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.

 

Ad Absurdam.

In logic, reductio ad absurdum (Latin for "reduction to absurdity"), also known as argumentum ad absurdum (Latin for "argument to absurdity") or apagogical arguments, is the form of argument that attempts to establish a claim by showing that the opposite scenario would lead to absurdity or contradiction.

--

A friend from the business, a he/she, his/hers, they for purposes of anonymity and I we're talking just a couple days ago. 

They were telling me, though there was only one of they, they were telling me that a holding company agency they're working with has sent a list to a group of creatives offering the services of a large number of creative teams because another part of the agency is pitching a lot (to try to make up for gigantic business losses) and still another part has a lot of people they'll have to let go because there isn't enough to do.

So like lobsters at one of those old-timey restaurants where you pick the crustacean out of a tank that you want to bibbify, this particular agency is allowing creative people to pick creative people to help them pitch. Management has merely sent a list of names and titles. No portfolios. No 360-degree reviews. Nothing but a name.

It's an example, maybe reductio ad absurdam of one of GeorgeCo's quasi-famous differentiators. "I don't believe availability is a capability." 

I mean just because you have a person doesn't mean the person has the skill. The Holding Company commoditization of our business has done to a creative field what assembly lines did to manufacturing. They've broken down tasks into such small parts that ostensibly anyone can do them. It's an overall attempt to turn skilled labor--which is expensive--into unskilled labor which is cheap. So anyone can do anything at anytime because all creatives are interchangeable. 

I suppose I remarked to they that it's striking that we grew up in a business with traffic as a function, but there was really no one in what's now called "resource allocation," but what could be more accurately called (at least on the Titanic) "deckchair repositioning."

I continued, as I so often do, "it's like they have more taxi-dispatchers than they have cabs. Or a military with more logistics people than soldiers. It's like watching road-crews on the highway. Two people working, twelve people with clipboards." 

It got me thinking about "just-in-time-management" which started as logistical sleight-of-hand that helped reduce warehousing costs, is now being applied to what's euphemistically called "talent management." That is moving people around and around as balm against actually having people who can do the job and manage a piece of business.

That sent me spiraling. 

I imagined this dialogue from the not-so-distant-future of agency life.

CREATIVE ONE: I have a pitch next Thursday and need some mid-weight teams with financial services experience.

RESOURCE ALLOCATION: I can give you Margaret and Sam for three hours on Friday, between ten PM and one AM.

CREATIVE TWO: Daphne and Ezekiel just had an assignment killed. They'll have 45-minutes free on Wednesday.

RESOURCE ALLOCATION TO CREATIVE ONE: I can give you Daphne and Ezekiel for ten minutes starting eight minutes ago.

CREATIVE ONE: Do they have financial experience?

RESOURCE ALLOCATION TO CREATIVE ONE: They do know what money is. They've used cash in the past. Though they prefer indebtedness.

CREATIVE THREE: My hair's on fire! I have concepts due tomorrow on a $30 million pitch for low-flavor orange juice.

RESOURCE ALLOCATION TO CREATIVE THREE: I can give you Daphne and Ezekiel starting last Tuesday until yesterday.

CREATIVE THREE: That won't help. I need someone now. 

RESOURCE ALLOCATION TO CREATIVE THREE: Jill and Karen are free starting October, I can get you them for 15 minutes every other day for three months, though Karen is taking November off to have a baby.

CREATIVE FOUR: Sold! I can use the 15 minutes. And I'm fine with Karen WFM.

RESOURCE ALLOCATION TO CREATIVE FOUR: WFM? What's that mean?

CREATIVE FOUR: Working from maternity. Where have you been?

RESOURCE ALLOCATION TO CREATIVE FOUR: The only thing is neither Jill nor Karen are writers and they've never done anything but banner ads. And they speak only Mandarin.

CREATIVE FOUR: Who cares. Can Karen work while 85-percent effaced? I mean, can she work between contractions?

RESOURCE ALLOCATION TO CREATIVE FOUR: That might be tough. I can get you Pablo and Simon. Though they work out of Sydney and are 12-hours ahead of us.

CREATIVE FIVE: I can only use teams 11-hours ahead.

