Friday, June 13, 2025

10 Gifts For the Holding Company CEO that Has Everything.




1. A single vinyl record. To remind him of when he had Agency of Record accounts.




2. Black Ink. An obsolete metaphor of the harkening back to times (like the 80s) when agencies were profitable.


3. Pineapple (Revenue) Upside-Down Cake. The cake recipe can be applied to agency data: revenue, head count, overall outlook. Just look at your financials as if they were upside down.


4. 3-D Lion. Printer. Perfect for printing replicas of faux Cannes Lions for ads that never ran, for results that never materialized, for clients you no longer have, by people you no longer employ. Why go to Lion hunting when you can breed your own?



5. Synonym Buns.
 After two-decades of industry contraction, stultification, firings and lowering of fees and wages, even the wiliest of Holding Company CEOs is running out of euphemisms for precipitous decline and abject failure. 

Our Synonym Buns will provide endless tasty ways of saying 'we're fucked.;
ex. "Downgrowth." "Negative Profit." "Downvaluation." "Right-sizing." "Write Downs." "Shrinkgrowth." Deceptive, yes. Delicious? You bet!


6. Silicone Butts, 100%  Fake Buttock Enhancers. Perfect for the CEO, who, after he's shed two out of five employees, wants "asses in seats," when he has no more asses to justify his seat expenditure. Your RTO mandate? With our buns, consider it done!™


7. Yachta, Yachta, Yachta. For the CEO who's tired of hearing the accusations about his incompetence halving revenue during his tenure. A simple way to remember the $1,700,000 you spent for a yacht rental while laying people off, plus a little reading about income inequality.*

(* Offer not applicable for CEOs who can't read.)



8. Custom-printed t-shirt. (Spinal cord not included with purchase.) After all, as Schattner said to Marx, clothes make the oligarch.



9. The Camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle chainsaw. Jesus apocryphally said, "it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven." 

Our deluxe high-powered "Camel Chopper," can help cut your own personal camel down to size. Works with both Bactrians and Dromedaries. Or try it on a llama, alpaca or other ungulate. 



10. A pink slip.
 This one needs no explanation. Human not included.

Thursday, June 12, 2025

Disposable.


From Raymond Bernard's "Wooden Crosses" (1932).
The man knew is way around a match dissolve.

Sorry about the quality. It's not available on YouLube.

If you work in metaphors like I do, you can learn a lot from the ongoing war in Ukraine and Russia. Basically, it seems like it might someday be called "the first AI war." 

I'll ™ that now.

It's removed from the AI war we read about in advertising everyday. Which mostly consists of rich people firing poor people and replacing them with algorithms. 

That said, basically I believe that the 
ongoing war in Ukraine and Russia will be the "past is prologue" for the ad industry's AI war.

Some months ago, I drew the illustration below.

It sucks, I know, but it explains how things work.

It explains why you probably have eleven boxes in your apartment full of old chargers, wires, devices and batteries. You buy tech to fix something, then another something arises.



It's pretty simple, really, as ugly as my drawings usually are. Every solution causes another problem. 

That's about as macro a statement as you're likely to get in a blog on advertising.

In advertising, and in warfare, or in just about any other pursuit, people buy something new because they buy the promise that it will do something magical for them. 

But you can't have a dog if you're not willing to vacuum up dog hair. You can't have a kid if you won't change diapers. And you can't replace your creative people with AI if you're not willing to give up a certain degree of perspicacity, humanity, laughter. Connection.

In the "first AI war," Ukraine, with 40,000,000 people is fighting Russia, with 140,000,000. They're out-peopled by 350-percent. Ukraine's defense budget is about 20-percent smaller than Russia's. So, as in advertising (or the way advertising used to operate) if you can't outspend, you have to out-think.

That's the derivation behind Ukraine's recent drone attack which damaged or destroyed a significant number of Russia's most sophisticated airplanes. 

The problem: Ukraine is out-resourced. The solution: AI-enable drones that can evade detection and penetrate thousands of miles within Russia. Hide them on trucks and...go!

As Benjamin Sutherland, the Security and Technology correspondent writes in "The Economist," 


For this sentence: "increasingly capable flying robots promise to reshape warfare," substitute something we might have already heard from any of 38-dozen agency moguls: 
"increasingly capable AI promises to reshape advertising."

But here's the rub. And what everyone forgets.

Every solution creates a new problem.

Which demands new tech. Which creates new problems. Which can only be fixed by new tech. 

See my illustration above.

And then this, from Sutherland:


It won't end here, of course.

Because underdogs always find a way around problems. As Ahab might have said, "where there's a whale there's a way."

