Elbow Grease.

Every neighborhood has a worst house. 
It's usually mine.

When I was a boy, living under the leaky roof of my mother and father's tilted little house in Yonkers, New York, abutting the Bronx border, it was a very different world.

If someone wanted to watch TV, you had to warm up the black-and-white set. If they wanted to change channels, they had to leave their seat to turn the dial. Or yell at me to do it. And there were only seven channels, counting Channel 13 which was public television and no one watched.

No one reads John O'Hara today. 
They should.

Likewise the phone. 

We had phone exchanges then, like John O'Hara's "Butterfield 8," or "University 7," or "Yonkers 4." And we dialed the phone. And the phone was attached to the wall. And people used it to talk to other people. Not at all like we use phones today.

Most people don't know this anymore, but dialing was time-consuming. In fact, the original area codes were assigned to American cities based on their populations. New York, then as now was the biggest city. So it was easiest to dial. 2-1-2, five clicks. LA and Chicago were next, so, six clicks, 2-1-3 or 3-1-2.  Dallas, 2-1-4, seven clicks. Detroit 3-1-3, also seven clicks.
That's how it worked.

An early picture of my mother.
She carried a big stick. She didn't speak softly.

The thing I remember most about the old days is the thing I still use. Sure as shootin', my mother the harridan, wasn't Dutch, but she kept a spic-and-span house thanks to her propensity to kick the crap out of me and my older brother, Fred. We waxed the floors, mopped the floors, scrubbed the floors on our hands and knees and then scrubbed clean the scrub brushes.

I spent hours buffing floors.
I was full-time with parquet.

I was particularly expert at doing the dishes. I worked as a professional dishwasher one summer, but they fired me for being too fast. I made everyone else look bad. 

The thing I was best at, still am, is what in commercials they might have called "stubborn, baked-in stains." I took the word stubborn as a throw down. I'm stubbornerer than anyone, with the possible exception of Rich Siegel, of Round Seventeen fame.

My mother under the sink had an array of pads and rags and cleaners. Some of those were elite. Reserved for a certain kind of pot or pan. Some were the infantry of her OCD kitchen, the cannon fodder of her cleansing arsenal. They'd sacrifice their lives to keep her at a distance.

The operative words in all this scouring were "elbow grease." You had to apply elbow grease. If after ten minutes of using a scouring steel pad the size of a studio apartment, a pad that could take the varnish off of a vault at Fort Knox, the stain was still there, guess what? You had to use more elbow grease. I remember as a 10-year-old having tennis elbow induced by Farberware.

All this has an advertising point.

I wonder if elbow grease has disappeared from advertising. 

If scrubbing the scrubbed parts has vanished. Of standing there over the guilty pot and working it until it gleams is a thing of the past. It ain't in scope. And we'll make 27 more of 'em tomorrow.

My mother grew up poor during the Depression. On more than one occasion she came home from school to find their furniture out on her West Philadelphia street. The Freedmans were evicted with no place to go.

Wandering Jews is not news.

Even when my father started making money, she never threw anything out. She darned socks. Patched blue jeans. Handed-down hand-me-downs. 92% of our glasses and dishes were from gas station give-aways. 

Once we let the bananas go bad and she served us banana sandwiches. On stale bread. She refused to throw anything out.

You can sure as hell bet she'd have thrown me out for not getting the pan clean quicker than she'd toss the pan. I was easier to replace, even if it meant sleeping with my father. So, I scrubbed.

I'm not sure that advertising is better off today when we regard it as disposable and transitory. Not as permanent as my mother's kitchen gear. I'm not sure we wouldn't be better off working until the work was done. Until the puzzle was solved, until the stain was eradicated.

This post is not about my mother or pots and pans, of course. It's about elbow grease. An orientation to make things work and make things last. It's an old idea. Outdated. Foolish as a dinosaur and dumb. Especially when you can just get a new "anything" for 79-cents, less if you give them your cell-number. Then they'll give you 10% off your first ungratifying purchase.

