Rhyme of the Ancient Copywriter.

Not too long ago, I wrote, sold and produced a passel of commercials for a large tech brand. Large, of course, is relative. They're not Google, Apple, Microsoft or even IBM. I think they're about the 2400th most-valuable company in the world. As a one-man agency, I'd like a dozen clients that size.

Like most companies, from the dry cleaner down the street, to some couture place over on Madison Avenue, to a high-end restaurant, to a major ad agency or tech company, people started those businesses to do what they love. Making ads for themselves is not usually top-of-mind. That's why so many clients tell agencies they're too expensive. 

The value of advertising is seldom revealed to them. Therefore, they regard advertising as a cost, not a value.

The commercials I'm writing about had that sort of genesis. The tech guys who ran the company knew their product was onto something they believed would be big. But, they were having a bear of a time trying to say what their product did.

That's the part of writing commercials that a lot of people don't see. The part that defines and differentiates. That tells viewers what you make in a way that makes it lust-after-able.

In fact, for this client, while I was on the phone with the product people I said to them, "What will it say on your landing page when people get there?" 

No one seemed to be able to answer. So, again, while on the phone I wrote something, something that started with the word "Introducing." And was followed by the name of the product. That was followed by words like "the most...ever assembled." After all, as my friend Rob Schwartz has said so often, what's the point of introducing something if it's not the 

first at something, the
only at something, or the
best at something.

I set the line in big bright type--I used their color and font--in In Design. I'm hardly an In Design master, but I got my point across. The 27 engineers on our zoom breathed easier once they had what I called their "summary thought." 

I sent it over to them, and I waited. I assumed they'd spend a week watering what I wrote down. But magically, they left it alone. (It had given them something to shoot for.)

Now that I had the job, I thought about something another friend, Dave Dye often asks. "Why does no one do jingles anymore?"

I didn't exactly write a jingle for a client--it's hard to take a million dollar product seriously if it's introduced with JUNE MOON SWOON bushwa, but each spot, there were five :30s and a :60 in all had a rhyming epigram. These were about the versifying equivalent of a slogan by Muhammad Ali. Gerald Manley Hopkins has nothing to worry about.

Poetic acumen notwithstanding, I figured the people watching commercials like these aren't taking notes. Just as you want to leave a Broadway show humming a tune, a dopey rhyme might work to give viewers something to remember at the end of 30 seconds. Like the prize inside the old Crackerjack box.

So, I wrote little epigrams for each spot like "no more Frankensteining. No more whining."

Again, I waited a week for the "you can't say thats." But they never came. Last night the client sent me a screenshot of the social they did around the TV campaign. Each one prominently featured one of my little ditties. 

That made me feel pretty good.

And proved the rule of thumb, 

that sometimes doing something dumb 

winds up being a lot of fun.

AU, AI, Aw Shit.

Such is the peripatetic style of my reading that some time ago I happened upon a series of books published from the late 1940s until the early 1970s called "The American Trail Series." These are not "academic" books. They're casual histories of the routes that criss-crossed America--from the earliest Post Road from New York to Boston, to the Oregon Trail, to the fur trapping routes throughout Canada and the Great Lakes. 

Such books, I'd say, were the product of a different America, a more literate world where we inculcated ourselves with the myths (good and bad) that contributed to our collective belief in American exceptionalism. These were stories that bound us together as a nation. That gave us something to believe in. They're flawed, of course. What isn't? But they beat the alternative.

These books are not, so far as I can tell, available in electronic versions. So I ordered a few in hard cover. You can pick them up on abebooks.com for less than the price of a Starbucks coffee.

I've gotten out of the habit of reading ink on paper, but prior to our week away from the ardour of running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I grabbed the book shown above, figuring it would teach me something of the history of where my wife and I are holed up for the week, the booming desert city of Tucson, Arizona. Tucson was part of the Gadsden Purchase--an extortion of almost 30,000 square miles tract of land that we took from Mexico, after defeating that poor nation, in the 1845 war of imperial conquest, for a mere $10 million.

