like being all county basketball from the southside of Chicago. Westchester was a golf Mecca.

Fred has a work ethic that makes me look like a slacker. To get his handicap into the low single-digits, Fred practiced all the time, mostly his short game and especially his putting. Once he said to me, "you drive for show and you putt for dough."

Meaning in golf, it's the details that separate the winners from the also-rans. On the putting green, a ten-foot putt means more than a 330-yard drive. 

There are probably thousands of golfers who can get on the green in two. But only a few dozen who consistently sink long putts.

You drive for show and you putt for dough.

About 50 years ago, I read a book by Malcolm Cowley. I don't remember anything about it but the title. It's the writer's version of the golfer's money shot, above.

The title was, "And I worked at the writer's trade."

When I think about the advertising business today, I also think about the business I grew up in. There was a time, this will be hard for many to fathom, that advertising agencies had beautiful office spaces and paid good salaries. What's more, they were located on Madison Avenue, Park Avenue, Lexington Avenue and Third Avenue. Back in the 1980s, I think Ogilvy was on Fifth Avenue.

In other words, ad agencies were sited within spitting distance of the companies they worked for. They were near the very center of the world's most-prominent companies. Agency CEOs had a pick-up- the-phone-relationship with Client CEOs. And agencies were well-paid for the work they did--they didn't charge like vendors, nor were they treated like vendors. 

I remember when a boss liked an ad I wrote but the client wouldn't buy it. My boss thought it would win gold. Hall-of-Famer, Amil Gargano agreed and called the client's CEO to sell the spot. He suggested I make one copy change--that would allay the client's issues. The client bought the ad.

Not too many months ago, I got a phone call from Steve Hayden, my advertising mentor and the closest person to a father I ever had. Steve had given GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company a client and he asked how it was going with that client.

"I think it's going pretty well," I answered. "He just called me on Saturday. A friend of his died and he needed help writing his eulogy."

"I'd say that's going pretty well," Steve said.

Somehow I think too much of our business has become too much about our own awards and our own aggrandizement. No, I don't relish writing eulogies for clients, but when you run your own agency and you're lucky enough to work primarily with CEOs or at the least CMOs, your job isn't a flashy one. Or it's not all flash, anyway.

It's not merely the spot or the stunt--real or phonus balonus--that shows up at Cannes. It's the 32-million things that a client needs, that's your job. Your job is to do them, to pull the client's ass out of the fire, to make the client look good. To come through and come through and come through. Even a eulogy for someone you don't know on a weekend in a rush.

Your job is to putt for dough.

To do the little things that build big wins.

Like I said, there was a time when agencies were treated well and paid well. I think it was because clients knew that those agencies came through with smart thinking when it was needed and asked for. And even more-so when the client didn't even know they needed it. They weren't worried about scopes and billable hours and deliverables. They were worried about delivering.

When I ran an agency I had a slogan. I still use it today. As in every day. "There's a big difference between doing the assignment and doing the job."

When advertising did the job people got rich from advertising. When we did nothing but the assignment advertising became a low-wage industry.

I believe in advertising that does the job. Advertising that over delivers. That knows the client and the client's products. And what makes them tick. And what makes them different.

That's the advertising industry I'm trying to build with GeorgeCo.

I couldn't give a rat's ass about the industry advertising has become. It's not the industry I love.

So far, five years into GeorgeCo., I've been able to find a lot of clients who like the way I work. 

I'd say 'they like the cut of my jib,' but that sounds too much like advertising.

Say Hey. One Last Time. (A Tribute.)

Willie Mays, and a large and well-muscled portion of my youth, died yesterday. Mark Harris, author of a tetralogy of baseball novels, maybe the best ever, once wrote "The only hero is the man without heroes."

1. The Southpaw.

2. A Ticket for a Seamstitch.

3. Bang the Drum Slowly, and

4. It Looked Like Forever.

I think Harris' quotation is right.

Though he had momentarily forgotten about Mays when he said it. 

In any event, below, some of my writing on Mays. And one of the best baseball songs ever, by the great Treniers.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Thinking about Willie Mays.

Recently The New York Times reported that the Yankees were urged to sign Willie Mays (at 18, already the best ballplayer in the Negro Leagues) not once, but a good number of times between 1949 and 1950. 

The Yankees didn't even look at Mays, not because they had Mickey Mantle coming up, but because Mays didn't suit their view of what a Yankee should look like.

