Shiv Not, Lest Ye Be Shivved.

We live in an HR-inflected era that quite often puts an emphasis or a priority on amity, congeniality, and collegiality rather than quality.

As I've written before, "can't we all just get along," is fine for family vacations. It ain't so efficacious when you're living in the real world and working toward solutions or ideas that other people are unable to embrace. Ibsen's great play was called "An Enemy of the People," not "Building Bridges While Killing People."

I fucking hate this faux and destroying geniality.

No, I don't hate the people I work with and for. 

But I hate the idea that plastic friendships and saccharine politesse are mandatories in a world that is almost 99 and 44/100-percent cut-throat and 99 and 44/100-percent cruddy.

In fact, if you took all the 360-degree reviews in the world and laid them end-to-end you'd quickly realize the only purpose they serve is to have someone at some time say shit about you so management can keep your wages down and justify your firing when they come to the illogical conclusion that you're making them too much money so you need to be canned. If there's ever been a more Soviet style of worker repression, I must have missed it. I can't think of any organization or any person who's ever improved or learned something through such a review.

As Paul Simon wrote in "Mrs. Robinson,"

I hate weasel words and diplomacy. And people who smile and grin while they suck the marrow out of your bones.

I had a boss many years ago of my father's generation--actually he was  older than my father. This was the generation that went to war, not to tennis camp.

If I fucked something up (I worked for him when I was 22. And who doesn't fuck things up when they're 22?) I'd literally get called on the carpet. Once on the carpet, I'd do what people do. I'd hem and haw and temporize.

Mr. Patrichuk had a way of dealing with that.

"Hit me but don't shit me," he'd say.

That's how I feel about things. 

If Ogilvy had said when they fired me that I'm too old, too fat, too cranky and too apt to tuck-in my shirt and not wear a fedora and all those things are off brand, I would have been fine with being fired. But they lied about it. 

They lied about everything. And worst of all, they lied and believed through their huge corporate legalese hubris that I was too blinking stupid to know I was being lied to.

Years ago I was working for a technology client on some really complicated business hardware. Specifically a category of servers that ran a certain sort of operating system. 

The thing about working on technology is that you might never of heard of what they're selling, but one day you find out that the market for what they're selling is in excess of $50 billion. 

I remember the head client drawing a giant circle on a large piece of paper then diving the circle into wedges like pie slices. 

"This is our share of the ____ market. This is X's. This is Y's. In 2003, we have one business objective. I want to kill X and Y. I want your work to do that."

I like brass knuckle advertising.

Advertising that hits you between the eyes.

No flourish. No adjectives. No pandaring. No blandishments.

That forgotten word: Truth.

Right now Coke and Ogilvy are assaulting the world with both garbage and lies. Then creating ads so put a smile on their death rictus.

This is what happens in a world where we go along, don't ask questions, collect our pay and kill future generations.

It seems Coke has been on a roll lately, displaying in social channels example after example of their creativity. People from all over the country are sending me silly-ass shit like this, this, this and this.

That's in addition to this silly-ass shit, which purportedly is running all over Brazil and Argentina.

Moments ago, another far-flung friend sent me this. Which is far-from silly-assed. It's from the Washington Post and it leads to to believe that Coke's recent ads are an attempt to distract people from the facts in the global study the Post just reported on.

I don't like this crap.

I don't like being hit. But I like less being shitted.

I like being accoutred like Mack the Knife. Kurt Weill's, not Bobby Darin's.

I'll admit. I like that way of working. And thinking. And dealing with people. 

I like a one to one ratio between saying and doing.

When I played baseball and I was a starter, everyone on the team who wasn't a starter was hoping I'd fuck up somehow. Because they wanted my job and my livelihood. Of course, when I was at bat with two men on they wanted me to hit a double. But they'd were also ok if I swung like a rusty gate and popped out in foul territory. They'd get the chance, not me, the next time.

I'm not saying we have to be assholes to each other. Far from it. 

But I think it makes sense to posit that we're looking out for ourselves, our careers, our future and our families. Anyone who pretends else wise is a liar.

There's a lot of that sort of lying in the business today. I had a partner years ago who had served in the Marines. He called it grin-fucking. ie. Smiling at you while shivving you.

That's dishonest.

I hate that shit.

Nada On Brand.

I had a shitty week last week. A week way up there on the Olympus of shit. Last week my soul occupied shit's highest Pantheon.

I wasn't as mad at the world as I ever was--I'm reserving that level of angritude for, god forbid, trump's reelection, but about as mad as I get in a world that seems to specialize in making me angry.

