Superbowl advertising won’t be better or worse that it always is. And it never will be.

Come to think of it, advertising, as industry won’t discover it has anything in common with any of the characters in the Wizard of Oz (except maybe the Wizard). Hearts, courage, and conscience will remain on too many dusty agency supply room shelves, unasked-for.

In case you missed the “breaking news” on your preferred 24/7/365 news network a couple of weeks ago, this was just in: Meta announcing that, soon, very soon, formerly legless avatars will be able to ambulate through all those thrilling virtual spaces on their own two props.

Been thinking of late about what should probably be known as the Kelly-Carroll Equine-Porcine Proposition: “If wishes were horses, pigs would fly.” Both halves are grounded in Scottish lore—James Kelly published the former half in his 1721 book of rhymes and proverbs; Lewis Carroll drafted on the centuries-old local porker proverb in “Alice” for the latter.

Funny how these things happen.

Was sitting outside on an increasingly fall-like Manhattan day, still too damned muggy and hot, but the seasonal shift is palpable, when on streams Gershwin’s classic, “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”

Forget the best and worst, for my inflation-shrunken dollar it’s the liverwurst of times: a queasy sandwich made with bread slices of dubious provenance surrounding cardiologist-upsetting mystery meat slathered with a suspect white substance scooped from a bottle embellished by strange gray spots, greasy fingerprints, and a crusty splash of old yellow mustard.

1. From a recent Media Village post.: “The key asset of Facebook was the network effect of its social graph (all your “friends” were there)…TikTok practiced asymmetric warfare by eschewing the social graph and replacing it with an interest graph.…”

Can’t resist milking the old Jewish joke: The pessimist says, “things couldn’t possibly get any worse.” To which the optimist replies, “Sure they could!”

History may not repeat, but it sure knows how to slam a hip hop lyric. Okay, that doesn’t sound great coming from a pale and male (not stale, never stale) writer of a certain age. But, damn, the more things change, the more you hear discordant echoes.

It tells people what we do, what we believe, what we’ve done, and, what’s in it for them. And that’s that. brainchildcreative.com

You want to know the only thing that really matters in advertising?

The work.

You want to know why most advertising seems so empty, unexciting , almost vapid, of late?

The work.

You want to know why we have opportunity to make advertising more than it’s ever been?

The work.

First, we got the announcement from mass-meater Steak-umm (and, yes, it is real steak) inviting all of us to drop $49.99 on bedsheets that smell like beef. Funny. But right after that, it was Velveeta quite seriously going where no melting food substance has gone before, pushing cheese-perfumed nail polish, “Pinkies Out.”

come.

And no, that solitary word isn’t a typo, proofing error, or design malfeasance. Instead, it’s a total rip of a clever attention device pioneered by Howard Gossage, a.k.a., brilliant progenitor of the left coast’s version of the 1960’s advertising creative revolution.

Hella lot of bruiting about crypto last weekend (www.protocol.com/bulletins/coinbase-crypto-crash-ad), much of it provoked by a new spot from Coinbase. While the ad attempts a sharp tap on the irony bone, the real twist is this: it ran on TV, a medium whose demise has been reported every six months, mas o menos, since 2001. In the comparative doom-forecasting dead pool, crypto’s hardly been nicked.

Pursuing the theory and practice of reductionism down to its ultimate Occam-inspired expression, The Reductionist has this: New website. Live @ brainchildcreative.com. Done in 1,480 fewer days than it took the guy from Italy to paint the Sistine Chapel.

After too many input from too many sources, with too much bad news and too little headspace to process it all, we somehow wind up with, well, this week. But, hell, it’s only Thursday and who knows what new oddities are yet to be added to a list that’s already veered from the unfathomable to the disturbed. Here’s 5 that immediately trippeth off the mind:

By way of updating Benjamin Disraeli’s slam that there are three kinds of lies—“lies, damned lies, and big data,” I can’t help but share this screen grab from Google Trends. For those who’ve never toyed with this mental crack-equivalent before, it’s a way to analyze and compare the volume of Google searches on a topic, over a period of time, in a geography of interest. Here, I entered “Will Smith slap,” as the first search term (blue line), “Ukraine” as the second (red line), “Joe Biden” as the third (yellow line), last 7 days as the period, and USA-USA-USA! as the playground.

Fans of Dante Alighieri’s epic deadlands romp, The Divine Comedies, are well versed in hell’s 9 circles: limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery. How the Purgatorio he failed to put brand manifestos on the list is hard to fathom—because, as every writer who’s ever been given the Sisyphean task to come up with one knows, it’s a gig that goes deep south far more easily than anyplace else.

In the spirit of true reductionism, it’s our pleasure to present the launch creative for a dramatic new healthcare product from the good people at FDB in one short sentence.

Just a quick love note: we gave through the International Rescue Committee (rescue.org) but there are dozens of other ways to make a contribution and a difference. As to the rest of what normally passes for a blog post, The Reductionist is too speechless with anger and sadness to put more than a few words on either on paper or into pixels.

On Tuesday, we LinkedIn-published our first collection of what we’ve been calling “fortune cookies”; a running series of small-space self-promotional mini-ads intended to deliver a smidge of “aha,” along with a satisfying crunch.