It occurs to me most agencies, in fact most businesses work in exactly this way. Years ago I read a book by engineer/scientist Ben Rich, called "Skunk Works." Rich was the lead of the top-secret Lockheed lab that developed many of the most-advanced air-craft the world has ever seen, including the stealth fighter and the blackbird. Once he developed a stealth ship for the navy, a ship that couldn't be seen by radar or sonar. The navy turned down his plans because Rich's ship didn't look like a ship. In other words, he created a Willie Mays and what they wanted was a Mickey Mantle.

Advertising agencies, of course, follow exactly the same practices. Just try to sell a cereal commercial without milk dripping off a spoon or a grin shot. Or a cosmetics commercial that doesn't follow the conceits of all other beauty commercials. And despite all the fulminations and breathing through the mouth by C-level people (most of whom have never written an ad) TV still comes first--because it always has.

I suppose we could call this Willie Mays syndrome.

-

To my San Francisco friends, I happened to see Willie Mays play in one of his last games. He joined the NY Mets and returned to New York in 1972 and finished his career in 1973. I saw him creaky and lonely one fall day when my friends and I cut out of school and headed to Shea. We had terrible seats, and Willie could hardly move, but none of that mattered.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

On the start of baseball season.

Almost two decades ago, when my daughters were probably around seven and three, the great Ray Charles was playing in the great concert hall, Radio City Music Hall. I have been a Ray Charles fan since I was eight and saw and heard Norman Jewison's "In the Heat of the Night" which features the music of Ray arranged by Quincy Jones.

I had never heard anything like it. So real, so moving, so naturalistic. As different from what I was used to hearing as the American Ash Can School was from the French Impressionists.

In any event, I took my daughters to see Ray Charles because I knew he was on his last legs and believed he was someone who should be seen before either you or he dies.

Forty years later I had a different but similar experience.

The hapless New York Mets--who even when they won somehow managed to be hapless--brought the "Say Hey" Kid, Willie Mays back to New York.

Mays, of course, was one of the greatest ever. Though Hank Aaron--and others--will eventually amass more homers, there was no one like Mays for power, speed, grace and daring. What's more, before the Giants moved west to San Francisco, Mays roamed the vast center field of the Polo Grounds, an ancient stadium in upper Manhattan. Mays was New York, famously playing stickball with kids in Harlem. Playing baseball and enjoying it for what it is, a boys' game.

By the time the Mets brought Mays back he was as creaky as a holding company's grip on finances. But still, me and my friends knew we had to see Mays play in person. So out we sneaked from school. Out to Shea Stadium in Flushing, Queens.

We sat, of course, in the Upper Deck. These weren't the cheapest seats in the ball park, but they were close. We were way out in left field, so far away from the action at either the plate or center field, we could barely see Mays. Nevertheless, there was a little kid up near us with his father who screamed in his pre-teen falsetto when Mays was at bat, "Hey Willie, hit one over here!"

I think one fly ball was hit to Mays. And somehow he gathered it in though it looked like he could no longer run. It was sad to see the great Mays no longer great. But the point is we had seen him. We, in our own small, insignificant way, had paid homage to him.

In advertising, of course, we do not honor our forerunners. In fact, it seems, just the opposite happens. We bury them when they stop accumulating gold or speaking jargon. I used to work at two agencies that were at one time among the most-storied in the industry. They are all but forgotten today.

This is to our industry's detriment. We may never be as good as Charles or Mays. May never vary genres like Charles or make a basket catch like Mays.

But we can enjoy.

More important, we can learn.

Killing Me Softly.

I try to be a nice guy in many ways.

I try to help people in the industry when they come to me for help.

I try to return phone calls. 

I try to be a decent human being.

I try to connect people.

All that.

But when it comes to work, I'm not so nice.

A lot of my age-peers these days ask me why I work so hard. Why I'm so avaricious and hungry. Why I'm so determined and fervid.

I wrote something on my blog the other day--a kind of stream-of-consciousness response to those questions. Without really thinking about it, I wrote: "It's not about the money anymore, it's about kicking ass. 

I like to win. I like to win assignments. I like to win growth. I like to win for clients. I like to win against other people who want the business I want. I like to win against everyone who ever put me down because I'm not like other people and don't hang out with the boys. I like to win to show the big-money holding company fickers that I shouldn't have been thrown out at 62--at the peak of my powers--because I'm too old, or not diverse, or, I'm afraid, a Jew (in coded language, they call us: 'privileged'.) 