But wait.

Days before my anger, I had a talk with my good friend and ex-partner, the great Sid Tomkins. Sid and I worked together at Ogilvy. He got fired about nine-months after I did from Ogilvy/London, but quickly landed a full-time job helping lead advertising for the great English brand, Specsavers.

I asked for Sid's help in designing a book I'm planning on trying to publish. I said to Sid, "I don't even mind if you change the font. I'm getting kinda sick of Futura Extra Bold Condensed."

Sid, as he so often does, set me straight. 

"George, that font is your brand. It's your voice. Your clarity and muscle. Your strength and sight. Don't change that."

Now, to the anger I mentioned above.

I had a scope tiff with a long-time client. Though I've come through for them on really tough assignments with really good work over really short timelines, they didn't want me to charge for four days for something that took me four days. They wanted me to bill for one day for four days work.

A lot of self-rebuke ran through my corpuscles.

I remembered my brother, the lawyer, once admonishing me, "As Samuel Goldwyn said, 'A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on.'"

I remembered my wife, breathtakingly-level headed once chastising me, "You made one mistake. You went to work for consultants and you thought they were human."

I remembered my therapist, the Vizier of Vienna once biting my loosely attached head off and yelling at me, "I never want to hear you ever again say, 'they care about me.' No one cares about anything but themselves."

I know I'm expensive. (That's also my brand.) I get more money because I do more-better work.

I don't know why it's ok to ask creative people to do things you wouldn't ask an auto-repair-person, or a plumber, or a dry cleaner to do. I'd never take in a nice suit and ask Tony to clean it for eight dollars rather than twenty. I just wouldn't.

Besides, Tony would kick me out of his store and I'd never be allowed back in.

These guys know who I am and what they're getting from me. I've positioned myself and priced myself as extraordinary talent. You come to me for work and thinking you can't get anywhere else. Whether or not I believe that, or you believe that, they bought that. That's what they're paying for. You can't get the work, then say, "wow, that's a lot of dough-re-mi."

All that said, I met them half-way.

And I was angry about it. Angry at myself for giving in. Angry at the generalized mean-ness disorder which has wracked our industry.

I took me a minute, but then I realized why I was so mad. 

It wasn't about the money.

It was that they asked me to abnegate my brand. They bought my brand, they tried to get me to ignore everything my brand stands for: definition, differentiation and demonstration. Things no one does anymore and certainly no one does better than I.

Here's a bit of what I said to them:

"My point is simple. I want to keep working with you... and whatever's next. But I've worked hard to be the best--and I need to be paid commensurately."

That's my brand.

I could sell it at a discount.

But that ain't on brand.

The industry itself, at least when it comes to itself, has forgotten its own brands. There's no difference between Ogilvy creative and anyone else'. No difference between this Holding Company and that. No difference because they all follow the same race-to-the-abyss brief. 

New amalgamations are proof of that. Names which once meant something are "contracted" into a hodgepodge of meaningless letters and au courant logos that are wildly commoditized. 

We used to have a sense of the work Y&R did--at least during Steve Frankfurt's presidency there. But what in god's name is a VML, and what happened to the essences of the agencies the new entity subsumed?

These new non-entities stand for nothing, do nothing special and then can charge nothing for it because they do nothing of value. In an industry that created untold wealth by creating brand value, we are now in the brand evisceration business.

Etiam si omnes, ego non.

My client and I worked it out. Sometimes GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is hot-headed and feels slighted. Sometimes clients forget or are too busy to remember. Sometimes--luckily most times--with innately good people, the better angels of our nature can prevail.

All the same, let me end with a bit of Hemingway from his greatest short story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." I remember when Madison Avenue was a clean, well-lighted place, even if it was grimy and somewhat dank.

 "Good night," the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It was the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine. 

"What's yours?" asked the barman. 

"Nada." 

What A Waste.

h\t Nicole Yershon.

There's a campaign running in people's feeds on LinkedIn for Coca-Cola. I doubt it's real in any real way. Rather, it's a contrivance spread and spread and spread by a variety of red hagiographers, bent on pretending there's life and substance left within Oafilvy, after they fired everyone with life and substance and replaced them with either an AI bot or an $800,000 per annum figurehead.

The work, to my eyes, about 3000-percent too inscrutable to be comprehended my anyone with a mere three-digit IQ. Frankly, I don't even get it. I can't get from a twisted logo to recycling but maybe that's just me. Further, I can't believe the Coca-Cola company is truly spending massive amounts of money on outdoor which, according to my LI feed, anyway, they're pretending is just this side of ubiquitous.

