UNIMPRESSIVE ASSHOLES: TALES FROM INSIDE THE CORPORATE MEDIA

“The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife.”

—David Ogilvy

Welp, your hunches have been proven correct, and 2020 was indeed a fluke, to say the least. Pollsters and pundits alike have been talking out of their asses yet again, and it’s been confirmed that even after last Tuesday, they will never learn from their mistakes.

How do I know? Because I’ve worked in a few Manhattan advertising agencies with global coverage, both big and small, for a number of years. I’ve been inside the conference rooms. I’ve watched the webinars. I’ve seen the blacklists against conservatives. I’ve received the company-wide emails. I’ve overheard the office banter amongst the C-suite. I know which kinds of employees the management values, and exactly what they think about you, the consumer. Best of all, I grew up in the rust belt, so I have a firm idea of how out-of-touch these people are with the typical American.

The advertising/marketing world can also tell you a lot about other segments of the media these days, as it is now deeply intertwined with tech, television, film and the news Americans watch/read. In addition, many of the big-name marketing firms are owned by publicly traded holding companies, which are connected to the very ESG-oriented powerhouses that Americans have come to know in the world at large.

So far, the typical conservative’s understanding of the elitist media goes something like:

• They don’t know enough/any conservatives
• They’ve never heard an opposing view their entire lives
• The incentives (money, access) are just too sweet for them to change course

As well, there are organizations and companies in the conservative sphere that limit their reach due to tribalist ideology. But most of these types of employers have been wise enough to define their target market. Ultra Right Beer and Newsmax, for instance, aren’t at all trying to woo the NPR crowd, and they’ve likely budgeted their marketing accordingly.

For most corporate media agencies, they still tell clients that they intend to “maximize revenue” and “leave no market untapped.” Basically, they’re lying to the brands they partner with, and the brands willingly accept the lies.

Keep in mind, this corruption isn’t just coming from corporate CEOs and their executive suite. And it’s not just the twentysomethings who recently graduated with a marketing degree. This is the vast majority of people working in the profession, from the bottom-up, from top-down, and everyone in between. Anyone deviating from this trend is silent, either due to intimidation or learned complacency. Many of them get fed up with the system and change careers entirely.

Let me give you an insider’s analysis on the majority of people who decide what you see and hear…

Most of them are from a big-city metro area, or at least the tri-state region

If you work in media in New York City, most of your colleagues will be from one of the five boroughs. If they happen to be from Long Island, or Westchester, or New Jersey, or Connecticut, many of them will act like this gives them some kind of extra perspective. But they will still show the same attitude of dismissiveness toward the outside world.

They will almost never ask their coworkers from smaller cities and towns about relevant consumer sentiment. They don’t care. In fact, these city slickers wouldn’t survive a day outside of their safe space. Hell, many of them wouldn’t be able to handle Staten Island.

There are some employees who grew up in the South or Midwest, but most of them left their small towns because they aspire to be like the big-city natives. 

They don’t realize there is anything a New Yorker might learn from a red or even purple state. As I’ve observed after living in the NYC metro for almost 20 years, many out-of-towners don’t realize how good they have it back home, and many New Yorkers don’t realize how bad they have it.

All of this applies to firms in Los Angeles, Chicago and other such cities as well. Yes, there might be office locations in South Carolina, or Tennessee, but these teams are kept small and are usually treated like an afterthought by the rest of the agency.

And most employees coming from other countries usually have little to no experiences with Americans outside of these cities, either, other than perhaps a short vacation or four years spent primarily on an American college campus.

Most of them have a limited sense of self outside of work, if at all

In order to impress management, advertisers attempt advancement by becoming a carbon copy of the people above them, rather than developing their own unique contributions. In the Series 2 premiere of The Apprentice, contestant Jennifer brags that she didn’t eat any shrimp cocktail at Donald Trump’s dinner party until he did so himself. She even made sure to use the same knife! No confidence, no thoughts, just mimicry.

I’ve met so many of these kinds of people in advertising, even if on a smaller scale. The most exciting hobby they tend to have is maybe hiking or running, which is all well and good, but there’s usually nothing that sets them apart from anyone else. No fishing, or musical instruments, or woodworking, or computer programming, etc. Not even background knowledge on a subject outside of their job.

