The Long and Winding Rude.

One of the great privileges of being as old as the reptiles, and working for yourself, not directly for a corporate behemoth, is that you have something of a chance--if you take it--of looking at the world from a distance, not from up-close.

If the good graces of the world had given me the patience and the scholarship money and I had somehow become an academic instead of an advertising man, I probably would have toggled back and forth between teaching English and teaching history. The two were always tangled in my mind and like my daughters' long, thick hair. I was never able separate one strand from another. They were interwoven like mammon and cruelty.

How can you read "The Goophered Grapevine," for instance by Charles W. Chestnut with no historical understanding of American history from 1619 to the early 20th century when the book was written? How could you read "The Grapes of Wrath," by Steinbeck, or "Heaven's My Destination, by Thornton Wilder devoid of the elucidation that comes from knowing something of the times in which they were written? 

That goes for just about any piece of literature that I can think of. Columbia professor James S. Shapiro probably agrees with me. He's written dozens of books about literature, historical context and why those book are important today. If you think things are rough in amerika in 2024, you might want to read Shapiro's "The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606." Order here.

All this is to assert, I've managed to enter my dotage with my faculties intact, a decent book of business and more clients than I can shake a pay-stub at. That allows me the privilege of trying to piece together something people above my pay-grade call "long history." That is, not an historical account of the Franco-Prussian war, which lasted little less than a year, but instead at the tectonic movements of people, empires, technologies and ideas that shape history, not over the course of a human life-span, but across centuries or even millennia.

It's easy with our quotidian "we're about to be wiped out for all time" mindset to think we're about to be wiped out once and for all. At the height or the depth of the cold war I remember reading a small item about some experimental anthrax that escaped from a Soviet laboratory and killed everything in a swath as broad as trump's cranial merkin. 

After reading that article, I spent years looking over my shoulders for an anthrax attack, from russia from our own government from walmart from verizon from wpp or from some other malign force beyond my control. I still have unnatural worries about anthrax, it must be said, or half-a-dozen other things that you can read about in the paper or hear on the news about as often as you encounter a sequin on Taylor Swift's pupik.

Long history encourages, as the name indicates, a long view. A view that is positively Faulknerian in outlook. That mankind will not only endure, we will prevail. Sure, I can counterpoint the fuck out of that, and so can my myriad readers. But as Hank Williams sang, and you should sing now and again, "I've been down that road before."

Mankind, for what it's worth, have survived everything we've thrown at ourselves and has been thrown at us by cosmic and pathological forces. Damn, we survived the Antonine plague, the Justinian plague, two bouts of the Black Death, the scourge of smallpox, AIDs, Covid and Gilligan's Island re-runs. We've survived more wars than you have hair on your arms and more advanced weaponry too. We've survived leaders who would make Vladimir Putin look like Florence Henderson and I suppose we'll have to do so again before too long. Things might really suck for a while--there might be no chunk light tuna in the grocery store, but somehow we'll get through.

Right now I'm ensconced in some client work and I've written a sentence or two about a company and their ability to hang onto their clients for a long-time. I said something like, "they don't work quarter to quarter, they work quarter of a century to quarter of a century."

In our business we live under the thrall of a belief system that proclaims that the latest is always the greatest. We look for the hottest trends, the hottest technologies, the hottest VO's., directors, colorists and more. We chase trends like priests chase pre-pubescent children during a "friendly" game of tag.

That's the sort of apoplectic history that is all too much with us. So we produce ephemeral thinking following transitory trends because we deal in nothing that isn't of the moment.

In most cases the depiction of life as I see it expressed in television commercials and online advertising is so far from the reality of the life we all lead it would be comical if it weren't so horrifying. The verizon spot above is one of the worst assaults on humanity that humanity has ever contrived. In terms of realism, it makes bad AI look like something painted by George Bellows or another ashcan school artist.

All these so-called "we're here for you" monopolists who rip you off willy-nilly produce crap like the above. Their spots and other bullshit blandishments remind me of Hieronymus Bosch reconfigured by Edward Bernays. 

