If you’re in the mood for a slice of wry with plenty of mustard, it would be hard to top this 2021 gem from New York Times op-ed writer, Peter Coy: “One of the approximately 700 things that make climate change a knotty problem is that fighting it requires people living today to do things for the benefit of future generations. And, you know, what have future generations ever done for us?”

The Reductionist is a shade busy hacking through thorn-riddled underbrush to do a full-on post today. But, as a public service, while keeping the flame alive, I can’t resist riffing off a paragraph from a recent Michael Farmer article in Media Village.

While Dickens may have hit the irony in “the best of times” co-habitating with “the worst of times,” everyone knows there’s always the third option: “the times that really suck.” Circa now, anyone parsing the signs, portents, and augurs would have to give long odds that the year in front of us will totally qualify.

Tis’ the cliché, and we know this for two reasons. First, there’s the unrelenting onslaught of seasonal ads that always seem to feature passive-aggressive couples taunting each other with the gift of a monster truck. Who writes this shit, The Reductionist knoweth not. Then there’s the spate of “expert guesses” about the year ahead, penned by talking heads in every category—advertising especially guilty, Well, the hell with all that fakakta schmegegge *. This year, yours truly is going to riposte with the world’s first annual list of “anti-predictions”; actually, let’s call them “predict-me-nots,” since they’re all about what totally won’t happen in 2022. No matter how much they should.

Must be the holidays, because The Reductionist has been finding all sorts of interesting items in his Hanukkah stocking all week long. Okay, they were email flotsam and jetsam, but let’s not split greasy hunks of Santa’s beard over it.

Here’s where the advertising bloviosphere really has got it wrong. The big marketing news about the Facebook rebrand ain’t about some over-before-it-started attempt to change an inevitable narrative.

Recently, we posted one of our LinkedIn “fortune cookie” ads (so called, because they’re designed to impart a smidge of “aha” with a satisfying crunch) that read like so:

Beloved of agency new business ferrets, CMOs, and writers who fancy a shot at something more evocative than another hemorrhoid banner ad, the so-called “brand manifesto” can be the coat of many colors for creatives and marketers alike. In the right hands, they build understanding, ignite emotions, excite colleagues and consumers, and, on utterly rare occasion, become the stuff of advertising legend. 

Call it more evidence of a deepening deficit in critical thinking, or maybe we’ve gotten too freaking frightened about acting on instinct and experience. But increasingly, The Reductionist keeps colliding with circumstances where otherwise perfectly savvy people are willing to buy a prediction, any prediction, as long as it comes packaged as “data-driven.”

This being the Jewish Day of Atonement, it seems only appropriate to start with the confessions right from the top. Including The Reductionist’s secret fantasy about channeling the immortal Frank Costanza and rebranding the whole thing as “the day of evening scores and setting records straight.” In that spirit, and while I pause to ponder the probability of a lightning bolt arriving from on high in the next few seconds, I did want to share a few, well, call them rueful reflections on a few of my more or less egregious errors of judgement in 5780/81 (if you happen to follow the Hebrew calendar).

It was both familiar pain and unlooked-for pleasure; the results of a reluctant visit to the vintage car repair shop located on the outskirts of the middling-quaint town of Old Saybrook, CT. Of course, the Reductionist would prefer to pretend he had no clue about what was in store, but truth will out: any visit to a mechanic that involves a 1991 Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce is destined for mathematical tragedy.

First there was the stressed-out policing of the property, tying down anything that an 80 mile-per-hour gust could turn ballistic. Then, there was the interior plotting of trajectories involving the intersection of tree limbs, windows, and a household full of potential razor-sharp shards. Finally, there were all those randomly scary “what if’s,” that nailed down point that this was nothing even remotely within our control.

It’s been a week of New York marinating in its own juices; the dew point has been set to maximum sticky and “back of my neck/dirty and gritty” seems more like a snapshot than a song lyric.

Frankly, with The Reductionist’s brain imitating the frying egg in the old-but-still-famous anti-drug spot, I’m hoping you’ll allow me the luxury of a few random skitterings instead of anything coherent. Something along the lines of what’s probably happening right now when the predicted rain lands on the copper top of the Helmsley Building over on Park: splash, sizzle, and dance.

Once upon a distant memory, two then-celebrated science fiction writers imagined a Malthusian future where “by the people” governments had been supplanted by “for the shareholders” ad agencies, sales messages screamed from every screen, and brand loyalty was so engrained in the law of the land that that even your morning coffee would come laced by, quoting here, “a mildly addictive alkaloid.”

Lately, it seems the advertising bloviosphere has been even more brimming than usual with sturm, drang, und despair about the state of our less than idealized industry. From comments about the sins of deckchair-shuffling holding companies (legitimate) to anger about the off-on-the-icefloe idiocy of institutional agency ageism (also legitimate) to observations about the threats posed by digital dystopia (not just legitimate, but existential), it’s clear that almost nobody posting on the subject is looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. The shade of choice—babyshit brown.

If Samuel Beckett, playwright savant of all things existential, had it right, the last 14 months should have been Comedy Central. As Nell, his Endgame character, puts it, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” She goes on: “Yes, it’s like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don’t laugh any more.”

It’s meteorological summer in Central Park; 17 days from the real “no more teacher’s dirty looks” deal. The dogwood blooms are everywhere in profusion. For those of us not lucky enough to have grown up being able to tell the season by the verdant kaleidoscope of Frederick Law Olmsted’s urban vision, it’s a reminder of what we missed.

The theory is that the continued dominance of remote work will be one of the lasting consequences of the pandemic. Along with it, we are told to expect a tectonic set of social, economic, and cultural shifts that will recenter the zeitgeist from urban to, well, wherever the hell you and your laptop want to plotz.

In his most recent post, the celebrated Bob Hoffman, a.k.a. The Ad Contrarian, reports on a recent study showing the median CMO lifespan has now fallen from a nerve rattling 30 months in 2019 to a nubs-where-I-used-to-have-fingernails 25.5 months. To which the equally esteemed Michael Palma, headhunter and agency rainmaker extraordinaire, ripostes “Every recession. It was 22 months in 2009.”

When it comes to cliffhangers, Hollywood’s got nothing on US vaccination acceptance. If an epidemiologist-estimated 70 – 85% of us take the shot, we cut off the pathways for viral spread. If not, best guess is another very, very, bad winter.