Ad Aged--Will Madison Avenue Become Detroit?

Riven.

2012-02-24T09:03:00.001-05:00

Since America began about 250 years ago, the nation has always been riven. Early on the Puritans clashed with seculars. Then, of course, we had a great Civil War that pitted the North against the South. Today, we have Red states vs. Blue, which, I hate to say it, is merely a continuation of Civil War battle lines.

I read an article this morning in "The New York Times" about the airline KLM allowing people to pick their seats according to the LinkedIn and Facebook profiles of their fellow travelers. This is hailed by airline "spokespeople" (presumably they are called spokespeople because if you met them you would want to lance their eyes with a bicycle spoke) as a great way to make flying better, more enjoyable and more suitable to contemporary tastes. The program by the way is called "Meet and Seat."

Last night I watched the Knick's sensation Jeremy Lin get crushed by the Big Three of the Miami Heat. Naturally, I saw about three minutes worth of basketball and 27 minutes of commercials. Most of them consisted of impossibly pretty, impossibly fit and impossibly smiley young people dancing and screaming with joy over their 4G connection or a chemically-enhanced cheeseburger.

There was not a single ad, not a single marketing effort that made any appeal whatsoever to me. I am not a Luddite. God knows, I am not the Dalai Lama. While I don't pine for a great deal of consumer goods, like most people there are things I want.

But I am as different from the people marketers and politicians are marketing to as I can imagine. It's as if I'm from a different planet. Oh, I know, I live in New York and New York is a bubble.

Listen, marketers.

This bubble I live in is fairly large and is very affluent. Inside this bubble people do not find the crotch jokes and organ grinding that predominates in entertainment entertaining. We do not crave 99-cent tacos stuffed to the genetically-modified gills with hormone-injected cattle-product.

To paraphrase David Ogilvy, "the consumer isn't a moron..." We're just treated that way.

--
What's more, the logarithms that rule our online lives treat us like morons as well. They assume because my doctoral-student daughter sent me an email last night about getting an advanced assessment certification that I might want to be a dental hygienist or a nurse practitioner. It doesn't take a Svengali to see through the targetting apparatus that sends you such ads. The effect on me is just that it pisses me off.

Utilitarianism.

2012-02-23T16:45:00.001-05:00

Roughly 150 years ago, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham helped formulate an ethical theory that came to be known as "Utilitarianism." Of course Utilitarianism is more complicated that this, but I always synthesized its principle down to a simple epithet: Utilitarianism is "doing the greatest good for the greatest number."

Doing the greatest good for the greatest number is a notion that is lost on most marketers and agencies today. It seems we spend the bulk of our hours creating "experiences" few people will ever experience, ads no one ever sees, 'one to one' communications that reach no one and the like.

This we call "integration." Or a "channel strategy."

The question of doing the greatest marketing good to the greatest number is a calculus that is seldom considered. Instead, to paraphrase the Ad Contrarian, marketers believe they'll be regarded as suckers if they think "they're missing a trend."

In short, a channel strategy shouldn't be about optimizing the dozens of channels that can possibly reach consumers if the Earth slants an additional degree. A channel strategy should instead be about optimizing the channels you ultimately choose to use.

Lessons from Rome.

2012-02-23T10:02:00.000-05:00

You can learn a lot I think about life in an advertising agency from reading the history of the politics and intrigues that went on when Rome was no longer a Republic and was ruled by an emperor.

I'm not talking about the lavish lunches where we gorge ourselves on hummingbird tongues and braised dormice. I'm speaking of the machinations, the sabotage and the murders that happen near and at the top.

Right now I'm reading a book by a really stellar Classicist called Philip Matyszak. Matyszak has written a number of eminently readable (and funny) books about the ancient world, including "Ancient Rome on 5 Denarii a Day" a travel guide to Rome of 2,000 years ago and "Legionary: The Roman Soldier's (Unofficial) Manual." If you like your history made visceral, Matyszak is well-worth checking into.

Right now I'm reading his latest book, "Imperial General: The Remarkable Career of Petellius Cerialis."

What Matyszak makes abundantly clear is that being high of the totem pole (or stelae) in Rome was basically a death sentence. Many if not most emperors were assassinated, if not by rival politicos then by covetous family members. Few lived to die a natural death. Further, if you were a general and had command of your legions, you had a perilous line to toe. If you were unpopular your men would kill you. If you were too popular you would be regarded as a threat to the emperor and, therefore, assassinatable.

In our tiny industry we bewail and rend our garments about a lot of things. Chief Creative Officers come and go--one moment they're hailed as saviors and the next, of course, they're out on their ears. The same with CMOs. Also subject to untimely death are those perceived as threats or allies to the "Cs."

Agencies and Clients are meat grinders and none of us are far from becoming hamburger.

But back to Petellius. He had the extraordinary ability to be close and distant at the same time. Close to power but distant from it. When trouble brewed in Rome, when it seemed like around every corner there was a sword with his name on it, he was able to meld into the country-side, to disappear himself before someone 'disappeared' him.

Petellius-ness is rampant in agency life, too.

I guess we call it 'survival.'

Exhausted.

2012-02-22T07:52:00.001-05:00

This morning I had a bowl of Raisin Bran Crunch for breakfast. It's a good cereal as far as I'm concerned, slightly too sugary but it's rife with raisins and clusters of whole oats.

Because the paper hadn't arrived yet, I turned my ever-watchful eyes to the copy on the cereal box and read these words: "Plump, juicy raisins..."

They set my head spinning to life in Clientville.

Client 1: "We need to finalize the copy on the Raisin Bran Crunch box."

Client 2: "I have it right here from the agency. 'Plump raisins.'"

Client 3: "I don't think that sounds appetizing enough."

Client 4: "I don't think that copy paints a picture of the raisin's 'mouth-feel.'"

Client 5: "I really like the word 'plump.'"

Client 6: "I don't it rhymes with 'dump'"

Client 7: "I think 'plump' is fine, but we need another modifier. Plump isn't enough."

Client 8: "How about tasty?"

Client 9: "No, tasty is bland. We need something tastier."

Client 10: "How about delicious?"

Client 11: "Delicious is a good word but it's kinda long. Kids read these boxes and might not understand it."

Client 12: "Good point. 'Yummy'?"

Client 13: "It won't translate."

Client 14: "How about 'juicy.'?

Client 15: "I like that 'plump, juicy raisins.'"

Client 16: 'Plump, juicy raisins.' That sings.

Client 1: "All agreed?"

Client 2: "Let's put that into testing."

Somehow the line "Plump, juicy raisins" survived testing and myriad client discussions. It probably went up to the CEO of the cereal company and maybe even to his wife. This morning, it landed on my breakfast table.

As my old boss used to say, "Here's the thing:"

Here's the thing.

Raisins are a dried fruit.

By definition they can't be juicy.

Oatmeal. And advertising.

2012-02-21T08:01:00.000-05:00

Like many people my wife and I make oatmeal for breakfast, not the super processed "Quick" oats that respond in a flash to boiling water, and not some fancy-schmancy steel-cut oat imported from free range farms that are managed by artisinal oat farmers. Just normal Quaker original oats "Old Fashioned" in the large drum with the Quaker on the front. Oats are a pretty utilitarian breakfast, hot, healthy and filling and neither of us have to get all Park Slope about them. The oats we ate as children are good enough for us as oldsters.

This morning I noticed something about life because of the way my wife cooks the oatmeal as opposed to the way I cook oatmeal.

My wife looks at the recipe, measures the ingredients out and sets a timer to the time the box tells her to set. Nothing wrong with that.

I, on the other hand, measure things by eye-sight and boil, stir and mix accordingly.

No offense to my wife, often times when she follows the recipe exactly her oatmeal comes out like shit. It lumps and clumps like the oatey-equivalent of a cement dust-bunny. When I upbraid her about this, her response is invariably the same: "I followed the recipe. I set the timer."

It seems to me that there are similarly two types of practitioners in the advertising business.

There are the "recipe-followers" and the "eye-sighters."

The recipe-followers adhere to a prescription. A timeline. A set of best-practices. When all those planets align according to their dicta, we fold our tents and pronounce our work done. Qualitative concerns are of secondary importance. The scope is met. The work is complete.

The eye-sighters put their hands in the batter. Or their spoon in the oatmeal. They mix, they add, they experiment. They spend more time in front of the concoction. They don't watch a clock. They mind their mind. The "food" is cooked when it is done to their satisfaction.

Obviously, I think our business is better when it is run by eye-sighters.

Unfortunately, most holding companies follow recipes.

With apologies to W.C.

2012-02-20T17:56:00.001-05:00

Aunt Sylvie.

2012-02-18T22:19:00.001-05:00

I've known Aunt Sylvie, Uncle Slappy's wife of 57 years, for my entire life. She is a wonderful woman. Warm, an amazing cook--who at the age of 86 still gets around the kitchen, energetic and, most important, and eminently tolerant woman, as you'd expect from someone who has lived with Slappy for so long.

Aunt Sylvie, I'm told, was quite a "looker" in her youth. She can still turn a head or two at the community center pool in the gated community she and Slappy live in down in Boca. She dresses, and always has, to the nines, as they say, and in all the years I've spent near Aunt Sylvie I don't think I've ever seen her without makeup, unaccessorized and not well put together.

She would as soon go out of the house in a pair of sweatpants and bedroom slippers as Uncle Slappy would go deer hunting. It will never happen.

Through the years I've grown closer to Uncle Slappy. He's filled in for my father in many real and substantial ways. While I love Aunt Sylvie like the mother I never had, I am just not as close to her as I am to Slappy. Of course I care about her. We have great talks together and until she had to give it up a couple years ago, we'd often hit the ball together on the courts not far from her unit in Boca.

A couple months ago, my cousin Tillie called--the one married to the gastroenterologist in Ft. Lauderdale. Aunt Sylvie, who's barely ever left the house not wearing at least 3-inch heels had taken a tumble. The orthopaedist said this is no joke. At her age a fall could lead to a broken hip which could lead to a coffin.

Cousin Tillie arranged it. I would fly down. Tillie would pick me up. We'd drive to Sylvie and Slappy and conduct a high-heel intervention, replacing all of Sylvie's shoes once and for all.

We did it--with Sylvie kicking and screaming. But now she's wearing flats. And like anyone in "recovery," ever-so-slowly adjusting.

Efficiency and friction.

2012-02-17T10:29:00.002-05:00

Since the beginning of mankind some 200,000 years ago (or 6,000 years ago if you are a radical-right Republican like the current front-runner Rick Santorum) humanity has been on a quest for efficiency.

Our prognathous ancestors found, probably over the course of a couple millennia that it was more efficient to kill animals with a spear than with a blunt instrument, a club or a rock. So spears became all the rage. Likewise, wind-power was harnessed as being superior to rowing. Cattle were domesticated, and equines. Agriculture flourished, then machines, then computers all in an endless quest for every greater efficiency.

The opposite, I'm told, of efficiency is friction. When friction, in whatever form is overcome, efficiency is gained.

But the trick with attaining ever-greater levels of efficiency, like the trick with all things is stopping before efficiency gets out of hand. A good example of this is our modern notion of highway speed limits. It would be more efficient in terms of getting from point A to point B to let cars travel at they 140 miles-per-hour they are capable of. However, the rise in accidents (in this case the friction of crashes and pile-ups) out-weighs the gains.

What's happened in our industry, whatever you want to call it, Advertising, Marketing, Marketing Services, Story-telling, Product development, and what's happened in the world as we struggle through the fourth year of the Great Depression 2.0 is that efficiency has outstripped friction in huge and fundamental ways.

We can strip factories of their employees, strip the Earth of its sustaining force, strip entire swaths of entire continents and entire populations of their humanity to produce things faster, cheaper and better than ever before in the history of our planet. There has been no friction--ecological or environmental friction, rights of man friction, or simple common sense friction that has slowed our Adam Smith-ean vector toward the perfect, most highly-efficient capitalist system.

In our business specifically, we have seen the "mature" and more-highly-paid wrung from our midst. We have seen off-shoring. We have seen the disappearance of downtime. The withering away for production dollars all in the name of holding company efficiency.

The friction that used to be encouraged in agencies--the time to do a proper job, a gentle treatment of the people doing the work (not just people working in holding companies) and acceptance of extreme and sometimes volatile personalities has largely disintegrated. Now we are hourly employees and earn accolades for time-sheet compliance and even-keelness not the integrity of our product.

This is a lot, I know, for a Friday. Especially a Friday before a long, efficient weekend (a made up holiday--a sop to the working poor).

So, I'll stop now.

Writing this blog isn't at all efficient.

Poetry corner, Part II.

2012-02-17T08:00:00.002-05:00

By Carl Sandburg.

HAPPINESS

I ASKED the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
their women and children and a keg of beer and an
accordion.

A short call from Uncle Slappy.

2012-02-16T19:32:00.001-05:00

My house phone was calling when I got home tonight. The only people who call me on a landline are telemarketers, politicians (who are even a lower order of species than telemarketer) and Uncle Slappy, who is the apotheosis of humanity. It was, of course, Slappy.

I make fun of Slappy in this space. But I love him, for all his quirks, idiosyncrasies, all his nonsense, all his insults and barbs. Tonight he called with some Slappified nonsense.

"Shmendrick," he said when I picked up the phone. "They just opened up in Boca, you should excuse the expression, a combination bagel shop and travel agency."

"What's it called," Uncle Slappy, I said, readying myself for what was coming.

"From schmear to eternity."

And he hung up.

Neophilia and the modern advertising agency.

2012-02-16T10:19:00.001-05:00

It wasn't long ago that most large traditional agencies were asleep at the wheel or, worse, simply in denial when it came to work that didn't involve print, broadcast, outdoor or radio. As computers and the internet became mass--this has only happened in the past ten years--a host of new digitally-minded agencies sprung to life. They would fill the void created by the blind pig-headedness of traditional agencies.

What happened at the most macro level, in short, was this. The agency "landscape" was occupied by a Manichean struggle between two forces: the old pitted against the new. Manichean, of course, was a religion back some centuries ago that saw that the world was a constant winner-take-all struggle between the forces of absolute light and absolute darkness. There were no shades of gray. Or even Grey. And most agencies, too, adopted this world view. They either embraced traditional as a shibboleth or hung their fedoras on new media.

The language adopted by each side was in many cases vicious. Traditionalists disparaged Digitals as "tools and tactics." And Digitals lashed back with the oh-so-familiar epithet "_________________ is dead."

In fact when, belatedly, some Digitals became leaders in newly integrated agencies--agencies that still derived millions in revenue from traditional media, they would nevertheless continue issuing proclamations stating that, for instance, "television is dead."

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

The black and white struggle between old and new spilled over into every aspect of the advertising industry. Almost overnight "new" "channels" were suddenly valued in the billions. We were told they were on the cusp (always on the cusp) of changing everything. Awards shows extolled ads of dubious merit simply because they did something no one had ever done before. Ignoring the notion that maybe they were never done because they made no sense.

New, neophilia, became an end in itself. The search wasn't for the new thing, it wasn't even, in the words of Michael Lewis a search for the new, new thing. It was rather a quest for the new new new new new new thing.

And old, as in the old people who control 77% of the spending power in the United States were ignored or even worse, excoriated.

The language in the industry became barbed and vitriolic. The middle ground became elusive or no man's land. The world became an all or nothing proposition a world of absolutes.

The past and prologues.

2012-02-15T07:46:00.002-05:00

Yesterday two things happened to me.

1. I had about two hours on the phone and in-person with various people who work in media.
2. I discovered and perseverated upon the concept of neophilia. The free-floating exaltation of all things new to the detriment of depth, focus and past precedence.

My discussions with media were not fruitful. I was arguing, not for any specific channel, but for the concept of fewer insertions each with greater impact. I tried about eleven-teen ways of explaining what I thought was a fairly simple idea. I'd rather have 12 large insertions than 71 small space ones.