Maybe our current advertising palette is so well-focused-grouped we interpret it as "show people happy, dancing, slim, and worry-free at all times. Never show anyone with a problem, a need, a care or a bill to pay." 

Our avoid-the-moment, plasticine the smile advertising is based on alternate facts, because we can't bear to even think that the real ones are real. The best thing I ever read about lies is this: "it's terrible to lie to people. But the worst lie is lying to yourself."

We do advertising that avoids humanity, that ignores history, that's cognizant only of pay-for-play awards. 

Etiam si omnes, ego non. Or

h/t harry.

Lights Out.

Way back about 200 years ago I had my first job after graduate school writing advertising copy for the Montgomery Ward catalog. It was a crappy job for a crappy company for crappy pay. I started at just $225/week--which was just over $5/hr, but I learned a lot.

First, you learned to show up every day and do your job. Then you learned if you made a mistake, to take responsibility. Finally you learned that at most jobs there are two types of people. The lifers--the ones with little ambition and drive to get elsewhere. Their opposite were the stepping-stoners. The people using their current job to get to another job. Usually office friendships were established along these lines.

One hot summer day someone had organized a softball game against another office or another department. We were assigned by whatever league we were in to a small ball field on East 14th Street, with the FDR Drive on one side of the field and the towering smokestacks of an old Con Edison powerplant on the other side. The field was about as far away from people as you could be in Manhattan and it could only have been called a ball field by someone who had never before played ball. Or seen a field.

I think the expanse was about a mile east of the Union Square subway stop and as we walked there the heavy stormy skies grew blacker and the clouds looked like wet gym towels saturated in sweat. The whole of the atmosphere seemed ready to burst. Thunder was already booking and sheets of lightning were spreading across the gloom as if the heavens were being gift-wrapped in catastrophe.

But ballplayers are troupers. And if you love playing ball--especially when you're older and a game is hard to come by--you deny the reality of the weather and utter like George M. Cohan, 'the game must go on,' and so it did.

Back 45 years or so ago, I was prodigiously strong, think Paul Bunyan in a factory outlet suit and I was not all that far from my ball playing years. Plus, my temper had yet to be tempered and every swing I swung was swang with the velocity of anger.

I made it up to bat in the first inning. And like Roy Hobbs in Malamud's "The Natural," I hit a towering fly ball that cracked into the clouds and released streaks of lightning like Zeus with a migraine. The fat ball went up and up. Through the troposphere, the stratosphere, well into the mesosphere, heading westward as it descended.

The ball crashed into the barbed-wired shrouded Con Edison substation and sparks set off sparks like the 4th of July. Just at the peak of the explosions, the rain came and the city, ball players included ran for any doorway, broken umbrella or non-pissed-stained newspaper they could find. The lights went out all over New York, except for a thin section of Rockaway out in Queens that was serviced by Long Island Electric, graft and the mafia.

I can't be sure that my fly ball caused the power outage. And in those days, we all lived in fear of a replay of the 1977 blackout, riots, looting and mayhem of that 45-hours of terror. I think the power was out for a couple of hours. But we were cowering in our small apartments by then, dripping in sweat and fear of that particular brand of New York violence. 

Some cigarette attached to a union electrician from the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers found an old baseball that clunked a rat that bit into a wire that snapped the copper that caused the dark. He taped the whole conurbation up and the power crackled on not too many hours later.

I think that might be the last time I picked up a bat and swung the ash with intent. It's never easy to hang up your spikes. You can always convince yourself you have a few more games left in you. LeBron seems to be doing so now. Tom Brady did some seasons ago. Mickey Mantle saw his lifetime average drop to .298 because he played one season too many.

The portents told me to quit.

And I listened.

Let Freedom Wring.

For my readers outside of the United States, Ad Aged will be taking July 4th and July 5th off. These are the days in amerika where we proclaim our belief in mattress sales, traffic jams, carcinogenic grilling, and nominally, freedom.

Of course, as Bobby McGee once said, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." And, by the way, we've lost it.