By 1861 or so, the rectangles above formed something called the Arizona Confederacy, aligning themselves with the one-percent of the southern population who owned 99-percent of the slaves and tried to fight to uphold an economic hegemony that supported the primacy of that one-percent. We are still fighting those battles today. Yes, a majority of the nation sacrifices to give succor and their tax dollars to the one-percent. We call that normal.

But, I pray, like today, blue troops from California defeated the retrograde forces of the Arizona Confederacy and the territory remained non-slaveholding. New Mexico became the 47th US State on January 6, 1912. Arizona became a state five weeks later on Valentine's Day in 1912.

BTW, most of what is amerika today (I am switching here to my trump-era spelling) was Spanish or Mexican or Apache or Tucamora or Toltec longer than it was "ours." Perhaps the only construct less sensible than race is the construct of borders. Like race is imposed on our species--to better control it, borders are imposed on our planet--to better divide us.

These areas, of course, were unknown to most of the United States, only becoming of interest after gold was discovered on the American River in California. Then came the trick. How do you leave Hartford, Connecticut, or Peoria, Illinois, or even Galveston, Texas, and make your way to the gold fields of California.

Gold fever had struck America.

What makes this interesting to me is the similarity of its effects to the fever that afflicting so many today: AI Fever.

Like what happened when it was said nuggets of gold were yours for the plucking, common-sense simply vanished. Why stick to your knitting when, it was said, a "lazy person could make $70 a day just by bending over."

The mania then is like the mania now.

People were willing to give up all they had for the prospect of untold Midas-like riches that were theirs for the stooping. 

Logic flew out the window. Even the daunting task of getting to California rapidly shifted from almost certain death to little more than a walk in the park.

None of the three paths to California was enough to stop the torrent of those emigrants risking life and limb.

Path One, the one I'd have probably taken was sailing around the Cape of Good Hope and its notorious deathly turbulence, then 5000 miles up the coast to San Francisco. This was the longest and the most expensive route. The gold might be gone by the time you arrived. 

Path Two. You'd sail down the central American Isthmus to what was then Nicaragua and what is now Panama. Then trek 70 miles across from the Caribbean to the Pacific. Then hope to find a ship to sail up the coast to San Francisco. Death came easy across the Isthmus--if the mosquitos didn't kill you, something else would would.

Path Three, was the most popular. Start at Corpus Christi, or Brownsville, Texas, or Vera Cruz or Tampico, Mexico and hoof it across jungle, deserts, mountain ranges, hostile Apacheria, and Ladrones, bandits who would kill you for your boots. In all, a 1500 mile trek under conditions I couldn't endure for a mile and a half.

But such was the lust for the AI of the day: Gold.

That people went. People died. People came back poorer than they left.

I suspect, if amerika is around to write a history of the AI gold rush 175 years after this chapter closes, the similarities to the California gold rush of 1849 or so will become more and more obvious. A few, yes, will get terrifyingly wealthy. A few will invent the binary equivalent of blue jeans. But most will suffer and have little to show but calloused hands and calloused hearts and calloused souls.

I'd bet on that.

Before I'd bet on the gold fields of AI.

--

Easy to be Bad.

Experimentation is expensive. That's usually why monopolies and their kissin' cousin-kin, oligopolies usually avoid it.

If you have a market sewed up, why spend billions innovating? Is it any wonder advances in personal computing came not from IBM or H-P, but from two guys in a garage who founded Apple. 

The same hold true for electric engines. The ICE-manufacturers (ICE=internal combustion engines) had no real incentive to develop alternative propulsion. Until Tesla came along and starting gobbling up marketshare. You're seeing the same behavior from the giant monolithic oil companies. No wonder we don't have an infrastructure for fast-charging. It's expensive and will cannibalize their business. Why bother? You already own the road.

The examples of this "closed-ness" are myriad. Why does it take longer to fly someplace today than it did sixty years ago? Why is amerika's phone networking and internet connectivity slower and more expensive than much of the world? Why does the US not have a credible airplane manufacturer any longer--one that doesn't have to pull government grift to not be liable for bad manufacturing processes that led to hundreds of deaths?

All these "systems" are closed systems. They're controlled by a few major entities. Throughout history "closedness," more than disease, corruption, famine and plague, have been what has killed empires, countries and companies.