Finally, exasperated I remembered something decalled either on the walls of the old Ogilvy HQ on 8th Avenue or imprinted in our frontal lobes at Ally & Gargano, I forget which.

"Small companies run small ads."

I tried that out on the media folks. But apparently they were thinking instead about the next free hockey game a rep was taking them to.

All this made me think of, of course, neophilia.

The new, the now, the au courant is not bad. But it is bad to eschew all that has come before. Because some of what is old is precious. It's that simple.

The tragedy of our species is that we never learn from the past. We make the same mistakes in just about every human endeavor. We have no history. Was it Faulkner who wrote "The past is never dead. It's not even past"?

Oh, I know.

Who the hell is Faulkner.

Neophiliacs in Advertising.

2012-02-14T12:33:00.000-05:00

John Tierney writes very intelligently for "The New York Times," primarily on health and science. I don't always love what he writes, but now and again he comes across with something big and seismic, something that in its own way explains the behavior of large swaths of humanity. It's rare and to be cherished when you come across writing and thinking that has a world view.

Today, Tierney talked about a trait people are calling "neophilia." It means, simply, a love of novelty and change. A love of the new.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/science/novelty-seeking-neophilia-can-be-a-predictor-of-well-being.html

Psychologists have tracked neophiliacs and found that the hunt for new sensation has "genetic roots and relations to the brain’s dopamine system, they linked this trait with problems like attention deficit disorder, compulsive spending and gambling, alcoholism, drug abuse and criminal behavior."

Other psychologists demur. They believe that neophilia--when complemented by other traits--is a "crucial predictor of well-being."

In short, "if you combine this adventurousness and curiosity with persistence and a sense that it’s not all about you, then you get the kind of creativity that benefits society as a whole."

The Times continues: "We now consume about 100,000 words each day from various media, which is a whopping 350 percent increase, measured in bytes, over what we handled back in 1980. Neophilia spurs us to adjust and explore and create technology and art, but at the extreme it can fuel a chronic restlessnes and distraction.

"[Ms. Gallager] and Dr. Cloninger" (the researchers behind this work) "both advise neophiles to be selective in their targets. Don’t go wide and shallow into useless trivia...Use your neophilia to go deep into subjects that are important to you.”

From an explicit advertising point of view, I happen to believe that most advertisers and certainly most agencies are afflicted with extreme cases of neophilia. A client I recently worked on delivers messages in something like 37 different channels. They have enough money to disseminate their message to the point where it is spread so thin it is virtually assured not to make an impact.

The explosion of media, channels and messaging has propagated, in short, "chronic restlessness and distraction."

If a visitor from another world came to me and asked me what a "brand" does, I would answer thusly: "A brand creates order. It supplies a cogent definition about values and a product to the consumer."

We are, ostensibly in the brand-building business.

The neophiliacs amongst are in the brand diffusing business.

Mendacity, Part 38465057384040.

2012-02-14T09:00:00.001-05:00

There is news in the "Times" and on National Public Radio that Apple, the name behind well-designed products built by slaves, is beginning to monitor its factories in China for humane working conditions. I'd bet my MacBook Pro that the following will happen. 1) investigators will "uncover" some violations and "fix" them; 2) they will do something large and showy like provide a recreation center, employee swimming pool or hot lunch or something like that; 3) they will affirm the basic goodness of their plants and assert that their workers are well-off--especially compared to those in other less-enlightened plants.

It wasn't that long ago that pseudo-humanitarians took a day or two off from wearing their $120 Nikes because labor in the Far East was getting fucked up the ass sideways.

Of course, after the flurry of "concern," this story got pushed off the airwaves by a cat that found its way home or a newly dead pop star.

In about a month, half of New York will be sporting something green and sparkly that came all the way from China, 15,000 miles and still costs just 99-cents. When the dust and the drunken vomit have cleared, you realize that the leprechaun hats, the cheap electronics and most else of what we avariciously consume is made cheaply because we can abuse the shit out of most of the world. And most of the world is happy to take the pennies left to them.

The same is happening in our industry and just about every other.

For us to turn a blind eye, or worse, express "high dudgeon" is the height (or depth) of mendacity.

Happiness.

2012-02-13T15:29:00.000-05:00

One of the horrible lies, the o'erweening banalities of our fucking era is the notion that we should always be smiling, happy and pollyannish.

When we lose our jobs (which happens, inevitably) we're suppose to utter platitudes. We're supposed to tell people we're happy to get to re-invent ourselves. We're looking forward to new opportunities. We're ready to set sail across greener pastures and other simpering mixed metaphors.

We're not supposed to say we're worried about the loss of income. Stressed about eating up our retirement funds. Anxious about paying for the kids. No, we're supposed to reflect and say "It's the best thing that ever happened to me."

We are told via the Oprahization of the world that virtually any tragedy or disaster is something upon which we can look on the bright side. Someone we love dies and we find ourselves uttering meaningless phrases "at least they didn't suffer." Or "he's in a better place." Or "maybe it's for the best." As if you know any of those statements are true. "He'd want you to put this tragedy behind you," we lie. How the fuck do you know what he'd want?

Just now I was taking the E-train back from the client and I saw a bunch of dog-awful posters for a new Budweiser product called "Bud Platinum." One of the posters exclaimed: "Every hour should be happy."

I'm sorry.

Every hour should not be happy.

Some might be pensive.

Some annoyed (as I am now.)

Some might be horrified (as I am now.)

Some might be melancholy.

Who are all these people, where do they get off telling us that we should be happy all the time. If that's the case why don't we bag fluoride in our water and gallop straight to paxil, prozac and lithium.

If you know anything about happiness you know that it is not, cannot almost by definition be a perpetual state. When we were hunting animals with spears, the cohesion of the hunt force and the chase made us, as a species happy. As would bringing the kill back to our dependents. But those feelings are fleeting. In fact most people feel a sense of let down after the mammoth is slain.

Look, you want to make me happy?

Let me be sad.

Design. Not decoration.

2012-02-13T07:23:00.002-05:00

Last month I saw a You Tube video of George Lois speaking before a design and art direction group in the UK. Lois, as you would expect, excoriated 99% of all design for being banal, mere decoration without a larger, brand building idea. Lois' tirade was blunt and laced with various versions of the word 'fuck.' Fuck, fucking, fucker, mother fucker and probably a few more variations on a theme.

This weekend my wife and I traveled to lower Manhattan to see the new 9/11 Memorial, a tribute to the fallen people and buildings on that horrible day. (I happen to think the best tribute, better than the Memorial itself, is the two-dozen or so construction cranes that battle for air-space building new towers around where the old ones were destroyed. Positive communities build. Negative ones tear down. New York is showing itself a positive city.)

The architecture of the memorial is like the good art direction and design that Lois mentions. It is meaningful, not just pretty. It has a message.

The memorial is located on the land where the Twin Towers formerly stood. There are two deep, black granite pools and fountains where the foundations of each Trade Center were, with a deep, "bottomless" square in the middle--where the elevator shafts sunk to. Water cascaded down the walls, filled the pool, then lapped into the bottomless center. Around each square are displays that list the names of the victims of the Pennsylvania crash, the Pentagon crash, the Trade Center crashes, and the 1993 terrorist attacks in the World Trade Center.

In all, it was a memorable and moving articulation, made even more effective, I think by the wind and rain of the day.

My one complaint is that the crush of getting in, long lines despite the tickets you had to procure on line, and the unusually nasty and chaotic security disrobing, destroyed what should be, to my mind, a quieter, more solemn viewing experience. Further, the "Museum Shop" was as crassly commercial and sentimental as a Nigerian vendor in mid-town.

In all though, visit. If you're from out of town or not, as we used to say on the Dunkin' Donuts account, "it's worth the trip."

Lessons from "Lin-sanity."

2012-02-11T12:18:00.001-05:00

As I reported in an earlier post about the New York Knicks' unlikely star point-guard, Jeremy Lin, his sensational story continues. Last night the Knicks won their fourth straight game, this time over the LA Lakers--a legitimately good team, with Lin scoring a whopping 38 points, four more than demi-god (and accused rapist) Kobe Bryant.

Lin has scored 89 points in his three games as a starter, more than the first three starting games of any NBA player in 30 years.

This morning on NPR there was, almost inevitably, there was a short piece on Lin and the Lin phenomenon. It included this insight by Lin himself.

"Most scouts assess a player in five minutes. If he's not incredibly fast, if he doesn't have 'mad hops,' he doesn't make the grade."

Lin's game is one, apparently, it takes time to appreciate. He sees the court well. He has wild basketball smarts (as you'd expect from a player from Harvard), he changes speeds and he is an adroit passer. None of these skill register instantaneously.

In our "I need it done yesterday world" we too often rush to snap judgments. We assess work, thinking, talent, insight, integrity and more in a flash.

We don't assess, we prejudge.

I have been in a hiring position, looking at portfolios since 1993. I have always looked at them the same way. I go through every page. The ones I don't like, I put aside. The ones I do like, I put aside and come back to 24-hours later and go through them again.

If Jeremy Lin--and thousands like Jeremy Lin--were evaluated properly, he wouldn't have been cut by two teams.

Bad mood Friday.

2012-02-10T15:55:00.000-05:00

It seems to me that many agencies today are more concerned with making decks than making ads. The amount of time spent "putting the deck together" dwarves most activities other than filling out timesheets.

Orson Welles wrote, starred in and directed "Citizen Kane" when he was 25 and 26.

I took a few minutes to put a deck together to sell the idea of "Citizen Kane" to studio execs.

Jeremy Lin of the New York Knicks.

2012-02-10T07:25:00.001-05:00

I'm not much of a sports fan but once in a while, the world of sport delivers a metaphor that it's interesting to explore.

About two weeks ago, the ever-struggling New York Knicks basketball team picked up a player called Jeremy Lin. Lin was an unusual, not particularly promising point guard. For one thing, he went to Harvard. Great basketball players don't usually go to Harvard. In fact, the NBA hadn't seen a Ivy Leaguer in their midst for nearly ten years. Secondly, Lin is an Asian-American. The book "Great Asian American Basketball Players" is even thinner than the volume titled "Great Jewish Jockeys." Finally, Lin had already been cut from two or three other squads. At best he was looked upon as a guy who would play about six or so minutes at the end of a game.

Instead, New York is gripped by something called "Lin-sanity." For the last three games, Lin has averaged over 20 points and seven assists. He has led the Knicks to three surprising victories and out-played some of the most heralded opponents in the league.

It remains to be seen if Lin is more than just a "flash in the wok."

But what's interesting to me is that he was almost passed over simply because he did not look or have the heritage he was supposed to have. He probably can't jump over a moving car and dunk a basketball with fury.

Nevertheless, Lin, for now is defying perceptions. Scoring points and surpassing expectations.

Sometimes things that don't look the way things are supposed to look do the things they're supposed to do.

In other words, sometimes reality trumps perception.

Advertising perjorative of the day.

2012-02-09T18:07:00.002-05:00

"He's a few slides short of a presentation."

Uncle Slappy and the Schmendrik.

2012-02-09T10:04:00.001-05:00

The phone rang last night at 10:20 and I knew right away it was Uncle Slappy and that something was wrong.

"Schmendrik," he began, without even saying hello, "An utter Schmendrik."

"Hello, Uncle Slappy," I answered, trying to put a lid on the pot that was boiling over. And then I, mistakenly uttered the sentence you should never say to an old Jewish person, and particularly not to Uncle Slappy.

"Is everything ok?"

"Is anything ok? You mean is anything in this whole fakhakteh globe not run-down, diseased, depraved, vulgar and disgusting."

"What happened? Did you get a hair in your soup at Ben's?" I tried joking him out of the rant I knew was about come, the deluge that was bursting over the walls of the dam.

"You remember Morty Wolff? Morty the Schmuck Wolff? You remember Morty the Schmuck Wolff died last year in flagrante delicto with a bowl of chopped liver? Well Sylvie and I did what we had to do. We went to his unveiling today."

(An unveiling is a ceremony that dedicates a grave monument erected for someone who passed away twelve months earlier.)

"Was it bad? I know how you love unveilings."

"Was it bad? Was it bad? Does the Pope shit in the woods? Was it bad? Let me tell you what it said on the Schmendrik's tombstone:

"Mortimer Frederick Wolff
1929-2011.
Gentleman. Scholar. Athlete.

"First of all," Slappy was running now like a Kenyan marathoner, "First of all, Morty Wolff has never been, will never be, could never be a Mortimer any more than Sean Connery could be Jewish. He was the very definition of "Morty-ness." Not a real human being, a Morty."

"I understand," I answered, trying to give the old man a minute to breathe.

"Then there is his ferstunkeneh epithet.

"Gentleman. He's a gentleman like Madonna is a lady. He was always low, vulgar and gauche.

"Scholar, I'll give you. If you count being able to do the TV Guide crossword as scholarly. Give me a three-letter word for feline..."

"Oy," I added, sagaciously.

"And athlete. This is a man who never hit a tennis ball that didn't fall into the net. He cheated at shuffleboard."

Again, I interjected an "Oy."

"Here's the thing. There's very little in life or death--except life and death--that should be permanent. No one, no one, no one is smart enough to put something on themselves that is as permanent as a tombstone."

"You're right, Uncle Slappy. Right as usual."

"In other words, don't be a schmendrik. Don't write in indelible ink."

On death and dying.

2012-02-09T07:30:00.002-05:00

The longer I work in advertising, the longer I believe that very few people in advertising love advertising.

I was brought up believing that the path to some sort of happiness of fulfillment lay in choosing a job or profession you loved. You, therefore, honestly enjoyed going in to work. You enjoyed the things you did at work and the people you did them with. As my first ECD said to me when he hired me, "I want this to be the kind of place where you work hard all day and then you go home and you're proud to tell your wife what you did."

Obviously I'm not naive enough to think for even a scintilla of a nano-second that you could possibly love your job every day. Most days, or many days anyway, you don't even love your loved ones. But you should, I've always believed, at least conceptually have love for what it is you do.

In agencies today it seems this notion is dead.

Not that people don't love what they do.

But what they do has nothing to do with advertising.

There are people who develop products. People who generate (or say they do) conversations. People who figure out how to make your cellphone more annoying than ever.

In short, it seems that about 90% of people within advertising agencies today are employed in pursuits that have little to do with advertising. They're embarrassed by the profession. They think, somehow, it's evil. Or outdated. Or...dead.

The real disconnect is that when people are exposed to advertising (that which is dead or passe or embarrassing) they enjoy it. It's been four days now and people are still talking about Clint Eastwood, Will Ferrell and a few other terrific spots.

I don't know what's happened. Why so few ad agencies love advertising.

But it all reminds me of the guy in the circus who cleans up after the elephants.

It's a shitty job but he doesn't want to leave show business.

Memes.

2012-02-08T09:27:00.002-05:00

Of late there have been a spate of asinine videos running around the web entitled "Sh*t _________ say." I suppose there have been so many they qualify as a meme. Though somehow humanity has existed for hundreds of thousands of years and never felt it necessary to use the word "meme" before, though now it's uttered every few paragraphs and, we'll quickly be assured by non-English speaking "creative technologists" that it is part of our taxonomy as if anyone really knows what a taxonomy is.

The real point about these Shit memes is that they are not funny. And by the time the inspiration hits you and you decide to post one to your mother-fucking Facebook wall, said memes are as moldy as week-old toast.

Meme, I'm convinced, is creative-technologist Newspeak for corny.

But in any event, I thought I'd come up with my own memette, a little meme, which I am calling "Shit No One in Advertising Ever Says."

We have too few meetings, please fill all my available time.

That planner's 48-minute ramble starting at 7:30 was clear, cogent and clarifying.

HR is so helpful. I'm going to call them more often.