If you're at all interested in amerika and concepts like freedom and even the more hallowed reasons for the July 4th caesura from work, there's a book you might read, "Freedom's Dominion," by Vanderbilt University professor, Jefferson Cowrie. You can order it here from one of amerika's non-tax-paying monopoly booksellers. And you can read the review from "The New York Times" here.

Right now, I am about three-quarters of the way through another book you might want to pick up and actually read. It's called "The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins" by Stefanos Geroulanos.

As the title of the review from "The Economist" indicates (you can read the review here) words like history, humanity, origins, species, freedom, independence and hundreds of other don't have exact definitions so much as they have political interpretations and prejudices.

The amerikan far right and liberal people like me both believe in freedom. But our definitions of what freedom is (you'll know it when we let it ring) are as different as chocolate is from a cinderblock.

In Cowrie's book, and as the title of the Times' review indicates (as well as the photo above of george wallace) freedom means the freedom of the dominant race (so often that means native born, christian white men) to have things their way and not to have to pay tax for that luxury. They want to be free to have their privileges, like to kill little girls while they're attending church. Then call themselves, as bannon and trump are doing, "political prisoners."

Bobby Frank Cherry fought for the freedom to kill little girls.

Many of the 80,000 or so people who read Ad Aged every week are in the communications business. We should probably spend more time thinking conceptually about language. The shades, nuances and layers of its meaning.

There's scarcely a word uttered these days, especially when it's used in political discussion, that isn't laden and loaded with bias and subterfuge. It seems to me a lot of people use the words independence and freedom think they mean, "I should be allowed to do and say what I want and no one can stop me. But other people, people whom I disagree with, don't have those same rights. If they have the right to express themselves it takes away from my right to have things my way."

Essentially, that's the thinking behind those who say government can't take our guns but can take our ovaries.

OK. It's July 4th. It's Independence Day.

The day when all amerika is free to agree with everything I say.

Mainstreaming Lies.

Maybe it was always this way. Maybe I just notice it more now.

Maybe it's that there are no more watching dogs, whistle-blowers, truth-tellers.

Non-short-cut takers.

Millions are calling for a presidential candidate in cognitive decline to step away. Yet we accept a presidential candidate who's a convicted felon, a sexual abuser, and a pathological liar.

We live in a country where the liar is the debate winner. Ergo, the country is the loser.

The scariest part of all this is the part that's hardest to see. We're so used to the lying that we no longer notice it. Lying is like sirens in a city. They're supposed to alarm you. But they're so ubiquitous you no longer pay attention.

On Saturday, Jess Bidgood of The New York Times wrote about these lies in an article worth reading.

Maybe I'm exaggerating. Maybe I'm over-reacting. But similar truth-abnegation-through-repeated-lying-distortion-and-rewriting is happening in our industry as well.

Cannes is a perfect example of this.

Ogilvy won network of the year. They're doing it with fake ads. They fire people each month. They've reneged on their diversity pledges. They're losing (at least in their flagship office) millions of dollars per annum. And so on and so on.

I'd not be surprised if half of the big holding company agencies won some slim prismatic slice of an agency of the year award. And many of them--once the biggest names on what was once Madison Avenue--are teetering on the bring of insolvency or irrelevance.

In 2023, DDB won Cannes network of the year. 

I don't know if they even have 100 employees in New York anymore. And certainly, they seem to lose C-suite people as fast as trees lose leaves in a wind storm.

But like Trump and his legion of enablers, the industry is enabling the propping up of the lies of the industry. That it's doing work of consequence. That it in and of itself is consequential. Worst of all, that the ad industry is vital to clients and a healthy career.

Ogilvy's recycle lies for Coke are a perfect example. Yet. They win praise for an ad that allegedly ran for recycling. Yet.

        

If we say it enough maybe people will believe it. At least the ignorant will.

This is how we mainstream lying. How we blur the distinction between reality and salesmanship. How we obscure everything in service of share-holder value.

It was Orwell who said, “In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." Let me add to that. “In an age of universal deceit, telling lies is a business model."

We work for, vote for, live with, act on, abide by liars. 

