Back in the day, there were stories about Soviet Union emigres who found going to a grocery store in America a terrible ordeal of choice. Used to buying bread or toothpaste or cereal typically identified simply as bread, toothpaste, or cereal, respectively, former Soviet shoppers found an unimaginable array of choices for one staple. My experience of late isn’t that much different. The toothpaste selection is the simplest example.
 
Crest — of P&G branding fame — offers an array of toothpastes and for the life of me, I can’t figure out which one I should get. The same holds for Colgate, Arm & Hammer, Pepsodent, Closeup, Sensodyne, Aquafresh, and as Yule Bruner in “The King and I” proclaimed with swagger, “et cetera, et cetera, et cetera”. Crest, for example, lists these brands on its site:

1. Crest Gum And Sensitivity All Day Protection
2. Crest Gum Detoxify Deep Clean Toothpaste
3. Crest Gum Detoxify + Whitening
4. 3D Whitening Therapy Toothpaste — Charcoal
5. 3D Whitening Therapy Toothpaste — Spearmint Oil
6. 3D Whitening Therapy Enamel Care Toothpaste
7. 3D Whitening Brilliance Blast Whitening
8. 3D Whitening Radiant Mint Whitening
9. 3D White Brilliance
10. Kid’s Cavity Protection Sparkle Fun
11. Kid’s Strawberry Rush
12. Kit’s Toothpaste Featuring Disney’s Frozen
13. Pro-Health Advanced Deep Clean Mint
14. Pro-Health Whitening
15. Pro-Health [HD] Sensitivity
16. Crest Gum and Sensitivity All Day Protection
17. Sensitivity Whitening Plus Scope
18. Sensitivity Complete Protection
19. Gum and Enamel Repair Toothpaste Intensive Clean
20. 3D Whitening Therapy Enamel Care Toothpaste
21. Pro-Health Sensitive & Enamel Shield
22. Complete Scope Outlast Whitening+
23. Complete Scope Whitening+

 
I get that some people need something for sensitivity (it’s why Sensodyne exists). But do we need all the choices around whitening, enamel protection, deep cleaning, outlast whitening, scope whitening, whitening therapy, sensitivity plus whitening plus scope, pro-health whitening (is this for professional athletes or professionals in general), strawberry-flavored toothpaste for kids, and my favorite, 3D white brilliance blast whitening? And what could 3D possibly mean in this category? Do I have to wear those funny glasses to appreciate it? And why are some designated as toothpaste and others aren’t? Clearly, I don’t need the strawberry flavored one, but must wonder, gee, will it be better than the outlast whitening one? And those that are tagged with a plus sign, make me wonder plus what? Why don’t they all have + signs? 
 
Brands with sub-branding only serve to confuse consumers. At the very least, the offerings could be simplified. This holds true for virtually every personal hygiene product — soap, shampoo, toothbrushes, deodorant — not to mention the plethora of lipsticks, make-ups, perfumes, and the countless array of haircare products. It’s a store stocker’s nightmare.
 
Heaven forbid that each of these sub-bands has a product manager who’s convinced of the absolute qualities of his or her brand’s ability to do what exactly? Clean teeth better than the other brands — from the SAME manufacturer — let alone a competitive brand from Colgate or whatever? Invariably we end up choosing what we started with as kids or get the one our dentist recommends (is he or she on the take, I wonder?). How many of Crest’s brands will last? Do they exist mostly to imply that nobody knows oral health like Crest, making your grocery store aisle a showcase of power and depth? The brand I use only has only four options where I shop, so it must be subpar. Yet, my teeth haven’t noticed. My dentist hasn’t either. But he does give me sample toothpaste and floss every time I visit. I save them for when I’m traveling. The free stuff works pretty well from what I can tell. 
 
At home, I use an Arm & Hammer whitening something or other because it comes in two packs at a discount. Maybe it’s called eternal whitening or blast-off clean or deep-cleaning gum power or some other string of adjectives to make my choice more even more fraught with worry, wonder, and what the fuck.