The brief was exactly the right length.

Please continue, I love when people read aloud directly from Powerpoint.

Sure, I'd love to write some performance reviews this afternoon.

My favorite part of the job? Timesheets.

Man, that memo from the Holding Company's Chief Risk Officer was really informative.

Thank you for your valuable feedback. I'm looking forward to incorporating all 48 of your excruciating and picayune comments.

Project management really stepped up to the plate on this one.

That proofreader is such a balanced and stable person. I love working with her.

That person's more experienced than I am. I think I'll let them do the talking.

Please.

Thank you.

I think it's our fault.

2012-02-07T10:19:00.000-05:00

In the wake of the Super Bowl a lot of friends, bloggers, blogging friends and friends of bloggers are decrying, as usual, the quality of spots that ran during the Bacchanal that pits one group of steroidal black men with no affiliation with a particular city against another similar group similarly unaffiliated, all led, of course, by a brainy white man, often one who is married to an international supermodel who has more breasts than brains.

What we are left with, when all the sound and fury calms is the assertion that Super Bowl spots suck because they appeal to the "lowest common denominator," though I for one think that any group called the lowest common denominator has no idea what lowest common denominator means.

I've often ruminated about what's happened in our nation to our collective intelligence. How is it possible to have "serious" presidential candidates who don't believe in evolution? How is it possible that our entire nation has no comprehension of American history? Is there lead in our collective pipes? Has our education "system" collapsed under its "systemhood"? (Should education even be a system?) Have we become so intellectually flaccid because we've been anesthetized because there's a flat screen every 33-inches in this country loudly blaring insipidities over and over until that's all we talk about?

I happen to think the dumbing down of everything is our fault. As an industry. We've bought into this notion that we have to appeal to our audience. That appealing to them is our measure of success regardless of what appeals to us--we never enter the equation. We're too busy thinking about what other people might like and we forget what we think is good.

Over the weekend I pulled a muscle in my left calf and I'm left fairly incapacitated. I can walk, navigate stairs, stand on the subway, but it all hurts like a sonofabitch. The good graces of my wife had me elevate my leg, rest it on an old ottoman (those Turks really come in handy now and again) and ice my appendage. I turned on Turner Classic Movies last night and caught 15 minutes of Jack Benny starring in Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 comedy "To Be or Not to Be."

I'm sure Lubitsch was told people wouldn't get things, that Jack Benny's delivery was too slow, that too many jokes became leitmotifs--that people would lose the thread.

He ignored the lowest common denominator. And so should we.

Create things that are smart.

You'll find your audience appreciates it.

Distance.

2012-02-06T09:29:00.000-05:00

As if I didn't recognize enough my estrangement from popular culture, the Super Bowl--its hype and its commercials left me feeling like a silent film star on a sound stage.

Some of the commercials weren't bad. But, really, 95% of them, if not more were advertising things I simply have no desire for. I can't remember the last time I munched a Dorito or an M&M, or craved a Coke or a Bud Light. Go Daddy means nothing to me, I master all the domains I need master and cars.com seems largely irrelevant--and the idea that the site will give me confidence seems extraordinarily spurious.

The Chevy grad spot was ok--but its impact was lessened in that it was released before the game. The same holds for the Chevy Sonic stunt spot, though I am as likely to buy a Chevy as I am to volunteer to campaign for Rick Santorum.

The Chrysler spot with Clint Eastwood stood out for me. It made me feel hopeful about Detroit's comeback, manufacturing's comeback. But barring a land war in China, I doubt manufacturing in the US will ever be more than a shell of what it was 50 years ago. The spot, sadly, was more about nostalgia than hope.

I guess at the end of the game--I am not a football fan and was bored almost to drooling-level after the first half, there wasn't one commercial that told me something I don't already know, or something that I regard as interesting. A heated steering wheel and vampire-killing halogens will not impel me to drop $60K or more on a car.

The game, I'm told, was a great one. A knuckle-gnawer. A nail-biter. Madonna was amazing...and she's 53! The commercials were fine. It's nice to see aging celebrities getting so much work.

The thing that struck me the most--and perhaps is the best example of my disconnect from the reality of the game--was the aerial coverage provided by, I think, Sirius radio. This coverage the announcers shilled every few minutes. And we got to see an antiseptic midwestern city at night with the Super Bowl trophy projected on a hotel with the JW Marriott logo on top.

Naturally aerial coverage of an indoor event made as much sense as having underwater cameras.

Nevertheless, something like 97 billion people watched last night. And I guess that counts for something.

Linguistic bullshit I can't stand.

2012-02-03T09:45:00.000-05:00

Until about five years or so ago, the word transparency was reserved for descriptions of window glass and cellophane. Then, seemingly all at once, it became something we all had to be. Politicians had to be transparent. Companies. Creative directors. Agencies.

In all my years I have never once used the word transparent.

I prefer the word honest.

Honestly say what you are doing. Answer people honestly. Honestly reveal your practices.

Honest is a perfectly good word. A stronger word than transparent. In fact, Merriam-Webster recognizes transparency meaning "characterized by visibility or accessibility of information especially concerning business practices" as their sixth definition for the word.

I honestly think the word transparency has emerged on the scene because it is a weaker word than honest. It is yet more evidence of the namby-pampyization of our language.

After all, if you're not transparent, people say you're not transparent or opaque.

They don't, therefore, call a spade a spade.

If you're not honest, you're a liar. Liar is again a stronger word.

It's much worse to be considered a liar than to be considered opaque.

Ida.

2012-02-03T07:45:00.003-05:00

I didn't grow up in a shtetl in the old country, but my grandmother Ida did and I guess she never truly left the Pale of Settlement. Her apartment, which she shared with another old woman, presumably someone else's aged grandmother, was on the second floor of a row house in the west side of Philadelphia, a poor neighborhood then, a desperate one today. She kept it dark, dark as the shtetl, or at least it seemed that way to me, who was used to the Kodacolor of the suburbs. That there was nothing in Ida's apartment that was newer than 25 years old added to the shtetl-ness of her rooms. Everything was old, threadbare--black and white, almost.

My grandmother did have a small, old RCA Victor television. The set itself was large though the picture tube was probably about six inches high and nine across. TV being new-fangled she had a hard time fathoming the notion of reruns. When it came to game shows, Ida wondered, why didn't people watch the original broadcast from earlier on. That way they would know all the answers.

My grandmother drank sweet Russian tea in a tall glass that was placed a brass cup holder. It was sweeter than any candy bar--sugared to the point where the tea was almost, it seemed, viscous. A single glass would last her at least a couple hours, usually about the length of one of our visits.

My grandmother spoke little English, speaking predominately Yiddish to my parents and saying little to me other than "Would Georgie like a cookie?" Like most children I would say "yes" enthusiastically and she would hand me two Ritz crackers on an old china plate, her version of cookies.

Then we would sit in the mid-day twilight, eat slowly the crackers and listen to rapid-fire Yiddish until it was time again for us to drive the 90 miles back from the shtetl to America.

Doing what it takes. Whatever it takes.

2012-02-02T17:53:00.000-05:00

There's a terrific obituary in today's "New York Times" of the great boxing trainer and cornerman Angelo Dundee. Dundee guided Cassius Clay--who later became Muhammad Ali--to his championship over Sonny Liston. He also trained Carmen Basilio to his welterweight and middleweight titles, and Sugar Ray Leonard to his welterweight championship. He also trained champions Jimmy Ellis, Willie Pastrano, Luis Rodriguez and George Foreman. You can read the obituary here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/sports/angelo-dundee-trainer-of-boxing-champions-dies-at-90.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

One thing that marked Dundee's success was his ability to think on his feet. The obit reports: "When Ali sought to regain his senses after being knocked down by Henry Cooper in the fourth round of their June 1963 bout, Dundee stuck his finger in a small slit that had opened in one of Ali’s gloves, making the damage worse. Then he brought the badly damaged glove to the referee’s attention. Dundee was told that a substitute glove wasn’t available, and the few seconds of delay helped Clay recover. He knocked Cooper out in the fifth round."

Another reason behind Dundee's triumphs was his ability to "read a room." "In the hours before Ali fought Foreman in Zaire in 1974 — the Rumble in the Jungle — Dundee noticed that the ring ropes were sagging in the high humidity. He used a razor blade to cut and refit them so they were tight, enabling Ali to bounce off them when Foreman unleashed his “anywhere” punches from all angles. Ali wore Foreman out, hanging back with the “rope a dope” strategy Ali undertook on his own, and he went on to win the bout."

Thinking on your feet, reading the room, and being smart enough to do whatever it takes is what it takes to succeed in brutal businesses.

Like boxing.

And advertising.

20,000 brises.

2012-02-02T07:28:00.000-05:00

There's a slight article in today's "New York Times" about a man named Philip L. Sherman, a mohel (a practitioner of ritual Jewish circumcision) who since 1978 has performed over 20,000 circumcisions. You can read the article here: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/bringing-decades-of-experience-to-the-bris/?scp=1&sq=mohel&st=cse

As I head out this morning to yet another client meeting--I average, counting conference calls, probably ten a week--I think about performing 20,000 of anything. No, I haven't attended 20,000 client meetings. It just feels that way.

Nevertheless, I think there's something to be learned from Mr. Sherman.

Come prepared.

Don't kibbitz too much.

Cut fast and clean.

Shake hands.

Get the fuck out.

Collecting.

2012-02-01T13:58:00.000-05:00

Years ago, and at a very young age, I worked on a new business pitch of some magnitude and was selected to present the work to the client. I flew out to Indianapolis with my boss, the eponymous co-owner of the agency, and a senior account person.

While on the plane I began writing in a notebook notes to myself that would explain what I wanted to say. I put enough thought into this as to keep my notes short and bulleted. The account guy saw me writing and when we got into the rental car he asked me what I had been doing.

Collecting my thoughts, I answered.

He said, I've never seen a creative do that before.

Today we live in an era in which we employ Weapons of Mass Deckstruction.

Every little movement in something as important as new business seems to be scripted and choreographed and rehearsed.

We lay on page after page of powerpoint.

We positively swill in our own importance.

Me, personally, I still prefer a few sentences typed out--not late at night, not during the heat of the moment--that tell the story.

Rejection continued.

2012-02-01T09:09:00.001-05:00

I wrote a few days ago about a poet, editor, playwright named George Hitchcock who gained some notoriety through his poetry magazine "Kayak." The sources of his fame were two-fold. One, he published some of the leading poets of the second half of the 20th Century and two, he rejected poetry submissions with a wit and bite that is rare in these days of politesse.

I ordered last week and it arrived last night a book on Hitchcock that included a passel of his rejections. They're dark, most of them, but somehow brightened my lousy mood.

Reflections on the Oscars and truth.

2012-01-31T09:21:00.000-05:00

The Academy Awards--the Oscars--are just about upon us with nearly, it seems, every movie trumpeting its
nominations and hailing itself as one of the decade's best (even though we are but two years into this decade.) With this spate of awards shows looming, I got to wondering what were 'best pictures' like through the ages? What, if anything do they have in common with the best of today? And finally, would they, given our current mania for "cuttiness" be watchable today?

I decided to order from Amazon the first Oscar winner for Best Picture, "Wings" which was directed by William Wellman in 1927. (Wellman went on to direct the original "A Star is Born," "Beau Geste" and one of my childhood favorites, "The Oxbow Incident," featuring evil incarnate, Jane Darwell, a compellingly laconic Anthony Quinn, not to mention young Henry Fonda and his sidekick, the somewhat dim Harry Morgan.)

"Wings" arrived on Friday and I watched it last weekend, all 139 minutes of it.

There is a tendency in our business to think that the present has no precedents and the past has no value. That we cannot learn, admire, marvel over things that went before. "Wings" belies those notions.

First off, it is a simple, seminal story of two boys and one girl (Clara Bow--the "It" girl.) Second, the action takes place in the heightened intensity of wartime. A good portion of the movie are some pretty stunning bi-plane dogfights (a bi-plane is an aircraft that has sex with both male and female planes) replete with color special effects enhancing the action.

Finally, there is love, laughter, the death of a hero. All the requisites that are resonant today.

I'll admit, I approach a movie like "Wings" with more than a little trepidation. I warn my wife away from the TV. "You probably won't like this," I tell her. I understand the pacing of movies from eight decades ago doesn't jibe with today's tastes. And all that.

That said, "Wings" was great. It was a little gung-ho about the glory of war for my tastes, but it was a good story, well told. And if you can imagine your father or grandfather who had probably rarely even seen a plane 85 years ago, watching aerial battles up close, you realize the movie was really onto something.

All this to say, as Sam sang in "Casablanca,"

"You must remember this
A kiss is still a kiss,
A sigh is just a sigh...
The fundamental things apply,
As time goes by...

"Moonlight and love songs, never out of date
Hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate
Woman needs man, and man must have his maid
That no one can deny...

"It's the same old story,
A fight for love and glory,
a case of do or die...
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by."

Summertime.

2012-01-30T13:52:00.000-05:00

Gershwin and DuBose Heyward's opera "Porgy and Bess" is slated to open soon on Broadway and accordingly, it's received a lot of coverage from "The New York Times."

Joe Nocera, a Times financial writer and op-editorialist wrote about it in his blog today, a follow-up from a piece he'd written a couple of weeks earlier. http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/summertime-rendered-25000-ways/?hp

Nocera writes, "no song has been recorded more than “Summertime,” which has been covered more than 25,000 times – by rockers, country singers, jazz musicians and blues artists."

He then gives us about 10 versions to sample.

I haven't been able to hear them all, but the three I did hear--Miles, Billie, and Ella and Louis represent the high-water mark of something.

If you want something you have to pay something.

2012-01-30T12:23:00.001-05:00

One of the universal truths of our species is that, since the beginning of time, we have always tried to get something for nothing.

Humanity has utilized slave labor since our beginnings.

Similarly, we have engaged in extractive activities since the beginning of time. Taking from the earth, consequences be damned.

I've often thought that the explosive growth of online advertising, syndicated content and the like was contingent of media metric magic. We've all sat in those meetings. Trillions of eyeballs promised to the advertiser for next to nothing.

Today in the world there is a hue and cry about Google and Facebook and the like taking our data and using it nefariously to sell us, track us and whatever else us.

There is also a mini-outrage over Apple products being made in China by labor that often works literally around the clock, or at least in 12 hour shifts, for $17/day. You know, roughly what the people who are outraged spend per diem on Starbucks.

Again, there is a similar tsimmes over oil and chemical companies who are using hydraulic fracturing in areas populated by people's country homes. People are protesting "fracking" (what could go wrong when you high-pressure pump toxic chemicals into the ground water) as they fill up their SUVs with cheap gas. God forbid they take the train.

The point is that few people, businesses, religions, or governments do anything for purely benevolent reasons.

The world hasn't really changed since we became erect.

It's pay as you go.

More New York memories.

2012-01-29T10:41:00.001-05:00

When I was a kid growing up in the 60s, the wheels had really fallen off the societal bus. If you look at world violence rates graphically, there is a fairly steady decline from World War II to present, except, of course, for bursts of violence like the explosions which began during our "Peace and Love" era of the 60s (through the 80s) when murder rates and other violent crime rates jumped through the roof.

I was mugged twice as a pre-teen or early teenager. Once two kids caught me on my bike as I rode through a rough neighborhood. I was able to startle one of them with a "karate chop" to the back of the neck and get away. The second time I took a shortcut on the way home from a friend's house, I cut through a Gristede's parking lot and a kid named Glen Hall came after me and any money I might have had on my person. Glen Hall was one of our neighborhood's few "negroes" and, as such, was considered bad and dangerous. I was able to commandeer a shopping cart and chase after him using it like a jousting lance and I got away from Glen with whatever change I carried. Later on when I was a 7th-grader Glen and I got into a fight--he pulled a knife on me--but I was able, somehow, to pin him to the ground before things were broken up. I think the fight, really, was over a nickel, or maybe a quarter.

