The office is officially closed, as the "Great Enstupiding" of the advertising industry is no longer my problem. You can find the best of my work in the archive below. If you are looking for me... I've gone to the beach.
What a road-crossing turtle, a breast-pumping nurse, and a house on wheels taught me about the death of the human operating system. Lately, I’ve found myself reminiscing about 1970s graphic
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When I launched The Cranky Creative in 2018, I thought I was starting a support group for frustrated creatives. I thought our biggest enemies were bad briefs and confused clients.
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Am I the only one noticing that everything is turning to crap? Crap ads. Crap science. Crap food. Crap music. Crap movies. Crap people. Crap software that you “subscribe” to
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If your “boldness” requires a permission slip from the HR department, you are not a pirate — you’re a parrot. WARNING: explosive post ahead. In the ad world, we worship
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It’s over. I’m done. For years, I’ve used The Cranky Creative to vent about the decline of the advertising industry. I’ve complained about the lazy concepts, the idiot creatives, the
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Marketing used to be about connection — understanding what people wanted and selling it with style. Today, marketing has become a megaphone for progressive politics, preaching woke ideologies that alienate
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A phallic shadow. The word “SEX” etched in ice. The American public has been bombarded with subliminal messages for decades, and the practice continues to this day. In 1957, researchers
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Oh, advertisers. It didn’t have to be this way. Once upon a time, consumers might have liked to hear from you. They might have eagerly awaited your TV commercials to
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If you only watched TV, you might think that white people (including fumbling, bumbling white males) are a minority in the United States. Depending on the commercial break, you might
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Is the advertising industry dying because creatives are lazy, or because audiences are too dumb to care? For years, I’ve used The Cranky Creative to document the slow-motion death of
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A thinking person’s guide to surviving the $8M-per-30-second brainwash. Welcome back, Cranky readers, to the $1 billion psychological experiment we call the Super Bowl. While the “normies” are bawling over
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They told you it was “progress.” They called it “equity.” But if you look at the cold, hard numbers, it looks a lot more like a targeted demolition. For a
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Trading the flu for something worse? They’re at it again. For more than a week now, my Facebook feed has been inundated with “news” channels from around the country posting
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A reader named Terri recently asked if I’d seen the Amazon holiday ad, “Joy Ride.” It features three elderly women looking wistfully at a snowy hill where young people are
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Well, folks, let’s toast the end of the year with one final, satisfying roast of the modern advertising industry. Why bother trying to pinpoint the worst TV commercial of 2025
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What if everything you learned about history was wrong? Is official history a lie? Did we inherit a majestic past only to be taught “we built it”? In my recent
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