RESOURCE ALLOCATION TO CREATIVE FIVE: I've got an interaction designer in Guam.

CREATIVE FIVE: Sold.

This is life in the agency business today. There's more time and money spent trying to find people to work on business than there is dedicated to having people who actually know your business. There are more people who are dispatchers than doers.

My clients I've spoken to, as friends, roll their eyes when talking about their agencies. They know what's going on. The over-staffing of texters, and the understaffing of thinkers. The lack of knowledge in what Peter Drucker called "knowledge workers." The too-rare experience of having experienced people on their business. The 100 complicators for every dozen simplifiers. 

The business today reminds most people of that old Woody Allen joke. "The food is terrible and such small portions." 

Only it's "the creative is bad but at least no one will see it."

Unless you choose to work with an agency like GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. The right people. Dedicated.

An Open Letter to Every Automaker.

I love cars.

I used to love car advertising. Especially, work done at Carl Ally for Volvo, Fiat and Saab. At Scali McCabe Sloves for Volvo. Of course, VW at DDB. And especially at Ammirati & Puris for BMW. Oh, and Porsche, at various times at Chiat\Day or Fallon.

As much as there's an emotional side to buying a car, there's a rational side, too. These agencies knew both sides. How to speak to both. How to limbic and to logic.

But logic and rational has all but disappeared from advertising today. For a number of reasons.

One. We've had about thirty years of planner bullshit proclaiming decisions are emotionally-based rather than rationally-based. OK. I guess I'm an anomaly. If I'm going to spend hundreds on something, someone ought to give me some sort of permission to believe. 

I also happen to believe that a number of factual points together can build to an emotional connection. Here's a random VW ad. Read the copy. Maybe you'll get my point.

Two. We've had about thirty millennia of bullshit that people don't read. So we read that so often, we stopped writing. 

No one took the time to do any discovery or any verification, as I did for the past few moments. They just repeated "no one reads," because advertising is easier and cheaper to produce when it's dumber and commoditized.

Let's ignore the data below because, "no one reads."

$80 Billion in sales and over half-a-billion print books sold--yet "nobody reads."

Three. And most egregious. Agencies today have staffing protocols that make it impossible for people to learn about the products and services they're paid to advertising. Staffing in an agency today is "just-in-time." They've eliminated costly inventories of knowledge and expertise. When "availability is a capability," copy becomes generic.

Since the advent of practical electric vehicles from about ten years ago, automakers have been banging their drum on their own electrification forays.

In the eyes of automakers and their agencies, they only have to say "The new ____________. It's driving electrified."

That's Shakespearean in a way. The Bard wrote, "A rose is a rose is a rose." Madison Avenue writes, "an electric is an electric is an electric."

We've forgotten completely that our job is to differentiate. 

And to differentiate requires the time, intellect, empathy and skill to find out details and make them interesting and important to people. That's the thing about point One above. Emotions aren't ownable. Facts can be.

Like I said, I like cars. 

And the Wall Street Journal does a good job covering the multi-billion (or trillion) automobile industry. They just ran this article "The EV Battery of Your Dreams Is Coming." 

There's a lot of tech in the article. About solid metal materials. About silicon, not graphite. About layers of batteries and anodes. About the expansion and contraction of batteries. Finally, even, about the very shape of batteries and a particular configuration's ability to increase range and decrease charging time and cost.

In short: All batteries are not the same. And in the coming years it won't be electrification that's the point, it will be the type of electrification. 

Actually, this short paragraph from the Journal, is exactly the kind of writing the ad industry no longer thinks is needed. Because even as though the average cost of a new car is around $47,000 and the average household income is around $80,000, car buying, like everything else, is based on emotions, right?

"...But BMW recently announced that it will begin selling the first vehicle using the company’s new platform for EVs, which it calls “Neue Klasse,” in 2025. These vehicles will have a new kind of battery which will hold more than 20% more energy than the previous type, and charging speed and range will also improve by up to 30%..."

What Madison Avenue will do with information like this will be interesting to see. Will they make it important and thereby sell more? Or will they just repeat 'no one reads' and not do anything with it?