I am so sick of corporations and their social media campaigns that purport to care about me. Corporations are in the business of making money. I get that. Nothing wrong with that. But pretending that they care about me is absurd.
​
A recent example: I get a call for Aetna Healthcare and they want to come to my home, take my blood pressure, and whatever else their certified nurse practitioner intends to do and ask about. I'm thinking, isn't this what my family doctor does for me? Isn't he someone who knows my medical history and can offer informed guidance to what I might do to take better care of myself? Oh, but there are services that we provide or can connect you with to improve your health and wellbeing. Services your doctor wouldn’t know about. So why the fuck aren’t you talking to my GP about this stuff and let him, someone I already trust, know about these awesome services?

I'm pretty confident that I can take care of myself and my needs without your help. I pay you money to obtain medical services at the lowest price point I can find and manage the paperwork etc. I love you no more than my wireless provider, which is to say not at all. I would listen to you if you simply said, "we have services that can help you spend less money on your healthcare and lower our costs and yours in doing so." I told the caller, "Aetna doesn't care about me as an individual. It's a big corporation in the business of making money. That's ok. But you don't really care about me. My wife cares about me. My children and siblings care about me. Close friends care about me. You care about runningan efficient, profitable business — and if your services can lower your costs — and maybe mine too — just say so. 

Interaction with corporations is transactional, not emotional or personal. Customer engagement should be honest — not a goofball pretense that your company knows anything about me other than what they need to know to provide better service in the interest of buttressing their bottom line. This need or desire is not bad or evil or pernicious — but admitting to it, understanding the people are human beings and pretending to “care” about them upends the understanding of what care means. 

I understand the need to make money. Everyone does. But wedding your need to make money to caring about me as an individual only serves to inflame my distrust in you. Be honest with me. You’ll get more traction.

©2019 John Hofmeister. All rights reserved. Yeah, I’m not Texas, but don’t mess with me.

Under attack for being evil, part of the deep state, and selling personal data to all comers, Google said it wants to offset criticism by giving everyone a chance to lighten up, while also allowing users to affirm their love or hatred of President Trump.

“Our analysts noticed that the simple appearance of “Trump” in a headline drove traffic, seemingly from both sides of the political divide. According to one Google insider who wished to remain anonymous, “What better way to delight users than to allow them to replace all appearances of ‘Trump’ with whatever term the user wants?”

Google spokesman Yashir Eustace Smith noted, “He’s incredibly polarizing. Why not put all that love and animosity to work with a smile? Everyone wins. Our ad targeting will be off the charts!”

The beta release will offer users a handful of replacements, including President Stump, Doofus in Chief, Colt 45, Greatest POTUS of All Time, Best President Ever, Generalissimo Donald, President Dumb Ass, and President Dump. “The plan is to see which names trend best and add more to encourage use of this remarkable digital release, grow our user base, and then sort and sell ads based on user replacement choice.”

The initial launch of ‘Replace Trump,” the Beta release name, will be an extension available for Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer, although no one knows if anyone still uses Internet Explorer. Once installed, users will see headlines and stories where all references to Trump are replaced with their preferred name for the current president.

Asked if this will be extended to other politicians or celebrities, Google spokeswoman Insidera Brown noted, “We will be looking into the adoption rate for this release. The possibilities are staggering. Hating and loving people has always been a huge draw throughout history.”

Industry insiders and experts agree it’s a no brainer. Some are insisting on adding President No Brainer, but Google strategists believe it could be seen as a double entendre — making it hard to employ appropriate ad targeting.  Plus, double entendres are thought to be French, earning proposed moniker a big thumbs down. “Everyone agrees, French is bad,” said one unnamed Google developer.
​
“We’re really excited about the possibilities of allowing users to only see and read terms for Trump that relate to their beliefs, however idiotic or accurate.”

@2019 John Hofmeister. All rights reserved. This means you, buddy.

Calling for a fair and balanced approach to awful shit that happens but still yields some incredibly good shit that comes with it, President Trump has proposed a National Endowment for the Inhumanities.