This is why so many of them use their LinkedIn profile the same way others use Instagram. 

To these workers, their professional network is the social circle where they can really let their hair down. Some of them use a LinkedIn-esque bio for their dating app profile, as if the opposite sex is vetting them for a job. It’s also why their free time tends to be so dull, including such average pastimes as cooking, traveling, or hanging out with friends. In other words, things that any human being does as a matter of existing.

Maybe they’ll do a one-night painting class, where they create the same mountain landscape as fourteen other people. Or maybe they’ll take an improv comedy course, because that’s what everyone else is doing in Manhattan. It’s almost like when sociopaths show emotion by re-enacting what they see other people do in emotional situations. They want to appear as if they have a personality.

Most of them operate only within the Overton Window of ideas

The corporate marketing industry is where innovation goes to die. It also has to answer to corporate brands, most of which are run by spineless cowards who aren’t capable of making decisions. These people don’t even focus on the bottom line anymore, and often default to whatever the competition is doing.

A few years ago, during the BLM and AntiFa activity of 2020, there was a hashtag going around the internet called #StopHateForProfit. Basically, it was a protest against Facebook because they allowed Trump to post campaign ads (although, they would tell you it was some altruistic quest to rid the world of fascism). A leftist activist group started a public Google Sheet listing companies advertising on the platform, believing that consumers would waste even a minute of their time checking a brand’s politics at an external link before buying a goddamn pair of shoes or refrigerator. Apparently, several clients were dumb enough to believe this as well, and began freaking out.

So of course most ad agencies hopped onto this trend, telling their clients to “go dark” on Meta, owner of two of the biggest social media sites in the world. Not because there was any evidence that revenue would be affected. Not because there was historical precedent for punishment against such an indirect connection between brands and their ad distribution network. Nope, just because the “experts” said it was best practice, all the other bigwigs were doing it, and because Trump was icky.

Facebook’s stock price decreased by 8.3% as a result. The long-term effects were forgettable, and Mark Zuckerberg responded by making minimal concessions to the boycott’s organizers, so all of their work became a short-lived publicity stunt. Still, such a stupid idea caused that much of a stir in the global economy, with Zuckerberg losing over $7 billion of wealth in a few months.

Marketers showed absolutely no concern for whether any users actually stopped using Meta platforms (the numbers likely stayed the same), and clients missed out on a month or more of eyeballs on their brands’ advertisements. All because of political bullshit misunderstood by a mob of unimpressive assholes.

Most of them assume you’ll buy their bullshit

Every single marketing firm has a line or two on their website about how they’re different from everyone else. We believe in transparency. We don’t shy away from a challenge. We disrupt the market. We actually integrate search and social media (so does most everyone else). We actually use data to inform our strategy. It’s nauseating.

They’ll give employees lines about how they want to create an “open dialogue” at the office and in ad messaging. Pitches to clients often involve “getting real” with consumers and telling it like it is. They’re tired of out-of-touch corporate-speak. We need to meet the viewer where they are. In fact, that’s what many corporate journalists are saying right now as a post-mortem analysis of the election. They may have even convinced you that they’re trying. I know, I used to believe them too.

Here’s Dr. Zac Seidler, Global Director of Research at Movember, pretending to be one of the good guys who really gets it in a LinkedIn post:

Just as with most in the corporate media, his strategy remains, Sure, I still don’t understand you, and I think you’re a gross piece of shit, but I’ll figure out a way to lie to you more effectively next time, so you’ll buy what I’m selling.

I’ve had a few instances of high-profile clients running ad campaigns with highly politicized blue-state messaging, even though it wasn’t directly relevant to their business. When the market didn’t respond, the account rep would always say something like, “We need to get a better idea of consumer behavior.” Spoiler alert: They never do, because understanding the other half of the country, to them, is not like being bilingual. Learning to speak Mandarin Chinese doesn’t make you a member of the CCP, but allows you to translate an entire chunk of the world’s communication. No, to the corporate media, understanding anyone center-right is akin to watching bestiality porn. It marks a threshold that they just cannot cross.