These days, five years after being canned from Ogilvy for, in the asinine words of their ageist CEO Mark Read, harkening back to the 80s. I'm still harkening back. I'm busier than ever, probably making more money than all of Ogilvy because I harken back to my mother's kitchen. 

And I muster up my elbow grease.

And work.

Ouch.

Dock Ellis was a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1960s and 1970s and a damn good one. 

You might know him for having pitched a no-hit game while tripping on LSD and publicly talking about it. A short documentary on the game made Dock's feat notorious.

But he won 138 games lifetime, which is a lot of games. In 1971, the year the Pirates won the World Serious, he won 19 games against only nine losses. He had a sparkling 3.06 ERA, made the All-Star team and finished fourth in Cy Young voting. 

On this particular day in 1974, Ellis was pissed. The Reds were the team of the Seventies and had a lot of swagger. They were bullies. The Pirates, though they won it all in 1971, lost their anchor, Roberto Clemente in 1972 in a plane crash and had started the season losing six straight. 

About a month into the year they were dead last in their division. Worse, according to Ellis, they were intimidated by the Reds, whose starting lineup had three Hall-of-Famers, and a fourth, Pete Rose, who would have made it had he not be banned in perpetuity for betting on games.

So Ellis decided to try to hit with a pitched ball every Red he could. He wanted to show his Pirates not to be cowed by the Reds. In horsehide parlance, he wanted to knock the shit out of them.

Elllis managed to hit Rose, Morgan and Driessen, and just miss Perez, who successfully contorted himself out of the way of the spheroid object. Ellis was yanked from the game after that, without retiring a single batter, and hitting three. One of the oddest pitching lines ever. By the way, for the entire 1974 season during which Ellis threw 176 innings, he hit only four more batters, totaling an unremarkable seven for the year. His major league high for hit-by-pitch was ten in 1970. Ellis never came close to Hall-of-Famer Don Drysdale in the guided-missile category. Drysdale led the National League in that ignominious category five times, including four years in a row from 1958 to 1961.

I bring up Ellis' escapade because of something I learned from another ballplayer, Ken "Hawk" Harrelson, a  pretty-good power-hitter for the Red Sox in the 1960s. Harrelson became an announcer for the White Sox, on and off, through 2018. 

Harrelson came up with the phrase TWTW or TW², which I've carried with me for twenty years. TWTW stands for The Will To Win.

TWTW, whether or not you're throwing a 90-mile-per-hour fastball at someone's head, is something everyone, every agency, every account, every client needs.

You have to do what it takes.

Get the job done.

Roll up your sleeves.

Raise your hand.

Work until you win.

That's how you win.

I don't actively try to be an asshole. But I have TWTW. I often joke that I work as hard as I do less for the money than for the thrill I get from winning. Money comes and goes. Winning matters more to me.

TWTW.

Everyone needs one.

--

I Hope This Isn't Stale. (A Repost.)

I've been stupidly busy for the last few months and I'm in blog post arrears. What's more, I was out with ad friends last night. Advertising people of roughly my vintage. Eating Chinese food and complaining (Job Number: OY 459-50394- VEY). Suffice to say, so I'm contentless this morning. No original Thursday post in sight. 

Please forgive me for recycling the post that follows. From way back in 2016.

The Case-Study Video.

One of the great deceptions of our age is something called “the case-study video.”

It seems that every day about a million 90-240- second blathers of stock footage are produced by American ad agencies. According to those videos, every business in America is growing exponentially and gaining new customers like sorority girls gain cold sores.

Everybody is getting everybody else to tweet, taste, dance, share, laugh and kvell about products and services that in real life elicit no such responses. I’ve seen videos where people go apeshit over a bank made with gingerbread, or who crochet entire billboards in Times’ Square.

Also these videos involve a lot of throwing paint and jumping in the air and doing a backflip. Also, spontaneous dancing, usually while wearing a fedora.

In short, according to these videos, America—and the world—exists in a sort of interactive Elysium where people can’t wait to get their hands on your product and fricken tweet about it.