We used to listen to the radio a lot in those days, primarily because we watched less television. After school we often went to Wilson's field, a large open lot covered in rocks and struggling grass where we would play whatever "ball" was in season--football when it was cold (we still had cold weather in those days) and baseball when it was warm. Usually one kid or another would bring a $3.99 transistor radio that you could buy at Korvette's, a discount store that was the Walmart of its day.

We would listen to music when we played, or the Yankees or Mets if they were playing a day game, which they did more often in those days.

There was a local manufacturer that made noodles called "Country Kitchen" that had a beautiful jingle that sounded like it might have been written and recorded by Harry Nilsson.
It went like this and was accompanied by a really wistful and beautiful melody:

"I was looking for a noodle
A different kind of noodle
That was golden right
Tastes so nice.
Then I found what I was after
With the taste as light as laughter…
Country Kitchen, pure egg noodle."

Despite the scrapes and bruises we got from playing ball, and the scrapes and bruises we got from neighborhood toughs, the world seemed an easier place than it seems now. We could get an ice cream cone for 17-cents and see a movie matinee for 50-cents.

Last night my wife and I treated ourselves to some frozen yogurt. Some teenagers came into the store after we did. One, with an ass as wide as the M-15 bus, ordered a banana split. She was charged $8.

Stop it.

2012-01-27T10:07:00.002-05:00

Below is an 145-word sentence from "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" by Laurence Sterne. Many people, and I am among them, consider the novel (which was one of the first ever written in English) to be one of the greatest novels ever.

"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me."

I'm not sure if people today can fathom a sentence of this length. If, in the "Interruption Era" we can unravel its meandering complexity.

One thing I am sure about, utterly and completely positive about is this: No one, no one, no one gains even a scintilla of value from a brand positioning statement that is 56 words long.

Rejection(s).

2012-01-26T09:09:00.001-05:00

I've been a bit under the weather of late. Fighting both a stomach virus and some long-running fatigue. I haven't been, as I usually am, bursting with energy. Perhaps the world is too much with me. Maybe I'm worried about my wife who has been afflicted with a bit of hearing loss. Or maybe the actual prospect of Newt Gingrich as president has so frightened me that I've crawled under a metaphorical rock.

But yesterday, I had a good day.

I was rejected three times.

Once, a short story I had written was turned down from a prestigious small press. That was followed by two other exogenous rejections.

Rejection, no matter how used to it you are, no matter how 'long the shot,' no matter how
trivial is never easy to take. It's no fun.

However, there is something reassuringly life-affirming about it.

It means you have tried something.

It means you put your ass out there.

It means you're challenging yourself.

That's only my point of view, of course.

You can reject it.

Help.

2012-01-25T16:05:00.003-05:00

I have often thought that my generation was the last where you could get rapped in the knuckles by your teacher (or your parents) for being a lousy speller. While I in no way condone corporal punishment--except between two consenting adults, of course--the state of our language is severely under duress.

I've just run across three indiscretions in short order on Linked In. All from people for whom communication, clear, cogent, intelligible communication is part of their job description.

I've been asked to accept an invitation from "an intergraded copywriter."

I've been told a friend is looking for "recommendations from her piers."

And the apotheosis from a young copywriter looking for a job: "____is a strategicly fun thinker with outstanding will power... Young and eager, ____ is climbing up the todum pole to a successful career in the ad world and strives to work with a team of intellegent left-brain thinkers..."

Showing up.

2012-01-25T09:12:00.001-05:00

As I've written about over the past few weeks, just about everyone in my agency is burrowed deep inside a World War I style trench, cowering for protection, covered in mud and filth, keeping their heads down and writing reviews.

Like most things in our technocratic age, questions are asked and answered in reviews so that they are as abstruse, obtuse, diffuse and confuse as possible. When I read reviews they make me think of my new "least favorite" politician, Newt Gingrich who calls, for example, Barack Obama the "food stamp president" because you can no longer call someone a nigger. Though the effect and purpose is the same.

In any event, having nearly finished writing my reviews, I am now reading reviews others have written. In other words, reviewing reviewers. Which, of course, begs the old Roman question "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who will guard the guards?

It occurs to me that maybe the best review you can possibly give is a version of the old Woody Allen line: "80 percent of success is just showing up."

Today, we are infected with choice and many people simply choose not to show up.

They turn up missing by attending and scheduling meetings that produce nothing but wind. They are absent when the phone rings and someone is looking for help. They are present when sweeping and grandiose proclamations are made but they're missing when the campaign needs to sold by dint of the small, but important pieces that bring it to life for the client.

Thomas Paine, the great essayist (today we would call him a motivational speaker) called such people "summer soldier(s) and ...sunshine patriot(s)..."

An ex-boss of mine called them--in a phrase I'll never forget--people with "Titanic attitudes and minnows in the engine room."

Woody Allen called them people who don't show up.

Spoken by a planner.

2012-01-24T16:20:00.001-05:00

"We need to do some talking where we just listen."

Sometimes you need a kayak.

2012-01-24T09:20:00.003-05:00

I just read a memoir by Roger Rosenblatt, "Kayak Morning." It's a rumination about the death of his 38-year-old daughter and the nature of grief.

We read and use phrases like "getting over grief," "coming to terms with grief," "making peace with grief," "learning to live with grief." Such phrases are well and good--they seem to make sense. That is, until you're actually grieving. Then, they have the emotional perspicacity of a Hallmark greeting card.

In "Kayak Morning," Rosenblatt introduced me to George Hitchcock, the editor of a small but prestigious poetry magazine called, as you might expect "Kayak." The journal was published for 20-years, 64 issues. At which point Hitchcock shut it down. "Any more," Hitchcock said "and it would risk seeming an institution. After that, ossification and rigor mortis.”

There was a motto that was printed with each issue of "Kayak." “A kayak is not a galleon, ark, coracle or speedboat. It is a small watertight vessel operated by a single oarsman. It is submersible, has sharply pointed ends, and is constructed of light poles and the skins of furry animals. It has never yet been successfully employed as a means of mass transport.”

In this era of fascist collaborationists, of insistent know-nothingisms, of pompous
pontificators, it's nice, for me anyway, to think of someone who did something by himself. The world is too much with us, and all that.

What no one talks about or laments in our open-work-plan, interruption-phreno-genic offices is the power of setting out on a spiritual kayak. Where nothing but heaven is above you and nothing but water below.

That might be when peace occurs and good work happens.

Career advice from Freeman Dyson (still working at 88.)

2012-01-23T09:13:00.002-05:00

Ever since I was a teenager and came across Freeman Dyson's long essays in "The New Yorker" on the horrible perils of nuclear holocaust, I have been a fan of his. When the reactionary Reaganites were telling us "everyone would survive if they had a shovel and enough dirt, I would always shake my head and say, first, did you read John Hersey's "Hiroshima"? and second, "Have you read Freeman Dyson?"

Dyson was everything I respected in a thinker. He stuck to no ideology. And he was unafraid (and still is) to take controversial positions. He's the rare scientist who thinks global warming isn't something we need worry about. You don't always have to agree with someone in order to admire and respect him. He also believes in the efficacy of nuclear energy and backs up his position with what seem to me to be fairly valid facts.

In any event, I've just come across a short piece about Dyson in "More Intelligent Life," the "life, style and culture" adjunct to "The Economist." In it, the 88-year-old Dyson is asked three questions:

(1) why he remained hard at work;

(2) what were his strengths and weaknesses now compared with earlier in his career; and

(3) what advice would he give to those who have been working for
(a) one year,
and (b) 30 years?

Here's the reply received by email the next day:

1. I continue working because I agree with Sigmund Freud’s definition of mental health. To be healthy means to love and to work. Both activities are good for the soul, and one of them also helps to pay for the groceries.

2. In my younger days my work as a scientist was deep and narrow. Now, as I grow old, my work grows broader and shallower. As a young man, I solved technical problems of interest only to a few specialists. As an old man, I write books about human affairs of interest to a broad public. In both halves of my life, I tried to make the best use of my limited abilities.

3.
(a). Advice to people at the beginning of their careers: do not imagine that you have to know everything before you can do anything. My own best work was done when I was most ignorant. Grab every opportunity to take responsibility and do things for which you are unqualified.

(b). Advice to people at the middle of their careers: do not be afraid to switch careers and try something new. As my friend the physicist Leo Szilard said (number nine in his list of ten commandments): “Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become.”

Something I've never been able to do.

2012-01-20T07:48:00.001-05:00

It's a new feature of Ad Aged, "Poetry Corner" where we lay down with iambs and meter not just our electricity but our feet. This is by e.e. cummings

let it go – the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise – let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go – the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers – you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go – the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things – let all go
dear

so comes love

Politics.

2012-01-18T09:47:00.001-05:00

Berlitz Advertising.

2012-01-18T08:55:00.004-05:00

I had a nice conversation with my eldest daughter this morning. It's always nice to witness cogency and intelligence before 8AM.

Sarah is 24 and a first-year Doctoral student going for her degree in Clinical Psychology. Her university adeptly seems to mix course work (theory) with clinical placement internships (practice.) Accordingly, Sarah is challenged with, say, learning something in a classroom on a Monday and then bringing that learning to bear with a client on a Tuesday.

It's a pretty grueling regimen. And Sarah, who is what some might regard as a 'Drama Mama' often feels the effects of her 70-hour work weeks.

There's not much I can say to her when she's feeling downtrodden. I usually just try to get her to take a step away from the ledge.

What I said to her this morning though seemed to work. It made me think, too.

"Essentially, you're learning a new language every term and forced to speak that language in your clinical placements."

She sighed heavily and (for once) agreed with me.

Then she asked, "How do you do it at work when you pitch a new piece of business? How do you know what makes a bank or a car or an air-conditioning unit 'different and better?' How do you know about the 'style' of the companies you're pitching? Do you hire category experts? I guess what I'm asking is, 'how do you learn their language?'

I took a deep breath.

"Well," I answered, "everybody wants everything in a rush. So, often, especially on pitches, we don't learn the culture of a company, their language. We speak in broken phrases. We emulate patterns we learned from other clients. Or we seek a universal language, an advertising 'Esperanto" I call 'Cooleranto.' We just try not to do something true, but something cool. We take a Berlitz course in our clients. We can find our way to a hospital or a toilet, but not much more. I think that's why most advertising sounds so phoney."

Thoroughly depressed at that point, I told Sarah I loved her and was proud she was pursuing her dream.

Thank god.

A first.

2012-01-17T18:08:00.005-05:00

Ever since I was a little boy and would go to 247 Park Avenue to visit my father at work, I've always wondered what it was like to operate one of the old timey elevators run, usually, by a dark man expertly handling a lever to make the elevator stop and go.

There are still a few buildings in New York that haven't been scraped and modernized and which haven't had their old elevators replaced by high-speed machines. I marvel at the men who run these boxes. They start and stop their car exactly on the floor requested. They seem to know exactly where they are in the building. They hardly have to look at the floor numbers as they chug by. They do it by feel.

The building I work in was never nice and by now it's probably 80 or 90 years old. It has three elevators. Two, the ones for passengers, are of the push button variety. There is nothing spectacular to report about these.

However, there's a third elevator, the freight, that is run by the Puerto Rican porter who keeps the building in its present state of architectural deshabille. Over the 27 months I've worked in this building I've come to know the porter. If I'm waiting in the lobby for a passenger elevator, he will often give me a "lift" in the freight.

He did today and I asked him if I could run the machine.

"No,"he said shaking his head.

But then as he shut the gate, he relented.

The lever is of the "dead man's brake" variety, like on the subway. If you stop holding the lever over to the left, the lever will spring to the center and the elevator will stop.

I pushed the lever over and counted up the floors, paying careful attention once I got to 10. (I work on 14 and there's no 13th floor.) I released the lever but was off by a couple of feet. I tried it a smidge. Again I was short.

"Line it up with this bar," he instructed.

I did and fairly well hit the mark.

I thanked him and got off on 14, having to step up only a couple of inches.

Running the elevator was a lot more interesting than the media meeting I was late to.

I can't write any more.

2012-01-17T13:03:00.005-05:00

OVER the past few weeks, as my wonderful younger daughter admonished, I've really been slacking on my blog. While I try to write every day, of late, I haven't felt like I have much to say. Usually, ideas find me when I think but lately if they've been knocking on more door, no one has been home.

Of course, my lack of ideas troubles me. Maybe it's a function (or lack of function) of my aging brain. Maybe its crenellations have smoothed. Maybe my synapses have withered. Maybe, thanks to the insistent dings, bings, bongs and pings that come from the various devices that I'm surrounded by have mitigated my brain function, have deteriorated my focus, have destroyed my whatchamacallit to such a degree that I can no longer write.

I'm sorry if I've been missing of late. I'm sorry if recent posts have sucked.

Let's just hope it's a slump. Not that I'm turning into a cretin.

Sorry.

2012-01-16T13:18:00.002-05:00

I just heard a report on the radio about a test given to four-year-olds here in New York City for entry into "Gifted and Talented" programs. Only children who score at or above the 90th percentile gain admission to such programs. The moderator asked why. The interviewee answered "Because they're gifted and talented programs."

What's happened in the world is that today everyone is "gifted and talented."

The media team, who can barely show up for meetings much less contribute original thinking, are told they're the agency equivalent of "gifted and talented." They're told they're "creative."

No.

Everyone is not gifted and talented.

Everyone is not a genius.

Everyone is not creative.

The new group think.

2012-01-16T06:27:00.004-05:00

One of the greatest frauds perpetrated by HR-"professionals" or Organizational Architects, or, simply the quacks and charlatans who issue proclamations from on-high is the notion of collaboration. You know, if we all sit together in a room, we'll get to a better place creatively than if we toil alone. If we work in a noisy, cluttered, chaotic workspace, a free-exchange of ideas will result, bettering our creative output. If no single person has responsibility, we all win.

Yesterday's "New York Times" has a long and important article that deflates these myths. It's called "The Rise of the New Group Think" and it's written by Susan Cain. You can read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?pagewanted=1&sq=brainstorming&st=cse&scp=1

Cain writes, "Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

"But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature."

That just about sums it up for me.

Don't make me sit in meetings which take away the time I need to actually think and, instead, demand that I think (for all) on demand. Don't make me sit out in the open where focus is often beaten by distraction. Don't tell me to collaborate when what you're really doing is watching.

This open plan, "let's all work together," bs is yet one more example of modern myopia. Let's do something completely different from how it's been done through all of recorded history--that'll work.

Leave me alone.

Karma.

2012-01-12T17:48:00.003-05:00

On Tuesday I had a fight with a cab driver. It doesn't happen often that I blow my stack but I did in cab 1 B 44. The fare was $10.40, I tossed him $11 and got out of his car and into another open cab I saw across the street.

Karma bit me in the ass.

I had left my iPhone in his cab.

Mutha fucker.

I did what I was supposed to do. With my near-photographic memory I had his medallion number and I called 311. They gave me the number of the garage he rented from. I reported the loss there.

Of course, I never heard back from the garage.

Instead the driver of 1 B 44 found my office number (I had a business card in my phone case) and called me.

Just now I ran out to 39th and 8th and met him. Of course it occurred to me that he was going to shoot me at close range in the face.

But instead, he handed me my phone.

I handed him $80.

Karma's a bitch.

Steve Hayden.

2012-01-11T09:18:00.003-05:00

I've been lucky in my career to have been close to some of the greatest creatives in the business.

I worked for Hall of Famers Ron Rosenfeld and Len Sirowitz. I worked for Amil Gargano and Mike Tesch. And while not Hall of Famers, I had my copy picked over and parsed by Harold Karp and Ed Butler. I worked for too short a time for Kirk Souder. And I partnered with the mercurial and brilliant Jeroen Boers and the simply brilliant and the brilliantly simple Tore Claesson.