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company has over its five years of life differentiated dozens of products. From a tech company that protects the food supply from pathogens by detecting disease up to 500 times faster than previous protocols, to a pizza company that makes healthier snacks through alternative grains.

My offer to the automakers in the coming battery wars is simple. If you want someone who can drive sales for you by making the shape of a battery interesting, important and "I've got to have that," I'm your protoplasm.

This blog is actually a good example of my skill. I have the same letters and keyboard as everyone else. Yet I've written nearly 2,000,000 words here and get about 350,000 readers a month. 

That's fantastic for a blog. It wouldn't be bad for an automaker.

Friday Fun-Time.

There was a time when agencies and even some creative people bought books.

I mean real, actual books. Things you could stub your toe on. Not just ones and zeroes.

I still do.

At the bottom of it all, I'm afraid like most decent creative people, of having an assignment, project, pitch or major undertaking and coming up like an empty fishhook, having caught nothing.

Not even a skein of ratty seaweed or a Coney Island whitefish.

If you'd like to come up to my office in Connecticut, you're welcome, assuming you don't stay too long and you have good manners and don't dirty the guest towels.

You can visit my books.

My office is also my library. Most important my restorative niche. Where, like Wordsworth, I go when the "World is to much with us."  Which is practically always.

My "surround-sound" bookshelves are still only half occupied, I haven't fully transported my things from my city apartment. But in Connecticut, I still have a thousand good books. Many of them picture books. 

I like picture books. Particularly those published by Taschen, like the one I took pages from below. I spend a lot on books. But if I get one smile per book, or one idea per one-hundred books, they've more than paid for themselves.

We live in a world of "in-flight announcements." Where you're ordered about with little kindness often at the top of some petty bureaucrat's voice. Books give me something more.

Joy.

I know I am lugubrious by nature. And in my posts I can lay on the sturm und drang in such a way as to make Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung look like "Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies. 

Consider today's post an apologia. 

I don't mean to be a dour son a bitch. I was born this way. And I'm doing pretty good for a poor boy who had thirty stitches in his his face by the time he was four. 

Self-portrait in pixels.

And btw, don't be a stranger. Tell me in the comments which album cover below is your favorite. You can be deep-dish about it and analyze it like a graphic designer, or you can just say, "I like the colors." Both are good.

For me, it's "Anatomy of a Murder." The design is Saul Bass, the music is Ellington. And the Otto Preminger movie has Lee Remick in tight pants. As they say, PC or not, hubba hubba.

BTW, if you give a damn, you can buy the book below for $18.34 plus $3.99 for shipping if you click here. By my calculations, that's half of a week's worth of Starbucks, half your weekly subway fare and probably less than five-percent of your monthly cable bill.

Boo shop be bop.

 

Scout. Pout. Out.

A friend just wrote to me through some chat mechanism. Messenger, or Slack, or Teams, or Goose, or Restraining Order. 

It doesn't much matter which one.

They're all the same and everyone hates them all because they all suck.

She said to me, "How do you find so many funny things online?"

I answered as I've been answering since my teen years, when they tested my vision and found I had an extra-ordinary visual field. Like off the charts.

I've grown used to questions like these over the last 50 or so years.

"I have a wide field-of-vision," I answered. "I see things other people don't."

A good skill to cultivate if you're in the advertising business. Or any other business for that matter.

Last night, about an hour after I turned off the incandescence, I was visited by Dame Insomnia. She escorted me to the website of the Library of Congress, where I found 64 typewritten scouting reports by the baseball man, Branch Rickey. 

Rickey was a front office man--a General Manager and scout--most-famous for having the courage to buck the racism of Amerika and baseball and hire Jackie Robinson to play for the Dodgers of Brooklyn. He might be the Bill Bernbach of the Baseball Industry, or the Henry Ford, or Steve Wozniak.

The first scouting report I read was the second-longest. It was of the Hall of Famer, Don Drysdale when he was just 17.

There's some dated language in many of the reports. Black players are often referred to as "boys." Not our way today, but reflective of the tenor of the times, and you can't, rightfully, judge one era by the standards of another. It just ain't right. I'd bet by 2400 AD, people or AI systems--whichever is supreme--will look back at dog owners as cruel and unusual. 

