This Week in Strategy: I am so tired.
Hi Strat Pack,
You read this newsletter because of the advertising. And we'll get to that. But before that we need to talk about something that's been on my mind for a while. And after the shooting of Jacob Blake, it's unfortunately become way too relevant again.
I wish I didn't have to write what I'm about to write. I wish I could say that we have learned anything as a society in the 3 months since George Floyd was murdered by a police officer. I wish I could say that as a country we are beginning to come to terms with how deeply ingrained structural racism is in our culture.
But here we are. Another unarmed black man shot by the police. Another armed white man murders people in the same city and is still alive.
Jacob Blake. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbury. Rayshard Brooks. George Floyd. All unarmed. All people of color. All innocent people who were judged to be guilty by the police.
The Charleston church shooter. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter. The Aurora movie theater gunman. The Stoneman Douglas High School shooter. All white men. All mass murderers. All taken into police custody and given the full protection of due process.
I look at social media through my New York liberal bubble and I see people posting about social justice. And that encourages me. But then I read the news in the real world and see that cops are continuing to kick the shit out of peaceful protesters across the country and get away with it. I read that the head of the police union doxxed De Blasio's daughter, and he basically apologized to them. I read that corrupt police departments protect crooked cops because its a 'brotherhood' whatever the fuck that means and government oversight agencies get their budgets cut and ability to hold police departments accountable curtailed.
Our local leaders are failing us. National politicians are stoking the fires of white fear and racial strife. And we're jerking each other off laughing at TikTok and hearting our friends IG stories about Justice for Breonna immediately followed by a National Dog Day post.
I am so tired. I can't even imagine how much that anger and exhaustion and frustration is compounded for People of Color. But what choice do we have, but to keep going. Keep learning. Keep protesting. Keep calling out racism when we see it. And vote in November.
I want to end by asking you to at least watch the last 5 minutes (but also the whole 15 minutes if you have time) of this Stephen Colbert clip talking about the NBA work stoppage. It makes me feel like there are enough good people in the world that change might just be possible.
Thank you for reading. As they say in showbiz, the show must go on.
It would be so easy to snap back and do a normal newsletter. I think it's important that we take this moment to reflect on the social injustice in America and fight for change. I know you're here for advertising. And I know I took last week off. But I can't just jump into my plucky mildly insane self. Hopefully we can return to our regular format next week.
The one thing to read this week
1) “NO CIGARETTES AND NO POLITICAL PARTIES”: HOW BLACK LIVES MATTER MADE AGENCIES POLITICAL AGAIN [BBH Labs]
No cigarettes and no political parties. When B, B and H sat down almost 40 years ago, these two types of campaign were off-limits as a matter of principle.
The fight for social justice started long ago and adland is late to the party. The industry must take a stance – whatever the cost may be. To bastardise Bill Bernbach’s words: ‘A principle isn’t a principle until it’s cost you a client.’ In fact, one US agency’s short animated film posted on social a few weeks back stated that if ‘Black Lives Matter’ was not a sentiment that you agreed with, they’d “support you finding another agency” – client or employee. Way to blow a hole through the diplomacy dyke. The revolution will need marketing agencies to get political again. So let’s turn “no cigarettes and no political parties” into “No vapes and a duty to use creativity in the fight to dismantle systems of oppression.”
2) Why it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult [Aeon Essays]
A longform piece I think is important for anyone who works in advertising. Don't forget, your agency, your friends & family, your CMO's daughter--are not the consumer. In fact, we are the echo chamber. Read this and ask yourself, is how you get your information, your consumer profiles, and your world viewpoint a self reinforcing echo chamber?
First you don’t hear other views. Then you can’t trust them. Your personal information network entraps you just like a cult
Something has gone wrong with the flow of information. It’s not just that different people are drawing subtly different conclusions from the same evidence. It seems like different intellectual communities no longer share basic foundational beliefs. Maybe nobody cares about the truth anymore, as some have started to worry. Maybe political allegiance has replaced basic reasoning skills. Maybe we’ve all become trapped in echo chambers of our own making – wrapping ourselves in an intellectually impenetrable layer of likeminded friends and web pages and social media feeds.
3) 'Allostatic Load' Is the Psychological Reason for Our Pandemic Brain Fog [Vice]
In stressful situations like the pandemic, there are physiological responses in our bodies. “Our stress hormones increase. We prepare to fight or flee. And as this pandemic continues and isolation drags on, we’re having a lot of these physiological adaptations, each time we feel stressed, each time we feel worried. And over time, these repeated hits, physiologically and psychologically, can accumulate.
That accumulation is called the allostatic load, essentially the damage on our bodies when they’re repeatedly exposed to stress. And while it feels like you're doing nothing most days, your brain is still dealing with the anxiety and strain of this pandemic. You're exhausted not because your body is working hard, but because my brain is.
4) The History That James Baldwin Wanted America to See [The New Yorker]
In July of 1968, just a few months after Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination and against the backdrop of American cities burning, Baldwin gave an interview to Esquire. He set the tone of the exchange from the very start:
Q. How can we get the black people to cool it?
A. It is not for us to cool it.
Q. But aren’t you the ones who are getting hurt the most?
A. No, we are only the ones who are dying fastest.
The editors did not seem to grasp how the moral burden of America’s nightmare rested not on the black people rioting in the streets but on the white people who held tightly to the belief that they were somehow, because of the color of their skin, better than others. These people, Baldwin argued, had to see themselves otherwise. New laws, gestures of sympathy, and acts of racial charity would never suffice to change the course of the country. Something more radical had to be done; a different history had to be told. “All that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history . . . which is not your past, but your present,” Baldwin said. “Your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history.”
Ok - the Baldwin story has nothing to do with advertising. But it has everything to do with being a well rounded human being. Thanks for reading this week. It's important to me that we stop and talk about racial injustice.
As always, the full archive is available here. Was this email forwarded to you? Want to start getting this on a weekly basis? All I need is your email, everything else is optional. Thanks for sticking around as always. See you next week