But most of all, I got to sit with and talk to and love Steve Hayden.

Steve retired yesterday, after 18 years, from Ogilvy & Mather.

There's not enough I can say about the man.

Most of what he did, it seems to me, is believe in you.

I was new at Ogilvy and in a van with Steve heading out to location early one morning. He got a call on his cell phone from the client. Two hours before the shoot, they killed one of the spots we were supposed to be shooting.

He turned around to me and handed me his IBM Think Pad.

"Write a new spot," he said.

I did.

And 30 or 45 minutes later and with great trepidation I handed him his computer back with my script.

"Good. That's great." He laughed at my last line.

He got on the phone and read it to the client.

We shot the spot.

I've been a copywriter since 1982.

Thirty years.

I was never as good as I was when I worked for Steve.

'Tis the season.

2012-01-10T11:46:00.003-05:00

It's review season at my agency. And I have in my inbox requests for about 168 reviews, roughly half of them about account people.

I hate writing reviews. Usually because the "form" you're meant to complete was created by someone (or some committee) that has no understanding of how to do a job well. They essentially ask you to review a house painter based on his cooking ability.

In any event, I give you this, which I've been carting around for parts of four decades.

1. Be smart about everything. Be an expert in your client’s business. Be an expert in “agency mechanics”…Learn to listen.

2. Be 100% buttoned up. Get inside and control the “boiler room”…Plan for disasters…Proofread as if typos could cost you your job.

3. Be curious. Question everything and everyone. Get out of the office and look around. Learn from others.

4. Commit yourself to “original thinking.” Be more than an advertising mechanic. Set aside a part of every day to “blue sky” big thoughts. Be seen as one who can serve up fresh ideas.

5. Create your own opportunities. Don’t just look for “handouts.” Constantly do the little extras. Deliver products that are consistently excellent.

6. Gain respect of everyone around you. Expect that you will need to “win” support from everyone. Always recognize others when they do good work for you.

7. Learn to express yourself effectively. You will go nowhere if you can’t advocate ideas. Rehearse. Rehearse. Rehearse. Learn how to talk to different audiences. Always be enthusiastic.

8. Build a broad foundation early. In the beginning be a jack-of-all-trades. Get involved with everything. Go back to school. Never stop exploring.

9. Wash windows—willingly. Face it, every job comes with drudgery. Always volunteer to pitch in when asked. But, always look for ways to do dirty laundry as efficiently as possible.

10. Learn to manage your business well. Get early agreements on assignments. Always be realistic, honest. If you disagree, say so. Make clients a legitimate part of the team.

11. Smother your clients with care. Be in constant touch. Make them feel that you think of them often. Dream up reasons to gain broad access to key client contacts. Never neglect clients at lower echelons. Know the “big issues” on your clients’ minds at all times. Lead.

12. Treat your clients’ money as if it were your own. Show them that you are both fussy about quality and frugal. Don’t simply accept the cavalier attitudes of others. Give appropriate direction on cost parameters. Make people meet expectations.

13. Don’t be meek and nervous. If you do your homework you will succeed. Act with confidence. But if you don’t have answers don’t fake them. Remember, most people want you to succeed.

14. Develop your own ideas about how to be a good manager. Watch your supervisor and others. Prepare now to take on more responsibilities.

15. Constantly build trust. Be 100% reliable. Be 100% honest. Do what you commit to do 100% of the time. Be respected by 100% of the people with whom you work. Be nothing less than 100% professional.

We made the next round.

2012-01-09T10:18:00.001-05:00

On a new business pitch I helped out on.

We are speaking to the prospective client now, who began our conversation with this loaded phrase: "Thank you for your submission."

Agency leaders.

2012-01-09T07:56:00.005-05:00

The genesis of this blog was my constant rumination over the ossification of the American advertising industry. Having worked in traditional advertising, in direct and in digital, I thought, perhaps somewhat arrogantly, that I had a unique perspective on the failings, the group think, the myopia of Madison Avenue. The industry as a whole seemed to be an industry as a hole.

As this blog enters its fifth year, I still think about the parallels between Madison Avenue and the decrepitude of Detroit. But today I'll spend a few moments thinking about how, as an industry, we pick our leaders. For that, I think, we can learn something by looking at the Republican presidential candidates and their endless debating and posturing and mud-slinging as Republicans throughout America select a "winner" to face Obama.

There are some agency leaders we pick because they're like Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry. They look good on paper and we overlook their obvious shortcomings and wallow in with rose-colored infatuation and say "he's the one. He did such and such campaign for Pigeon Rights that won Gold at Cannes. He can help resurrect us from our current malaise."

Infatuation leaders usually last one to two years and then leave to pursue other opportunities or to spend more time with their families.

Then there are the agency leaders we pick because they're like Newt Gingrich. They sound smart. They are supremely sure of themselves and speak as if they have all the answers. They understand new media modalities and shifting paradigms. When we pick them we say, "He must be very smart because I don't understand a thing he says."

Blather leaders usually prosper. They're considered too smart to fire. They're too lofty to do any work. Blame, therefore, never attaches to them. So they usually hang on like a barnacle until they get a higher holding company job and sow confusion globally.

Third, there are the candidates who are like Santorum. They appeal to a small group of core agency leadership and reinforce that core's eccentric world view. They are hired because they have a transformational system that will roll back the clock to a time when agencies were profitable and could actually afford the rent on Madison Avenue offices. These candidates will "bring us back" to a time when agencies mattered.

I call these leaders "Cleaverites." After the Cleaver family in "Leave it to Beaver." They promise a technicolor black and white future. When they don't deliver, they rise. Because we like their vision so much.

Then there are agency leaders who are like Ron Paul. They are close to Cleaverites in that they've constructed an alternate reality for the world, but whereas Cleaverites are pinned to the past, these leaders appeal to the zany. Their world-system has no sense of history, its apocalyptic and evangelical. Agencies buy this sort of leader when they are so desperate they need to believe in an unhinged reality.

These are the Zanies. They usually last about a year then go to work for small media companies. They then declare that all that went before is dead and then they promote a new sort of channel that "will change everything." Not only do these people have no sense of history, they have little sense of reality.

Finally, for today, there are candidates like Mitt Romney. They are Zelig-like. Saying exactly what needs to be said at exactly the right moment. There is a subject-object split between their words and their deeds. But their malleability is their most persuasive selling-point. They are easy to buy.

I call these leaders the Blands. They are most successful agency heads. They take credit for the success of others and excoriate failures as not their fault.

Sensible.

2012-01-08T09:14:00.002-05:00

My exquisite younger daughter just admonished me, once again, not to be so "judgey." Oh, OK. I'll try not to be, but since it's the start of the new year, let me state some things I regard as truths, or facts, or common sense.

Shirt tails have been tucked in for almost as long as people have been wearing shirts. I am not being a hater. I don't understand what's wrong with tucking in.

Backs, arms, vaginas, necks, knuckles, forearms, thighs, abdomens, bosoms and their like are not meant to be tattooed. There's a fat man where we are staying who has tattoed across his back "The truth is the only way." I'm incapable of understanding this.

It reminds me of some graffiti found in Long Island scrawled presumably by a coven of middle-class teenage wikkan wannabees. "Satin Lives." It's just dumb.

Hats. Hats are to be worn outdoors in the winter. Your mother probably told you that you lose 40% of your body heat through your head. Don't wear wool pullovers in the summer. And don't pay more than $12 for one. If you do, you're a fool.

Finally, pants. They are to be worn above the buttocks. Not below. Buttocks were invented by Samuel Buttock in Lancastshire in 1754 for the sole purpose of holding up pants. Further, underwear, butt cracks, incipient pudendal regions are for the sanctity of your bedroom. Cover them.

The above is not be being judgey. It's me being sensible.

Ronald Searle, 1920-2011.

2012-01-04T18:50:00.003-05:00

When I was a kid there was nothing I wanted to do more in my life than be a cartoonist. One of the cartoonists I admired most was Ronald Searle, who died last Friday in France.

Searle did the opening credits of a movie I liked, "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines" and occasionally my father would bring home a copy of the English magazine "Punch" where I could also see Searle's work.

Years later, when I was close to 30, Searle published a book "To the Kwai — and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945." And "The New York Times" wrote a story of a reunion Searle had with a Japanese captor--a captain who allowed him to sketch clandestinely while he was a POW.

Searle's obituary is worth reading. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/arts/design/ronald-searle-british-cartoonist-dies-at-91.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

I particularly liked this part:

Mr. Searle became a satirist, he once said, because “in the late ’30s, things in general and politics in particular were no longer neatly divided into things black and white.”

“On top of this,” he added, “there was the irresistible impulse to draw. I cannot remember wanting to be anything else other than an artist.”

I reckon most people in advertising can relate to that--or some other--irresistible impulse to create.

The Four Questions.

2012-01-03T18:58:00.003-05:00

I'm on vacation and don't really have the time to "write." But yesterday's "Times" had a great article called "Even a Giant Can Learn to Run." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/business/how-samuel-palmisano-of-ibm-stayed-a-step-ahead-unboxed.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Palmisano&st=cse

The article tells of IBM's continued resurgence under the leadership of Sam Palmisano, their CEO.

I haven't time to go into depth, but it seems Palmisano boiled his guidance down to four questions. They're probably four questions that everyone should ask themselves everyday. And agencies too.

• “Why would someone spend their money with you — so what is unique about you?”

• “Why would somebody work for you?”

• “Why would society allow you to operate in their defined geography — their country?”

• “And why would somebody invest their money with you?”

Flying with Uncle Slappy.

2011-12-31T10:31:00.003-05:00

My wife, younger daughter and I are flying to the Cayman Islands for a week in the sun. Our flight connects through Miami, so we decided to fly down with Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie.

I got up early, 3:53 to be exact. Like my father before me (and, of course, like Uncle Slappy) I am a lousy traveler--neurotic about missing flights. Uncle Slappy was up in the kitchen drinking his coffee when I walked in just before 4.

"You slept in," the old man taunted.

"Morning Uncle Slappy. Can I make you an egg, some oatmeal?"

"Has the Times come yet?" Slappy asked.

Uncle Slappy has been staying with me since mid-December. He knows the paper doesn't arrive till around 8 on weekends.

"I thought maybe you told the girl we were leaving early and early she could come one day it wouldn't kill her."

"The Journal is here," I told him.

"Fascists." He muttered.

The ride to the airport wasn't any better. There were five of us so I had to hail a mini-van taxi so we could all fit. After waving a few cabs off, I got a creaky old Toyota Sienna.

My wife and daughter piled into the far back seat and I helped Sylvie and then Slappy into the car.

"It's like climbing Kilimanjaro," the old man said as he moaned into his seat.

It was a lot to take at 5:15 in the morning, fortunately he was quiet the rest of the way.

We checked in at Business Class, my wife being Executive Sapphire Diamond Platinum Elite, and Uncle Slappy as is his wont, kibbitzed with the woman behind the counter.

"Sir," she asked "would you prefer a window or an aisle?"

"I hope I'm flying a wide body," he answered. "And I'd like a seat near the stewardess."

The woman behind the counter ignored him, which was fine by me and Sylvie.

The flight took off and went off without incident.

After two weeks in New York we said goodbye to Slappy and Sylvie when we arrived in Miami. Cousin Dot was there to greet them at the gate.

"How was he," Dot took me aside to ask me.

"Same old Uncle Slappy," I answered.

We said in unison, "Thank god."

Some thoughts on the past and the future.

2011-12-29T09:12:00.005-05:00

It's the end of the year, the last day of work for most people in what has been a challenging 2011, or 5772, or 1432, or 4706 for a good portion of the world.

The economy and our industry seem mired waist deep in Big Muddy, to pilfer a phrase from the Vietnam era. Unemployment, cupidity and stupidity remain high. But nonetheless, we slog on.

I am reading right now, speaking of slogs, Steven Pinker's tome "The Better Angels of Our Nature, Why Violence Has Declined." It's an amazing book. It's generated reams of debate and discussion. It's been named a "New York Times" notable book of 2011 and from what I gather from my bookish friends, is an early favorite for one of the big prizes--a Pulitzer (Pinker has twice been a finalist) or even a National Book Award. You can read a fairly recent book review here. That is, if you're still awake and reading this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-by-steven-pinker-book-review.html?scp=7&sq=steven%20pinker&st=cse

Pinker's point in all this is that the world is actually getting better. Less violent. More liberal. More livable. Fairer.

He backs up this seemingly preposterous assertion with oceans of data, charts and graphs up the yingyang and a logic that even my harridan of a mother couldn't unravel.

Now, while I'm thinking of macro trends, let's turn to 2012 but first think back a bit more on 2011.

Most thinking people would agree that over the last 50 years or so, our economy has transformed from one in which we made "stuff" to one in which we make "information." The great five-mile-long assembly lines of the Willow Run Ford plant (that saved democracy it can be argued by producing a B-24 bomber every hour) are closed. The outskirts of just about every major city in America are girded with shuttered factories and abandoned warehouses. Waste paper, I'm told, is America's largest export.

The same trend has afflicted the ad industry. From a highpoint in the 60s and declining since then, the ad industry made "stuff." We made TV commercials and print ads and radio spots. We made the billboards that dotted American roadways. We produced, aired, printed, propagated, promulgated.

Then, as manufacturing stuff declined, we switched to generating "information." Meetings grew in importance. Decks became our shibboleth. Planning became our product. Clients paid for this. But increasingly questioned what they were buying. How did a deck, or a meeting or a "strategy" advance their ball?

As you might expect from a cockeyed optimist like me, there are glimmers of hope. Manufacturing is rebounding in the States. Factories--albeit ones run by robots--are slowly being built. Old ones are being reclaimed and repurposed. It's not "morning again in America" but by fits and starts, we are beginning to understand that as a nation you can't just be a pontificator. You have to make stuff.

Perhaps we will see a resurgence of "stuffiness" return to advertising, too. A premium placed not on what you say or "deck" but on what agencies make or do.

Maybe the pendulum is beginning to swing back from theory to practice.

Maybe we will find a proper heading again.

--
Thanks to my 10101101 friends at Sell! Sell! for the wonderful cartoon pasted above. Theirs is an excellent blog.

http://sellsellblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/fifty-years-of-progress-in-advertising.html
--
And here's to a "Stuffy" New Year. If we make stuff, it will be a Happy one.

Joseph Farrell, 1935-2011.

2011-12-27T07:02:00.003-05:00

Over the long weekend there was an interesting obituary in "The New York Times" of Joseph Farrell, a market researcher and film producer. You can read the whole obit here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/business/joseph-farrell-dies-at-76-used-market-research-to-shape-films.html?hpw

Farrell, who had been an executive at the research company Louis Harris is credited with making the movie "Fatal Attraction" a success. As originally shot by Adrian Lyne, the Glen Close character killed herself--conducting ritual suicide to the music of "Madame Butterfly."

Farrell researched the movie and concluded "this is a great movie until the end..." and "They didn’t want to see her [Close] do herself in...They wanted to see her done in.”

Adrian Lyne reshot the ending. "In the revision, Ms. Close’s character and her paramour, played by Michael Douglas, have a violent struggle in which she is nearly drowned in a bathtub and is finally dispatched by a gunshot fired by his wife (Anne Archer)."

The movie went on to gross more than $300 million worldwide.

Of course, attitudes about research and its effects on creativity vary--in both the film business and ours. The "Times" reports:

"Whether Mr. Farrell’s influence was positive or malign was debated. Ron Shelton, the director of “Bull Durham” and “White Man Can’t Jump,” complained to The Los Angeles Times in 1992 that Hollywood’s reliance on marketing “contributes to the lowest-common-denominator mentality and the proliferation of formulaic movies and genres.”