At two in the morning, I read virtually all of Rickey's scouting reports that the Library of Congress had made available. You can find them all here.

What got me going about all this, of course, is what usually gets me going. Advertising.

Reading these reports got me thinking of how I was evaluated and rated when I was a boy in the business. I wondered what Marshall Karp, my first ECD in the business, said about me in my early scouting reports. Or Len Sirowitz. Or Ed Butler. Or Mike Tesch. Or Steve Hayden. Or Chris Wall. Or Steve Simpson. Or Lee Weiss. Or, even, Errol Morris and Joe Pytka.

I read not too long ago this book, about women in the CIA. Of course the CIA has a formal review process and keeps extensive records. But the assessments--the scouting reports--that really mattered were the ones traded in hallways and lunch rooms and "dead drops." 

Not that many months ago, I spent a nice chunk of change to get some career counseling from Cindy Gallup. I wanted to make sure my day-rate was high enough. I have friends who coach professionally, but I wanted to talk to someone I knew only slightly. 

Cindy said to me, "George, when two people are talking and only one of them knows you, what does that person say about you? What do you want them to say? That's your unique selling proposition."

I wonder if there's anyone left in the industry who sees it as rough, shiv-laded, and whale-shippy as I do. You keep nothing aboard a whale ship except that which makes the owners of the ship--the shareholders--money. I guarantee you the Pequod had no rock-climbing wall for crew recreation.

If you're still in the business, whether you're a freelancer, running your own thing, or one of the few people still with that relic of a demarcation--an FTE--you ought to think, no matter what your age, how your scouting report reads. Many of them, even of players who eventually went onto the Hall of Fame, are harsh. 

You'd want it to read like this:

Or this:

Not this. 

And what does your scouting report say?

By the way, my scouting report (a reproduction.)

Silenced. By Fear of Power.

 

I'm getting angry.

Angrier than usual.

Which is going some.

I'm angrier not only because of the destruction of the industry by "malefactors of great wealth" but also because everyone sees it but, to my ego-centric eyes, I'm the only one talking about it.

I just ran across an article in Monday's "Wall Street Journal." Their paywall is strict, their politics are retrograde and their logic is nefarious. But they provide another point of view and an outstanding book section, and the world's best writer on cars, so I subscribe.

The headline above sucks. In so many ways. Not the least of which in saying that groups tried to ban 4,240 titles last year, we were given no context.

I read a bit further and saw this graph:

Then, I got to these two adjacent paragraphs:

So, we're attempting to ban more than ten-times the books than ever before. 

I believe this trend, this rush to intolerance, is related to my text dialogue above. And is yet another impetus of my burgeoning anger.

What's happening here, in our self-annointed era where 'transparency' is heralded, is a folding-in of freedom of expression and free-speech. My well-tuned ears are philologically-minded. They notice things I've learned from George Orwell. As a "culture," we are using fewer words. Our ability to express and understand complicated thoughts is diminishing. We no longer have the words. (By way of comparison, Shakespeare knew twice as many words as a modern human.)😢

I also notice things I learned from Viktor Klemperer, a diarist, who chronicled his life as a Jew living in captivity alongside the Nazis and his post-war life living as a captive under the Soviet-East German police state in Dresden, Germany. His book "The Language of the Third Reich" taught me more than I learned from the 15 literature classes I took during my college years. 

If reading ain't your thing no more, you can watch Stan Neumann's documentary on Klemperer, "Language Does Not Lie."  If viewing something serious ain't your thing no more, you can think about the four words in the title. Unless, thinking ain't your thing no more.

The point in all my anger brings me back to George Orwell and another small set of words you might think about if being human is still your thing.

“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”   

There's some debate on the provenance of that sentence. No real debate on its meaning and importance. 

Bad things are happening in our world, but more specific to this dopey and in consequential blog, our industry. Money and livelihoods are being stolen by a few dozen men from a few thousand people. They're like cheaters when you're playing Monopoly. You're playing a game. They're playing to kill. They cheat to get all the money and all the properties.

They've taken it from you. 

They'll leave you living on Social Security. Which they will then attempt to take from you.

Stay silent, my friends.

You have nothing to lose but your everything.