When do you say enough is enough?  When do you tell a client that their marketing strategy is wrong?  When do you oppose fraudulent copy testing?  When do you say, “your advertising will fail?”

In today’s economic environment, the answer is Not Frequently.  To challenge a client’s thinking is to risk the business.  The probable outcome of not objecting, unfortunately, is often the same.  Either take a stand and risk the business early, or see results not live up to client expectations and risk the business latter.

This is the situation I’m in today.  A client whose revenue is important to our agency is making countless bad decisions.  New management has changed strategic direction away from a successful retail approach to a vision of aspiration and grandeur inconsistent with the category, the product line and the way consumers purchase the prosaic products in question.

I’m a strong proponent of high level branding, integrated across all aspects of product development, design, marketing, advertising and social media.  Apple of course is the poster child, though very difficult if not impossible to replicate. (In branding courses I teach I dissuade students from discussing Apple until the last class because it’s such a red herring.)

Many clients don’t know what brand advertising looks like.  They ask for it, but when they see it they shy away in favor of a hybrid product-sell mishmash. They ask for “emotional connection” and then insist on long sequences of product demonstration. They ask talented copy writers to compose inspirational scripts and then cut all the poetry out, replacing it with copy no consumer could comprehend. The client I’m talking about guilelessly commented on the use of a word in a TV ad, “We’ve never used that word before. It might stand out.”

Then, discredited copy testing methodologies are employed to guide and “fix” the advertising.  The wrong things are tested.  Often even the findings are ignored in favor of personal opinion.

There was once a time when agencies said No.  Clients were often resigned.  Sometimes the agency was simply arrogant; other times right.  Years ago at DDB, Keith Reinhard offered clients “guaranteed results.”  Based on client objectives, if the agency had free reign to create the best advertising, without client interference, the agency guaranteed defined results.  If those results were not achieved, the agency would pay back all production and media expense.  To the best of my knowledge, no client ever accepted the deal.

It comes down to personal integrity and courage.  Bill Bernbach wrote, “More and more I have come to the conclusion that a principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money.”

Principles don’t pay the rent, but a life lived by principles might be worth living.

So when is enough enough?

There is nothing in contemporary art today that conveys the stunning power linking the subconscious to visual imagery than Australian Aboriginal painting.  The current exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, from the peerless Kaplan and Levi collection of contemporary Aboriginal paintings, demonstrates, to me, how devoid of meaning are our own perceptions of the world, and how empty–truly nonexistent–is our kinship with the land, our fellow humans and the creatures with which we share the earth.  We have no collective memory of where we came from.

Of the world’s oldest continuous culture, the many Aboriginal peoples of Australia have given us through their painting the rarest opportunity to enter into a perception of reality that’s so rich and meaningful it’s beyond our comprehension.  We can know it but never feel it. Reality is a tricky word to use in relation to what these paintings depict.  To an Aboriginal, what they see as the reality of  time or landscape is a deep mixture of memory, creation stories, spirituality and physical presence, with no delineation between what we would regard as real or myth.  The word we use to describe this connection between the world of today and the world of creation is Dreamtime.

The first time I saw Aboriginal painting was in 1988 in Melbourne, Australia when my former wife and I visited the Victoria National Gallery and walked nearly speechless through its landmark exhibition Dreamings.  We had never seen anything remotely like these monumental paintings. It couldn’t have been any more revelatory than if we had stumbled into a convention of aliens.  We could not believe what we were seeing.

From that introduction we went on to collect eight paintings, now split between us, and to which I have added several more.  They are among the most precious possessions I own.

I fail to understand why contemporary Aboriginal painting is relegated to the sideshow of “ethnographic” art and not hung in the same galleries as Abstract Expressionists or, if not accorded that significance, at least among modern works of Western painters.  To even compare the intensity and richness of a painting by, say, Emily Kngwarreye to one by Damien Hirst is akin to comparing a late Beethoven sonata to a song by the Bee Gees (with apologies to the Bee Gees.)  The stupendous Aboriginal painting in San Francisco’s deYoung Museum is abandoned at the very rear of the arts of Asia-Pacific section of the museum.

I’m moved by these paintings in ways I never experience when looking at other art.  Haunting museums around the world since a child, I’m not a stranger to the broad range of artistic mastery.  I love Cycladic sculptures, Titian drawings, Manet portraits, Paul Caponigro photographs.  The Neolithic cave paintings shown in Werner Herzog’s film Cave of Forgotten Dreams dazzled me with their beauty and mystery. Who can stand in front of Picasso’s Guernica and not be silenced?   If I could afford to hang anything on my walls it would be Homer and Sargent watercolors.

Australian Aboriginal paintings are different.  Even after decoding their symbols and structure, their meaning lies just beyond comprehension, because each paintings is unique to its painter, or group of painters.  They tell stories. They celebrate aspects of the land that nourish and enrich the community’s lives.  They explain where their people come from and how they came to be.  They depict the origins of language and how things were named in the beginning.  I can only intellectually understand what an Aboriginal painter intuitively knows by instinct and heritage. And it has only been since the early 1970’s that this deep knowledge has been shared outside their own communities–often reluctantly.  This is secret knowledge– knowable, really, only within the clan.