“Just take a look at war. It’s awful, sure. But it also brings with it some fantastic advances in science and technology. No one ever said this exactly, but it seems like we’d never have automatic dishwashers without World War Two. I mean all those women who had to go work and make bombs needed a faster way to do all those dishes because they didn’t have enough time to clean them working full time.” Trump provided no facts to support this assertion. The White House has yet to respond to inquiries from yours truly.

In a related vein, Trump heralded the value of species extinction. “Democrats want you to think this is terrible. But it’s been fantastic for industry and jobs and everyday Americans. Who like snails, anyway? Ok, nobody except liberals at those fancy French restaurants they love so much. But if we have to give up a couple of snails for jobs that can help loggers or coal miners get good jobs — the snails are losers. It’s a no brainer. Believe me, I know all about no brainers.”

Trump went on to extol the value of awfulness, noting that every issue has two sides. Like when people talk about white supremacists. “There are good people on both sides,” Trump tweeted while commenting on white supremacists marching to save monuments to icons of slavery. “And let’s not forget the facts. Yeah, it sounds terrible but slavery was a great source of American power before the Civil War. Heck, even Britain wanted to help keep it going so they could get cotton picked cheap. Slaves help build our country. They deserve our thanks, but they’re all dead so we can’t do much for them now. All this reparations talk is just Democrats trying to get Black votes. ”

In a related tweet, Trump noted, “We need to see how terrible stuff can continue to make America great. If we hadn’t taken all that land from Indians, most of America would be living in tee-pees and chasing buffalo all day and waiting for Russia to conquer us. Very bad. Not just bad, incredibly awful and unfair.” How this was unfair, Trump did not say.

“The democrats and liberals want to trash all the good shit that comes from bad shit because they pretend to care about where the good shit comes from. I’m all about good shit — and however we get it doesn’t matter. Shit’s shit.”

In his recent tweetstorm, Trump noted, “It’s time to honor the value of how awful things can lead to great things. My unpresidendented presidency is a perfect example. We’re greater, more fantastic, and more safer (sic) than ever no matter what the intelligence agencies say. Almost all of them are Obama people who didn’t want to make American great. Sad.”

In a side note, Trump revealed, “I needed to get in this anger that I can’t account for about national security smart guys who don’t know where their elbows are.” In responding to his remarks, Trump aides asked for the mulligan now given Trump for every 6 press encounters. Trump has no known therapist available for comment.

The Endowment for the Inhumanities, yet to be established by Congress, is already seeking requests for funding for research initiatives by 8Chan, the American Nazi Party, the Koch Foundation, the Heritage Foundations, and an assorted range of foundations seeking federal funding decrying federal funding while benefitting from federal funding.

Trump concurred in his tweet, “Funding for bad shit should be comparable to funding for good shit. It’s only fair. Fair and balanced is good. Not fair and balanced is bad.”
​
When asked about how this sounded like the Fox News’ tagline, Trump said, “Yeah, that sounds like a good line. But I never read stuff unless it’s a bunch of words running under pictures of me on Fox News. I’m really busy, so watching just Fox makes it easier to keep up with stuff. I mean, there’s a picture of me and there’s good words about me underneath. Pictures and words. Incredibly fair and balanced.”

©2019 John Hofmeister. All rights reserved. So there. 

Having found my first job at an agency at 41 years of age, I’m an extreme outlier. These days most  get into the business straight out of school, whether a university with an ad program or an ad school. That glorious time of shiny, thick hair, the ability to drink till 2 and then drag your ass to the office at 8, and health insurance is like, yeah whatever.
 
Before my first agency gig as a copywriter, I got acquainted with the ad business when working at a big university’s marketing department where I met graphic artists and designers and began perusing CA and One Show Annuals. 
 
Once ensconced in an agency, I started paying closer attention to the business. It became clear to me that the ad business was interesting, fun, crazy at times, wildly subjective, and lucrative. 
 
It was also a place where an English major could make a living, not to mention artistically inclined souls who could draw or paint or make things look lovely. Without getting into the account service side of the show, why not go into the business if you have a creative bent? None I suppose — but with some caveats.
 
1. Plan on finding another career after you turn 45ish or older. The creative side of the business is ageist. Finding a copy or art guy who’s over 45 is pretty tough. This is just a fact. Don’t believe me? Check out this, this, or this.
 