The biggest lie is the one we tell ourselves when we don't notice any of this.

A Simple Test.

One of thing things that shocks me about AI is the spread between how great, powerful, all-encompassing, and always improving we're told it is and how bad it is when we actually confront it in the wild.

We're told how great, seminal and life-changing it is. I can't think of one shred of evidence how it's improved anything but corporate profits.

The phonus-balonus Toys R Us commercial is one example, but certainly not the only one.

Try to fix your broken cable bill with a chat bot. It's more Kafkaesque than anything Kafka could imagine. In fact, I'd get more help talking to Kafka next time my xfinity goes out.

Worse, watch something on YouTube. Take the clip above, for example. If an 11th-grader typed the transcription, you'd send him back to 10th-grade. You'd find some way to punish him. At least, detention. 

The typos. The lack of understanding. The way AI completely missed the essential humanity of the moment. Not to mention the humor. Yet the biggest companies in the world and the biggest companies in what was the communications business are willing to put their brand-equity in the hands of inept machines that aren't getting better. What's more, and maybe what's worse, at a time of record profits, they're all too cheap to have an actual sentient human "fact-check" AI's transcription and correct its glaring errors.

It's ok that it's an assault to the senses. Look at the money we're making.

What all this proves is quite simple and is, as AI might auto-generate: "As klay as the nodes on your feces." The corporations and their agents embracing these assaults on humanity care nothing for humanity. Using AI in such as way makes it all so perfectly clear. They don't care about you, or how bad stuff like this sucks. Cheapito, ergo bonus. It's cheap, therefore it's good.

I've noticed for years now, and don't know why brands accept it, how machines interrupt the videos you watch on YouTube with commercials willy-nilly. Not at a natural break, not at the end of a sentence. No, they'll shove one of their asinine messages smack in the middle of a punch-line.

Because, they can. 
Because they don't care about the film itself, the creators' intent.
Because they don't care about art, entertainment, performance.
Because they don't care about the viewer.

Because they only care about doing it cheaply. To mammothize their mammon.

That message is more important than the message they're propagating. The semiotics of interruption and disdain speak louder than the $49.99 triple-play bundle they're lying to you about.

This isn't about preciousness and not interrupting art. It's about a having the merest modicum of courtesy for the people watching. It's deciding where a break should occur with an eye toward the viewer, not only an eye toward doing it as cheaply and machinely-possible.

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is an ad agency now. Much of what ad agencies used to do is protect their clients from bad behavior. Stop them from doing things that hurt their reputation and their standing with people.

When we gave up our role as agents (that's why we were called agencies) and embraced our role as "vendor," and a low-cost commodity vendor at that, we gave up our reason for being.

Counterpoint: A few people at the very top got very rich. And are getting richer,

Our modern AI-derived calculus means it's ok to suck. If you get rich from it.

Lies. And Consequences.

There's a great serendipity that often comes from having a messy desk, or more accurately in 2024, a messy desktop.

I am an inveterate saver of things I like. I usually take a screenshot and leave that screenshot on my desktop. After a month or so, I roll up my sleeves and plough through all the little-liked-things I've compiled. I put a title--a memory jog--on them and file them away in a giant folder I call "Good Things."

On occasion as I file these things away, two or more bump up against each other, fire a synapse, and all at once, I have a genuine thought, or a blogpost, whichever comes first.

If you start with Bill Bernbach, as we all should (though I'd imagine 97-percent of those in attendance at Cannes would have no idea who he is--especially the 'executives' and chieftains in attendance--and I'm sure Bernbach himself would have hated about 97-percent of the work) you start with the words above.

Maybe, re Bernbach, what we should be thinking about isn't him as advertising person but him as something more macro. A person who's developed a philosophy, really, on how to get through to people. How to communicate, touch and make something memorable. These are things that don't change with the prevailing winds. They remain through time.

The proper study of mankind is man, and all that Alexander Pope stuff.

But back to cleaning my desktop. 