The case of Zheng He vs. Columbus is a good example. As Johan Norberg's written in his great book, "Open: The Story of Human Progress," in the early 1400s, China had it all over Europe. 

"Between 1405 and 1433, the emperor sent a gigantic fleet on seven voyages to project power and wealth around the Indian Ocean and create a system of tributary states. Under the command of the Muslim eunuch Zheng He, around 250 vessels carrying almost 30,000 men sailed to South East and South Asia, Arabia and East Africa. Decades before Columbus was born, they travelled much further than he would, on much larger vessels."

Zheng's flagship was about 500 feet long. Almost a century later, the best Columbus could sail, the Santa Maria, was only about 70 feet in length. One seventh the size of Zheng's ship.

But soon, China consolidated. Their emperor controlled all. And he decided exploration was dumb and threatening and expensive. There was no reason, he thought, to ever travel more than eight kilometers from your home village. China went from an exploring, experimenting society to a closed and prohibitive one.

Much of Europe was the same way. While scientists began to realize the earth was not the center of the universe, you could be excommunicated for such statements. In fact, the Church did not accept heliocentricity as fact until the 1890s. Because so much was controlled by the orthodoxy of the Church and the nobility they controlled, free-thinking was punishable by death, excommunication, burning at the stake, or all three. To call the Church a "stake house," would have gotten me in deep shit.

Back to Columbus. He was also snubbed by the powers that be. All over Italy, which was not a consolidated nation until around 1870, but instead was many kingdoms, Columbus couldn't find anyone to sponsor his search for a westward route to Asia. 

But, because Europe's governance was not unified (like the Chinese were) he asked the Portuguese. He asked the dukes of Medina-Sidonia and Medinaceli, and the kings of England and France. He spent twenty years as a beggar, looking for a patron, finally finding Ferdinand and Isabella. 

They enabled Columbus to do his thing. And Spain became the most powerful nation in the world.

But there's more. According to Norberg, Columbus' discovery was a "Sputnik moment" for other European powers. They all went after the wealth of the new world. They all innovated to get there. They were afraid not to. Lest they get subsumed.

Of course, this metaphor brings me to advertising.

Madison Avenue today is 15th Century China, or Dark Ages Europe. It's dominated by soon-to-be just three companies that control three-out-of-every-four jobs and dollars. There's no incentive to do anything but create a system for preserving the status quo. 

So while the business withers, agencies losing thousands of people and millions of dollars have themselves solipsistically awarded "agency" or "network" of the year. The inherent subject-object split between reality and accolades doesn't matter. Just as there was virtually no one around to gripe about the Ming dynasty or the Church, there aren't many who have the voice and stature to point out the industry's failures. There's no trade-press to cover it. They're busy covering the things the big soon-to-be-three want covered. (They'd get no ad dollars if they didn't play ball.)

When I started in the business, there were hundreds of credible agencies, independent and at some level, innovative. They marched to their own beat. Different agencies had different personalities and beliefs. 

Today, there are a few independents left and a few more seem to emerge each day. However, despite the success of agencies like Mischief and Wieden--and a few others I'm missing now--we've yet to see our industry's "Sputnik" moment. Where the power of a new way forces the old way to change.

Norberg's point, and mine, is that open-ness, though often chaotic is generally a force for innovation and good. We are living in an anti-open era, and now in an anti-open country. And certainly in a closed industry. 

What do you think the attack on universities, science, thougyt and immigration is really about. We're witnessing an attack on open.

There a lot of reasons things aren't working anymore. In enumerating them all, we usually forget the biggest: the most macro of them all. The monopoly incentive makes it easy to be bad.

--

BTW, this from Jamelle Bouie in a Times' newsletter.

I wrote about the MAGA movement’s conception of the future.

Trump and his allies are fighting a war on the future and, in particular, on the idea that our technological progress should proceed hand in hand with social and ethical progress — on the liberal universalism that demands an expansive and expanding area of concern for the state and society. And they are fighting a war for the future insofar as this means the narrowing of our moral horizons for the sake of unleashing certain energies tied to hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality.

 

Breaking Glass.

