The Great Di$$connect™

In between the grueling drives downtown during morning rush hour, drinking shitty civic bodega coffee, slumming on hard cement slab benches and holing up in cavernous wood paneled courtrooms that still use overhead projectors and microfiches, I managed to find time to squeeze out an R17 post.

As you might have summarized from my opening salvo, I'm not in a good mood. I don't like my time being stolen from me. Particularly when my clock is running out and I find myself staring at the very long Dirt Nap™.

And so today I'd like to rip off a bandaid, along with its crusty scar tissue, and talk about money. More specifically, ad agency money and how they're so reluctant to part with it. In most cases.

Part of this also springs from an article I read yesterday about how Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez had purchased a new mansion in Los Angeles. Or Beverly Hills. I didn't pay much attention because frankly I don't give a shit about celebrities. 

And don't concern myself with their lives because I don't travel in those circles. I'm pretty sure the rock hard bench I'm sitting on in the Stanley Mosk Courthouse on the 7th floor, wedged between Family Services and Traffic Citations, has never been graced by the significant rear end of the woman who goes by JLO.

The couple spent 61 million dollars for a house that sits on 5 acres, has 28 bathrooms, a pickleball stadium and for all I know a helipad, so they don't have get too close to the riff raff on the 110 Harbor Freeway. The riff raff is you and me.

Meanwhile, up the street from me at Sony Studios, T-shirt clad writers, talented young men and women who click and clack for food, are carrying signs (which I think could be funnier) and striking against their corporate overlords, who, like their advertising counterparts, do not want to share the booty. 

And here's where the cognitive dissonance comes in.

Over the course of my 35 year plus career in advertising, I have been in countless new business, and old business, presentations. 

I had the privilege of sitting in on meetings chaired by Lee Clow, Steve Hayden, Bob Kuperman, John Doyle, David Lubars, and more. Titans, all. 

To a tee, they all would open with an eloquent preamble about the magical value of ideas. And branding. And lather it on thick about how a great idea can act as a fulcrum for a brand. Endowed with the power to launch a company selling cars, computers or carbonated sugar water, into the stratosphere. 

For the most part, they were correct. I've seen it in action. And know that is true. That is the inherent and somewhat magical value ad agencies bring to the table.

In the same breath, however, these same agencies turn to the people who come up with those ideas, writers, art directors, designers, production people, and more, and year after year, tell them, we don't have anything in the corporate moneypot for raises. Or bonuses. Or even offices (see Long Table of Mediocrity™.)

And now, with the great Thinning Out™, "we don't have any money for YOU."

I can't be the only one to see this. Maybe, because I'm semi-retired and emboldened by a new sense of IDGAF, I'm one of the few that can actually say it, "This situation is FUCKED!"

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to bring my angry ass back in to the courtroom to mete out some justice.