The pleasure I get from looking at these paintings comes from a connection to something beyond myself.  I may not fully understand what it is, and for sure it is to something outside of my life and experience.  They push my idea of significance backwards and forwards.  I marvel at the colors, the intricate patterning of dots and lines, the multi-dimensional conceptualization.  I enjoy the stories told in the paintings.  I love that the traditions are carried by both men and women in the Aboriginal communities.  In some areas, such as the Utopia Station, the paintings are made exclusively by women, reinterpreting on canvas what they once painted on their bodies.

Like in any art market, the early paintings in the movement, from the 1970’s and 80’s, are the ones that command the highest prices at auction.  They represent the beginning and the artists are now the Old Masters.  The Seattle exhibition picks up in the 1990’s through the present, illuminating the development of the art among a younger generation.  A few of the last remaining elders are represented–Rover Thomas, Emily Kngwareye.  What a privilege to see these paintings in one place.

I wonder if we can imagine a world without advertising.  Forget for a moment that it’s advertising that supports all of the media we know: television programming, magazines, web content, radio.  The world would be much quieter; the landscape unsullied; our commercial experience would be limited to the very local.  Imagine how much brain space would be opened.  We would be in the 18th century–or before.  Would we lose very much?  Of course if we never knew a world with advertising, there would be no loss.  But if we did know the world as we know it today, how would we react?  Would we miss Apple bill boards along the highway?  Ads for Coca-Cola on TV?  Rolex ads in The Economist?  Motel-6 on the radio?

Many of us would say no, we would not miss advertising.  Philosophically it may be true.  I would wager, however, that most of us would be lost without the ubiquitous advertising sign posts pointing us to this retailer, that movie, this car, that computer.  Some advertising exists as pop culture in the landscape.  Think of Times Square or the Ginza. Some advertising is beautiful.  Some advertising can even make us cry.

Would the loss of advertising make us lonely?  Would we miss all the spokespeople who pitch us night after night?  Would we miss Larry King explaining the benefits of garlic?  Would we miss the public service ads asking us to send money to feed a child in India?  Would we miss seeing our heroes–Michael Phelps, Roger Federer, Shaquille O’Neill, Michael Jordan–shine the light of their celebrity on the things we want to buy?  (I’m 100% certain, on the other hand, that no one would miss political ads!)

For many, advertising is a solace, a connection to the world around them.  Just as robotic pets are used among the elderly to comfort and fill the spaces lost to age, abandonment and loss, advertising talks to us, telling us what we deserve, what we need, where to go, how to live a better life. “You Deserve a Break Today!” Some advertisers even want us to be grateful.  And many are.

For others advertising is a necessary evil, the inevitable result of a capitalistic culture, the scum on the rim of materialism.  Mass brands exist because of advertising.  Fast food, beer, cosmetics, cars, cruise ships, tooth paste–the list of what we buy is endless and what we buy, for the most part, is fueled by advertising.  An ad creates the desire for a hamburger, that sends us to MacDonald’s, which burns the rain forest to source their beef, that threatens wildlife, displaces people, and renders land unusable for generations.  Advertising has its consequences.

For those of us who work in advertising, it’s a craft, an art, a challenge.  We dissect the work into all its component parts and rationalize their intellectual content.  Art direction and copy writing are skills.  (That most copy writers have aspired at some time to be novelists is another story.) We can instantly comprehend the difference between a well written ad and one that isn’t; a well designed ad from an ad that looks like a dog’s breakfast.  Ads can be great because they’re simple and clever and cause us to see something differently.  “Think Small” is the classic example.  Top film directors create astonishing ads that dazzle us: Ridley Scott’s “1984” for Apple aired once and became legendary. Ad agencies like DDB became famous for creating ads that amuse us, stun us, cause us to question, cause us to dream.  There’s a book on Chiat Day titled Inventing Desire.

Most practitioners believe that advertising matters.  That great ads make a difference and bad ads are a disgrace.  Bad ads more often than not are ads that clients want–so say ad guys.   The poetic language is removed in favor of promotional copy.  The ad agency where I began my career, Benton & Bowles–famous for its work for package goods giant P&G–had as its slogan, “It’s Not Creative Unless It Sells.”  The agency didn’t attract the most creative talent.  Crest and Pampers didn’t suffer as a result.

Marketing as a practice and advertising as its child originated in the United States and has been exported around the globe.  Social critics decry the delusory effects.  What arose in 20th century America evolved inexorably from the great 19th century British trading empire, and before that the Dutch.  The British were so insistent that trade trumps national prerogative that they forced Japan to open its gates of self-imposed, and desired, isolation under peril of war.  (Puccini, then, would never have created his masterpiece.  What a tangled web we weave.)

How many times have you heard someone say, “What did we do before Google?”  I’ve said it myself.  Despite Larry and Sergei’s dislike of the industry, Google would not exist today if it didn’t derive its revenue from advertising.  Would we want our ability to search online to disappear overnight?  Even those who view Google’s mantra “Do No Evil” as fraudulent, would miss their favorite search engine.

In the priority of what I like in life, advertising falls close to the bottom.  Of course it’s also how I pay the rent.  There’s a survey somewhere in advertising lore that among the most respected professions, advertising ranks next to last, just above used car salesmen.  It’s a dilemma I think about every day.  It worries me.  It undermines self respect and engenders cynicism.  It’s a pact with the Devil.

Nothing changes without the will to change it.  “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and the courage to change the things I can.”  Imagining a world without advertising is as dreamy as wishing for Atlantis to emerge from the sea.  It isn’t going to happen.  Maybe someday the people who make the Big Decisions will agree to Stop It All.  The world would radically, inconceivably change, undoubtedly for the worse given the cycles of financial and commercial growth required to feed and employ the earth’s increasing population.  Goethe wrote, “Doubt can only be removed by action.”

