O and 7: A Parable
It may have been more rip-the-scab-off-the-festering-pus-infected-wound at the Meadowlands than any given Sunday, a la Oliver Stone.
But if you doubt the truth of "whatever doesn't kill us, makes us stronger," I'd invite you to take a trip to MetLife Stadium in the company of a couple of die-hard New York Jets fans.
On the way to the game, optimism bravely struggled for oxygen with the suffocating reality of a 0 and 6-team record.
On the way back, it was all "sorry for your loss" semi-somberly intoned by another of our group, a former big city mayor whose family happened to make bones in the funeral home business.
“With an O and 7 record,” texted another salt-rubbing friend, “are the Jets still charging for seats?”
Not to worry, though, this isn't going to turn into one of those reductio ad dumbass football-as-metaphor-for-life inanities.
Hell, football isn't even a metaphor for advertising.
In fact, I'd say the more closely advertising mirrors the NFL's cadence of long delays followed by scant seconds of actual play, the worse it becomes.
And the less it actually does.
Those who question are invited to take a look at what’s happened since 2009, when advertising fully succumbed to a crack-like programmatic addiction with its pretense of instant impact while-u-dashboard.
As a series of increasingly damning analyses are showing, the result of this kind of short-term thinking has been flat to stagnant growth, at least for major brands based on their public filings.
Slide down the food chain to smaller companies that lack the big’s promo millions, and common sense suggests the results were even more depressing.
So now, of course, we’re going all in on AI, which adds “no need for the time to get it right” creative short-termism to “no need to give it time to work” in media.
“History,” as Mark Twain wisely advises us, “may not repeat, but it does rhyme.”
Anyway, all of this is a digression from where I started, which was giving the proverbial h/t to my Jets-loving pals who manage, year after year, to stand tall through year after year of soul-crushing defeat.
In times of daily grief about so much that’s going on in our world, let’s agree they provide a pragmatically inspirational example.
“Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, told his kids they could root for either the Jets or the football Giants,” but they had to be Mets fans, no choice,” mused one of the bereaved.
“If loving a loser, why fans of the Mets, not the Jets?” I had to ask.
“Because the Jets always predictably suck,” he replied, and the Mets are always good enough to get just this close.”
“Christie wanted to make sure his kids learned how to live with a broken heart.”