Here’s another example of how badly they’re bullshitting you about being open to new ideas. I once overheard a conversation at an ad agency between a graphic designer and his colleague. His client was some kind of healthcare system, and they were promoting a new medical imaging device. The ad was going to be an image of a skeleton scanned through the machine, and the tagline was to be: “Most doctors would kill for a body like this.” Eye-catching, simple, witty, a little edgy.

Nope, the idea was shut down because it might be seen as a form of body-shaming. Oh well.

Most of them have no other skills outside of their corporate training

There exists a conundrum for large companies, as their operation requires a team of average-IQ, average-ambition employees to complete menial day-to-day tasks. For many of these people, it’s enough to merely have a job that offers a livable salary and health benefits. It doesn’t matter if half of their waking hours are spent completing the same reports and presentations for the next 30-40 years, because that may be their full potential anyway. But this degree of conformity and loyalty does not at all translate to decision-making, and far too many executives think it does.

That is how Alissa Heinerscheid and Daniel Blake were able to climb so high in Bud Light’s and InBev’s marketing departments. Counter-productive methods of measurement are used to determine merit by today’s marketers. It’s not just gender and ethnicity quotas anymore, but also how well an employee supports the status quo. And it just so happens that this status quo is currently set by BlackRock, Vanguard, the WEF and other overarching forces.

This is why it’s important for business leaders to understand that marketing strategy and business development acumen stem from a completely different set of skills than data analysis. Otherwise, you end up with employees who think Bud Light has too many “fratty” customers. By the way, before that whole Dylan Mulvaney controversy, Ad Age placed Heinerscheid on their “40 under 40” list. This is the kind of talent the system rewards.

Most of them are owned by the corporation, and they love it!

They cheer on company-sponsored happy hours, diversity committees, DEI trainings, and virtual meditation sessions on Zoom. They consider it a sign of compassion when the company offers in-office ping pong, a gym, a cafeteria, Grubhub stipends for late nights, bikeshares, a nurse’s office, and a barbershop (yes, I said barbershop).

That’s what I saw in the advertising world, but the times I would visit the Google NYC headquarters, every two feet I’d run into some kind of art installation, a factoid about Google’s history, or a digital exhibit that showed off their technology. For instance, this interactive LED wall that’s connected to the web. Sometime in the early 2000s, tech companies wanted to provide an alternative to cubicles and pocket protectors. They also wanted to reward software developers who sacrifice much of their humanity to build new web products. But after five minutes in this place, you just want to yell out, I get it, you’re soooo amazing. And hey, I enjoyed my lunch on those visits, but the sense one gets in these environments is that the people working there spend most of their time patting themselves on the back. They work at Google, dammit! That absence of humility is not conducive to understanding or caring about consumers.

These modern companies have been able to manipulate employees into a culture of increasing dependence. They have removed more and more reasons for workers to ever leave the office, to the point where they encourage childlike regression. We’re talking buckets of Legos supplied in a corner for full-grown adults to build and then display the smiley emoji they just made. Why bother having a spouse and kids to go home to?

This devotion to the workplace means that there are entire operations teams tasked with programming for these bullshit activities. Mandated trainings now go beyond legally-required sensitivity and anti-harrassment seminars. I had to waste an entire 9-to-5 work day on a program for “workstyle” and “emotional intelligence” assessments. Employees are primed to embrace such backwards priorities, and to allow management into their intimate thought processes. I responded by fudging every answer on these assessments. It’s none of their damn business.

Most of them are cheerleaders for management, for some reason

Comedian Lewis Black once quipped, “If you were inspired by George Bush or Bill Clinton, then you were probably inspired by your high school principal.” So, too, are corporate media types inspired by their Bill-Lumbergh bosses. Just look at how CNN reporters played teacher’s pet for Jeff Zucker, after he was fired for sleeping with an employee.

The desperation for approval is so severe, that these people are afraid to burn any bridges even after a massive public scandal—on top of dwindling revenue and the whole Cuomo brothers’ conflict of interest, no less!