In the meantime, I’m thinking about life on a Costa Rican beach as my Plan B.

James Meek reports in the London Review of Books ( 7 June 2012) that Viktor Yanukovych, the brutish Prime Minister of Ukraine, has hired Burson-Marsteller to promote his government’s case abroad of having imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko for her efforts to switch her country’s energy supplier.  The politics behind the case, and its doubtful merits, are beyond my scope; that Burson-Marsteller accepted this assignment, however, should shame even the fiscally venal Sir Martin Sorrell, whose WPP owns the public relations firm.  It’s well known that Burson-Marsteller, together with its  WPP sister firm Hill and Knowlton, has served the political interests of more than one shady–at best–regime.  The Yanukovych episode is but one of such assignments over the years, though its happening in 2012 should leave a sick feeling in the pits of our stomachs.  It does in mine.

Public Relations.  It sounds like a community action committee formed to effect dialogue between opposing interest groups, as for example in the recent brouhaha in San Francisco when the Board of Supervisors attempted to limit the number of dogs the city’s many dog walkers could walk to six.  The walkers wanted eleven.  In marketing, PR at its best creates stories to connect a promising new thing–an idea, a product, a venture, a rising star-to those most interested in hearing about its existence.  The channels through which these stories travel become their influence ecosystems, whether promoted by bloggers, traditional media, or from one person to another on social media platforms.  The best PR professionals are masters of words to describe their topics with urgency, importance and sometimes charm.  (Our wonderful PR maven at Isis Biopolymer last year was a masterful crafter of words and stories, not to mention a daily joy and delight. It isn’t for nothing that she calls her company Big Mouth Media!)

However, it’s a slippery slope between genuine promotion based on honest attempts to make a buck to unadulterated public manipulation.  Sometimes entire industries collude to hide the truth and misguide consumers.  Tobacco companies’ egregious use of false science to trick smokers into believing their behavior was safe is one, albeit notorious, example among many.  Big Pharma loves PR.  Beauty and cosmetics companies couldn’t exist without the steady stream of dubious, often false, stories of their products alleged effectiveness.  Dow Chemical loves PR.  In the realms of politics and religion, so unfortunately combined in our country, opinion manipulation is the name of the game.

One of the most ridiculous PR practices is the ubiquitous use of celebrity spokespeople.  The USA isn’t alone in this mass exercise in duping and silliness.  I say “ridiculous” only in the sense that what sane person could possibly be motivated to buy a product solely because of its association with well-known people.  The practice isn’t ridiculous from a sales and profit perspective because it rarely fails to work.  So much for sanity in the marketplace. It’s one of the age old forms of promotion, especially when there’s no inherent product benefit.  And everyone’s in the game. Even the guy I admire most, Roger Federer, stoops to tout watches and Swiss banking.  Money always has a way of talking.  The illusion that because I wear a Rolex I might be more like Mr. Federer is a powerful motivator.  Never mind a lifetime of practice, inspired talent, good looks, and a Swiss passport.  The stars are co-opted as much as their publics.

A humorous, if rueful, incident unfolded in my Westchester County driveway some years ago directly as a result of a tragic incident involving Burson-Marsteller–the latter maybe more telling of B-M’s role in the world of power and politics than even the results of its campaigns.  A few weeks before the event in my driveway, an executive at Burson-Marsteller had been killed at home by a bomb disguised as an ordinary parcel mailed by the Unibomber.  The man’s name had recently been in the press in an article about his involvement with a technology campaign.  It so happened that at about the same time, my name was included in a New York Times advertising column about the pitch I led at DDB resulting in the agency winning the global Digital Equipment Corporation business.  (Now, that dates me!)  Consequently, my former wife decided that our family was at similar risk and was suspicious of any package arriving at our house not from a known sender.

On the day in question, a UPS truck delivered three large cylindrical boxes, big enough to hold a medium sized child. The return address was a mysterious, Arabic sounding name in Cleveland, Ohio.  My wife panicked and called the police.  The boxes were carefully opened, only to reveal they contained rolled up newspapers.  Everyone was perplexed, and worried about what this could mean.  Fears had not been squelched.

A day or two later, our very good Greek friend called from Cleveland to tell my wife he might have forgotten to let her know he was shipping three boxes, allegedly containing Turkish carpets, to avoid paying Ohio sales tax by shipping out of state.  My wife, while relieved, was justifiably furious.

The longer I’m in the industry, the more suspicious I am of what I read in the media promoting everything from brands to people.  I’ve seen too much from the inside.  Somewhere there’s a PR agency spinning a story to convince me to believe in its validity.  The only difference between PR and advertising is that advertising is up-front with its claims, whether make-believe or accurate, whereas PR operates behind the scenes.  That’s why the Ukraine government can hire Burson-Marsteller to spread its version of the truth.  No one will know.  An ad in The Wall Street Journal would look immediately self-serving.  It’s all relative. Even small firms in Silicon Valley work tirelessly to turn minor achievements into major news.

It’s hard to know anymore what to teach marketing students about the morality of the craft.  I’ve proposed a course to Stanford on the Ethics of Marketing, although I’m not at all sure yet what the content will be.  Will there even be enough content?