Just moments ago, I found this little bit of wisdom. As a lover of the Classics, this had especial appeal to me. It seems an infrastructure of understanding and of empathy. It seems, in a way, a nod to Carl Ally's famous maxim: "Advertising should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted."

Maybe the Ally-ism above is too complicated by half. Maybe as an industry we've gone so wrong, we should simplify our reminder to this: Advertising must care for people.

Just moments after these ruminations, still cleaning my desktop, I bumped into this by economist Peter Drucker. Somehow, and I don't know exactly how, it seemed like the perfect accompaniment to the Hollis quotation above; the left bookend to the Greek's right bookend.

Maybe where it all comes together for me is the combo platter of unimagined consequences and the great efficiency we enable in doing things we shouldn't be doing at all.

My old man eyes see an industry that has forgotten our purpose. To tell the truth in ways that help people decide to buy or, more moderately, to consider buying. 

We've forgotten to love our neighbors. We've forgotten the pain most people are in. Their salaries are low, their expenses are high, and they're tired of being told how smiley and wonderful the world is. In the america of Madison Avenue, no one has a mortgage, or waits on line, or gets a cold hamburger or feels folded, spindled and mutilated by an ISP, a telco, an airline or a political candidate.

We've forgotten or chosen to ignore the reality of the world. Instead, every commercial is a pharma spot--a miracle in a pill and no one hears the 37-seconds of horrific side-effects. Not just pharma spots are promising chemical miracles. There's not been a car commercial shot--maybe ever--that alludes to real road-conditions or anything other than taking blond children to soccer practice.

The coke recycling grand prix is a good example of all this tommyrot. You can't walk 100 yards in america without tripping over polluting-forever coke detritus. Yet coke and its agency have the brass to pretend their pangloss on environmental destruction is worthy of a trophy.

If Newton's Third Law is right--for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction--consequences are in the very fiber of life on earth. Yet somehow we are all pretending we live in a world where there are none.

I know.

Heady for a blog.

There will be hell to pay for that.

L AI ZY.

More than a decade ago while working at Ogilvy on IBM Watson, I wrote an advertising campaign that never made it off of my computer.

The campaign could be summed up in four words: "In Praise of Hard." It was about the hard-work involved in gaining real advantages from Artificial Intelligence. Or, for that matter, any technology.

The way AI was being sold, the way everything new is always sold, is that it's going to make life so easy, all you have to do is flick a switch and voila: the answer. All at about 1/100th of the cost and the time.

Humans--back then I knew a few--have a natural propensity to fall for "something for nothing-isms." You can find examples of miracles, for instance, in every foundational text from Gilgamesh, to the Torah, to the Iliad and Odyssey and more. You can find more examples today just by turning on the TV. You'll see commercial after commercial that promises the world, with absolutely no side-effects and little cost.

We all really wish alchemy, turning base metal into gold, was real.

What was happening in the world of AI was that people thought they could ask it a question--what's the next big fashion trend--and get an answer. They didn't realize the amount of work that had to be done to allow a computer to derive an answer. Data has to be organized and fed into the machine. You can't just stick it alongside the Encyclopedia Brittanica and hope for the best. 

What's more, most sources of data are so sullied by bias and sloppy accounting as to be veritably invalid. Inconvenient truths are conveniently wiped out. The most popular stories, like executives at Disney, prefer happy endings. They don't even like having bad guys to overcome.

Just yesterday in the social media world an absolutely horrific AI-created spot for Toys R Us went viral. It's badness was so bad I could barely make it past the first clichéd piano note.

Then, what made matters worse, was people critiquing the spot but praising its production values. Its 'how far AI has come.' They normalized crap. 

I keep seeing commentary like this. People saying "wow, look how real this image AI made is--it's just amazing, and so fast and cheap." In fact, half my Facebook feed (I'm on Facebook about 30 minutes/month) is AI generated prostitutes who are gorgeous yet lonely. Maybe because they're nothing but pixels.

There are many historians, or just people with a sense of history, who trace the decline of America to the efforts of the Lyndon Johnson administration to simultaneously pay for both social-welfare programs and the massively-expensive Vietnam war. All without demanding sacrifices from American citizens.