It's hard, at times, to not be gloomy about the state of the world. And, to be picayune about it, the state of our industry. 

Some of that, I think, has to do with my naturally lugubrious nature. I often see the glass well-less than half full. And a future bereft of hope.

Truth be told, many times I don't see a glass at all.

It's not unusual to feel that the world has lost its bearings. Where the rich steal from the poor yet the poor vote for them. Where disinformation reigns. And truth is merely a social network owned by a swindler.

As Brecht wrote in Mother Courage before the rise of another reign of terror, "Peace is a waste of equipment." As Arthur Miller wrote in his great but unknown poem, "Lines from California," 

"When a man admits failure he becomes a pedestrian.
Brotherhood is when two men have the same mother.
Sacrifice is a car sold at a ridiculous price.
Society is when people listen to classical music;
or a Savings & Loan.
Law is order, Justice a decent return on money.
Progress is anything turning on and off by itself."

This week has been a busy one. I've had a few creative presentations. And four separate pitches for new clients. Though I don't do spec work for these pitches and they're usually over in about an hour, very little is harder than having these conversations. In fact, they remind me a bit of my recent cataract surgeries.

The surgeries took only five minutes and involved no real pain and only a modicum of discomfort, but all the same, they were draining and, yes, eviscerating.

On top of all that, an old friend called me yesterday from Paris. We had worked together when I worked in San Francisco over two decades ago. I immediately sensed her brilliance (I'll call her S, for anonymity's sake) and at S's behest I contacted--back in 2004--an ECD I knew in Paris who promptly hired S.

Since then, S has fairly set the ad world on fire. It's not very often that I'd consider putting myself in a subordinate position to another ad person, but I'd work for S in two shakes of a lamb's tail. 

In any event, S texted me out of the blue. I know when I get a text like hers, there's a problem. This wasn't a social call, I knew, this was a friend in need call.

I get a lot of these.

A lot of tears wet my shoulders.

My therapist of four decades yells at me for taking such calls. "You need to preserve yourself," he tells me. And he's right. What's more, there are times I need, too. And there isn't a for me.

But back to S.

S, you have to love who you are.

S, you do the work you have to do to do work that makes a difference.

S, believe in S.

S, keep on keeping on.

I don't care how corny this is.

You are your garden.
You are your rake and hoe.
You are your fertile ground.
Get to work.

Inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground

Go, S, go.

This Is Mark Denton's Fault

I had a post all set for today, a good one, too. A heart-string puller. But then Mark Denton posted this video on Linked In. 

I flipped over it. As I flip over almost everything Mark does. I sent him a note. Can I post this tomorrow? I asked. Yes! He said and here it is. 

Mark is amazing. Everything he does. I even wrote three blog posts about him starting with this one.  Maybe I should keep him my secret. But the world should know.

And I'm stupid that way.

Next, I decided to "pad" this post. It was too short just posting Mark's video. So I went through some of my files and posted things I've loved and saved for years and years. A hodgepodge.

I'm a relentless saver. And I have a good memory. It's amazing what you can steal if you're crafty about it.

Some of these things I've found. Some were sent to me. Some I wrote. Some I pretend I wrote.

Below, an idea I had for a class. It never got off the ground. Thank goodness.

A planner sent me this during a client Zoom call.

This beats GPS hands down.

I feel this way often.

Especially on Fridays. 

In New York, everyone is a little bit Jewish.

A serious caesura. Next time that human polyp says how persecuted he is.

97.4-percent of my friends feel this way.

Words to live by. Once you have a job number.

Not sure if Adam Smith would find this funny.

I dread phone calls.

Guilty.

Art director humor.
Like "I shot the serif."

My therapist would charge me extra for this.

Love thy neighbor. And bring marshmallows.

This contains multitudes.

My view of 97.9-percent of direct marketing.

Fearful symmetry. The best juxtaposition of words in the entire English language. Blake could draw, too.

Thank you, Ms. Babitz. Nevertheless.

He persisted.

When type tried harder.

Don't ever forget who you are.

The Queen's English is alive and mutilated.

An homage.

And finally, from a sage even sagier than Mark Denton. Another person who Yam what he Yam.