Late breaking news:  Stanford turned the course down, suggesting that perhaps UC would be more interested in ethics than they are.  Their exact reply is worth quoting:

Further, while the topic may be of great interest to you and a number of articles are appearing, we doubt that this is a course that will ever make the cut in future quarters.  Thank you for your interest.  Maybe another extension operation, like UC, will be a venue that takes you up on this subject.

I guess Stanford was a poor venue for the subject of ethical marketing.  Why didn’t that occur to me?

You don’t often see a campaign designed for suicide prevention featured in the Advertising column in The New York Times.  But on Monday (July 9, 2012) the Times reported on a Colorado suicide prevention effort aimed at men, featuring PSA’s, YouTube videos and a website, ManTherapy.org.  The campaign uses humor to capture men’s attention and engagement with the site to open them up to the options of talking to a doctor and therapy.

I wonder about this.  I wonder if using online user experience strategies and engagement tools will attract seriously depressed guys in the first place and convincingly persuade them to seek help. If someone is contemplating suicide, will he really be deflected by a PSA or quizzes on a website?  The mock doctor portrayed on Man Therapy is gently humorous, folksy and not threatening.  I doubt that many would initially connect his easy-going style and message with suicide prevention.

I wonder, too, about the signs on the Golden Gate Bridge: “The Consequence of Jumping from This Bridge are Fatal and Tragic.”  The jumpers know that.  That’s why they’re there.  Do the signs deter many?  From watching the movie “The Bridge”—cynical and heartbreaking—it would appear that indecision, perhaps fear, cause some to hesitate, although in the end they all jumped.  [It was a mistake to have watched it.]  And the San Francisco Police Department no longer publishes the number of bridge fatalities so as not to attract even more.

The Times article states that women are three times more likely to attempt suicide, but the fatality rates for men who attempt are four times higher, or 79 percent to 21 percent.  31 percent of men jump. Among active duty servicemen in Afghanistan, as of June 1, more died of suicide than killed in action.  Would they have been helped by logging on to ManTherapy.net?

I’m reading the MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle’s latest book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.  She writes, “Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities.  And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed.  We are lonely but fearful of intimacy.”  Having risked intimacy, I once told someone I wasn’t fragile but I was very vulnerable.  The danger wasn’t technology, rather love.  When that vulnerability was pierced, like my heart, the Golden Gate Bridge, for a moment, beckoned. That moment passed and history didn’t repeat itself, although the vulnerability remained. Technology has proved no balm, however my sons and friends have.  Fellowship works.  Turkle’s book strongly suggests that younger people often seek that possible balm in virtual worlds, in social networks, in relationships defined digitally rather than personally.  In Chatroulette, a “relationship” typically lasts no longer than a few seconds.  There’s very little heartbreak when someone unfriends you on Facebook. [Wanting to limit my Facebook friends to 150, I have unfriended more than 500.  I hope they haven’t been heartbroken.]

Someone must be studying the relationship between new technology and suicide.  My own unscientific opinion is that technology may play a role of withdrawal, but it’s the same old forces of love, hate, money, affronts to self-esteem and alienation that pull the trigger.  Speaking of triggers, the Times article also states that one reason men are more successful at killing themselves is because their gun ownership is much higher than women’s—a statistic I’m sure the NRA ignores.

Are the Man Therapy PSA’s and its linked website advertising?  The Times article is in the Media section, headed “Advertising,” so the paper clearly believes it so.  For decades public service announcements have advised us not to drink, not to smoke, not to light fires in the woods.  The most horrifying five minutes of film I know is a PSA from the Victoria (Australia) Transport Accident Commission graphically showing the consequences of drunk driving, set to R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.”  The first time I saw it I couldn’t watch it to the end. Try for yourself:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2mf8DtWWd8

The eminent Jungian psychologist James Hillman, in his Suicide and the Soul, describes what we call emotional suicides, performed under the domination of an overriding passion.  “Here would belong revenge against one’s enemies, to give others anguish; to manipulate the world, in rage at frustration; humiliation over financial ruin, shame over public exposure; suicides of guilt and conscience, of anxious terror, of the melancholy of aging, of loneliness, of abandonment, of grief, of apathy and emptiness, of drunken despair and despair over failure, especially failure in love.”

I suspect the men who may look into ManTherapy.com might well be suffering from one of these emotional states.  Frankly, who at times hasn’t?  I don’t believe any man would, however, wish to believe he had been manipulated by advertising.  Maybe that’s the beauty of the campaign—it’s in stealth mode.

Maybe one thing the campaign could accomplish—being an even greater good—would be to change ManTherapy to man therapy.  For the most part it’s true that depressed men don’t like to talk about their depression.  And yet, the fellowship of guys is a powerful force.  Even talking to just one friend can open up the possibility of brighter times.  Over the past year the most effective therapy I’ve experienced has been the support and friendship I have with other men.  Sure, there have been women friends, too, who have been there and offered their own friendship and perspective, different from my close group of men, and therefore welcome and valuable.  Only another woman could read an email and declare it “fifty paragraphs of crap!”

I was once asked by an allegedly “important” psychiatrist if I had read Camus’s The Stranger.  The question was odd and was asked with more than a bit of showmanship.  He was making a point about psychological barriers and behavior patterns.  Friendship has been the antidote, not the medical profession.

If the ManTherapy campaign helps only one man, it will be worth it.