That's something-for-nothing-ism and its rot has rotted our country. 

We could get cheaper goods from China without paying the cost of displacing jobs in America. We could cut back on roads, healthcare and education without paying the cost of a decaying state. We could get get get without working or paying.

For most of human life on the planet we dumped forever chemicals into our environment, or 200 billion plastic bottles a year and we pretend it's all ok.

To be all-george about this, I'd say that something-for-nothing-isms have destroyed what used to be the ad industry. Remember, digital advertising was founded on the notion that you could reach people at an incredibly low cost and with no waste. And it would all be so great, they'd talk about your work and spread it for you. Remember?

What's more, targeting would be so accurate and timing so adroit (the right message to the right person at the right time) relevance would obviate the need for creativity. Brands could "dull their way" into peoples' hearts.

Just when I want a Snickers, I'd get a coupon for one.

Nearly everyday I see someone extolling the virtues of AI. Again, its speed and its gee whiz magic. "Wow, it made a duck in a chef's hat on a yacht making a cherry pie! That's fantastic."

No one thinks about what consumers think. They prefer to think the purported gee-whiz-ness of the ones and zeroes will carry the day and get people to notice. "Look how realistic it looks, and so fast and cheap."

I'll go out on a limb here.

The same things that made stories interesting, shareable, illuminating and mnemonic in 3000 BC are the same things that will work today.

Apocryphal or not, this six-word story is better than anything any AI system as ever regurgitated. 

Baby shoes. For sale. Never worn.

When Homer was singing his tunes no one asked, "was that writ on the latest technology, papyrus? Or was it scratched on a clay tablet?" No one care because the way we make something doesn't matter. The radio commercials I recorded digitally were not inherently better or more interesting than the ones I recorded on magnetic tape. Shooting on pixels is inherently no better than shooting on film.

What we're supposed to be is interesting, valuable, informative and memorable.

That takes work.

No machine can do it.

And never will.

Yes, they can make a car crash or an alien fly through the air, but to make something interesting to humans takes an understanding of what's interesting to humans. I think that's a job for humans.

I'm not sure you can program humanity into a machine. 

I think that I shall never see,
A bot that acts with empathy.
It's a test most humans fail to pass,
So I think your brand's a bloody ass.

Below is how humans judge work. It doesn't matter who makes it or how. It matters how it makes you feel.

Maskirovka.

If in my entire life of playing ball, from the sewer-grate games on the asphalt in front of my parent's tilted little house in Yonkers, abutting the then-benighted borough of the Bronx, to the dazzle of lights under the Mexico City sky while playing the perennial champions of the Mexican Baseball League, Diablos Rojos del Mexico, if during all those years, and all those "let's play two" long days and nights, if I hit 10,000 balls into the outfield, 9,990 were sent between the left field foul line and left center field.

In fact, I can probably remember every single time I hit a ball to the opposite field. 

Ted Williams, perhaps the greatest hitter of them all, had the same propensity. And for Williams, American League teams developed a shift, stacking the right side of the field with five fielders, maybe six, rather than the usual three. 

No teams shifted for me, which reminds me of a story of Jimmy Piersall jawboning with catcher Yogi Berra after Whitey Ford had beaned a few players who in his wily mind needed beaning. 

Piersall, it's told said to Berra who was catching, "If Ford throws at me I'll beat his head in with my bat." Berra, unflappable and wise answered perfectly. "We don't bean .220 hitters." Nor do they shift for them.

In any event, one afternoon we were playing someone somewhere and we had two men on. I was coming up and Hector called me over from the on-deck circle. 

"Just hit one to right," Jorge, the old man directed. "One to right will bring two men in if I have them running on the pitch." 

In the batter's box I moved my back foot away from the plate and my lead foot in. I had shifted myself as far as possible, and waited for something I could put wood on. Preferably something out over the plate or outside. No one noticed my stance (we don't notice .220 hitters) and before long, I hit a bloop to shallow right field. It was too deep for the second baseman and too short for the right fielder. With the runners running, they scored and with my walk off blooper, we won the game. Maybe 6-5, something like that.