But my real disgust at this work isn't that I don't understand it. It's that it's a lie. 

78 million metric tons of waste translates into roughly 172 billion pounds of garbage.
Roughly the weight of 500 Empire State Buildings.

Coke turns out literally thousands or tens of thousands of plastic bottles literally every minute. The most-optimistic estimates of plastic recycling says no more than one in three bottles are actually recycled. In other words, about 30-percent of plastic bottles don't wind up in our oceans, landfills or bloodstreams.

Actually, the work, I believe, is a lie or, better, is two-counts of lying.

First is the lie that the ad is a real ad. That it actually ran in a real way. Not just one billboard then galloping around the world via the closed community of a social network, then Cannes, etc.
(When the ad industry was important, it wasn't about awards, it was about measurable gains, aka sales.)

Second, the message itself is a lie. Coke ain't recycling plastic. In part because plastic can't be recycled. Plastic is a bit like nuclear waste. Its side-effects last lifetimes, or hundreds of lifetimes. 

Most distressing about all this, at least to my old-person's way of thinking, is that brands and their agencies are lying, and there's no independent press to point out the lies. The "media" can't. Because they want Coke's ad dollars.

What's more, normal people, i.e. anyone but me, no longer question the bushwa put out by giant companies. We look at crap like the lying Coke ads above, and we say, "wow! That's Cannes worthy."

No one even realizes that the financial holding company that owns the Cannes Awards (the for-profit Cannes Awards) is also a major investor in many of the holding companies that spend millions supporting the Cannes Awards.

Now, that's recycling. A dollar spent on an award show goes to the people who own you, and they give you a 19-cent trophy in return, then let you claim the awards as part of your new business spiel.

It's pay to play.

Or better, lie to die.

Lancing.

As more and more people in the ad industry are no longer in the ad industry, as in matter of fact, now that the ad industry is no longer in the ad industry, I get a lot of calls from friends and associates for advice on how to make it on your own.

As GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company storms into its fifth year as both an LLC and a Delaware Company, word has gotten around that mine is a going concern. There's no real vig in me telling the world how green is my valley or how filthy my lucre, but I will repeat something an old baseball manager said to many years ago when I was in the prime of sinewy youth.

"When you're up to your neck in shit and someone starts throwing baseballs at you, what do you do, duck?"

I spent a lifetime unraveling the wisdom of various Hegels and Heideggers of the Horsehide. What I got from the example above is simple, "believe in yourself and get out. There's no good coming to where you are. Remember, shit, necks and baseballs. As the old joke goes, it's time to leave show business."

Just now an old friend, an accomplished and teetering-on-brilliant strategist sent me a note. She's Oxforded and Cambridged and no more socially-awkward than the usual products of that augustosity. For the sake of anonymity and as an homage to Franz Kafka, I'll call her K.

K wrote, "Hi George! How are you? Wondered if you have time for a chat some time please? I'm thinking about freelancing and would love to learn from your guidance and wisdom! Thank you so much!"

Like I said, I get a lot of notes like these. So I thought about writing one of my quasi-famous Ad Aged lists, like "Ten Things to Think About When You Go Out on Your Own."

But then I realized, I don't have ten things to tell anyone. I have one thing. And that one thing revolves around one word: "Freelancing."

First, expunge, abnegate, eradicate, eliminate, destroy, dismantle, liquidate, never-again-utter the word Free. Even if you're somehow forced at a ballpark to join in during the National Anthem, substitute the word "fee" for free. You are now and forever more a citizen of the land of the fee. 

Got that? Ok. Now to part two of the word, half of which must not be said.

Lancing.

I want you to picture a medieval knight. A guy with a deadly lance.

His lance is his life. His living. His profession. It's how he earns his ducats and gains his self-respect.

What is your lance?

What is your life?

Mine is my pen. My pen is attached to my arm. My arm is linked to my brain. And my heart. A brain and heart that for forty years have solved the toughest, most intractable problems presented to the eighteen or so agencies who employed me at one time or another. 

My lance is my life. My experience. My skill. My craft. My insights. My wit. My synapses. My connections. My listening. My world-view. My studying. My listening. My reading. My thinking. My sweating. My midnight-oil-burning.

That is my lance.

I am not a "- - - - lancer."

I am a "lancer."

My lance is my weapon. My brain. My unique selling proposition. My lance is one-hundred things I can do that no one else in the world of advertising can do. Because my lance is the sole extension of my me-ness. 

If you want my lance, this is really simple, if you want my one-of-a-kind lance, my Harry-Winston not Zale's-lance, you're going to have to pay me for it.