A walk with Uncle Slappy.

2011-12-25T18:39:00.006-05:00

Uncle Slappy, thank god, is about as spry and active as an 85-year-old can be. Not only is he still as sharp as a tack, he thinks nothing of taking the elevator downstairs to the health club in our building and working out for 20 minutes or so on the stationary bike.

"The bike is good enough for me," the old man told me. "Not like that meshuggenah epileptical."

"Elliptical, Uncle Slappy."

"Whatever," Slappy replied, pedaling a bit faster through his laugh line.

Despite working out in the morning, Uncle Slappy announced after lunch that "he had spilkas. Ants in his pants."

Usually when Uncle Slappy needs a walk, we head over to the promenade just a block from our apartment. It's as sylvan a walk you can get it the city with sweeping views of the East River and the Hell Gate and Triborough bridges. Today, however, we piled into a taxi and headed over to New York's newest park, the High Line.

Slappy had never been to the High Line. It was railroad tracks when he was young and derelict most of his middle and old ages. Slappy eschewed the elevator at 23rd Street and braved the 27 steps (he counted each one) at 22nd. I give the old man credit. He wasn't even winded when we reached the modest summit.

We walked south from 22nd toward Gansevoort, strolling slowly, watching other walkers. At around 15th Street we noticed a huge and ugly billboard fouling the beauty of the scene. It was advertising a "Gentleman's Club" called "Scores."

"Those are no gentlemen who go there, to that Scores," said Slappy, "And those are no ladies."

We looked at the billboard for a second when Slappy noticed that some clever graffiti artist had climbed up the sign and bearded one of the ladies, subtly and well.

"In my day, we had show girls but show girls didn't have beards," said Slappy. "Not even mustaches."

We walked a few blocks further, then descended to street level and took a taxi home.

Slappy went to lay down. He's still sawing wood in the guest room.

Uncle Slappy gets a gift.

2011-12-22T20:14:00.003-05:00

Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie arrived from Boca last week ostensibly to celebrate Hanukkah with us. Tonight is night three of a promised eight nights and while I love Slappy--he is after all my father's brother--I can clearly understand why my wife has lately been rolling her eyes--even more than usual.

The truth of the matter is, Slappy and Sylvie should probably never have left New York for Florida. I think they felt they had to. That it was some obligatory journey they had to make like Muslims to Mecca. In any event, Boca's been no Mecca for them and they seem to be spending more and more time in our guest room and less and less in their two-bedroom condo not far from the beach.

We've been renovating the room over the last six months and unfortunately the painters had to come today to finish their work. Uncle Slappy and Sylvie don't like to complain but the smell of the paint is a little much. Nevertheless, we've thrown open the window, turned on a fan and given the place a good airing out. It's a little dusty, but I'm sure Slappy and Sylvie will sleep like logs.

On Hanukkah, it's traditional each night to exchange small gifts. Nothing lavish, certainly like nothing you'd find in the Neiman-Marcus catalog, but, instead, little tokens to show you care.

I took the train downtown after work today and bought Uncle Slappy a baseball cap from Sammy's Roumanian Steak House--one of the last of the old Jewish Restaurants in New York. I also bought for him a quart of kasha varnishkas with onions and mushrooms with the gravy in a separate container so things don't get soggy.

We lit the menorah this evening and I gave Slappy his gifts, wrapped.

I've known the old man my entire life but tonight I really struck a chord. He unwrapped the hat first and quickly put it on, not even taken off the tags. Then he opened the container of kasha varnishkas. His eyes suddenly became as big as kreplachs.

"For me you got," he said, "kasha varnishkas from Sammy's?"

"For you, Uncle Slappy," my wife answered.

"A fork please, you'll give me." And he dug right into the container.

I think I saw a tear in his eyes.

And it wasn't from the onions.

The Availability Heuristic.

2011-12-22T10:19:00.005-05:00

Right now I'm reading two-time Pultizer-finalist Steven Pinker's new book "The Better Angels of Our Nature, Why Violence Has Declined."

It's a tough book to read. Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard and he's not above getting a little technical and statistical for a "lay-reader" like myself. Still, the reviews and praise this book received upon publication was so fulsome that I bought it the day it came out.

According to people who know about these things, "Better Angels" is on the inside track to win perhaps the 2012 National Book Award and the 2012 Pulitzer. I read a lot of books that have won such awards and winning them is not like winning a daytime Emmy or even a Clio. The quality is pretty high.

Pinker's book analyzes about 6,000 years of human history and shows that, contrary to how we all feel, we are currently living in the least violent period in human history.

Here's a bit from what I read last night that I think has bearing on our industry today.
He says, in a section called "Was the 20th Century Really the Worst?" "The twentieth century was the bloodiest in history" is a cliche that has been used to indict a vast range of demons, including atheism, Darwin, government, science, capitalism, communism, the ideal of progress, and the male gender. But is it true? The claim is rarely backed up by numbers from any century other than the 20th, or by a mention of the hemoclysms (blood floods) of centuries past. The truth is that we will never really know which was the worst century, because it's hard enough to pin down death tolls in the 20th century, let alone earlier ones...."

Now, here's the part that has a bearing on what we say and do in advertising and it involves a concept propagated by Nobel-Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky. It is the notion of "the availability heuristic." In short, "the easier it is to recall examples of an event, the more probable people think it is."

So, we think of the 20th century as the bloodiest because it has the most bloodshed that we remember.

Likewise, we issue proclamations like "nobody watches TV," or "mobile websites are vital to a brand's success," or "Facebook 'likes' are the new currency" because they're the latest things we remember seeing, hearing or experiencing. They may have no relation to reality other than "recency."

A POV. Revised.

2011-12-21T15:10:00.004-05:00

I was asked a brief while ago to lend my considerable heft and gravitas and help guide a pitch. Much of my complaints about meetings, posturing, empty-headed jargon was propelled by my experience on this assignment.

But now, with hours to go, another POV emerges. The whirlwind has slackened. The tornado is now only gale-force. The jabbering is abating. Individual specialists are sitting at their desks and doing what they do.

It's a nice thing when professionalism takes over a process. When muscle memory of how things should be done cancels out megalomania. When people zero in on their strengths and do the work they should have been doing all along.

Years ago as I was leaving Ogilvy, my boss and mentor said something to me that I think about almost every day. "George," he said, "You're never going to be happy because you get places too fast and grow frustrated with the pace of everyone else coming along."

That's the trouble with things like pitches.

Doing the work is not that hard.

Dealing with all the meandering, the waffling, the inability to make decisions is.

Advertising advice from Holden Caulfield.

2011-12-21T09:08:00.004-05:00

As 2011 draws to a close (you could shoot a cannonball through my office right now and not hit any living thing but maybe a rat or two) I started thinking about what would make 2012 a better year.

The first thing that came to me was a quotation by Holden Caulfield from "The Catcher in the Rye." Obviously he isn't talking about advertising but, nevertheless, there's a lot of wisdom contained below.

"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddamn stupid, useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They'd get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life."

First, we could improve 2012 by having "fewer goddamn stupid, useless conversations." Take the time to coalesce your thoughts before you "think out loud." Actually, think before you speak. Actually, don't speak unless you have something to say.

Second, "write it on a piece of paper." In other words, commit. Put something down. Put some skin in the game. In advertising we make things. We do not merely speculate. Grow some balls.

Third, "I'd be through with having conversations..." Our daily routine should be about creating work not creating meetings. Meetings are not our reason for being, work is. So stop booking meetings to bring yourself up to speed or to have the "group" do the thinking you were supposed to do.

I'm sure there's more we could do to make 2012 better.

We could not interrupt someone when they're typing.
We could not book meetings from 12-2 and not supply lunch.
We could show up on time.

But this would be a good start.

A meeting is not a solution.

2011-12-20T09:49:00.002-05:00

In the days before Microsoft Outlook ruled our lives, we did not start our days by printing out a Microsoft-generated schedule of our meetings. In fact, if a meeting was needed, a "secretary" would walk over to your desk and say, "Steve and Harold want to see you guys at 2." We would show up at 2 and chat.

Today, we live in a meeting-centric universe. And meetings have become conflated with work. Specifically, there are hordes of people, yes, hordes, who define their jobs by the meetings they make.

Meetings, to bastardize Protagoras, become the measure of all things.

There are meetings to discuss things that were discussed at previous meetings. Meetings to set up subsequent meetings. Meetings labelled "work sessions." Meetings to discuss the status of various projects. Meetings to discuss schedules.

Setting up a meeting is not advancing the ball.

All meetings do is generalize responsibility so that no one is responsible.

It's a couple days before we have a couple days off.

Vacation can't come soon enough.

Kim Jong Il. Some memories.

2011-12-20T07:34:00.006-05:00

This happened 25 or 26 years ago, yet I remember it like it happened yesterday. I was sitting with my partner, Craig, in my office. We were just coming off the high of winning a raft of awards for a small fast-food chain called El Pollo Cubano in which we named their new fish sandwich "the Fidel o' Fish." The sandwich was a huge hit and Craig and I were riding high. I wrote about it some years ago and you can read it here: http://adaged.blogspot.com/search?q=Fidel

Now we were charged with bringing El Pollo Cubano's new Korean BBQ fish sandwich out of the test kitchen and right into the very fabric of American culture. This was to be more than the introduction of just another sandwich. We knew we needed to start a movement. We needed to synch with and have an impact on popular culture.

Craig was flipping pencils up at the ceiling when the phone rang. I picked up the Ameche and heard a crackling on the other end of the line. "Hold please for the great and exalted leader of all Koreas."

I snickered and just about put down the blower when I heard a heavily-accented voice on the line.

"This is Kim-Jong-Il. It would do me a great honor to have, like my comrade Fidel, a sandwich named after me."

Apparently having an eponymous sandwich was now a mark of honor among the world's dictators. I could see Tito Taters. Noriega Nachos. And of course, fish and Gorbachips.

I put the phone on speaker. Craig took over.

"We shall do our best, Exalted One" my partner intoned.

Then we heard a peremptory click from Pyongyang.

I think I was the one who said it, though Craig swears it was him.

"The Kim Jong. The Il-lest Korean Barbecued Chicken."

We ran that up the client's flagpole and in a few short weeks, we had a hit on our hands.

We tried phoning the Exalted One, but could never get through to the North.

I'll miss you, Big Guy. I'll miss you.

Katz's.

2011-12-19T09:19:00.002-05:00

Years ago I worked for a brilliant and eccentric Creative Director at Ally & Gargano called Ed Butler. Ed was like a lot of successful people in the agency business. He was incredibly passionate about advertising. In fact, often when Ed saw an ad he really liked, he would find out who created it and phone them with his compliments.

Today, I came across some copy on Katz's Deli's web site. I think it's pretty damn good.

"Hanukkah

The same thing happens at the big Hanukkah celebration every year. Someone, maybe your grandma, your mother or whoever wears the apron in your family, is stuck cooking for the big Hanukkah meal instead of spending time with the family. After finally having brought out the latkes, knishes and the rest of the meal, he or she sits down and tries to enjoy a few spare moments with the family. But you can see in that face with the frustrated look of someone already thinking about doing dishes. Why should a loved one be slaving away in the kitchen? It defeats the whole purpose of Hanukkah.

You can see the problem. Maybe you have even heard the complaints. Rather than commandeering the kitchen like a pirate (watch them look over your shoulder), you should sweep in with food. You will be more like a superhero (cape is optional). Granted, few places make food appropriate for Hanukkah (although there is a lot of Chinese food options for Christmas), and you sure as hell can’t insult the cook by fetching food from your corner bodega.

Only Katz’s Deli will be worthy of the apron. We’ve been at the table as a family for over 123 years. That’s more than 963 days of Hanukkah. That’s a lot of latkes. Our legendary meats will kill the worries that occur when a cook relinquishes the kitchen. You may even transform your cook into an animated conversationalist (or chatterbox). But other than being designated the best daughter, brother, step-son or niece, think about the jealousy you’ll engender from the rest of the family. That’s its own reward. You always were the smart one anyway.

The rest is pretty easy. Place an order. Pick it up or we’ll ship it to you. We prepare it (pastrami, corned beef, rugalach, etc.) and you take the credit.

The dishes, however, are up to you."

Time frames.

2011-12-19T08:46:00.003-05:00

About two weeks ago I went to a symposium at the Times Center which featured economic historian Carmen Reinhart. Moderator Thomas Friedman asked Reinhart to speculate on the economy in the first six months of 2012. Reinhart took the question, slowly closed her eyes for a moment and then answered. "I am an historian. I don't work in six-month time frames. That's less than a blink of an eye. I deal in 60 or 70-year sweeps."

I've been thinking about Reinhart's statement since I heard it.

Lately at work we are creating voluminous decks on our "Facebook strategy." These are intelligent and well thought-out and the product of people who really know how Facebook is being used today. These decks show how people can connect, share and form communities on Facebook. They are the stuff are dissertations. Gems of insight, data visualization and vision.

But there's a problem.

We are looking at the future in a six-month time frame. We are assuming an orderly, predictable universe without breakthroughs, without disasters, without upsets.

Only five years ago or so it looked like Lonely Girl 15 was going to take over the world of advertising. Today, Facebook is ascendant. Ascendant though no one I personally know uses Facebook the way decks say people do.

Tomorrow, however, who knows?

Maybe Facebook will elect presidents, find spouses for the lovelorn and build potent brands that would make Steve Jobs envious.

Maybe in three-years-time, Facebook will be on life support or dead.

The point is, no one knows.

We need to look at the proper time frame.

Uncle Slappy on Marriage.

2011-12-18T10:31:00.003-05:00

I suppose it's a holdover from another, more decorous era but "The New York Times" still dedicates about eight pages in its Sunday Style section to announcements of engagements and wedding. For as long as I know him (which is my entire life) Uncle Slappy has been reading these pages and commenting as only he can.

He started with a linguistic thrust like Errol Flynn in one of those old swashbuckling movies.

"Everyone talks about gay marriage," Slappy began. I put down my coffee waiting for the punchline. "I'm tired of all the coverage. Gay marriage discussed in the Senate. Gay marriage discussed by the ferstunkenah Republicansches. Gay marriage this, gay marriage that."

"Well, it's a very important issue to some," I temporized.

"Gay marriages, fine" he continued. "What about morose marriages? That's the real issue. Almost everyone I know has a morose marriage. 55 years Sylvie and I are married. She still doesn't know what size spoon I like to eat my honey nut with."

I grabbed the sports section and left the old man alone in the kitchen.

Joe Simon, 1913-2011.

2011-12-16T16:21:00.004-05:00

Joe Simon, who created the comic book hero Captain America died on Wednesday in New York. You can read his obituary here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/books/joe-simon-a-creator-of-captain-america-is-dead-at-98.html?hpw

I loved comic books when I was a kid and still, on rare occasions read them today. I used to love Captain America when I was about 12. This was during the peak of American involvement in Vietnam, when our country seemed to be crumbling, and there was something reassuring about the comic. What's more, comics in those pre-inflationary days cost 12-cents. I had a paper route, and could buy eight a week for less than a dollar. My brother did the same. We were careful to avoid getting doubles. These comics were much of our education growing up, though my brother is a lawyer and wouldn't admit that now.

In any event, this is the part I really like from Simon's obit:

Simon "moved to New York, where his first job was for Paramount Pictures, retouching still photographs of movie stars. 'I retouched some of the most famous bosoms in motion pictures — Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard and Dorothy Lamour,' he wrote. 'Good bosom men were considered experts and got lots of work. I could hold up a sagging bust line with the best of them.'”

Hello, sports fans.

2011-12-16T14:27:00.004-05:00

I just happened upon a list drawn up by ex-Major League baseball player, pitcher Don Carman. Carman pitched for 10 major league seasons for the Philadelphia Phillies, the Cincinnati Reds and in the junior circuit, the Texas Rangers. When he wound up his career he had lost one more game than he had won.