Right now, I'm reading a long military history book called "Endgame 1944. How Stalin Won the War." The war Dimbleby is talking about Stalin winning, is not the war against Hitler, but the war within the war, against Roosevelt and Churchill--the West--for the post-war domination of Europe. By the way, it's a war we're still fighting today. (Ukraine.)

The thing that's struck me about the book is the over-confidence of the German generals even as they're being out-thought, out-materiel-ed and out-manned by the Soviets. The Germans bolstered their defenses where they, the Germans, would attack, if the Germans were the Russians. The Russians attacked instead where the Germans wouldn't think they'd attack. 

This is the essential idea, crossing up your opponent. The Soviets called it maskirovka. It's essentially feinting. Showing one thing and doing another. The ol' double cross. Hitting to the opposite field. Out-thinking, not out-spending.

There's not much advertising point in all this, except the most basic strategic point of all. 

Do something unexpected.

Or, like Daffy, get your head blown off.

Willie Mays, The Say Hey Metaphor.

This is not about Willie Mays, really, though it involves Willie Mays.

It's about people who have special gifts based on experience, skill and vision. There's a French term that's often used in military science called Coup d' œil. Don't ask me to pronounce it, I can't.

It means the ability to understand a situation in the blink of an eye. Realtors have it--good ones, anyway. They can come into your apartment, tell you to move a vase or a lamp or an arm chair, and suddenly your $1.2 million place becomes a $1.3 million place that sells in four days.

Once I shot a commercial with Joe Pytka. It was an interview with Ridley Scott. Scott began by saying he's shot 2000 commercials. (That's 50 a year for 40 years.) He said he comes onto location and he immediately knows where the lighting goes. He sizes things up. Malcolm Gladwell talked about it in his book, "Blink." 

Experts from museums around the world verified the authenticity of a 3,000-year-old Kouros. The Getty Museum wanted one more bit of testimony before making the purchase. They flew in an expert who in a second said the Kouros was fake. He knew in a blink. 

That's coup d' œil.

In the agency non-business, or the non-serious agency business, 99% of the people who have coup d' œil have been shit-canned, largely because they also have white d' hair. I know a lot of such people--their coup d' œil is uncanny. My friend Rob Schwartz, former CCO and CEO of TBWA\Chiat\Day New York told me Lee Clow said to him once, "Oh, you have that Steve Hayden thing.  You can see how all of this plays out." Something like that. (Rob, you can edit me.)

Here's how former Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent described Willie Mays' coup d' œil.

"Late in the game an A’s hitter sent an arcing foul ball in our direction. I sat still, watching the ball in flight. I never even glanced at the field, failing to consider that a fielder might try to make a play.

"Fans do what I did. But players are different and Willie was a Hall of Famer. He immediately understood that Giants first baseman Will Clark was headed our way. Mr. Clark arrived suddenly and crashed into my lap with the ball in his glove. It was then that Willie showed why he was different.

"As Mr. Clark landed on me, Willie reached out and grabbed Mr. Clark’s legs to keep his spiked cleats from cutting us both. While I was tracking the ball, Willie was tracking the danger. He helped Mr. Clark get on his feet and turned him back toward the field.

"Willie had been thinking ahead. He fully anticipated the crash and executed a deft intervention. Once I saw what he had done, I realized what his talent had given him. I told him I was beyond grateful for his protection—and for the up-close demonstration of his unique ability to anticipate what was about to happen in the course of a ball taking flight.

"Willie looked down while we mortals looked up. He knew when to take his eye off the ball. The rest of us reacted while Willie was thinking ahead. He was simply different and his kind is rare indeed."

We work in a non-serious business now. We spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars awarding ourselves with awards we purchase at a time when our purchase with clients and consumers withers and dies. We celebrate work that never runs while the work that does run is more and more offensive and ugly and ineffective and insulting. 

To paraphrase Churchill's praise of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, "Never have so few done so little of consequence and applauded themselves for it so mightily." 

We've fired the Willies.

And promoted the sillies.