I like to win to show the poseurs in Cannes who are wearing wool hats in June and cliché facial hair and cliché tattoos, and who do cliché work that never actually runs and never actually has a material effect on anything other than a $12 trophy that you spent $12,000,000 trying to win, that you are little more than cultists pretending what you do and poo and make and fake are worthy of awards--awards that are leveraging a prestigious name to lend prestige to an industry that embarrassed to do what it's actually supposed to do, so it dresses itself up in fine feathers and furs to finagle the fakery of it all.

Also, re the people who have raped our industry, as they have pillaged so many others, who have seen marketing spend as percentage of corporate revenue drop to its lowest point ever (except for 2021 during the 'Covid' era) and who nevertheless persist in publicly whistling past the graveyard and celebrating their hubris, I want to win against them.

Against all that, I like to win.

Etiam si omnes, Ego no.

Even if all others, not I.

Not I.

Not long ago, I read an article in the sports section of the cheery neo-fascist Wall Street Journal that brought it all to the forefront for me. If you can get past their Draconian paywall, you can read it, too.

There's a notion on our modern world about geniality, collegiality, bridge-building, togetherness, collaborationism and other treacly-sweet lies propagated by people who want to benefit from your hard work without paying for it. They want us to play nice while they're knives out stealing from us. It's the sort of bullshit that's behind the credits of a six-second spot being longer than the credits of Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky."

No. Don't watch the whole thing. It's too good for you.

You don't have to be a bastard and sabotage people. But I don't believe in playing nice. I believe in predatory thinking. (Thanks, Mr. Trott.) I believe in everything you are, everything you've learned, everything synapse you snap should be dedicated to winning. For yourself, your family, your work and your client.

The WSJ writes:

I think that's how I've written a blog every day for 17 straight years and survive in a business and a world and at times even a family that seems to want me dead, or at least forgotten.

Our purpose here is not to fade-away. Not to be forgotten or marginalized. Not to be unimportant.

That's what we're supposed to do for brands. Not with lies. Not with stunts that last about nine-seconds. Not with fake ads and their accompanying fake case-studies.

But with real work.

Work that makes brands thought about. Considered. Selected. Bought. Re-bought.

That day will come when I opt in to disappearance. 

But it will come on my terms.

See ya.

My annual Father's Day post. (A Re-Post.)

 As of this moment and forward into perpetuity, or next year anyway, this will be my annual Father's Day post. It might be shit. But it means something, somehow to me.

--

On Father’s Day, in this age of social media, it seems that everybody who’s ever had a father dutifully posts some sepia-tinged photo of their old man, smiling wistfully at the camera. If you’re around my age, those old daguerreotypes (they seem that ancient to me) are usually accompanied by a line or two of writing. Something like, “I miss you, Pop.” Or “I think of you every day.”

I grew up essentially without a father. My old man was away more than he was home, and when he was home, and sentient, that is, not drunk, or hiding from  his termagant of a wife, he was seldom present.

Naturally, I tried to be a better father to my daughters, believing that your job as an elder is essentially to do two things. 1. Give your charges roots. 2. Give your children wings. They should know where they came from, they should understand values, and they should have the confidence to soar.

Of course, being human, I probably fucked up four times for every one time I succeeded. That’s about as human a ratio as any of us get. And while I wish I had had more Ward Cleaver in me and less of myself, all I can say in terms of being a father is that I did the best I could with what I had.

I wish I had a time machine or some cosmic stain-remover and could undo much of what I did, said, didn't do and didn't say that demands undoing. As we age, we flip through life accomplishments and disappointments like a fat man on a toilet looking at the old Sears catalog. We're disgusted and repelled by much of what we see

As I grew up without a father, so did my father. My grandfather, Morris, whom I never met, died when my old man was just 8, and too, he was absent more than he was present.

It’s probably bred in the bone for a lot of men. In the binary world we grew up in, we were trained first to make a living. Everything else, including important aspects of fathering like having a catch or taking your kid to the ballet have, for many of us, come in a distant second.

Many men, myself included, were raised to believe that you take care of your family by giving them a nice place to live, nice clothing, toys, educational opportunities & c. Because of our own liabilities, peccadilloes, genetic-damages and other shortcomings, we might have miscalculated. Yes, we should have been there more. And maybe should have weighed our words with more precision.

My old man’s father, Morris, one of two grand-fathers I never met, came over from the old country, Russia, in 1913. He just beat the immigration shut-down that happened around the time of the first World War.

Morris was 25 or thereabouts when he arrived in Philadelphia. He had no skills, no education, spoke no English, had no money and no family in the New World.