It seems that even a mediocre pitcher like Carman was still beset by sports reporters after the game, so in order to avoid having to answer their banal stock questions, he posted the following list on his locker:

"1. I'm just glad to be here. I just want to help the club any way I can.
2. Baseball's a funny game.
3. I'd rather be lucky than good.
4. We're going to take the season one game at a time.
5. You're only as good as your last game (last at-bat).
6. This game has really changed.
7. If we stay healthy we should be right there.
8. It takes 24 (25) players.
9. We need two more players to take us over the top: Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig.
10. We have a different hero every day.
11. We'll get 'em tomorrow.
12. This team seems ready to gel.
13. With a couple breaks, we win that game.
14. That All-Star voting is a joke.
15. The catcher and I were on the same wavelength.
16. I just went right at 'em.
17. I did my best and that's all I can do.
18. You just can't pitch behind.
19. That's the name of the game.
20. We've got to have fun.
21. I didn't have my good stuff, but I battled 'em.
22. Give the guy some credit; he hit a good pitch.
23. He, we were due to catch a break or two.
24. Yes.
25. No.
26. That's why they pay him _____ million dollars.
27. Even I could have hit that pitch.
28. I know you are but what am I?
29. I was getting my off-speed stuff over so they couldn't sit on the fastball.
30. I had my at 'em ball going today.
31. I had some great plays made behind me tonight.
32. I couldn't have done it without my teammates.
33. You saw it... write it.
34. I just wanted to go as hard as I could as long as I could.
35. I'm seeing the ball real good.
36. I hit that ball good.
37. I don't get paid to hit."

What occurred to me when I read this is how we in advertising can likely come up with similar lists. One set of lists would pretty much cover any meeting you might be forced to attend.

1. We're trying to start a conversation about the brand.
2. It's part of an integrated ecosystem.
3. We need to put the consumer in the center of things.
4. We're going to own the color blue.
5. Media has some slides on that.
6. This game has really changed.
7. We want a clean, simple, uncluttered layout.

And so it goes.

Please stop sharing.

2011-12-16T12:44:00.003-05:00

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for "The New York Times" and a National Book Award winner for his brilliant account "The Worst Hard Time," the account of "Okies" who didn't leave the Dust Bowl when the Great Depression (the last one, not the current one) struck.

Today he has a wonderful op-ed in the digital paper called "Please Stop Sharing." I feel compelled to repeat that title in all caps. PLEASE STOP SHARING. You can read his thoughts here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/please-stop-sharing/?hp

There's a lot I like about Egan's piece, here are a few selections from it:

"...there is only one difference between the knuckleheads of yore — me, for example — who did numerous stupid things between the onset of puberty and a late adolescence lasting to nearly 30, and those Twit-iots of the 21st century.

"And that is technology. Facebook, Twitter, cell phone text messages and palm-size appliances yet to sprout from Apple’s labs allow all of us to be banal in real time."
--
"People I once admired, even looked up to — smart, literate, funny folks — have gone down several notches in my estimation after they decided to reveal their every idiotic observation via Twitter."
--
"I cheered the news from my colleague Jenna Wortham this week that the march of Facebook into every facet of our lives has slowed at last. Of course, with 200 million active users in the United States, Facebook has won the war. It’s all over but the arguing among corporate overseers about how to divvy up our private information for profit..."
--
"The imperative of Facebook — maximum exposure of the personal “brand” — is by itself a form of poison to lasting relationships. It’s hard enough trying to stay close to say, five good friends. Why have surface relationships with a hundred of them?"
--
Read the whole article.

You might even want to share it.

Uncle Slappy and the mushroom barley.

2011-12-16T08:37:00.005-05:00

With Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, beginning next week, Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie pulled into town last night. I was working late and unable to meet their train from Florida at Penn Station but somehow my favorite octogenarians made it into a cab and up to my apartment.

Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie reached my apartment before I did last evening. Fortunately I had left my house keys with the doorman and they let themselves in. When I arrived home around 9, they were sitting in the guest room--which my wife and I are in the process of redecorating--in virtual darkness.

"Aunt Sylvie, Uncle Slappy. Why are you sitting in the dark?"

"There's just the overhead," Slappy said "you are missing some bulbs."

"Why didn't you turn on the lamp," I asked.

"What's there to see? Aunt Sylvie I've been looking at for 55 years."

I knew enough to change the subject.

"Have you eaten?" I asked, knowing that talk of food was always fertile ground.

"Sandwiches I packed for the ride," Sylvie said. "But Mr. Big Mouth finished his before we hit Georgia."

"It's a 24-hour trip by train," I reminded them. "You haven't eaten since yesterday?"

"Yesterday, schmesterday," rejoined Slappy with one of his trademark dismissals. "When you're my age, the days all run together."

"Let me get you some..."

Slappy cut me off.

"Mushroom barley would be nice. Not too hot so that it burns. And four saltines."

Slappy has, I knew, a weakness for mushroom barley and I had therefore gotten some at Park East, a kosher grocery on 2nd and 84th. I microwaved a bowl for he and Aunt Sylvie.
They shuffled their way into my eat-in kitchen and sat down. I brought the soup to them.

Slappy, as he's been doing for nearly nine decades blew on it.

"Not too hot, is it?" the old man asked.

"No, it's just the way you like it Uncle Slappy. And," I said bringing over a plate with a short stack of saltines, "your crackers."

"Low sodium?" he asked.

"Of course."

Uncle Slappy dipped his spoon in the mushroom barley like a surgeon making the first cut. He blew at the spoon, then tasted the soup.

"Ach, you microwaved," he asked.

"Yes, Slappy. I zapped it."

"It's not good hotting with a microwave." He ate slowly and deliberately two saltines. Then he got up, left the kitchen and went to sit alone in the dark.

A note from Harper Lee.

2011-12-15T12:28:00.001-05:00

I don't usually do this but I am incapable of topping or adding to a post I just found here: http://www.abebooks.com/blog/index.php/2011/12/14/letter-of-advice-from-harper-lee/

"Letter of Advice from Harper Lee

"I love stories like this. People can sometimes go out of their way to be so lovely. This must have made that one reader’s whole month.

"In 2006, a young reader who loved the book To Kill a Mockingbird wrote a letter to 85-year-old author Harper Lee, in the hopes she would send him back a signed photo of herself.

"While Lee did not grant the photo request, she did respond, personally, in handwriting, and offered him life advice, instead:

“06/07/06

Dear Jeremy

I don’t have a picture of myself, so please accept these few lines:

As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don’t think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, “I’m probably no better than you, but I’m certainly your equal.”

(Signed, ‘Harper Lee’)”

"What an incredibly lucky fan. Not only did she give him some beautiful, sound advice, but frankly, Harper Lee’s signature usually costs quite a bit."

All my life's a circle.

2011-12-15T10:46:00.000-05:00

Hedy, not Hedley, Lamarr.

2011-12-15T07:11:00.004-05:00

There's a new book out by Pulitzer-winner Richard Rhodes on the surprising life of Austrian-emigre and film siren Hedy Lamarr (not Hedley Lamarr.) It's called "Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World." And you can read the review here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/books/hedys-folly-by-richard-rhodes-review.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=hedy%20lamarr&st=cse

Louis Mayer, head of MGM called Lamarr “the most beautiful girl in the world.” I've always been more inclined toward Rita Hayworth or Madeliene Carroll, but why quibble over callipygian peaks? In any event, Lamarr was also an accomplished inventor and during WWII, invented a remote control torpedo, a precursor to today's spread spectrum technology.

But here's the part of the review I really liked, a beautiful last paragraph:

"Lamarr longed for people to see her as more than another sultry face. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she once said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Concrete.

2011-12-15T06:31:00.003-05:00

Not all that terribly long ago I was the head of the flagship office of a large digital agency. I guess because they paid me a lot of money management felt the need to punish me periodically by making me attend two-day symposia led by HR. I've been to a dozen or so of these brain-drains over the years. They always leave me feeling homicidal.

This particular one was centered around, it seemed to me, being concrete. Concrete. That was the word they used. And they used it as a pejorative. They meant rigid, hard-assed and unyielding. These attributes were, according to the outside consultant who ran the sessions, bad things. We should instead be welcoming, open to all points of view and work styles, and we should seek a sort of ethereal amity--the agency equivalent, I suppose, of rainbows and unicorns.

Right now at work I am spending a few spare hours a week helping out on a new business pitch. Just about every day some producer or another schedules a two-hour "touch-base" or "work session" where about eleventeen-dozen fairly high-paid people crowd into a too-bright conference room and stare at their handhelds.

What I've noticed in these meetings is that everyone is HR-correct. No one is concrete. No one comes in with a thought, a fact, a thorough reading of the potential client's annual report.

Yesterday I brought in two well-written manifestos. Two paths I think we could chase down to get to a tone, a feeling, a point of view.

I was concrete. I did something. I put thoughts on paper.

One of the eternal debates in advertising is whether or not we are in a service business. You hear it all the time, usually from account people or brainwashed creatives.

No.

We are in a product business. We make communications that transform businesses. That's our product. It's that simple.

If you don't come into a meeting with something real, something concrete, stay home.

Truths.

2011-12-14T09:15:00.003-05:00

As long-time readers (if there are any) of Ad Aged know, I am a nut about old movies. This is not because I am living in the past. It is because I find moments of truth, humanity and wisdom in them that I seldom see in newer works.

Jean-Pierre Melville's 1956 movie "Bob le Flambeur" starring Roger Duchesne had one such seminal moment. Bob is an aging crook looking to get out of debt and to make one more killing before he retires to a life of leisure.

Bob is "too old for this" and he knows it. He is staring down the barrel of his own mortality. It's a painful moment for him. An admission that he's lost his looks, his physicality, his elan. Melville communicates all this in about 48 frames of film. Bob, getting dressed in front of a mirror closes up on his face. He is immaculately groomed, ready to face the world. Then, just before he leaves the mirror, he pinches his throat and wiggles an inch or two of excess skin, skin he never had before. That's it for Bob. That excess skin defines his destiny. There's no escape from it.

Another such moment I love is from Ernst Lubitsch's small 1937 comedy "Angel" which featured a drop dead gorgeous Marlene Dietrich, the great and under-rated Herbert Marshall and the greater and still more under-rated Melvyn Douglas.

Lubitsch was the master of the small cinematic touch that conveyed big meaning. In "Angel" Dietrich is married to Marshall but is embroiled in an affair with Douglas. Lubitsch illustrates the character of his characters with a few simple lines of dialogue.

Dietrich: (At her dressing table. Marshall enters the room. She looks at him, indirectly, through the mirror. She doesn't like what she sees.) "The op-wa starts at eight, doesn't it?"

Marshall: "Oh, the opera."

Dietrich: "Oh, darling, you promised."

Marshall: "And I'm going to keep my promise. You love the opera. I hate the opera.
So, why shouldn't we go?"

Their entire dynamic, her imperiousness, his attempts to please, all in a few lines.

Good communications relies not on platitudes and puffery.

It is contingent on minor moments of reality, of truth.

There is beauty, laughter, wisdom in these small moments.

Find them.

What's wrong.

2011-12-13T15:53:00.000-05:00

It’s hard to be conscious and not be inundated (and depressed) about the sorry state of affairs in American politics.

Our Congress, that branch of our government that makes laws, no longer functions. The 47 or so Republicans slinging it in the hopes of gaining their party’s nomination so they can run for president seems to have yielded a gaggle of half-wits. Some are incapable of finishing a sentence. Some don’t have even a basic grasp of world issues. Virtually all of them deny established truths like Climate Change and evolution.

Here’s where the trouble lies:

Today candidates are asked their opinion on almost every conceivable topic, from a pipeline across the center of the nation, to the gold standard, to whether or not all people have the right to marry. These opinions get aired, discussed and debated. Constantly.

We wind up considering about 75 viewpoints of each candidate. And in our “absence of hierarchy” era all of them are important.

That’s a problem.

Because you’ll never find someone who agrees with you on every “issue.” So we wind up having candidates that no one really likes. A candidate could hit on 67 of those 75 viewpoints but you could hate him because he disagrees with you on those missing 8. That’s why, today, no one has any real support.

It goes something like this: “I agree with him on almost everything, but I just can’t vote for him. In 1958 he came out in favor of protecting the migratory path of the Latvian Lake goose and I’m against that.”

Unfortunately, advertising has fallen victim to the same “everything for everyone” syndrome.

A television ad can have everything going for it and then some pipsqueak consultant will grab the floor and ask: “I don’t think this ad will build community and conversation.” And poof, your ad is dead, though it was never meant to build community and conversation.

In short, our list of expectations is so vast that we can only be disappointed. That’s what’s wrong.

Smart work, well executed.

2011-12-13T09:03:00.004-05:00

I was watching TV a few weeks ago--I confess, it was "The Hitler Channel," one of those stations at the dusky end of the "dial" that caters to the esoteric, obscure and the downright strange. Usually the commercials on such channels suck. They're for cleaning solutions that wipe out mold and mildew like republicans eviscerating the middle class.

But I saw the ad above for "Ballroom Jeans" and was enchanted. I googled Duluth Trading and found a couple more pretty wonderful little commercials.

I've never heard of the agency that created these small pitch perfect masterpieces. Google, again, tells me they're produced by Planet Propaganda out of quaint old Madison, WI.

It doesn't matter from whence it comes. This is nice work.

Read me.

2011-12-12T14:06:00.003-05:00

Years ago, back when typewriters roamed the Earth, I got a raft of insipid and politically-driven changes from a client named Ken.

I was pissed. And I worked hard to show it in my copy. In fact, if you read down left-hand column it would read:

K
e
n

I
s

a

F
u
c
k

I finished this little copywriting insurrection and walked down the hall to show my copy to my account guy. I should say here that on the account I was working on I produced probably 50 ads a year. The client loved me and generally loved my copy. The fact of the matter was I made the lives of my account people pretty easy.

I sat there while the account guy read my copy. He was a pretty good guy, pretty smart and dedicated, but he had a bit of a stammer.

"G g g George..." he started "it's f f fine, b b but it's not as as as good as your u u usual copy."

"Read it closely," I said.

He read it again. After a minute he said, "It j j just doesn't f f flow."

"Read down the left-hand column."

He did and got it.

"Y y you know if you d d didn't say anything, I I I would have f f faxed this to K k Ken."

Here's my point.

This particular account read my copy. He even gave it some thought.

Today, it seems, no one reads anything. Account people, "producers," no one seems interested enough in either the work or their jobs to bother.

Who knows what's sneaking through because of that.

Catherine. The Great.

2011-12-12T08:41:00.004-05:00

I am reading Robert K. Massie's magisterial new biography of Catherine the Great. (I know it will disappoint George Parker, but 3/4ths of the way through, the Empress has so far avoided doing anything with horses outside of riding them.)

Be that as it may, next time you think your agency is a nest of vipers, pick up a tome like this. The politics, the intrigues, the back-stabbing and gossip are, literally, murderous. 18th Century Russia makes agency life seem like skipping through the tulips.

After Catherine led a coup d'etat to knock Peter III, her putative husband and full-time weirdo, off the Throne, she spent a good amount of time and showered rubles, titles and other largesse on her lover of the time Captain Gregory Orlov. Orlov was a rough, crude man who had designs on marrying the Empress. That and an attempt by Lt. Fedor Khirtovo to release Ivan VI from imprisonment in the Schlusselburg Fortress, and thus challenge Catherine's right to the Throne, led to a lot of gossip and speculation that Catherine's hold on Mother Russia was, at best, tenuous.

So Catherine did something we could all learn from.

"To end this chatter, she issued on June 4, 1763, a so-called Manifesto of Silence. To beating drums, people across the empire were summoned into public squares to listen to heralds reading her proclamation, which declared that "everyone should go about his own business and refrain from all useless and unseemly gossip and criticism of the government."