I once knew a woman who gave up a man who loved her deeply to pursue what she called her “personal legend.”  Having taken The Alchemist to heart, the lady believed there was a yet-to-be-realized achievement in her future and the quest for this achievement was incompatible with love, at least love with the man in question.  I don’t know why, but this came to mind today while watching the finals of the 2012 European Championships.  Spain won, spectacularly, 4-0 against Italy.

Earlier in the day I told a friend I was heading down to North Beach to watch the game in one of the many Italian cafes, sure of finding a crazy scene of avid fans. (I did.)  My friend said, “I never could get into soccer, there aren’t enough goals to make it exciting.”  This is a problem only in the United States, where sports fans are never more thrilled than when their team wins by factors of ten.  Imagine a Super Bowl score of 6-0.  You can’t.  Or an NBA Final Four finish of 12-2.  But in soccer, a shut out of 1-0 is a terrifically exciting game.  It’s all about the play: the passing, the footwork, the speed and agility of the players, the goal keeper’s saves, the headers, the near misses, and yes, spectacular goals.  It’s not called the Beautiful Game for nothing.

Americans always want more: more goals; more cars; more TV’s; more everything.  If it isn’t growing, it’s dying.  The stock market is predicated on this principle of growth.  Everyday life is predicated on acquisition and personal “growth.”  Some people are even willing to walk away from the only unconditional love they will ever know to seek the chimera of a personal legend.  As with all pursuits of growth, it’s a fool’s mission, founded on the fear of emptiness.  We are a society that fears emptiness, so to compensate, rewards growth at all costs.

Marketing is the toolbox of growth.  Advertising is its hammer.  Everything we do is designed to persuade more, sell more, influence more.  Now we also connect more, share more.  We create social ecosystems that spread like viruses. We achieve status by the number of “friends” we have, Robin Dunbar’s How Many Friends Does a Person Need notwithstanding.  Is there a limit to this?

Our greatest philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “What is the remedy? Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be a unit; –not to be reckoned one character; –not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand…Not so, brothers and friends—please God, ours shall not be so.”

I’m afraid we are reckoned in the gross.  And everything we reckon is in the gross.  There’s no singular achievement in a social network.  Charles Pierce in Idiot America writes that the value of the crank, once a valuable—and local—counterpoint to the status quo, has been set free by television and the internet to spread fraudulence and stupidity at light-speed to an ever more uninformed and gullible audience. The growth of bad ideas has become exponential.

I wonder if there’s an answer since there’s no turning back.  Americans are never going to learn to love professional soccer.  Or be content to maintain a stable business.  Or find happiness in the here and now and not in an elusive legend.  The Alchemist is, after all, a work of fiction.

When the pursuit is growth for growth’s sake, what is left behind?  Sometimes it’s failure, which is proper however unfortunate.  Sometimes as a business or an industry grows it fails to adapt, to look at “today” squarely.  Digital Equipment Corporation grew to the point its hubris blindsided it to the future—and it failed.  As a teenager in Pittsburgh, I witnessed the last days of the steel industry, when survival was no longer an option, much less growth. These are simplistic analogies, I know, but with these, people are left behind, too, as they are when lost in love. Most never recover.

I wonder tonight what the Italian National Team must be feeling. 4-0 is a stunning victory in championship soccer.  It was an historic win for Spain. I know, too, how that man feels having lost to another kind of victory. Detroit feels that way.  Undoubtedly Greece feels that way.  The problem with all these examples is that romance always fails.  It’s the way of the world and we make it so.

In this week’s New Yorker, Ken Auletta writes about the complex class-action lawsuit being waged against Apple and five publishers for allegedly colluding to fix prices of ebooks.  To date, the DOJ has sided with the plaintiffs and three of the five publishers have settled.  It’s well recognized that the lawsuit is a sideshow in a larger battle for digital dominance among giants Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.

Auletta ends his piece with a quote by John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan Books, one of the five publishers that has refused to settle.  “Books,” he says, “ are in danger of becoming roadkill in that larger war.”

Every reader of my posts (ten I believe, three of whom are my sons) knows that I love books: printed and bound, physical books.  I love to hold them, read them, collect them, make them.  I’m old school enough to believe, like Jefferson, in the idea of a personal library.  I love all books, from beautifully bound hand printed books from small presses to Penguin paperbacks.  I know this is antiquated and for sure presents a problem of shelving in my apartment.

I also have a Kindle and a Kindle app on my iPhone.  I recognize it as a legitimate and efficient source of reading material. Its content is delivered simply, conveniently and cheaply. It’s great for travel and for acquiring something to read when no bookstores are nearby and there’s no opportunity for an Amazon shipment (a source of last resort.)  But it is not a book.

I rarely read novels on my Kindle, or any book that I think has lasting value, that I’d like to pull from a shelf and read again.  I know this makes no sense since you can do the same thing with digital content, minus the shelf.  Primarily I read business books on my Kindle, books I need to read to stay current but date as quickly as stale bread.  Used book stores rarely buy business books for the same reason so there’s not even a second life opportunity.  Kindle’s crowd-sourced underlining feature is a key benefit to skimming a business book that ought to have remained a HBR article, which is usually the case.  (I guess this says as much about my attitude to business books as it does to my feelings for ebooks.)