I spent most of my life with my lance in a holding company clamp. That clamp kept me from realizing how special my lance is. After five years helping clients from start-up to Fortune 50 solve problems giant holding-company agencies couldn't solve--because they shed their experience, brainpower and skill, I know how special my lance is. And if you know, and you do, else why'd you call me, it's time to pony up.

One last thing.

I'm sure there are those who will remark about the phallic connotations surrounding the waxing of my lance. This ain't about phallic. I'm taking half of a word we use to denigrate our worth, "- - - - lance." I'm eliminating the bad part and valuing the good part.

If you want to laugh salaciously like a schoolboy re the word lance, fine. You're missing the point in all this. I don't care if you do.

I'm lancing all the way to the bank.

 

Immoderate Friday.

A couple weeks ago I met some advertising friends for dinner at the Old Town, an ancient, beery-bar down on 18th Street between Broadway and Park Avenue South. As the city has changed, the neighborhood has changed and the world has changed, the Old Town hasn't. Except for their prices, the place has the same dust, the same stained menus and the same sepia photos on the walls that they had when I first went there back in 1988.

                                

I'm sure "weathered" would not have been my adjective of choice.

What's more, the Old Town is said to have--and this is a source of some local pride--the "oldest urinals in New York." (And I might add, the best tasting urinal mints.)

The people I met at the Old Town were two creatives--work partners and young people--they're younger than my daughters. They used to work for me when I was at Ogilvy. Since then, they've traveled to half-a-dozen agencies, always searching for a place to do good work, a place where they feel supported, ok-- loved.

Such a place is getting harder and harder to come by. Just hours ago, as it happens, I had a Zoom call with a young copywriter--a friend of my younger daughter's from their tweenage years. She's at the hottest of hot shops now. Still, she's feeling disconsolate--she's unhappy there and doesn't know where to go.

Some of this general and intergenerational malaise ain't that different, I think from how the Old Town itself might feel, if an old-timey bar had feelings with too much anthropomorphism. The Old Town might feel like I feel, an anachronistic piece of hard-wood furniture in a press-board world. Flesh and blood in a world with silicon standards.

I had a professor in college who taught me a lot in one sentence. I had another one who did the same trick when I was in graduate school. I bumped into a third just a couple months ago when I read Emily Wilson's new translation of "The Iliad."

In college, my teacher said, "you can understand Shakespeare by understanding one word: Order. When the order of the universe is upset, the rivers flow blood. When foul is fair and fair is foul, shit happens. Heads roll."

In grad school, my teacher said, "all of Western Civilization can be summed up with one line (below) from the African Queen."

Wilson, in her brilliant preface to the Iliad, never uses the word "immoderate" to describe Achilles, but immoderate is what he is. As Wilson says below, Achilles' reaction to Agamemnon, or later to the killing of Patroclus is without moderation.

Somehow, I look at these three examples and words:  1) order; 2) natural and 3) immoderate and feel they work well to capture my feeling about life today and the ad industry today.

As long as there have been bipeds on the planet, we've always  communicated the same way. 

• We've worked to get attention.
• We've told what we want.
• We've found a way to persuade. 

And we've regarded this evolutionary tendency as natural. It's how pre-language babies communicate. It's how friends and lovers communicate. It used to be how advertising worked.

It used to be natural. The order of things. 

But now we have machines who know how to do it, we're told, better than we do. We have machines who have been granted the license and authority to upset the order of the universe, to attempt to rise above the natural. This isn't just using AI. This is choosing the love of mammon more than the love of humankind.

And I feel immoderate about that.

Do you?

Can you watch this and not think that it was written for what used to be the ad industry?

Remember.

Remember how Google+ was going to change everything?

Remember how Second Life was going to change everything?

Remember how 5G was going to change everything?

Self-driving cars?

3D printing?

Cryptocurrency?

The Metaverse?

Web 3.0?

Twelve things I've forgotten?

And A.I.?

In advertising, remember how integration was going to change everything?

The new CCO?

That account win?

Being bought by WPP?

The new caterer in the cafeteria?

Or interactive marketing and conversations about brands?

Or the "glowy" highlight on the "Learn More" button?

Or the starburst?

Or our biggest sale of the season?

Remember all the things that were going to change everything? Most of which we hardly even remember anymore?

Like Vietnam? The Holocaust? Hiroshima? Jim Crow? "Separate but Equal?" Bombing Black churches?

Remember all the things that were going to change everything?

