Testimonials.

There are times in the industry when forces conspire and you find yourself having to do customer testimonials. If and when this happens to you try to at least put words in the mouths of the people who are testimoning that sound realistic and natural.

This Dell monstrosity has just one thing going for it. The ad unit I saw was small. So while it's shit at least it's shit confined to a tiny space.

Thank you for the wisdom of your inexperience.

Something has happened in the world and I suppose I’m somewhat responsible since it probably started with my generation. Growing up in “The Era When Everything Changed,” my generation rejected everything that came before it. In the classroom, we clamored only for things that we deemed “relevant.” I remember a wood-paneled seminar room at Columbia University when one of my fellow graduate students said this about Shakespeare to a distinguished professor of English: “Me and Billy boy don’t jive.” No, I am not making it up. I am using it as an extreme example of the wholesale expurgation of all things hallowed as meaningless, dated and therefore somehow irrelevant.

This attitude pervades the advertising industry today. You might be working for a financial services company that (like most businesses) caters to the affluent. Invariably a bunch of “body-art-acolytes” will burn thirty-two thousand hours talking about twitter and how to make something that should be thoughtful, intelligent and deep shallow, irrelevant and cool.

Cool is not a strategy. Often times it's not even in the ballpark.

As I said in a previous post, I am re-reading Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” right now. I guarantee that 99 44/100s of the people in the world would think I’m reading something esoteric and irrelevant as opposed to something essential and important. Not because they have read it and rejected it but because it was written before 2007 and doesn't involve vampires.

Stop me if you've heard this one.

That’s not what the client asked for. We know more than the client about the consumer. (That’s why we’re agents, not vendors.) It’s more important to meet the needs of the consumer than meeting what are sometimes the internal political demands of the client.

It’s due ASAP. Is it really? Or is it due because you’ve scheduled a client meeting prematurely? When will the work run? Can we have an interim meeting to show them what we’re thinking without spilling the beans?

They want last year’s work re-skinned. I suppose that’s ok, since nothing in the world, or nothing their competition is doing has changed since last year.

You didn’t hit every point on the brief. The brief was a client agenda—a negotiation, not a communication. This is too much information for our audience to take in.

We have to show it to low-level clients first. We show work to people who can both approve and disapprove. Not to people who only disapprove or people who try to improve.

Use stock photography. So we will stand out in the same way everyone else does. Do you go to a restaurant and ask for canned and frozen ingredients?

It’s only online content. You have one brand. Not an online brand and an offline brand. The same principles and integrity you demand from your traditional agency must be applied to content. Is the work on brand? Does it impart useful information? Is it brilliantly executed? Is it interesting, watchable?

The health-care debate.

My guess is that the people most against health-care reform are the people most likely to die earlier.

This map shows life expectancy in the US. The darker the color, the longer the life expectancy.

Wonderful. And from The New York Times.

There's a blog on The New York Times called "Abstract City" that has some wonderful images, about eight in all, of which I've pasted two here. Check it out here http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/bio-diversity/

Faux Pas.

Right now I am working with a coterie of heavily tattooed people. It is my nature to read whatever is in front of me, so I spend a few minutes a day deciphering the words and glyphs indelibly marked on these people. One guy I'm working with has tattooed his knuckles like Robert Mitchum in "Night of the Hunter." (see above.)

On his knuckles are the letters: TC [Lightning bolt] B.

Me: What does that stand for "The country's best yogurt?"
Him: Douche bag. Taking care of business in a flash.

Notes from a misanthrope.

I got this from a book review in today's New York Times. You can read the entire review of "The Gift of Thanks" by Margaret Visser here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/books/18book.html?hpw

Here are some parts of the review I found particularly stirring: “It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back. Often they retaliate by inviting you again, and you must then extend another invitation. Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called social life.”

..."the word 'host' is related through Indo-European roots to the words 'hostile' and 'hostage.'"

"English speakers are obsessed with the terms 'thanks' or 'thank you.' We often say these words more than 100 times a day, in a flurry that many other cultures find baffling."