The victims of this squeeze on traditional publishing are first novels, poetry, most non-fiction, essays and criticism—all books with limited revenue opportunity.  These books used to be funded as prestigious loss leaders.  Publishing houses can no longer afford such luxuries, just as they can no longer afford their once-upon-a-time brick and mortar bookstores.  Who remembers anymore Scribner’s beautiful store on Fifth Avenue?  It’s now a Sephora.  I wonder how long Rizzoli will be able to maintain its showpiece store on 57^th Street.  Their store in San Francisco closed years ago.

This is a generational lament dating from antiquity. Early Greek dramatists bemoaned the decline of oral traditions with the advent of written documents.  Nevertheless, it’s said that Alexander the Great slept with his copy of the Iliad, annotated by his tutor Aristotle.  The world moves on in magnificent ways.

Digital content has inevitably led to digitally based education. This is clearly a boon to spreading knowledge in places where no institutions of learning exist and to those who cannot afford the opportunity to sit in classrooms once occupied by classmates Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  As someone who regards himself a liberal egalitarian, and who also laments the great dumbing down of America, I embrace digital education.  I’m thinking of enrolling in one of MIT’s online courses in physics given my interest coupled with woeful scientific knowledge.  Classroom-less language instruction has been the norm for decades, starting with tapes and CD’s.

I’m not troubled by my conflicting emotions about the decline of traditional publishing and the rise of digital.  At the end of the day, reading is reading and all reading is a good thing.  Digital formats will continue to improve.  First novels will be easier to publish.  Book reviews will be easier to access.  Books are already easier to buy. Sharing enthusiasm for a writer or book can spread like wildfire.  Specialty books will continue to be printed. The Morgan Library will continue to exist, though likely not your local public library.  This blog, after all, exists only in digital form.

Still, I’m reminded of Wordsworth’s On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic: “Men we are, and must grieve when even the shade of that which once was great has passed away.”  It’s a pathetic sentiment, I know.  That doesn’t make it any less heartfelt.  I’ve long given up the quaint idea that my sons will want my books when I’m gone and plan to sell or donate them first so they won’t have that burden with which to contend. I know they will continue to read which is the only thing that counts.

I’m reading with dismay Stuart Elliot’s adverting column in yesterday’s New York Times: “The First Graduates from Advertising High.”  The Brooklyn school, named the High School for Innovation in Advertising and Media, is supported by the Interpublic Group (McCann-Erickson, Draftfcb, Deutch,) the Advertising Club of New York and the American Association of Advertising Agencies.  It’s aimed mostly at minority groups, which in itself, is a worthy objective.

 But what does this mean for the future of advertising?  Assuming these graduates are hired at the kind of top agencies supporting this enterprise—considering Madison Avenue’s dismal history of hiring minorities—are we simply perpetuating a self-fulfilling perspective that ignores the larger realities of the industry’s effect on the culture at large?  Where will broader thinking come from if all students learn is within the confines of advertising and media? 

 The days are gone when account people needed an MBA to get a top agency job–agencies could not compete financially with the manufacturers and consulting firms. I once had an OTC consumer products client tell me there was no way their product managers would take our account executives seriously.  Their educational and experience backgrounds were simply not the same, to the detriment of the agency’s staff.  So how will an agency fare on this score with people only schooled in the trade?  It’s a closed loop and relegates agencies to true vendors, not strategic partners.

 To be clear, I’m not criticizing the objective of providing minority students with opportunities they may not have had before.  I’m wondering, however, if such a narrow educational focus will truly provide opportunities for advancement and success, or if this focus will reinforce the divide between those that do and those that lead.  One consequence of the lack of junior agency expertise is that clients only want to deal with senior people.  At my last agency here in San Francisco this caused considerable financial pressure, spreading many assignments across the senior staff while limiting the time they could spend with any one client and pushing most of the work to junior, less experienced personnel.  It’s an unworkable model for long-term success.  The opposite can also result in the same kind of pressure: I’m working now with a very senior group of people, with no junior staff at all.  It’s great for our clients. But, this means highly paid individuals are spending time on functions easily handled by less experienced people.

 In my ideal agency, small multi-disciplinary teams would handle assignments based on knowledge and interest sets.  No team would be fixed.  Teams would come together to fulfill specific roles and projects and then reform to meet the needs of the next new thing.  Design firms often work this way, such as Ideo.  In my agency we would have anthropologists working with writers, historians with art directors.  Solutions would be developed holistically—not piecemeal.   Nothing would be integrated because everything would be seamless.  Concepts such as large and small or simple and complex would not exist.  For the most part, virtual would not work—sparks rarely ignite when people aren’t together.  Humanistic values would be pervasive across and within the organization.  Diversity and geographic differentiation would be the norm. The Christian Right need not apply.

 The first question to any job candidate would be, “What have you done to prepare for this role that isn’t related in any professional way to what this role may be?” “What are the last ten books you’ve read?” “If you could save the world tomorrow, what would you do first?”  “If you weren’t sitting here, where would you rather be?”

 In every job interview I’ve ever had—every one—the two things on my resume that provoke the most, and usually first, comments and questions are the two things that have the least to do with marketing or communications or advertising: the fact that I worked on a Mississippi River tow boat in college and, later, earned an M. Lit in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College, Dublin.  No one ever remarks on the MBA.

 My hope for the graduates of the Advertising High School is that they look beyond these niche studies and find diverse interests to fill in the gaps.  With this undergraduate background, their likely next pursuit will be to earn a degree in business, or communications, or even advertising: in other words, more of the same.  This may very well be enough to land a job. I also hope they will push for more.