But when you’re 25 or 28 or thirty-something, you’re thinking about getting ahead, getting into CA, winning a One Show Pencil, and making VP or SVP money. Nothing wrong with that. But if you are pursuing this career, start your plan for the day when you get laid off — because odds are you will be. Several times.
 
Oh, you’ll be told the account you’re on was lost or the client was looking for “new” directions or overall billings are going away — and so is your job. You’ll be told it’s got nothing to do with your age. You’ll be shown a list of people younger than you (with less experience, talent, and moxie, too). In this pile of bullshit, there may be a kernel or two of truth — enough to keep the lawyers happy anyway.
 
2. Save like crazy. Advertising can be pretty lucrative after you put in some time as a junior and “leadership,” the account people, and your creative bosses decide that you have what it takes. But when the day arrives that the account you’re working on goes away and they “have” to let you go, you will need savings to lean on. But don’t plan on spending too much of what you saved. 
 
If you’re lucky (or not depending on your POV) you will get old. Sixty or 70 or 80 something. Money will be tight since you’ll be spending more and more of it on healthcare. And we all know where those costs are going.
 
3. For writers, you need to get really good at actual writing. Grammar and knowing how to write for laypeople will matter when you are freelancing and forced to edit your own stuff and aren’t being paid to be charming or fun or entertaining — when the money comes from being straightforward, simple, and often painfully obvious without being a bore. So, when those long-copy gigs show up, grab them. That 200-page website? Grab that, too. Sometimes getting good at what you don’t like doing will serve you well. It’s called work for a reason.
 
For art folks, never pass a chance to make a table or chart, clean up a photo, edit the leadership team’s annual video, organize and graphically present mind-numbing statistics, work with multiple-paged documents, and know all the Adobe Creative Suite like you programmed it.
 
4. Do something else. Advertising draws people to its hallways for the money, the coolness, and all the glib, stupid shit one takes from Mad Men. Life at most agencies can be a crushing grind lots of the time and a total blast some of the time. I'm guessing the same holds true for almost any profession.. A career is a long time. Choose wisely my friend.
 
© 2019 John Hofmeister. For my other take on the business, check out this. And I am in the habit of recommending the guy’s blog. Check it out. 

After a career in advertising (which continues as I freelance my way into life’s twilight), I’m a bit torn about my feelings about the business. As a kid in high school and college, I hated advertising, believing it got people to buy stuff they didn’t need or want. Of course, that’s sometimes true. But more often than not, advertising is just trying to persuade people to buy something whether they need it or not — and oftentimes they do. There’s no arm twisting of the sort one might experience on a used-car lot. There’s just a company with stuff to sell that needs some help selling it to people who need it or who might otherwise do without it. And ad agencies are there to help. Themselves and others. They helped earn me a living, raise a family, pay my mortgage, buy stuff the fam needed, and get by.
 
Advertising, actually branding, has been around ever since one human tribe encountered another human tribe who had goods or game they needed but didn’t have. When one tribe did have a surplus of grain or pelts and then found a way to trade and make up the difference, modern-day capitalism was born. And if that arrangement didn’t work out, they could always fight over what one had and the other didn’t — which, as we know, they did with some regularity. Over time, the clunky bartering in grain for pelts or whatever was replaced by money, which has taken all sorts of forms, everything from salt to cocoa beans to beer to gold. Gold, which to be honest, serves no real physical need, but which its status as a rarity (not to mention its sunny brilliance) allowed it to serve as common means of exchange. But I digress.
 
Advertising and branding are necessities in a world of competing items that bear no significant differences. Pepsi and Coke. Nike and Adidas. Infinity and Lexus. Lays and Ruffles. If we’re upfront about things, either of these alternate brands would fit the need they actually serve: something sweet to drink, something to cover one’s feet, something to get from point A to point B, something salty and greasy and fattening and therefore delightful. Naturally, their brand followers would insist on some difference, but marketers know better, seeing as how they readily jump from one marketing division or ad agency to another with some regularity in the interest of advancing their careers and increasing their salaries.
 
