Notes from outer-space.

Every once in a while I like to imagine what some alien-culture, like, say, college graduates, would think of America if they had nothing to judge her by other than the television commercials that aired on the most-viewed telecast ever, Super Bowl XTHLxIIV.

Here are some reasonable conclusions:

1. There is no middle age. Everyone is either a 20-something or 80+ like Abe Vigoda and Betty White.
2. No one is fat. Not even incessant beer-drinkers and people who love Doritos like Marcel Proust loved madeleines.
3. There is an unholy fascination with wearing one's underwear with no pants. And this behavior is extraordinarily funny.
4. We have learned to communicate with beavers and they are our friends. Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Squeak-el notwithstanding.
5. Beer is the nectar of the gods. You can build a house out of it, including furniture and drinking it is preferable to personal safety, thus upsetting Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
6. One of our genders feels threatened. Men are so insecure they need to reassert their penis-hood via their choice of soap.

A thought in passing.

"They're brain dead from the head up."

How bad ads get approved and produced.

From this week's New Yorker.

Super Bowl review.

"A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies. And we are dying now. We will either wake from our state of induced childishness, one where trivia and gossip pass for news and information, one where our goal is not justice but an elusive and unattainable happiness, to confront the stark limitations before us, or we will continue our headlong retreat into fantasy."

The above is from Christopher Hedges' critique of modern America, "The Empire of Illusion." I thought of it as I watched as much of the "game" as I could stand last night.

Drugged, over-sized black men, led by a white man to "redeem a city."
The bombast and noise of the legion of announcers. (Imagine if our wars were as well-covered.) Products as drugs--particularly beer, soda and soap.

Someone who builds his house out of Bud Light? People who prefer to live on a desert island with Bud Light to being saved? Coke promising you can "open happiness"? Soap, or pants, that let you assert your man-ness?

This is bread and circuses and I found it all very depressing.

Supply chains and the death of America.

At one time, companies like Standard Oil, Ford Motor and US Steel ruled the world. They exemplified vertical integration. For instance, they found the oil, built the derrick with wood grown in their forests, shipped the oil in barrels made with their wood by their coopers, and refined and distributed their product through their exclusive wholly-owned companies.

Along the way, some bright MBA came up with the notion that risk and responsibility could be amortized if suppliers or vendors did the work you used to do yourself. And supply chains were born.

A product like a Ford was now made with parts and pieces from hundreds of suppliers. The trick to profits was managing your supply chain and getting component parts efficiently and cheaply. The more cheaply Toyota, say, could get gas pedal assemblies, the more money Toyota could make.

Naturally since our industry is now run by MBAs called holding companies, advertisers have adopted a similar approach. When advertising is lame creatively, strategically or from a production point of view, clients can no longer pick up the phone and call David Ogilvy or some other eponym. If they call the head of an agency, that head will call another department head, who will likely call the group head, who will likely call someone else to find out why something sucked.

There is no throat to choke.

There is a lot of talk in agencies about different departments synergizing. About everyone having a seat at the table. About creativity coming from everywhere.

I'm sure there was conversation at Toyota, too, along the same lines.

But whose throat gets choked when brake pedals stick?

It's 2010. Does anyone need to know who Lou Dorfsman was?

I had a meeting with a young designer this morning. She's designing some creative for me. I said to her, "there should be a playfulness and a tension and a symbiosis in the typography like Lou Dorfsman's CBS wall."

A blank stare.

I understand this designer's point of view.
Dorfman's heyday was many decades ago.
The machinery of his craft is today obsolete.
There are new technologies today that allow you to do things you couldn't do just a few years ago.
There are new, hot designers who are winning all of the new, hot awards.

Do you need to know who Lou Dorfsman was?

Do you need to know Shakespeare?
Do you need to know Welles?
Do you need to know Durer?
Or Michelangelo? Or unknown Greeks.

One of the things I've seen more and more of of late is creatives who go to school for two or four years to become creatives. What are they teaching them if they are not teaching them Dorfsman? And in graduate Marketing curricula, do they teach Dorfsman? Krone? Tesch?

Or is it just trends and pie charts?

Once again.

As always, click to enlarge.

What happens when the Ivory sinks?

Toyota has stood for quality for probably 30 years now. And now it seems like every vehicle they've ever made is being recalled. What do they do?

When fuck ups are made--regardless of what they are or what field they're in, there are two courses you can follow:

You can lie.
You can tell the truth.

Lying is glib. Which is the trouble with it. It doesn't give you any cause for introspection. You don't admit or own up to your mistakes. So chances are you'll repeat them.

Truth on the other hand is tough. It means you face the consequences. That you are willing to pay recompense for your misdeeds. Truth hurts. It probably hurts enough so that telling it will act as a governor in the future.

Lie.
Tell the truth.

If I were Toyota, I'd somehow find a way to buy ten minutes of commercial time on the Super Bowl.

I'd spend five of those minutes apologizing.
And another five saying how I'm going to make it up to you.

True or false?

We love it.
We love it but.
We love it but could you change the visual so it's more human?
We love it but could you add a mention of our nationwide reach?
We love it but the call to action needs to be strengthened.
We love it but legal has demanded some copy changes.
We love it but we have to say "can help" before every verb.
We love it but we need to talk more about our process.
We love it.
But
but
but.

The gizmo that could save...

print, the auto industry, television, the government, advertising.

Now that the iTampon has been revealed, extolled and otherwise heralded as the savior of printed media, I started thinking about what would really save print. Thinking along those lines I quickly extrapolated my thoughts to other areas.

The gizmo that could save print, I concluded, is the human brain. Here's an example of what I mean. For 30 years or so I read the advertising column in The New York Times. It was my "first read" of the morning, because it "imparted useful information in an engaging way." Of late, Stuart Elliot has been writing about the prevalence of wedding rings on the fingers of actors in commercials. Meanwhile our industry is in the middle of a tsunami of changes.

So, I find Elliot irrelevant. It has nothing to do if he's paper or digital. It's that he's been pandering to the dumb. Not digging. Reporting pablum.

The same has happened in most every other industry and sphere. The filth on television and the movies that passes as drama, comedy or action. The lack of historical reference, the lack of acting, the lack of intelligence are appalling. So, when my wife says, "do you wanna go to the movies?" I think of how rotten the whole experience is--how I can't easily get a reserved seat, how the theatres are small and noisy, how the movies themselves are often nothing but a string of curses interrupted by a string of special effects and I reply, "No. I have a Rene Clair movie on dvd that I'd rather watch."

What's happened in the world, and accelerated over the last 30 years, is the acceleration of idiocy. Idiots rule. We cater to them. Their opinion matters. So the fattest nation in the history of the world gobbles up the intellectual equivalent of a double-cheese four cheeses pizza with cheese baked into the crust.

Idiots rule. Those with active brains feel left out. So things get dumber. And idiots rise higher.

Dum de dum dum.