Cereal monomania.

To show you just how truly messed up I/we are, after scanning the NYT headline, “California Billionaires Try for Ways to Cut a Comma,” I instantly concluded it was about AI.

Dumb. Actually, it was about a meeting of California’s uber-rich, all sweating bullets over a state ballot proposition targeting the 3-comma club, who were urgently searching for a door out that wouldn’t require following the lighted exit signs.

Instead, my subconscious veered way into left field, riffing off OpenAI CEO Sam Altman preaching the need to stop using those pesky “please's” and “thank you's” in communicating with ChatGPT to cut hyper-expensive compute time.

Seems the good ol’ back-brain was reasoning the same might apply to the jillions of waste characters that come with Oxford punctuation.

I’d say call me crazy, but chances are you’re already there.

The psych ward has a technical name for my condition: monomania. “An obsessive or compulsive preoccupation with one thing.”  

In advertising, it’s not limited to the AI technology that one day might consume the planet following its own mono-maniacal mission to optimize global paper clip production. 

Of late, it seems we’re all victims of serial monomania, not just dialed into the one thing, but perpetually obsessing anew. 

Click, goes Don Draper’s slide carousel, and we spy “data and attribution.” Click, it sings again, and it’s “programmatic everything.” Click, “mass personalization”, click, “brand purpose,” click, “creator economy,” and, of course, click-click-click, the endless game of musical chairs called “agency reorganization.”

What’s both sadly ironic and sadly sad is that for all the recursive focus on those topics, we seem to be missing the value proposition forest for the splintered trees of fragmentation, overload, and crap.

In the process, we miss, miss again, and keep missing the unarguable signs that creativity, not technology, not dull content, not AI, and certainly not restructuring is the only North Star in a darkly worrisome nighttime sky 

And that, friends, is why I opened this post with “cereal monomania.”

Talk about your box full of Froot Loops.