Last Saturday my son Adam graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.  The class of 2012 was Bowdoin’s 212th graduation ceremony.  My oldest son David graduated in 2005.  I graduated in 1973. (Sam, my middle son, bucked the tradition and happily graduated from New York University in 2008.)

Adam majored in neuroscience and plans on becoming a physician after working in a lab for a year or so.  He plays Schubert on the piano; reads Haruki Murakami; collects mechanical pencils; was captain of the college ultimate frisbee team.  David is completing a Ph.D in physics education at Columbia and teaches 8th grade science and math.  Sam will enter his third year of law school in the fall, clerking this summer for the Massachusetts Attorney General in Boston, making watches in his spare time and coaching figure skating to earn his keep.

I’m thinking about my boys while reading Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, a book David recommended as a “must read.”  The book chronicles the dismaying history of how the United States, unique in the Western World, has ended up with a population majority that doesn’t read, is largely anti-intellectual and anti-science, prone to fundamentalist religion, clueless to the country’s history, against national education standards, reveres the rich more than the educated.  Since the beginnings of the country, the South is much to blame for this, but attitudes and beliefs developed there have drifted across the country.

A liberal, humanist eduction is one of the few bulwarks against this tide.  But as a recent article in The New Yorker pointed out, even at some of the nation’s most elite universities–Stanford for example–the trend is away from the humanities in favor of the quicker route to fame and riches offered by electrical engineering and computer science.  In Asia and developing countries, this trend is exponentially greater.  Very very few aspiring students in China or India want to waste precious time taking classes in history, philosophy, classics or literature.

Maybe this is vital to the future; certainly it’s necessary in our contemporary connected society.  But where does it leave an open-eyed humanist, still pursuing Enlightenment goals?  Many, such as my sons, have integrated their interests into a mix of personal and professional objectives combining specialization with a foundation in the humanities.  They know, however, that they’re in a privileged minority even as competition within their peer groups remains intense.  Their lives have been enriched, their minds opened, but will they get the job?

Advertising has played a significant role in dumbing down American mass culture. The linkages between advertisers’s need to reach the largest audiences, the ads created to reach them and shows like American Idol are obvious and insidious.  More Americans are likely to vote for their favored singer than for an American president.  Who receives more media coverage in America: the Kardashian sisters or the eight Supreme Court Justices?  Admittedly, Ruth Bader Ginsberg is unlikely to sell many copies of People magazine, though therein lies the problem.  (Thurgood Marshall may have in his day.)

I don’t see a way out of the pact with the devil between advertising and advertisers.   The advertising industry tends to breed cynical fellow travelers.  Pseudoscience markets itself as legitimate research; the lowest common denominators of consumer opinion rank higher than the opinions of experts; media planners direct dollars to the trashiest shows in a vicious circle to reach the largest audiences.  The list goes on and on. I’m chagrinned to have been involved. I’ve scripted a higher-ground narrative on the premise that my principles have never been compromised by working on less than savory businesses.  Who could object to persuading consumers to purchase an HP laptop or take a holiday in Bermuda?  But this is just self-rationalization to assuage feelings of guilt.

I don’t mean to promote the prejudices of a highbrow elite against lowbrow taste. (Progressive middlebrow values have been on the wane for decades.)  I do mean to bemoan a culture lacking serious and national secondary school standards; a culture that favors superstition and hope over evidence based proofs; a culture that would rather the US president be popular at a BBQ than smart in the White House; a culture that defines celebrity on the basis of being famous for the sake of being famous.

I’m writing this in the kitchen of a grand and beautiful 19th century Columbia County house overlooking a wide expanse of the Hudson River.  My host and her guests represent the  loftiest levels of New York culture, taste and erudition.  My friends for forty years. No one comes from the Christian Right; everyone believes in evolution (why is this even debated in the 21st century?)  The galleries of the Metropolitan Museum are as familiar as the sidewalks of the Upper East Side. The environment and historic preservation are serious concerns. High level education is assumed; Kansas is very far away.  This is an outpost of the liberal, humanist tradition in American culture.

I suspect these old-school, rarified outposts will last indefinitely, though undoubtedly growing smaller and fewer.  In many ways the cultural attitudes here are at odds with the Democratic principles evidenced in the voting booths.  (Vintage posters of “FDR for President” hang in the back stair hallway.)  At dinner last night we discussed the future of art books.  The conversation began with the assertion that art books were a poor substitute for viewing the actual works, and that no one should think they have seen the Mona Lisa after looking at a reproduction in a book.  The question of art book survival was actually aimed at the transition from the printed page to electronic media.  Around the table most regarded this future with a combination of distain and horror.  The only one who didn’t was the director of a Gilded Age museum, whom I least suspected to be open and supportive of wider exposure to the best examples of art, music and literature. –surely a sign of hope.   I wish we had had a few twenty-five year olds at the table!

I’m going to put my faith in my sons and try very hard to believe their future will be different.  It’s difficult to see, and anyway too late for me and the boomer generation. (Susan Jacoby has more recently published an equally distressing book on the fallacies of “youthful aging,” the latest euphemism for growing old.)