Ah, a Manifesto of Silence. Golden.

A contradiction.

2011-12-10T18:35:00.003-05:00

I just came upon this photograph by the unmatched photographer and Hungarian emigre Andre Kertesz. It got me thinking.

At a time in world history when we are more pressed for time than ever before (in every time in world history we have been more pressed for time than ever before) there are more ways to fill our lives up with junk than ever before.

Just sticking with photography for a moment, we are Flickr'd and Instagrammed into mediocre submission. We are bludgeoned with snapshots of cats playing polo. We are pinioned with pics of people we hardly know.

We hardly have time for great because we are so besieged (and besotted) by the deluge of daily dreck.

There is greatness in the world. Greatness and originality. In art and in work.

But we're too busy looking at shit (and in looking at shit proclaiming that "everyone is a photographer") to notice.

The question.

2011-12-10T09:11:00.003-05:00

There's a simple question that, in these days of multiple touchpoints and "surround-sound" strategies, seems is never asked. Because every agency now has 32-million "practices" each fighting for their own bottom line, the question is never posed, never considered, never even brought up. We don't ask it because we're more concerned with what WE need as a practice or an agency (to hit our holding company numbers) than with what our clients need to succeed.

The question is this: "How can we do the greatest good, influence the greatest number of people for the money we have to spend?"

What we have barring this question is competing fiefs. We have the mobile people spending like crazy developing WAP sites that few people will use. We have legions of tweeters and Facebook zealots creating "experiences" that have, at best, dubious return on investment. We have data-viz visionaries. The content confab. The video vehements. And they're all saying to clients who are also trying to hold onto their jobs "ME ME ME!"

In our nation right now which is so wracked by sectionalism and divisiveness, no one asks the question. In the multiple wars our Offense Department is waging, the question is never asked. I've been in the agency since 1984 and I've never heard the question asked by anyone but me.

So oceans of people are running around agencies and in client organizations producing myriad media pinpricks that viewers swat away like flies.

Because no one asks the one simple big picture question.

A lesson in copywriting.

2011-12-09T04:21:00.003-05:00

Almost 40 years ago I got my first lesson in being a copywriter.

It wasn't from a course in school or even from a book. I got it at the New York Auto Show.

Like a lot of teenage boys I was a bit of a car nut growing up. Every year I would go to the Auto Show at the old New York Coliseum. The Coliseum was a hulking space on Columbus Circle (gone now and replaced by the gleaming Time-Warner Center.) It smelled of concession-stand hotdogs and cigarette smoke. The Coliseum was built ugly and quickly went down hill.

My lesson came when I walked over to see the new VW Super Beetle. This was one of the last of the original bugs made for America. I remember it was the first time I'd seen taillights with an amber turn signal.

The salesman at the booth started talking about the turn signal. "The minute you flip it on," he said "the turn signal starts." A few people in the audience laughed. "The turn signal on some cars doesn't turn on for as long as a second." The audience snickered again. Finally he said, "If you think that doesn't matter, at 60 miles per hour, a car travels 88 feet in a second. So the Beetle's turn signal turns on 88 feet faster."

I was floored by that fact.

Suddenly I believed in the VW. If they cared that much about a turn signal, these must be very good cars.

It was certainly very good copy.

I met an older woman on the train today.

2011-12-08T09:34:00.002-05:00

We were sitting next to each other and I could tell she was an older actress--that she was reading a typewritten play was a giveaway.

I turned to her and asked her, "Any good."

"Yes, it's the story of Leni Riefenstahl. Do you know her?"

We went on from there, chatting about Nazis, underwater photography and shooting in South Africa past 81st Street, 72nd Street, 59th Street all the way to 42nd.

Anyway, Nazi or not, propaganda or not, the clip above is well worth viewing.

Quiet please.

2011-12-07T09:23:00.004-05:00

Maureen Dowd, that is, the brilliant Maureen Dowd, has a surpassing column in today's "New York Times" that puts a finger on much of what is wrong with our industry and the world today. Her column today is titled "Silence Is Golden" and if you have a couple of minutes (that you're not wasting on Facebook, Twitter or some other diversion) you can read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/opinion/dowd-silence-is-golden.html?hp

Dowd's column is about our loss of silence.

Near its start she provides this 50-year-old quotation by Swiss philosopher Max Picard:
“Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence,” once as natural as the sky and air.

Dowd continues: "fiendish little gadgets conspire to track our movements and record our activities wherever we go, producing a barrage of pictures of everything we’re doing and saying..."

What's lost today is all this:

Silence is something you hear.

Quiet and solitude are things you can do or seek out.

Repose and "being in the moment" are special activities and should be cherished.

She points out, silence is like a zero in mathematics.

It's not nothing.

It's powerful.

It can lead to actual thought.

That's what she said.

2011-12-07T07:14:00.004-05:00

Last night I went to a discussion at the Times Center, a 300-seat auditorium in the new New York Times building. It was moderated by three-time Pulitzer-prize winner Thomas Friedman and the panel featured Nobelist Paul Krugman, National Book Award finalist Joe Nocera and author-historian-economist Carmen Reinhart. Together and for the next 90 minutes the four had a lively discussion about the economy and the trouble the entire world faces.

At one point, Nocera brought up two factories he visited recently in North Carolina. One built by the German mega-corporation and Nazi lubricant Siemens, the other built by Caterpillar, the tractor people. Together to build these factories the companies were given $36 million in tax relief (socialism for the rich) and together these factories employ a whopping total of 1,200 people.

In Obama's Osawatomie speech yesterday, he mentioned "Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100."

Everywhere such realities are present. Except perhaps in our industry.

Yes, I know most agencies have dramatically downsized. Yes, I know that basic digital work is being "off-shored" to places like Costa Rica or Minsk. Yes, I know all that.

However, I also know that I have a purportedly big client meeting tomorrow to discuss 2012 planning. I know that to put a deck together has probably, so far, cost the agency 500 man hours. And I know that, unsatisfied with the meandering group-think that is the output of all these banal and wasted hours I sat at my table and wrote the deck we eventually decided to use. It took me one hour.

I do not like writing decks. It's not what I do. But I like even less sitting in massive meetings and "collaborating" with people who are sentencely-challenged.

It does not take a lot of people to do what we do.

It takes, often, a lone person thinking clearly and without distraction.

That "model" is cost-efficient and produces work that is more solid.

I don't know why we make things so hard.

An idiosyncracy and a confession.

2011-12-06T11:12:00.003-05:00

Since I love to sketch and since I have an admiration for some things old, I write primarily with fountain pens. Because I often lose them, the ones I use at work are usually moderately priced, bought in most cases at airport duty-free shops for less than $50. Even so, I'm still a little paranoid about losing them. Accordingly, I think I spend two billable hours a day looking for my pens.

Some thoughts on bras.

2011-12-06T09:04:00.003-05:00

In the book, "The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm," author Juliet Nicholson spends some time talking about a recent innovation that changed a lot. The summer of 1911 was when monied and titled young scions in England began to make the leap from laced-up corsets and mounds of petticoats to a new-fangled invention, the brassiere.

The brassiere did more that damage the whale-bone industry. Suddenly, women could get dressed (and undressed) in minutes, not hours. It no longer became an ordeal to undress. It was much easier, thanks to the brassiere, for couples to couple.

It occurs to me that while simplicity is often good and beneficial, it can, and often is, taken too far.

I am not a fan, for instance, of the state of deshabille in which most young people are attired. I like the feminine form in all its luxuriant softness as much as the next guy. However, I have no desire to see anyone's ass-crack and cleavage, while there's a time and a place for it, does not rightfully belong in an office. Plain and simple, it is distracting. Likewise, I have absolutely no desire to see people's underwear.

I bring this up because I believe that the semiotics of today's dress speak volumes about much of what is wrong with our world today.

While the brassiere might be considered a boon to young lovers everywhere, today undressing is too easy. In fact, most people only walk around half-dressed.

In short, in clothing and most all else, we have made things too easy. In so doing, we have removed the quality of consideration from most actions.

It used to be if you wanted to comment on an article you read you needed to find pen and paper and envelope. You needed to write it down. Address the envelope. Find a stamp and mail it in.

Now, any dickwad with vectored fingertips can write any banality at any time.

Whatever is gained by this freedom of expression. Much is lost.

Likewise, in our business, any In-Design pixel putz can make a professional-looking layout. It can be done in mere seconds. You can slap some blather, some stock and some tautological twatology onto the page and, voila, it looks like you've had a thought. When all you've really had is a semantic belch.

And belching is not thinking.

And even if it passes for thinking in what some day may be called "The Dark Ages 2.0" it isn't thinking.

And I don't care what you think about that.

24 digits and ontology.

2011-12-05T14:08:00.002-05:00

As usual, I am sitting on a conference call.

The producer punches in 10 numbers, then 10 more, then four more--24 digits in all just to get into a conference call.

For all its flaws, the Social Security system operates with fair efficiency with nine-digit i.d.s.

Are the 24 digits for security reasons?

If security is so paramount why not cause us to punch in 100 digits and be really safe.

Graffiti by my friend Lisa.

2011-12-05T10:53:00.002-05:00

http://lisalevyindustries.com/

The best toys of all time.

2011-12-05T09:45:00.005-05:00

I've just been emailed an article in "Wired" magazine entitled "The 5 Best Toys of All Time." It got me thinking.

For the last few decades or so Wired, and journals like it, have run an enormous number of articles that fall into two categories. 1) The "This-Will-Change-Everything" category and 2) The "Things-that-Mankind-Have-Known-Forever-Are-No-Longer-Germane" category.

We've read in recent years about the death of print, the death of television, the death of agencies, the death of bricks-and-mortar, the death of "the death of" articles.

We've also been treated to about a gazillion gizmos that will change everything. Lonely Girl 15. The segway. Just last week in the "Times" we were told to get all heated up by a new thermostat.

All that is why I liked this article so much on the best toys of all time. They are according to Jonathan Liu:

1. A stick.
2. A box.
3. String.
4. A cardboard tube.
5. Dirt.

You can read the piece here: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/01/the-5-best-toys-of-all-time/all/1

The same reductio ad absurdum quality can probably also be applied to our business. We can analyze the quantum appeal of pixel manipulation, we can create apps that allow you to create more apps, we can augment reality while we change the paradigm to decrease costs, but when push comes to shove, a gag, a pratfall, a funny expression or an intelligent appeal do more to drive more business and brand value than any new "toy."

It's that simple, really.

Or, as Preston Sturges noted in his "11 Rules for Writing a Hit Movie,"

1. A Pretty girl is better than an ugly one.
2. A leg is better than an arm.
3. A bedroom is better than a living room.
4. An arrival is better than a departure.
5. A birth is better than a death.
6. A chase is better than a chat.
7. A dog is better than a landscape.
8. A kitten is better than a dog.
9. A baby is better than a kitten.
10. A kiss is better than a baby.
11. A pratfall is better than anything.

My cousin Herb.

2011-12-05T07:55:00.002-05:00

My cousin Herb and his father before him had a small leather goods company that made high-quality attache and brief cases for men. Schlesinger Brothers was founded in 1919 and stayed in business until about ten years ago when in was bought by Tumi. The cases Schlesinger built had fallen out of favor with most men preferring soft-sided bags with straps they could throw over their shoulder.

One weekend I was with Herb, he was my father's age and more of a father to me than my own, and he talked about closing his factory which he had relocated from Camden, NJ to a small town called Berlin, NJ.

"In the old days," he remembered "men would come in and apply for positions. We didn't look at applications. We didn't background check. We didn't ask for their employment history. We didn't care that they 'interviewed well.'

"We gave them space on a bench, leather, wood, nails, hardware and tools and we told them to make a bag. If the bag they made was good, we hired them."

A Saturday in New York.

2011-12-03T15:04:00.007-05:00

My wife, ever-resourceful as she is, and I are members of the Metropolitan Museum which is just a few blocks from our apartment. One great advantage of membership is that you can pop in for 30 minutes and scout the place out and see what you want to go back to see later in more depth.

The museum today was like a flower that just opened. It was so full of beauty it was ready to burst.

We went specifically to see the new galleries dedicated to art in the new Near East galleries which featured art and artifacts from the parts of the world we are trying to blow up, Iran, Syria, Iraq etc. The Met, of course, does an astonishing job and has a breath-taking collection. They've recreated whole rooms, from floor tiles to benches to window treatments. The result is stunning and transformative.

From there we went to a collection called "Infinite Jest." A panoply of satirical cartoons lambasting, among other things, the profligate and pretentious rich.

Then a gallery of about 200 Steichen photographs.

Then, in an effort to battle the persistent cough and cold that's affected me these past two week, we walked to the 2nd Avenue Deli which opened in my neighborhood over the summer and is located, somewhat inexplicably on 1st Avenue. There we had the greatest art of all--a light dill-flavored chicken broth with two really good kreplach.

Art is great and powerful. Many of the pieces we saw were thousands of years old. Others have endured through the centuries. That's all well and good.

But there's nothing like a really good kreplach.

--

For non-Jews:
Kreplach are small pasta dough triangles filled with ground meat or mashed potatoes. Similar to dumplings, they are sometimes called Jewish ravioli or Jewish wonton. Sometimes kreplach is boiled and served in soup. Other times kreplach is fried and served as a side dish. It is customary to eat kreplach before the Yom Kippur fast, on the last day of Sukkot, and on Purim.

Alan Seus, 1926-2011.

2011-12-02T17:17:00.002-05:00

Alan Seus, a comedian on Laugh In just died. He handed me a lot of laughs when I was a kid. You can read his obituary here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/arts/television/alan-sues-a-laugh-in-cast-mainstay-dies-at-85.html?hpw

Industrial advertising.

2011-12-02T09:24:00.004-05:00

This might be a little disjointed but hopefully I'll get around to a point.

I went to work via a different route this morning and saw a billboard festooned with McDonald's golden arches. That, together with some recent media news got me thinking.

What's happened to almost everything that touches our souls--from hamburgers to advertising to publishing--has been industrialized.

We create "marketing engines" that are distinguished not for their interest, motivation or persuasion but instead aim to reach the greatest number of people at the lowest possible cost.

Just as McDonald's has created a "hamburger engine" to distribute the greatest number of patties at the lowest possible cost.

The original intent--to make something distinctive and delicious is gone. The technocrats that run ad agencies and major corporations aren't lovers of advertising or hamburgers.

They are lovers of efficiency. Create multiple communications distributable over dozens and dozens of touchpoints that inhabit a communications ecosystem.

So systematically they destroy the companies they lead by abnegating their original purpose.

The sad fact is, it seems to me, that advertising has little to do with creating great ads. It's about content strategy, ecosystems, fractal landscapes, data visualization, content syndication.

These are the topics which occupy our days.

Outside of a stuffy conference room I've never heard anyone use any of those terms.

They are meaningless.

So is much of what we do.

Thank god for advertising.

2011-12-02T09:14:00.000-05:00

A reminder.

Uncle Slappy has a cough.

2011-12-02T07:31:00.003-05:00

The phone rang at 6:45 this morning.

That can mean only one of two things. One of my daughters has a problem or Uncle Slappy needs to talk.

It was Uncle Slappy.

"A cough," he started, "A cough I have for three weeks and can't get rid of."

"I'm sorry, Uncle Slappy."

"To Dr. Richard P. Cohen I am going this morning."

"Good, he'll probably just give you an anti-biotic and knock it out of your system."

"Richard P. Cohen, the doctor, not Richard T. Cohen, the podiatrist."

"I got that Uncle Slappy." I waited, pregnantly for Slappy to continue.

"I just hope ammonia I don't have."

"Pneumonia, Uncle Slappy."

"That too," the old man said, and he hung up the phone.