He had escaped mandatory terms of the Tsar's Army: 25-years or death, whichever comes second. And he did it by volunteering, or being volunteered, at the age of ten or so, to work on the greatest infrastructure project of the 19^th Century, the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. 

Life was cheap as the Trans-Siberian Rail-Way was being built.
Thousands died, many more wish they had.

With baggy pants down around their ankles,
the cry of "Hem boy!" would ring out.

Temperatures dropped to -200 (Celsius.) Colder in the shade.

It was a railroad three-times as long as the transnational route across our continent. Through terrain that made the American West look like Frontierland at a Disney theme park by comparison. It was nearly 6,000 miles long and was built through some of the most desolate and forbidding land in the world. What's more, in the summer, temperatures could drop to 200-below (Kelvin) and it got even colder in the winter.

Morris was too young to swing a pick, or to do much else but be sodomized. So he quickly became what was known on the Trans-Siberian as a “hem-boy.”

The workers who laid the tracks were given by the Trans-Siberian railway just one pair of work pants. By the time they had reached Krasnoyarsk, they had generally lost so much weight from eating their meager rations that their pants were down around their ankles. Of course, when you're pounding in spikes all day, having your pants fall down isn't just embarrassing, it's downright dangerous.

So the railroad hired scores of "hem boys" who would run along the railway waiting for a worker to sing out "Hem boy!" Then they hustled over to pin-up and hem the workers' pants.

There's no telling how many hems my grand-father shortened this way. Or how he managed to last the years he did. But somehow he lasted long-enough to save what he needed to land in America and start a new life on our teeming shores.

It’s easy to hate your parents, your father especially. Because like all people, one’s parents are especially flawed. It’s part of being a parent, I think, that you’re usually missing when you’re needed most and you don’t usually find out until years later when you were needed and what for.

There’s not much any of us old people can do about any of that. Maybe there’s some parenting parallel to Newton’s third law of motion. For every action there was an equal and horrible error or inaction. 

It doesn't matter if you're making a billion dollars running a hedge fund, or flipping burgers up at 7 Brothers Deli on 44th and 10th. All of us fathers want the same basic things for our kids. A chance for them to be themselves and find their path.

That’s probably as good an encapsulation of fatherhood as you’ll find anywhere.

And it pretty much sums up this old man's trials and errors as a dad. Like my grandfather, whom I never met, we're all just hem boys, working on a long railroad.

Let it Bleed.

 

When I was a boy and harbored fresh-cut-grass dreams of playing baseball until I reached an ancient age, say 36, I read over and again a book by Ted Williams called "The Science of Hitting." Many people regard Williams as the greatest hitter of them all. Had he not lost three years as a fighter pilot during World War II, and two more as a fighter pilot during the Korean "police action," he might have broken the Babe's home run record before Henry Aaron did in the mid-1970s.

What impressed me most--no, actually awed me--about Williams was something I read about him in passing. He would take batting practice until his arms and rib-cage bled from the repeated friction of skin grating skin.

If you're a sports fan (which I'm not anymore) you'd probably have read about some dirt-court kid shooting thousands of baskets a day improving his shot. Or a runner running hundreds of lonely rain-soaked miles up rocky hills. 

If you're of a literary bent, you've heard about the writers with the discipline and rigor to write one-thousand words a day or even more. Read some early bits by Elmore Leonard on his drive to make it as a writer. He wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote some more. Two-pennies-per-word-pay and rejection did nothing to slow his slog.

Now that I run GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I've learned things I never knew when I was working for agencies I didn't own. I'm learning things while on my own that I never learned from the six creative Hall-of-Famers I've worked for.

Most of all, I've learned to gear the work you try to sell to clients to the work you're good at doing. In other words, if you're fast and prolific, sell fast and prolific. If you're brutal and foundational and that's the work you do, sell that. Don't blow with the wind and change what you do. Instead, find a way to play to your strengths.

This isn't exactly, "if all you have is a hammer"-thinking. Because of course your toolkit (to extend the metaphor) has more than one tool. But it would make no sense for me to try to write like William Makepeace Thackeray when my sensibilities are more Mickey Spillane or the great god, Chandler. 

That's one part of what I've learned along the way. The other part is a tougher lesson and harder to effect. 

Anyone can do anything some of the time. When conditions are right, when you're well-rested, in a good mood, warm, well-fed and clean and dry.

The trick to any of this is shitty days.

You know, 99 out of 100 days. Or 9,999,999 out of 10,000,000.