Today, it seems every Holding Company agency seems hell-bent for leather to eliminate every person they possibly can. The data on headcounts in advertising is hard to come by. Transparency and holding companies go together like cleanliness and the #4 train.Bbut in 2016, WPP had just over 200,000 employees. Today, they have closer to 100,000. 

Even a CPA realizes that's almost a 20-percent drop.

The Holding Companies are going all in on the latest technologies--AI and other algorithmic sleights-of-hand. However, like the eventual use of microwaves that can disable a drone's circuitry, eventually something will displace AI. And the same companies working to get rid of people will realize they might need them.

They over-indexed. ie fucked up.

When you get right down to it, no matter how sophisticated the world gets, there's very little that can vanquish a determined populace even with merely bricks and sticks. In other words, sometimes the oldest technologies (people and elbow grease) can defeat the newest (AI.)

A century ago Henry Ford thought through, somewhat anyway, the problem of retaining his workforce. He was smart enough to know (despite his virulent Jew-hate) that nothing ruins a company faster than unhappy employees.

As "Forbes" magazine writes:

Too late the Holding Companies will realize that no one wants to buy from companies that destroy people, humanity and life on earth.




Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Show Me.

Not many people today think about Manichaeism, the ancient and defunct religion that saw in the world an ongoing struggle between light and good and darkness and evil. 

Before the spread of Islam, Manichaeism was the chief rival to Christianity. There were churches and scriptures that had spread from China through the Roman empire and Mani was revered as the final prophet, after Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses and Jesus. (The religious figure, not my doorman.)

However, bygone it is today, it seems to me that much of our world is caught in a sort of modern-day Manichaeism. 

Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Authoritarian, Red or Blue, we see the world as the struggle between major irreconcilable forces. Most often, this is a nuance-free world. Like a serious marital spat there's no going back. Middle-ground and compromise seem to be missing. As Beckett wrote in "Godot," "There is no lack of void."

Beckett was funny that way.

In advertising, I see a Manichaean struggle happening as we speak, or as I write, which I do more often than speaking.

There are those who are buying the AI thing whole hog. And there are those who are resisting. Cascading from that position, the AI-ers believe in something I call advertising inundation: Messaging doesn't have to be impactful to be effective. It just has to be so persistent, that sooner or later it wears you down. That's why I have four ads pop up if I order take-out and three ads on my metrocard.

The Manichaen counter-point to inundation is impact. That's where you create something that may be short on ubiquity, but is long on stopping power.


A metaphor might be the difference between carpet-bombing and a targeted strike. They'll both, the thinking goes, eventually take out the enemy. There's a stylistic and philosophical difference in which is the most effective.

I will say, I am not in the inundation camp. 

In fact, the glut of advertising in the world today has turned me even more Wordsworthian than I've always been. My solution for feeling like "the world is too much with me," is to turn off the TV, block the ads, and ignore if not boycott most everything I see from every brand that's forced on me. 

I realize I am old, but inundation advertising (which is inherently non-consensual) has turned me post-consumer. I don't buy anything anymore, save gasoline, lox, pastrami and toys for my grandchildren.

What strikes me as odd about all this is how rapidly the inundation side of the dichotomy has gained precedence over the impact side.

Especially since I've yet to see a scintilla of proof that inundation works. (Agency case-study videos claiming "billions of impressions" are heinously fictional.)

Not too many weeks ago, the world saw evidence of the power of AI. 


Ukraine, out-spent, out-manned and out-gunned in fighting the Faux-viet Union, used AI-enabled drones to destroy or damage an estimated 41 Russian air-craft, including their version of the amerikan AWACs system, which is way up in the Pantheon of technological sophistication. They launched drones from trucks. Their AI eluded all the Russian's defensive systems.



These AI advances I can see with my own eyes. And when someone in The Economist (even if he's selling something) says something like "the Digital Targeting Web” can make the army ten times more lethal," I listen. Especially because I've read a thing or two about what defense contractors like Palantir and Anduril are already selling to the (dis)United States. (It's scary.)




I would rather a defense infrastructure run by the engineers at either of those companies than one run by people at  Lockheed or Boeing or Raytheon. You don't want a billion dollar aircraft carrier if it can be destroyed by five-hundred $100 drones.

Mind you, there's a runaway "Wehrmacht" quality to these companies, and they scare the crap out of me. But that's not the point.

The point is this:

They are showing proof that AI works. As are the battlefields in Lebanon, Ukraine and Gaza. (And probably LA, too.)

Advertising agencies are claiming AI works too.

