Clearly, the Iraq invasion and subsequent civil war needs reassessing, though perhaps not as you’d think. First, you’ve got to understand what Bush has actually done.

In a move reflecting fashionable corporate-think, the President applied today’s business thinking to the battlefield. Finding the cost of the war on terror too high to pay at home, he did what any executive of a company would do. He outsourced it.

He spent time looking for a suitable partner from among the axis of evil. North Korea? Been there, got the shrapnel. Iran? Too crazy and too many allies. Iraq? Perfect – a country with no powerful friends and lots of oil. And like Nike, IBM and Walmart before him, the President has also discovered the benefits of subcontracting to someplace else.

Instead of terrorists making targets of people here, they now target American soldiers over there - guys who are paid to be shot at. And instead of American civilians dying in their thousands, it’s i-Raqis. But heck, it’s not just the labor in these developing countries that’s cheaper: their lives are, too.

Moreover, like any good executive he’s kept the real money in American firms. The contractors who contract nothing but fees, the rebuilders who build nothing but profits.

However, the real issue lies not in Iraq but in what Bush has created as a bi-product of his outsourced war.

Just as American industry has built an efficient workforce out of a bunch of unskilled laborers that now competes directly with ours, Bush has made a ruthless army out of what used to be a bunch of amateur bombers. When they start competing directly with us, you might want to outsource yourself a long way from here.

One of the greatest marketing ideas in the last six years is online banking. It is the financial world’s iTunes. Not only does it make sure you visit your bank’s website more than once a week, it’s free to use, improves your life and spares you the expense and nuisance of stamps. And once you’ve loaded your various account numbers are you really ever going to take the time to switch banks and do that all over again?

As brand loyalty schemes it is one of the all time greats. Plus, it’s more cost efficient for bankers, too. Everybody wins. It is an application that takes on the traditional role of advertising - brand awareness, increasing traffic, customer retention – and delivers them and more; it actually makes itself useful.

Are banners really the smartest way to use the interactive powers of the web? Or would it perhaps be more useful to put our developer hats on when it comes to creating online ‘ads’.

The questions we should ask ourselves at the outset of a marketing brief is how can we create utility within our advertising? How can communication serve the needs of the consumer? We preach customer service to our clients but we rarely think about it when we come to create their ads.

When an ad is an app you offer something more than just an image of your brand. After all, the slickest – and stickiest – thing about Apple’s music revolution is not the iPod but the iTunes app.

When I started in advertising a long, long lunch ago the 30 second spot was still a relatively novel idea. We’d tried all kinds of lengths within the body of a program but eventually settled on 30 seconds. It seemed long enough to tell a story, short enough not to annoy the viewer too much.

So when I hear of its demise it’s like hearing of the passing of an old friend. (That happens quite a bit when you get to my age.)

Still, you have to move with the times, I guess.

Occurs to me, though, that when you look at the history of how most folks like to be entertained, it has always been a fairly passive experience. From court jesters telling jokes to storytellers round a campfire, we listen or stare fairly submissively, with perhaps only the occasional interactive moment in the form of a rotten tomato.

When you realize that most live events, theater for instance, remain one way performances - from stage to audience - it’s obvious that not everyone wants to be a participant. Some people just like to watch. Especially if the entertainment is actually entertaining.

As it is with life, so it is with the web. Even as TV, print, you name it, merge onto one device – or one protocol - we may still want to come home after a few too many martinis and simply veg out in front of that device.

That’s not to say that the internet doesn’t create new ways to interact: clearly it does. But within the area of entertainment that’s less participatory, there will undoubtedly be room for commercial messages that are traditional in form if not in media.

The maximum time we can ask of any viewer to spend with those newfangled commercial messages? Why about 30 seconds, I’d guess.

Yours, quaffing a gibson,
Buddy Mackeson
Chairman Emeritus (Fictional),
The Brooklyn Brothers

What do Rachael Ray, YouTube and Deal or no Deal have in common? They celebrate the mediocre.

In Rachel Ray, the Food Network has forsaken chefs like Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali who strive for authenticity, for someone who is as easily digestible as her food. She is Kraft Crumbles to their Pecorino Romano.

