The gap between what companies promise and what they deliver. A series.

Let me tell you what I believe, and then let me tell you about the waxer.

I've spent more than forty years in marketing. Here's the closest thing I have to a professional creed: if you're going to use marketing to hide a terrible company behind, I want no part of it. Marketing as a shield. Fake it till you make it, at scale, with a media budget. It's a big part of why advertising has the reputation it has, the smoke, the mirrors, the wink. Some of it earned that reputation honestly.

I've always worked from the opposite premise. You find what's true in a company or a product and you amplify that. It usually wins. Not always. Usually. And when it wins, it keeps winning, because nothing you said has to be walked back.

Which brings me to Apple, and the waxer.

In 1987, I pleaded with the owners of the agency where I worked to buy one of the first Apple IIgs machines. Pleaded. These things were massively expensive, and the owner I had to convince came up in the rubber cement generation. "Hell, we didn't have waxers or Spray Mount, we had rubber cement and liked it."

He also happened to be my father.

Understand what I was asking him to buy. I learned to spec type from my dad. I spent middle school summers riding my bike to the typesetter to pick up galleys, long sheets of set type that got cut apart, run through the waxer (or, if you were an accidental huffer by professional proxy, coated with Spray Mount), and reassembled by hand onto art boards. Keylines. Bleed rules. FPO photos, "for position only," standing in for images yet to come. That was the craft he taught me. And I was the one lobbying to bring in the machine that would begin deleting it.

Here's the thing, though. He wasn't the obstacle. The price was. My father brought new tools into the shop his whole career, the stat camera among them. Advancing the craft was the craft, as far as he was concerned. He evaluated the IIgs and he bought it. I used it to preformat type, and the typesetter's days were numbered from that afternoon forward.

And that was one tiny slice of what Apple did to the creative industry. The hype was real. I offered plenty at the altar over the years, nineteen of them as an agency owner, when the offering was a whole shop's worth of Macs on every refresh cycle. I'm not sorry. Being "on a Mac" used to mean something, dammit. It was a creative's tribal marker.

Then came the iPod, then the iPhone, and the capitulation went total. Culture changed. Literally. All of it earned.

Now? Incremental updates. Planned obsolescence. A slightly better camera introduced with the same keynote gravity that once introduced things that changed the world. It's an accounting company now.

Here's why that matters beyond one aging creative's heartbreak. When the most admired company on earth spends two decades wrapping mediocrity as excellence, and we all keep lining up (I'll buy the next one, let's not pretend otherwise), it normalizes the gap for everybody. It teaches the whole market that the presentation can outrun the product and the customers will stay. Every broken perforated box is downstream of a beautiful keynote.

So this series is about that gap. The space between the brand promise and the operational reality. The box designed to be displayed that shreds instead. The loyalty program that can't recognize loyalty. The phone tree that understands your frustration and fixes nothing.

Now, I can hear the objection forming: seasoned guy (read: older) bitching about those damn kids on his lawn. I'd like to preemptively plead not guilty. This isn't grievance. It's absurdism. What I'm documenting is fluffy hypocrisy, and we all buy it, me very much included. I am not above any of this. I keep falling for the yoink that is inevitably coming every time I reach for a perforated tab or square off against a clamshell. Each occurrence really just needs a sad trombone and an 80s sitcom laugh track. That's all I'm pointing out.

But underneath the bit, I mean it. If I ever went back for the MBA, this would be the thesis: marketing writes checks that operations can't cash, and how a company might actually close that gap. For real. Because consumers deserve it. Period. We've bought enough islands and jets and space adventures. Can we have shit that works?

— Gary Hopkins

Founder and principal of Method, a strategic marketing practice.