The difference is in the real world I see reports like this. They talk about advances and things that couldn't be done before to give someone, some organization or some nation-state an advantage:


In the advertising world I see reports on how cheap and fast something was done. Never in how it moved people. There's nothing to recommend the AI-generated commercial below except that it's as genuinely human as plastic vomit.




I've yet to see any evidence of AI communication efficacy. (Evidence of parsimony doesn't count.)

To my slightly informed technologically-aware eyes, I'm not even sure why we'd think AI would work for creative endeavors. It seems fine for sizing up a battlefield or collecting high-way tolls or routing UPS trucks through a busy city. But, making people feel something? Show me.

Show me AI that:

reaches people.
resolves a problem.
comforts the afflicted.
makes a bad day better.
makes someone laugh.
does something unexpected.
can actually anticipate.
brings joy.

Because it allows the moguls in the advertising industry to fire literally thousands of people, they're flogging it as hard as the Dutch flogged tulips five-hundred years ago.

The Dutch got pretty flowers.

We're getting nothing more than twelve men with perennial golden parachutes.






Tuesday, June 10, 2025

A Smile from Pyle.

I didn't ask Lesly for her permission to use this from her site.
But why wouldn't I?


Like Walt Whitman, today's guest-writer, Lesly Pyle contains multitudes. She's funny. Warm. Ambitious. Brave. A connector. And a bit of a trouble-maker, the characteristic I most-admire in another human being.

Lesly wrote me last week with the news a lot of ad people are dealing with these days. I wrote back with my usual old man wisdom. "Don't hide the news," I said, "Use it." And moments laters, Lesly sent us (it's for all of us, after all) this wonderful post.

Enjoy it.

And enjoy Lesly's Lesly-ness.

And hire her.

When you do, you owe me one.

Copywriting Portfolio: PyleOfWords.com

LinkedIn CV: LinkedIn.com/in/Friscomoon
Email: friscomoon@mac.com

Best-Selling Dementia-Fundraising Book (with more stories like the one below): PyleOfMemories.com


Angels & Demons | A Tale of Two Agencies

By Lesly Pyle

 

_____ 

 

Cut to 2000.

 

I graduated from the University of Oklahoma in June and moved to San Francisco shortly after. You could say I was a Sooner fresh off the Schooner.

 

My first post-collegiate job was at an incredible ad agency called Foote, Cone & Belding. FCB for short. FCB was known for its creative work — and its equally creative pranks.

This story is about the latter.

 

I was only a month old at FCB when my fellow creative assistant, the mysterious Michael Burbo, approached my desk with a mischievous grin on his face. This was not rare. Michael Burbo was always up to something. He spoke from a 3/4 angle, never quite making full eye contact. This kept him in a stance poised for a quick escape should the need arise.

 

Look, kid, Bacino called,” Burbo said.

 

Oh boy.

 

Any sentence with the words Bacino called” was worth leaning in for. Brian Bacino was our boss. He was a Group Creative Director who was kinda like a don. But the fun kind. If Burbo was scheming, Bacino was likely behind it.

 

Bacinos at a Giantsgame with the Top Brass,” Burbo said. Theyve ordered Black Ops.”

 

Burbo and Bacino spoke in code. It was a great education for this small-town Okie to learn how to decode their cryptic language. But, by four weeks into my four-year tenure at FCB, I had figured out some basics. If the Top Brass were at a baseball game during the workday, this meant two things:

 

They were drinking.

 

And they were thinking.

 

A few days before this fateful phone call, the ad agency across the street from us, GMO Hill Holiday, put up a little sign in their window facing our building. It had basic black letters on a white sheet of copier paper. The lack of visual panache plus its punchy tone made us suspect that it was designed by a Copywriter. It had only two words:


FCB SUCKS.”

 

“FCB SUCKS.” We got a big laugh about our little brother from another mother calling us out. Both agencies were owned by Interpublic Group — a giant holding company that got gianter recently when it merged with the mothership, Omnicom.

 

FCB was the big kid on the block and felt no guilt about humiliating our brethren publicly. In fact, the command to do so had come from FCBs executive leadership at the last game of the Giantsregular season. They were masterminding a sinister plan between overflowing cups of overpriced beer, whilst cheering their hearts out to send the Giants to the post.

 

Bacino gave Burbo a budget.

 

Burbo gave us the green light.