With this kind of mindset, it’s no wonder that they’re willing to self-medicate with Xanax and Adderall for the stamina to reach four levels below the VP of their department. There’s apparently no other way these people can feel useful in the workforce. They’ll feel the need to virtue signal on behalf of the CEO, either through internal email replies, or publicly via social media—even for the absolute worst management decisions. Rather than hold anyone accountable, these employees are more likely to pull a Chris Crocker and say “Management is trying their best!” It’s the same kind of people who wouldn’t dare admit the obvious about Biden or Harris.

Most of them are NPCs, programmed by the talking faces on their screens

If you want to see the typical experience of a social media manager, just check out this piece of satire. The portrayal is so accurate, it’s painful for me to watch. The insecurity, the office culture, the empty motivations…That’s where your shitty media landscape comes from.

What really sticks out for me, though, is how obsessed the character is with pop culture. In fact, even his Rick & Morty fandom reminded me of the Funko Pop Mr. Poopybutthole figurine I saw on someone’s desk at my last gig.

There is no self for these workers. Everything from their mannerisms to their speech comes from something that may have worked on TV, or in some influencer’s TikTok. They might boast that they’re an avid reader, knowing full well that their bookshelf is filled with Tina Fey and Michelle Obama memoirs. They’ll tell you that they have a real dark sense of humor, as evidenced by their Big Bang Theory and The Office references.

One of the best examples of this programming is what I noticed after Jen Psaki became Biden’s press secretary. I suddenly began hearing the phrase “circle back” repeatedly during work calls. Yes, we’ll circle back on that project. I’ll have to check with our affiliate team, and then I’ll circle back. Did you want to circle back next week? Circle back. Circle back. Circle back.

I literally counted 11 instances during one hour-long call. That’s clearly not a conscious update that someone makes to their vocabulary. That’s brainwashing through hours of CNN viewership that has been zapped into someone’s neurons.

Corporate marketing is built for NPCs. But don’t take my word for it. Take the word of this Glassdoor review for a marketing firm:

Most of them have utter disdain for half of the people they’re trying to persuade

I once sat feet away from the entire C-suite at an advertising firm. They were preparing to pitch in a few weeks to a certain brand with a large red-state following. As is done for any potential client, they were researching for annual revenue, market share, all the important stuff.

As he was reading the brand’s Wikipedia page, one of the execs blurted out, “Hey, check this out. XYZ company gave $XX away to charity last year. That’s weird, a conservative company giving to charity!” These are the people who were about to enter a large-scale deal with a group of people they hate, and then try to market to a bunch of people they hate even more.

Corporate media employees know deep down that people like you aren’t a threat (they’d flee the country the way my great-grandparents fled Russia if they did), but they certainly make business decisions as if you are. One of the biggest reasons why so many conservative sites have to be sponsored by herbal supplements and survival gear purveyors, is because Manhattanites, Chicagoans and Angelinos blacklist those audiences. This originated when Trump’s first election triggered calls for de-platforming and censorship, as well as a grand classification of trusted and fake news.

The source of truth for all of this was the Media Bias Chart, created by Vanessa Otero in 2016. As anyone outside of the corporate bubble can see, the chart is highly subjective. BBC and CBS Evening News were both situated right in the center, which suggests odd methods of measurement. Trying to downplay Hamas’ atrocities, and instigating childish shouting matches with Trump don’t strike me as centrist coverage. Nevertheless, this very chart was used to determine which websites wouldn’t receive advertising. And of course, advertisers focused on the right half of the matrix to block. Breitbart was always the first name out of their mouths.

Clicking their computer mouse, and unchecking a target audience in a Google or Microsoft advertising platform is much easier than earning your trust.

They’re the ultimate embodiment of the Principal Skinner meme:

Most of them are isolated

Many marketing agencies have offices on high floors in tall skyscrapers. Employees are isolated not only horizontally within the building’s walls, but also vertically—hundreds of feet above the ants that some call the “public.” When I was in the office, it would usually feel like a cold laboratory in there, as if even the oxygen pumping through the HVAC system were commercially manufactured. Every semblance of humanity had been sucked out of the interior. Everything was white, gray, beige, metal, concrete, glass.