My greatest joy is that my sons inhabit both of these worlds: at home in Silicon Valley and MOMA; a science lab and the Muse d’Orsay; a criminal court and immersion in the old Bohemian court of Rudolf II.   It’s the old nature versus nurture argument.  We need both, and a liberal education is the foundation of the second.  Yet, I see no way for the country as a whole to remake itself in a more humane, open–yes, civilized (in the original meaning of the word)–manner.  There is no civil discourse in American politics, no higher aim to improve the way the country “thinks.”  The promulgation of high culture is almost solely in the hands of parents, since art and music and the work of DWM in pubic schools have largely been abandoned as unnecessary frills.  One huge problem most liberal humanists face is that we tend to speak only to each other, and the same is true for conservative fundamentalists.  Few Southern Baptists are likely to be reading the liberal press, just as I am unlikely to tune into Rush Limbaugh.  Our worlds are self-defined and self-contained. There’s no conversation at all.

Sitting here on the patrician side of the Hudson, the Catskills in the distance, among my friends, I feel like a man living on one of the last, remote outposts of the British Empire, clinging to a memory long gone from the modern realities of the world and no boat to return to that imagined home. Then I reprimand myself.  It’s the responsibility of all who believe in liberal humanist values to transmit them to as many others as we can. It’s what I’ve done for my sons. We need to do more, to move beyond our comfort zones, to challenge the status quo of indifference or worse.  We need to listen, too.

What would we be without memory?  Would we be happier?  Would we never regret the passing of the past?  Would everything we see, everyone we know, remind us of nothing?  The great Alexandrian library and museum took its name from the fact that it was dedicated to the Muses, the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of memory.  A museum holds the memories of our past, as our brain holds the memories of our life.

In his memoirs, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand wrote,

“Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.  How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business!  And yet, what would we be without memory?  We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of the past.  How wretched this life of ours is!—so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory.”

 I often wonder about the consequences of memory when contemplating popular and undoubtedly prudent sayings such as “living in the moment,” or the self-attention advocated in The Power of Now.  I understand these principles in theory but rarely in practice.  I’m not a Zen master and always get overwhelmed with memories from the past and anxieties of the future whenever I attend mediation sessions.  I have a friend who is a Buddhist monk at Tassajara who says this is normal, and that one should think of these in-coming thoughts as tennis balls that simply need to be lobbed out of one’s mind.

I even wonder if the notion of living entirely in the present is an excuse for a lack of knowledge, perspective and insightful anticipation.

While I hesitate to draw a commercial comparison, brands could not exist without memory.  Existing in the minds of consumers, brands are the accumulated thoughts and experiences people have with brands.  Think of Apple, the preeminent brand today.  Many of us are old enough to remember pre-Mac Apple, and Apple’s famous anti-IBM 1984 TV ad.  I had an MBA student last year who didn’t know who Elizabeth Taylor was on the day she died, but could describe the 1984 ad in detail despite its single airing happening before she was born.

Great brands trade on our memories of them: Chevy, Ivory Soap, Coke, Michelin, Crest, Kirin…  New TV shows like “Pan Am” trade on our memories of even a long defunct brand.  Edsel continues to connote failure, a joke. Even internet brands evoke their beginnings.

And that’s the fallacy of companies attempting to create a brand from scratch, simply by asserting that certain benefits will be appreciated by consumers viewing its advertising.   Bricks are laid one at a time and the house doesn’t come to life until all the walls are up.  A brand isn’t a product or service, distinct from the world it lives in.  I’ve recently seen a “brand” strategy that includes among its many objectives the desire to produce a feeling of gratitude among people who see the ads as they imagine how they might feel after they buy and use the product in question.  This might be very hard to accomplish!  I don’t know how to feel grateful for something I’ve never experienced, regardless how wonderful that something might be.

Back in the Dark Ages of my career, I remember sitting in a meeting at DEC after the launch of their Alta Vista search engine—lauded at the time—when someone asked whether anyone had heard of this new competitor with the kooky  name, Google.  It was dismissed as an upstart.  But then Ken Olsen, DEC’s founder, dismissed PC’s thus starting DEC’s demise.  No business school student I’ve had in the past three years has ever even heard of Digital Equipment Corporation, much less understood its importance in the history of computing.  DEC has been erased from memory, along with Silicon Graphics, Amdahl and hosts of other companies born and died in the Valley.  Facebook, now valued at $104 billion (how do you even imagine that?) sits on the former SUN campus.  History buffs may well be scratching their heads.  We know what happens to people who forget the past.

Facebook isn’t going the way of SUN anytime soon and has given the world a communication platform unlike anything seen before.  Along with Twitter and other social sites, Facebook may be one example of a brand that does, in fact, live very much in the present.  Not much lives in the past on Facebook; even less so on Twitter.  It’s about this moment, right now, and the anticipation of the next five minutes. A Google search, on the other hand, is all about delivering the past, to the eternal regret of people and companies who want their pasts forgotten.

With the vast surveillance capabilities of the US government, and their storage in what will be the world’s largest server facility being built in Utah, there will be no such thing as a forgotten memory.  The very idea will be irrelevant.  I tell my sons to consider every computer key stroke, every cell phone call, every site visited, bill paid—perhaps even every word spoken in public—will be known by someone, somewhere, sometime.  I still get unnerved today when I’m writing to a friend on Gmail about, say, a dog and simultaneously an ad for Purina Dog Chow is being served across the top of the page.  In other hands, this aggregation of key words and their linkage to advertisers who pay to know could have very different consequences.

I think, perhaps, there are situations in which we would be happier without memory.  A loss or a broken heart might be one.  In these circumstances evolution may have got it right giving goldfish their three-second memories. Why remember anything that produced pain and anguish.