In YouTube we have the ultimate amateur night. Everyone and anyone is the director. Film, America’s greatest contribution to the history of art, is reduced to shaky camera accidents, jackass stunts and lip-synching fools.

And in Deal or No Deal we have a game show whose sole spectacle is someone opening a briefcase. What’s next? A game derived from a PowerPoint presentation? Spreadsheet Millionaire?

As Robert Hughes argues, it’s OK to be an elitist if what you’re demanding is the best of everything. And we do demand the best from our athletes, our technology, our scientists, even our military. Yet when it comes to art we are fed from Ray’s garbage bowl.

When you look at the earth geologically rather than ecologically you realize that we don’t have to save the planet. The planet is more than capable of saving itself.

The planet has been both a fireball and a snowball and it was still able to foster and nurture life. It can be hit by massive meteorites that wipe out virtually all species yet still rebound. It can erupt, shift, boil, bubble and shake itself to its core and still remain intact.

No, the earth is a resilient place. It’s been around for 14 billion years and will continue to exist whether we destroy the environment that keeps us vertical (and able to pontificate on blogs) or not.

One could argue that it is a little arrogant even to think we will have the slightest effect on the history – or the future - of our planet. After all, we have been here but minutes compared to the dinosaur. And the entire Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian and Carboniferous periods came a long time before us, and they still ended in the Permian extinction.

Now, we may well be the first species to play such a large role in its own demise (not to mention the part we played in killing off thousands of others) but the earth and life will prevail. Just perhaps not ours.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t do everything we can to preserve our existence. We should. We should change our light bulbs to fluorescents. We should run cleaner cars. We should find ways to consume less.

But we should also remember why we’re doing it. This is a selfish act of self-preservation and no less noble for it. In fact, it is a Darwinian necessity to act. That is inarguable and cannot be refuted by right wing politicians or industry polluters. Arguing that we’re doing it to ‘save the earth’ is dissembling.

We’re not destroying the earth. We’re merely destroying ourselves. The earth could give a crap.

Buddy Mackeson has had an extraordinary and illustrious career in advertising so we were delighted when he accepted the honorary but important position of Chairman Emeritus (Fictional) at the Brooklyn Brothers. He is our consigliore, our lighthouse and wise counsel. For those of you who have never met Buddy, and there can only be a very few of you if you’ve ever wandered the corridors of the industry’s largest agencies, you will undoubtedly know his work.

Buddy was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York (and is the inspiration for us naming ourselves the Brooklyn Brothers). His break in advertising came in 1955 when he joined what was known, before the acronymization of Madison Avenue, as Doyle Dane Bernbach. Acknowledging that working directly for Bill Bernbach was the best training a man could get, Buddy has always maintained that his learning curve has pointed downward ever since.

Yet Buddy is not without his own skills and talents. Rising to lead Bernbach’s formidable account service team in 1960 there is a story, that he refuses to confirm or deny, that Buddy was the inspiration for the original VW ad. The story goes that when Bernbach turned to him in a creative meeting and requested his opinion. Buddy replied “I like the work. But if I gotta be honest, Bill, I think it’s small.”

And long before the famous lunar module ad, Bernbach was often heard in meetings muttering after his head of account management “He’s ugly but he gets you there.”

It was this talent for execution that caught David Ogilvy’s eye and in 1963 Big Red managed to lure Buddy away. Once again, Buddy had a hand in creating ad lore. When returning Ogilvy’s Rolls Royce to him Buddy mentioned “that it sure was a bootiful car but that focking clock drove me focking crazy. Even when I gunned the engine that’s all I could focking hear.”

The direction for Hathaway Shirts was also changed forever by Buddy when he appeared at a client meeting sporting both a brand new Hathaway shirt and an eye patch after a hunting accident.

Ogilvy himself was unwittingly the catalyst for Buddy’s next big move.

In an effort to keep his legendary lieutenant Ogilvy sent Buddy on a fact-finding trip to Puerto Rico and it was here Buddy met with Rosser Reeves who was looking for a big-hitter to head the Marlboro account.

Reeves had originally intended the Marlboro Cowboy to be a kind of forerunner to the Village People. Images of an Indian, a leatherman and a cop were due to follow the cowboy but in a mix-up with the media buyer, the cowboy image stayed up far longer than anyone intended. “A campaign that runs for forty focking years based on an order that I fucked up. But what did get me? Focking fired.” says Buddy now.