Especially in digital marketing, employees are usually stuck at their desks for such extended periods that they have to relearn how to speak after a full work day. Outside of client calls, everyone is too busy listening to their Spotify playlists and fixating on a spreadsheet to engage in any human interaction.

New York City itself is isolated. I would often look out of my office’s window, across the Hudson to New Jersey and beyond, and think to myself, there’s the entire rest of America that these assholes can’t see. Manhattanites are even separated from other boroughs, like Brooklyn. They subconsciously believe that nothing relevant is happening outside of that tiny island. In Queens—just across the East River—almost 40% of the electorate chose Trump on November 5th, and most marketers still don’t care.

Most of them believe corporate journalists, influencers and consultants over experts

Being a corporate journalist, social media influencer or DEI consultant doesn’t require any kind of degree or skill for employment, and it shows. The DEI certifications offered by institutions like Cornell University are nothing more than schemes to get a few thousand dollars at a time out of gullible Facebook users who saw an ad for the program in their feed.

And yet, these are the experts who develop corporate culture nowadays, although there’s been some recent backtracking at several companies. No looking at quantitative behavioral data, or hashing out different opinions on the subject. No figuring out how to make people more qualified for certain positions. No looking for strategies that benefit the largest amount of employees. It’s all about the optics, and the optics say:

Whenever there’s an industry-wide slump, it’s typical for the team to trust market analysis from sources like CNN, Business Insider, or Huffington Post to troubleshoot. I rarely ever heard staff at an advertising agency suggest that the company should be run more efficiently, or tell a client that their core messaging or the product itself might not be marketable. If a well-funded advertising campaign still performed poorly, some go-to excuses were always seasonality, or market forces (i.e., customers aren’t spending). Any pontificating in the news, from the inevitable “new normal” after Covid, to Texas turning blue, was taken seriously by these millennials and Gen-Xers, because they simply believed what they were told.

I went into advertising thinking there was a scientific quality to the research behind marketing teams. It turns out, even the leadership in these companies usually relies on the same information as the average basic bitch on line at Starbucks. That’s what I often saw on their computer screens, or in links forwarded to Slack teams, at least. It’s not until you get to the umbrella organization that owns the agency that you start to see hard numbers behind decisions, and those are usually high-level discussions regarding the overall profitability of their investments, not the day-to-day operations of those businesses.

Most of them go against their own stated beliefs, and they don’t even realize it

The first lesson I ever got in marketing was to listen to the market, even if I didn’t agree with it. As true as that statement is, the guy who told me that was recently on social media, flabbergasted about voters who chose third parties or write-in candidates:

“Your 1.3% not going to a major party tilts the election. A bad thing if there is no chance in hell for your candidate to win. So pick a party as best you can! Especially write-in people – really?”

So much for defending democracy.

At one ad agency, an extremely progressive one at that, an employee was about to get married and go on her honeymoon in Japan. During a surprise office party in her honor, a geisha costume from Party City, complete with chopsticks, was given to this white lady to change into—by the CEO himself. Though I heard an Asian employee whisper “This is kind of racist” in the crowd, the irony was lost among most, who were practicing their selective wokery.

At another agency, we had just finished up a status call with a client. The internal team stayed on the line to regroup. One of our contacts on the call had an awkward personality, perhaps a shortage of people skills, and one of our directors had no problem stating the obvious: “I think he’s on the spectrum or something.” This was during Autism Awareness Week, for which we’d received a company-wide email.

The point isn’t that I’m at all offended by these incidents. A lot of well-adjusted people can have a sense of humor or deal with a different point of view. The point, as Norm MacDonald would say, is the hypocrisy. All of these marketers were fine to contradict their own principles, as long as coworkers considered them part of the ingroup, or if they had a high enough job title.

THEY KNOW NOTHING

Here are two short stories to give you an idea of the blind spots we’re dealing with here:

One of my previous coworkers, who grew up in Connecticut, was telling our supervisor from New Jersey about his then-upcoming trip to a conference in Minneapolis.

“Be careful,” she said. “There might be a lot of republicans over there.”