I'm not against gratitude or anything. I just generally hate everyone.

Chain store advertising.

The neighborhood in which I live is as off the beaten track as things get in Manhattan. It's a little too far east, too far from the subway and defiantly un-hip. That's ok by me.

Nevertheless despite its out-of-the-wayness, over the past twenty years or so a seismic change has occurred. Most of the neighborhood businesses, "The Ideal Coffee Shop," or half-a-dozen Hungarian or German restaurants like "Csarda" have been shuttered and been replaced by stores like "The Vitamin Shoppe," "Starbucks," or "GNC."

Last night I got off the subway at 7:30 and decided I needed hamburger rolls for the dinner I was putting together. The only bakery left in the neighborhood was part of the barkery-industrial-complex, a mini-chain with the unfortunate name of "Hot & Crusty."

I asked for hamburger rolls. "We don't got none." I asked for three kaiser rolls. The kid doesn't ask if I want poppy seeds or sesame seeds on them, he picks up the first three he sees and stuffs them in a bag big enough for two-and-a-half kaiser rolls and gives the bag to me to bring it to the cash register. The cashier says three dollars. I not so unreasonably ask for a bag. Rather than putting my rolls in a bag, she slides over a crumpled plastic bag with a smiley face on it. I leave disgusted.

This entire experience made me think about the advertising industry. Like the state of retail in my neighborhood and much of the world, the little guy is no longer. Independent shops where they know your name, know their product and know how to sell are all but gone. Same with agencies.

Service is surly, unresponsive and completely lacking in a cosmic sense of quid pro quo. They really couldn't give a rat's ass if you leave the store disgusted and never come back. The workers make low wages and can probably get a low-wage job elsewhere. It doesn't much matter if it's a bakery or a place that does quick oil changes. There is, from the employees, no passion for what they do.

Basically, now that we all pretty much work for one of four agencies, we are essentially working for advertising chain stores. Think about a typical chain store experience. You usually can't find help. You usually can't find what you want. When you do find help they usually suck. And when you get home with what you bought you are usually dissatisfied, often you feel like you paid too much considering.

No personality, no accountability, no loyalty, specious cost-efficiencies. This is our chain-store, holding company world.

We hate talent.

There is an article in The Economist this week http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/management/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14301649 about talent. Its subhead is "Talent is not patient, and it is not faithful." The article then goes on and speaks about how companies are fighting for talent "essential to their future success."

This might be true if you work for an engineering firm or a retailer but my experience over the past twenty-five years or so is that companies hate talent. Because, often, talent and lack of conformity are often bed-fellows. And agencies hate oddity. They hate manic behavior. They hate impatience and lack of tolerance for mediocrity.

Much as salaries are now relegated to acceptable "bands" by level, personalities are relegated to bands too. Volatility, passion, anger, pain-in-the-ass-ness, even brains are all excoriated. We have built a system where we welcome everyone regardless of their skills as long as they don't have too many of them. We run on a thesis of the greatest good for the greatest number. Which might be fine for a democracy and a bureaucracy. But not for a creative business.

We love "team players." "Active collaborators." "Bridge Builders." And so on. We disparage and dismiss iconoclasts, independents and radicals.

There, in a nutshell, why most everything sucks.

Wet roadway.

There's a road sign I noticed last night on my way back from Kennedy Airport. I've ridden this route a thousand times but I never noticed the sign before. The sign says "Wet Roadway".

It occurred to me last night that wetness on a roadway is usually a transitory condition not an on-going one. It's weird to put up a sign that says Wet Roadway unless there is something leaking somewhere. After all, the sign isn't put up when it rains and taken down when it's not raining. Therefore I conclude that rather than fixing a problem involving a leak somewhere, the highway department just stuck up a sign.

Somehow this got me thinking of advertising. Rather than create work that is compelling, we often throw up signs that telegraph what's about to happen. We follow a formula--ok, here's the product demo, here's the joke at the end, here's the button.

In other words, rather than doing something creative, we put up a sign that says "Creative" and hope for the best.