Advertising by itself lost its heft to communicate discernible value a while back. Nowadays, when it comes to mass-market products, advertising is nothing but the promotion of brands. The old tools of advertising — sales, couponing, today-only, two-for-one deals, no interest till the Pope marries — still have their place. But the real business of advertising (the advertising people talk about at Cannes and that fills award-show books) is the promotion of brands — products with comparable alternatives — brands that need to attach unknowable, indiscernible, and unquantifiable value to a company’s products or services.
 
Today we are enamored of brands. And for many, they have replaced longstanding attachment to church or party or country club. As a kid, I knew dudes as a Chevy or Ford guy and somewhat later as a Nike or Adidas or Columbia or North Face guy. And in these raucous times, I also know rightwing or leftwing nutjobs — Trumpeters and Berners or whatever — but those aren’t brands, just secular religions whose gods will, like all gods, eventually die. In some ways, the very idea of branding and how it works is, at best, a cataloging schema. It’s the sort of schema that Russian, Chinese, Facebook, and Instagram, and the world’s varied brand trollers rely on to influence your purchase or your vote. If we can put people in a brand box, it’s just fucking easier to get them to do shit, whatever that shit might be.
 
For descendants of Western Civilization — civilization being a generous description of the last several millennia seeing as civil is its root meaning — a long-running belief in a life hereafter has been replaced by a life right now. We want to be cool right now! We want to be envied right now! We want to be wearing the brand to die for right now! This is leading to all sorts of problems, not the least of which is the depletion of the ozone, ocean fisheries, fresh water, and landfill locations, along with the appearance of Pacific islands of floating plastic three times the size of France.
 
The lost love of the Cross and its replacement by the gauche idolatry of stuff — basically the replacement of a willingness to forego want for a better hereafter with I want shit now— doesn’t bode well humankind. None of this is to say that branding and buying and having stuff is evil. It’s just a plea for moderation. Once the race figures out how to live within its means, things will improve. But whether it will or not is something the current want-it-now crowd doesn’t give a fuck about. The secular crew I share faith with live in hope, hope being the only brand that gets me through the day.
 
© 2019 John Hofmeister. All rights reserved. 

​They’re not social networks. They’re tribal networks.
The advent of social networks began, as their name implies, as a great big hug among friends. Announce baptisms, birthdays, betrothals, graduations, and promotions! Pass along gift ideas! Share all that lovely bonhomie with all your pals everywhere! 
 
Yet none of us live in a purely friendly, social collective. We all know — and are probably related to — perfect idiots whose understanding and intelligence is and has been forever suspect. Those folks who account for eyerolls at holiday gatherings when they say something found to be accountably, obviously, and refutably stupid with a basic Google search. You know, people who don’t read. People who rely on Facebook for news. People who watch and listen to one network to tell them what’s going on in the world. Forgivable offences would they not affect the future of our democracy.
 
Of course, calling social networks “social” grants them a kindness that they don’t deserve. There’s nothing social, a term that implies conviviality and friendship, about these networks. They are, as time has shown, nothing more than gossip mongering among like-minded lovers and haters of whatever we love and hate. The social sharing we seek is invariably subject to the heartfelt cares of Aunt Martha who thinks we need to know about the Second Coming, Donald Trump’s twitter feed, and the easily-refuted fictions barked by Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News. Martha means well but her sources are a bit suspect.
 
Imagine a network absolutely free of political discourse. An awful place to be sure, but one that doesn’t ask us to parade our politics or religion or sexuality for whatever reason people want to parade such things. It seems that the Internet has allowed us to return to our basest of instincts — to believe without facts, to accept without caution, to herd without thought, and to run off the cliff to our perdition and embrace the unwitting yet gleeful approach to the bottom of our worst selves.
 
Go Tribe!
(I know this expression too well and recognize that its only saving grace for me is its gut-wrenching hurrah for an unhappy baseball team in Cleveland whose fans have waited since 1948 for a World Series win. What can I say? It’s October and my Tribe is, as ever, in mourning.)

​©2018 John Hofmeister. All rights reserved.