Over the last few weeks, my wife and I have been drip-dosing ourselves with Sergey Bondarchuk's seven-hour epic from 1965, "War and Peace." It might be the most amazing motion picture ever filmed. It, literally, had a cast of millions. Its battle of Borodino is the largest battle scene ever filmed, making "Saving Private Ryan" look like an episode of "Gilligan's Island."

With every scene, I mutter to myself, "Oh, the death of the aristocracy, this will change everything." Or "Oh, the Russian Winter, this will change everything." Or, "Oh, Napoleon's a scoundrel and his men know it, this will change everything." 

But nothing, really, in the 200 and 12 years since has changed all that. The West is still fighting the Russians. The aristocracy is still decadent and still coming out on top. And people are still, blindly, following tinpot despots.

Disruption comes and goes.

Vast changes come and go.

Even all four horse-people of the apocalypse come and go. And today, roughly 97.9-percent of people think an apocalypse is a type of circus act.

More and more.

I'm with Faulkner. 

He said in "Requiem for a Nun," "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

This is the latest mumbo-jumbo some holding company that fired $300 million of people is investing $300 million in. Is there a sentence below you believe? Is there a sentence below that doesn't hurt your soul? This one gets me: "basic creative tasks like writing headlines." 

Anyone who thinks writing headlines is a basic task has never written a headline. Certainly not one that stood out amid the ten-thousand that we see everyday. Creating scripts, and synthetic voices? 

They'll probably create scripts and synthetic voices about authenticity.

Really? Clients want to work with companies that do this? It reminds me of the old joke, "sincerity is everything. Once you can fake that, you've got it made."

When A.I. and sentient machines have taken over all of earth, someone, someday, some still small voice will still put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard and scribble out something a machine can't.

A joke. Some hope. A tear. A tiny bit of fight.

Those are the things that change everything.

Adam Had 'Em.

You wouldn't think about it if you were normal, but 350 years or so ago, pins, for clothing, for wigs, for god knows what, were a big deal. 

Pin manufacturing in the 17th Century (I say this with some exaggeration) was like chip manufacturing today.

In fact, by the 1660s, it was multinational.

Most of it was taking place in northern France. But brass wire was brought in from Holland, supplied by Dutch middlemen who marked it all up.

Adam Smith, in the most famous economics book of all time, "The Wealth of Nations," published in 1776, used pin manufacturing to illustrate the division of labor.

"One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations … and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands."

Some of those distinct hands were attached to women--about half the workforce. You could pay those feminine hands less.

Still can.

As much as I have a Master's degree in English Literature, I've  become a fairly well-read amateur historian and equally well-read amateur economist for a good amount of time. Accordingly, when I look at the take-over of the advertising industry by giant capital, I look for precedents and economic motivations. 

Because the ad industry, like so many industries before it has quickly been transformed from a craft industry--products made by a few skilled hands--to a mass production industry, products the result of dozens of small operations carried out by unskilled labor.

The later, the unskilled labor operation, is cheaper, because unskilled is cheaper than skilled. Today, anyone can make an ad, and usually does. While actually, no one does. Because an ad itself isn't conceived any more, it's broken down, as above re. pins, into dozens of small operations, which different hands behind each of those operations. You don't have to understand advertising anymore to make an ad. That's no longer part of your job. You need only do your small bit. Then the ad moves to the next work station.

To be vulgar about it, making an ad today is a bit like the industrialized killings done in Germany during the Hitler years.

Killing was assembly-lined. There were no triggers to pull. Dozens of people did a small, innocuous task along the way. Everyone of those people along the way had plausible-deniability of responsibility. How else does a nation of 70,000,000 murder 7,000,000 and not go mad?

The ad industry ain't that different.

Except it has already gone mad.

No one's actually responsible for the 49.7-percent of all commercials that end in people dancing. Or the 53.4-percent of all commercials that repeat "triple-play bundle" twelve times in thirty seconds. Or the tsunami of balloons in every automotive dealer ad. "Spring into savings, muthafukkah."

No one's actually responsible for the CEO of the Holding Company making roughly 300 times the wage of the median salary he pays. No one's actually responsible for the billions in bot-driven ad fraud. No one's actually responsible for the ageism, where just nine-percent of WPP is over 50, as opposed to 33-percent of the population. No one's actually responsible for WPP, in just seven years shedding 45-percent of its workers and going from 200,000 employees to 105,000 employees. 

Nope.

Everybody sits at their workstation, canceling noise, canceling heads and turning their designated screw one-quarter turn tighter. 

We'll never know who it was who finally turned off the oxygen completely.