 

The FCB Fox Force Five was led by Michael Burbo. He recruited the rest of us. Brian Tocco, a fellow creative assistant, who was Burbos best friend and best pranking accomplice since childhood. Ward Evans and John Benson, a creative director team, who played in a band with Burbo. And the Okie who nobody really knew but trusted with Top Secret intel anyway. I wondered if it was my Gomer Pyle naïveté that got me the nod. My band of brothers shouted my last name like Sergeant Carter repeatedly:Pyle!” “Pyle!” “Pyle!” That joke never got old. For them, anyway. But if thats what it took to be part of the hijinks, I was happy to fall in line.

 

FCBs and GMOs buildings were smack dab in the middle of the San Francisco Ad Ghetto.” Yes, thats really what its called. The Ad Ghetto. Our office was seven stories tall with a modest roof deck. GMOs was only three stories but they had a much larger rooftop. The kind where you could throw all-staff parties. In three days, the Blue Angels would perform their annual Fleet Week Flyover. Ad agencies were always looking for excuses to party. Fancy flying was more than reason enough.

 

The FCB Fox Force Five had little time to prepare our disproportionate response to the 8.5 x 11-inch FCB SUCKS” sign taunting us from across Pacific Ave.

 

Cut to October 5, 2000.

 

At 0900, we enlisted the FCB championship softball team. We drafted the players with the strongest arms and the tightest lips. Until our strike, you could count the number of people who knew about our secret mission on two hands.

 

At 16:00 hours, from our lookout atop FCBs building, we saw trays of charcuterie and tables of booze being carefully arranged on GMOs roof deck. Perfect. It would soon be full of unsuspecting victims.

 

We waited for the right moment. The GMO crowd was at a quorum. The Blue Angels’ aeronautical acrobatics appeared overhead.

 

Ward Evans was a creative by day and a musician by night. He played a few instruments but on tap for this day was one in particular. His trumpet. He tooted the iconic Attention” bugle call. Everyone across the street turned their awe from amazing circles in the sky over to us. We stole the Blue Angels’ thunder. Our plan was working already.

 

Wards bugle call was our teams cue too. John Benson and I unraveled the first of two king-sized sheets which cascaded down the side of our building. It held our giant two-word retort:

 

HEY GMO.”

 

Ward trumpeted again. Burbo and Tocco released our second sheet to reveal the ultimate call to action:

 

SUCK THIS.

 

It might not have won a Titanium Lion for copywriting excellence but it got the point across.

 

For the next several minutes, the FCB bombardiers pelted GMO over and over and over again with water balloons. We had buckets of balloons in our armory. Allegedly, our assault was all caught on tape. The softball teams captain also ran the in-house A/V Studio.

 

With the help of long-range slingshots and throwing arms like cannons, we targeted GMOs trays. Splash! Food went flying. We targeted their booze. Splash! Bottles went flying. We expected all of this.

 

But what we didnt expect was their reaction. Or lack thereof.

 

We thought our sibling rivalry would just keep escalating into an Ad-nerd War for the Ages” with antics press-worthy enough for the front page of trade magazines like Ad Age. First things first. We needed GMOs counterattack. Aside from a half-hearted attempt to dump buckets of water on our heads during a Pacific Avenue block party, it never came.

 

A different headline made the news instead. GMO had just laid off much of their San Francisco staff. Many of the people we had just soaked from head to toe had just lost their jobs. We literally rained on a parade that had already been deluged.

 

We eventually got ours.

 

A few months later, FCB went through a large layoff of its own. It rendered our big seven-story building that housed 500 people unnecessary. And we had to move.

 

Our office was converted into luxury condos. We watched this sad transition take place from FCBs new home, across the street, in none other than GMO Hill Holidays recently vacated space. FCB continued to shrink and had to move again in a few years. 600 Battery” has since been known as a doomed address for ad agencies. Commercial real estate seekers beware.

 

Cut to 2022.

 

I moved again. This time, to an agency far, far away: The Richards Group (TRG) in Dallas, Texas. On my first day, I met one of TRGs group creative directors and fellow copywriters. Hes a neighborly fella named Mike Bales. He told me he had also moved to Dallas from San Francisco.

 

Where did you work in 2000?” Bales asked.

 

FCB,” I said. You?

 

GMO Hill Holiday,” he said.

 

Mischievous grins appeared on both of our faces.

 

And to answer your next question,” he said, Yes, I was there.”

 

But hes yet to admit if his was the infamous window that faced FCB.

 

Cut to 2025.

 

In another twist of fate, the author of this story, Lesly Pyle, was laid off from TRG and she’s now looking for a job. Contact her for creative positions and/or creative shenanigans. She’d like to thank George Tannenbaum for giving her this space so this story would finally see the light of day in an official advertising trade magazine: Ad Aged, not to be confused with Ad Age.