The mistake did indeed lead to his dismissal but rather than return to his native New York, Buddy continued his journey west. “It was the 70s and to be honest I don’t remember all that much that happened. Except for meeting Guy and Jay. Boy those guys could party but we got some shit done too, you know?”

The Guy and the Jay were, of course, Jay Chiat and Guy Day. And the ‘shit’ he refers to is Nike and Apple. And while the 1984 ad has as many authors as a Hollywood screenplay, those who were there at the time attribute much of the original thinking for the ad to the brief penned by Buddy, although his original line “the computer for the rest of yous” was eventually amended by copywriter Steve Hayden.

“All Steve did was drop the and y and the o” says Buddy.

Buddy remains an influence on advertising to this day not only at the Brooklyn Brothers but to many of the industry’s leading lights. Chuck Porter calls him ‘Pappy Mack’ and legend has it that beneath that chicken suit is none other than Buddy himself - “Sometimes you gotta get your hands dirty, knowwhatimean?” John Hegarty still asks Buddy to cast his eye over a layout. And even Lee Clow bows down to the man that taught him to think different.

We are proud to have his imaginary eye watch over us. And though he may not do as many meetings as he used to, he’s still up for a martini or two at lunch.

gb 10/25/06

The Brooklyn Brothers are pleased to announce the appointment of Buddy Mackerson as Chairman Emeritus (Fictional). Buddy recently retired after a long list of ficticious posts at some of the great agencies of the last 40 years, including Ogilvy, DDB, Chiat Day, Goodby and most recently Crispin Porter. We are very pleased that he has agreed to return from his imaginary home in Florida to bring his entirely fabricated wisdom to our small creative collective.

The United States is history. Or will be very shortly. It’s economic and military muscle might not atrophy but its constituent parts, namely its constituents, will disassemble.

If you know anything of Western Europe, you’ll know it’s long been dogged by the nationalistic tendencies of ever-decreasing communities – from ETA to Plaid Cymru. And the sum of what used to be the Eastern bloc is being reduced to tinier and tinier parts.

But America won’t fragment into nationalities - most people here came to escape that - it will fragment into nations of interests. The irony is that this is being fueled by the very network that was created to unite us.

The web was supposed to bring about greater understanding and connectivity – a place where we can all hold digital hands and sing an almighty Kumbaya. Actually, more and more, the web, like a good Playtex bra, divides and separates.

This blog for instance will only ever reach a few hundred people who either know me, or have an interest in small obscure ad agencies, or people with absolutely too much time on their hands.

And if you travel down the long tail of commerce you find 12 people listening to the Groundhogs. Those 12 people would never have found each other through any other medium and a minority interest is rekindled, legitimized and glorified. All well and good. Except a shared interest is not common ground if it is populated by so few.

We don’t need to be reminded of the days of mass audiences and water cooler chatter to realize we are all on different paths these days. Even when our paths do cross, a conversation about a web site or a youtube clip is cut short when the colleague you’re talking to says “oh I saw that months ago”.

All technology dehumanizes us because, by its very nature, it allows us to transact without human interaction. A second life is no life.

Nor, increasingly, does the web allow a proliferation of thought. The idea of filters and bots is to reduce the amount of information we see. And we happily limit it to our own set of pre-conceived notions and check-box philosophies. Sometimes it’s not even our choice. Google is happy to limit access to China’s citizens to gain access to her market.

The internet extends our reach but reinforces our prejudices. Before, if we were challenged by the people in our community we might have to redress and rethink to remain part of it. Now we simply go online and find a group of people who agree with us.

No-one changes their mind anymore. John Stewart preaches to the already converted. Fox News is for right-wing republicans and always will be.

In this world there are no enemies, only buddy lists. But a world without enemies is a colorless one.

One only has to recall Orson Welles speech in The Third Man to realize that the death of intellectual and emotional confrontation is the death of imagination.

‘In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

By socializing in smaller and smaller circles of consensus we are diminished. And it’s not just the media that becomes fragmented but society itself.

Eventually, there is only one i in iNation.

gb 10/24/06