Another slow news day, another opportunity for George Lois to go on record about the current state of advertising: it stinks. All of it. You know who you are.
Last night, Digiday posted a few snippets of an interview with the former art director, who will get far more attention for calling Donald Trump an anti-Semite and a cheap bastard than for complaining about the poor quality of whatever ads he’s been watching.
His basic argument is that no current campaigns are memorable. (We might argue that the reasons for this fact are varied and have little if anything to do with the skills of current creatives, but once he gets started he just keeps going.)
For almost a decade, Lois has been on an extended media tour of sorts to let the world know that Don Draper is a fake. As he told a colleague of ours at the School of Visual Arts a couple of years ago, “What does that guy do all day? All I see him doing is drinking and sleeping around.”
Matthew Weiner defended his work in turn, recently telling AdAge that he’s always been more of a David Ogilvy guy anyway. Here’s a good Print Magazine writeup of the ongoing disagreement between these two humble gentlemen.
FTR, Lois also hates emojis, Twitter and Cannes, where he says the word “creativity” never comes up. You already knew that, but we have to wonder what was so “fun” about working at agencies back in his day.