Here is another coworker I overheard at another ad agency, right when Trump was impeached for the first time.

“Yes! So how long until he’s removed? Wait, there’s a hearing first? Wait, what does ‘impeachment’ mean?”

After this social media manager checked his Wikipedia…

“Wait, Bill Clinton was impeached, too?”

And yet, these people think they’re capable of basing business decisions on politics.

A number of marketing firms were started by a pollster

“If you ever decide to seek your fortune in a foreign country, the best thing you can do is get a job with the local Gallup poll. It will teach you what the natives want out of life, what they think about the main issues of the day, what their habits are.”

—David Ogilvy

David Ogilvy, the father of modern advertising, went through a patchwork of careers before starting his namesake company in 1948. This included selling cooking appliances, working in a hotel kitchen, even living with the Amish in Lancaster. His first job in America, however, was working for George Gallup in New Jersey.

Polls may have at one time been the best available measure of consumer sentiment in the time of the newspaper, but they have overstayed their welcome in many corners of media research. Unfortunately, they still hold influence in the business world.

When you watch an award show, like the Grammys, does it make any sense that members of the academy are asked to vote on the Best New Artist, or Album of the Year? Since their choices always tend to be mainstream artists, and not based on Julliard-level standards, shouldn’t these awards be linked to sales numbers? Isn’t that a pretty clear indication of who is most appreciated?

In the same way, far too much market intelligence is based on speculation or what consumers say they will do, and much less on historical or behavioral data. I once received an e-newsletter from a market research firm reporting that “30% of people say they’re more likely to buy from a brand that aligns with their values.” Okay, but how many of those people actually did?

Many rich celebrities say they would proudly pay higher taxes to fund government programs, and yet the “Gifts to the United States Government” address only receives an average of $1 million every year. That’s out of the entire American workforce of about 168 million. People will say one thing, and do another.

That’s why, despite the controversy around the personal views of the Chick-Fil-A CEO, the fast food chain’s sales actually increased during the media circus years ago. In fact, a gay coworker who sat right next to me at one of these ad agencies often ate their meals for lunch. Perhaps people just want to eat their fucking chicken sandwiches.

Presidential polls, some of which are owned by media companies, now have a reputation for being ideologically skewed. Sometimes this is purely bias, and sometimes it’s due to the Bradley Effect, such as the shy Trump voters in 2016. Either way, it was highly likely that the data showing a close race between The Don and Kamala meant that Trump had the edge. There were clearly voters who were either too afraid to reveal their opinions, dismissed by the pollsters, manipulated by the pollsters, or left out of the sampling altogether. It was indeed odd that RealClearPolitics suddenly showed a series of Democrat-leaning polls in the few days leading up to the election, right after Trump had begun to lead again, without any clues as to why. It was as if the timing were too perfect.

Following Election Night, clips of livestreams began to emerge of veteran political scientists, including the trusted Professor Allan Lichtman, the guy with the “13 keys” prediction system. Just as with climate models and pandemic models, so too is an election model subject to inaccuracy. While these thirteen factors involved deeper thought than most analysts put into understanding public opinion, it is amateurish to narrow something so complex into an evergreen formula. But pay no mind to the several moving parts involving economic policy, education policy, foreign policy, demographic shifts or changing national attitudes. Pollsters often consider themselves to be “gurus” who are not to be challenged. And that is what causes media people to be taken aback when their narrative implodes.

It’s important to understand that peppered within these media agencies are a number of conservatives and moderates who are also tired of this shit. In fact, I ran into a former employee of one of my previous employers at this year’s Trump election night party. I’ve seen so many assistant directors, managers, SVPs, VPs and CEOs scratch their heads, trying to figure out what they don’t understand about half of their own country. They agonize over why they aren’t trusted by the populace, why they can’t predict landslide political victories, or why they can’t find any of the information the Trump crowd is talking about on Google.

They simply could’ve asked any one of us, as long as they made us comfortable enough to provide an honest answer. As David Ogilvy once said about his employees, “All of our assets go down the elevator at 5 o’clock.”

That includes the MAGAts and other dissidents among them.