It's doing what you do every day. As well as you do on your best days. It's writing well, or hitting well, or being well when you're not. That's what matters. It's beating a deadline or another person you're vying against when you feel like you've been through the rinse-cycle or been driven over by a fleet of taxis with their meters running that makes the difference.

I'm not the best at anything I do. There are hundreds of people way better than I am.

What I am best at is doing what I do when I suck at it and muscling through no matter what.

What I'm best at is typing and thinking till my fingers bleed from my keyboard and I've found an answer after looking at the question eleven ways till Sunday seven days a week.

As my boxing hero, Joe Louis, once said, "I did the best I could with what I had."

That's what makes a hero.

See You Later, Data Gator.

There's a very good website I subscribe to and often send clients to look at. It's called Our World in Data and it's almost invariably interesting. I can't for the life of me figure out how journalism has gotten so much better than advertising at presenting complex information in a simple and, even, enjoyable manner. Advertising is positively retrograde, like a general only trained to fight the last war.

I like Our World in Data best when it uses data to take apart a commonly held notion that's also commonly wrong. Wrong as in not right. Wrong as in mistaken. Wrong repeated so often, without proof, that the wrong is believed, by many, to be right.

Like using a Sharpie to change the course of a hurricane wrong.

In advertising, we been besieged by wrong masquerading as right for as long as I've been in the business. 

Pontification is our style.

So things that make no sense, and make no one any money, become truisms. In fact, whole careers, agencies and countless decks are built on such blather. Let's go "digital first" because some CMO read the phrase somewhere and let's be "agile," I suppose because it rhymes with reptile.

When pontifical pronouncements are eventually proven wrong, they're never apologized for. No one ever says, "I know I said people want to have conversations with brands. It turns out they don't. I'm sorry I fucked up." Or, "It turns out Facebook likes don't lead to ROI. They're as meaningful as stickers on a hipster's Mac." Or, "surveillance capitalism--turns out it destroys more than it creates."

A lot of our embrace of wrongness comes from not recognizing tenets we ought to be familiar with. Like recency bias.

For instance, if you ask people to list the greatest music, movies, meals, presidents, commercials, agencies, or whatevers, recency bias means the preponderance of choices will be things that took place recently, or people you've heard of recently.

Likewise, it's said that if a neighbor dies it will have about the same impact on you as 10,000 people dying in a far-away land. A small terrorist blast in New York has greater meaning to us than US bombs killing one-million in Vietnam or Iraq or wherever else we're killing millions at the moment.

Of late, many people have been claiming that earth is experiencing more disasters than ever before. Certainly the hysteria of our age seems ratify that. And watching the sensational nightly news lends the claim further weight.

My guess is that a graph of great anythings would look roughly similar. People might believe a hot contemporary agency is as important and winning as DDB was in its heyday. Because that contemporary agency is winning awards by the boatload. No one ever considers that there are dozens more shows and categories now than there were not long ago. The chances are very good that that very-hot contemporary agency isn't dominating so overwhelmingly as DDB had.

But as for natural disasters, consider this, from Our World in Data:

"Many organizations, such as the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization, have reported on this as a dramatic rise in actual disaster events. Here are a couple of high-profile examples:

•  “According to the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT) of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), disaster events have increased from 100 per year in the 1970s to around 400 events per year worldwide in the past 20 years.”
• UN chief says natural disasters have quadrupled since 1970. 
• World Meteorological Organization (2019),said “The number of disasters has increased by a factor of five over the 50-year period.
• UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): “The number of disasters has increased by a factor of five over the 50-year period, driven by climate change, more extreme weather, and improved reporting.”
• These points were repeated in leading media outlets such as the BBC and The Economist.

 

Importantly, Our World in Data notes that the increase in the reported number of disasters is due primarily to reporting bias. And in the past, smaller disasters, weren't reported at all. They simply didn't make our radar screens.

A look at these two sets of graphs may help.

Looking at "smaller" disasters, it does appear that today things are getting worse and that today more bad things are happening.

But when you look at larger disasters through the ages, our graphs appear relatively unaffected by time period. There don't appear to be more bad things happening today than 125 years ago.

Maybe, just maybe, it's not that things are getting worse, but that reporting is getting better. That there aren't more disasters, we just know of more disasters.

I'm not saying the world doesn't suck or that we don't have good reasons to feel gloomy. 

I am saying, chill.

And research before you leap.

And if you get lost in your own enthusiasms and it turns out that Barbie or DTC or the newest newest new thing was really just a temporal flash in the pan, admit you fucked up. And try to be smarter next time.

I think most people want help from brands.

Instead we give them only hype.