In fact, I suppose with a nod to David Letterman and also Reality TV, the whole of the world—according to the case-study video—seems to be engaged in some version of “Stupid Human Tricks.” People replace their teeth with bottle-openers, cook sausages on the back of a flatbed truck while racing down a highway, or upload pictures of themselves to salutary effect.

Agencies, of course, follow this banality. And doing Stupid Agency Tricks becomes the Modus Operandi of every agency worth its CEO's $22,000,000 salary.

Years ago a client of mine was positively gushing. We had run a single ad and, according to him, sales were up 400%. I pushed him about his data—data that would have made a great case study. The single ad had upped sales from one unit to four.

Here’s a sample script—what these videos usually sound like:

VO:        Breakfast is changing.

People are fast-moving, hard-charging.

They no longer have time for a sit-down meal to start the day.

So our client “The House of Toast” was suffering.

Same store sales of toast had decreased by 3% a year for six years running.

Toast sales were plummeting.

White toast was down an aggregate 26%.

The situation was even worse for pumpernickel.

House of Toast came to us for answers.

We came up with a multi-channel campaign

designed to make toast a destination again.

A series of “twoasts,” targeted tweets to lapsed toast eaters.

A targeted campaign of stickers on toasters urging people to “toast toast!”

And wild postings that put toast on everyone’s lips.

And it worked!
Toast sales did more than just pop up.

They soared.

Rye up 19%

Whole wheat up 31%.

And sourdough up a staggering 49%.

But our toast renaissance didn’t stop there.

Knowing our market had changed,

that both moms and kids wanted a faster toast alternative,

we brainstormed “Tube Toast.”

Toast on the go for today’s on the go consumer.

Tube Toast became the fastest growing entry in the Fast Moving Toasted Goods (FMTG) category.

Redefining breakfast.

Redefining toast.
Redefining delicious.

So let’s do what all of America is doing once again.
LET’S MAKE A TOAST!

Bee. Leaf.

Between 1963 and 1966, things sucked for the Hertz Rental Car company. 

Their marketshare had been at 61% in 1963. 

By 1966, they had lost 12-points. More than 20% of their share.

Worse, they had a competitor that had momentum. Avis had grown from a 29% share in 1963 to a 36% share in 1966--roughly a 25% gain. Hertz's own forecasts predicted that by 1968, Avis' marketshare would surpass Hertz', 43% to 42%.

I've been making my living in ad agencies for over 40 years. I've seldom had a shittier hand dealt to me than the Hertz scenario. Avis was "cool." Their ads were done by the best agency in the world. Avis pulled off a neat trick. While they were gaining huge amounts of marketshare, they kept their position as the underdog--the one everyone rooted for.

It was gauche in those days to NOT rent from Avis.

Yesterday I wrote a post about believing in the power of what we can do: the power of the power of advertising. 

I used an old Hertz commercial to help illustrate my point.

My point was that step one in doing great advertising--business-results-impacting advertising--is to believe that you can do such advertising and that such advertising can make a palpable difference in the fates and fortunes of clients (and agencies.)

The Hertz advertising above, I'd argue, is not, in the parlance of today, very creative. There's not a joke, a pun, a bit of popular culture, a celebrity or a design fillip to be seen.

Just facts.

There were no planners at Carl Ally (Hertz's agency) when I was there in the 1990s. There were certainly none during its glory years from roughly 1962-1985.

But someone said, and many believed, "let's look at the product. Let's look at the facts. Let's look at what makes Hertz actually better. And lets write and art-direct the shit out of that."

Let's believe, in a sense, David Ogilvy's gendered line, "The consumer isn't a moron; she's your wife."

In other words, if you can show that your product is superior, let's assume most people will choose superiority.

Facts, attitude, bluntness and a brilliant icon (the #1 finger) reversed the momentum for Hertz and Avis. 

That's what advertising can do.

Ah, but I hear you say, Hertz had it easy. Their product was better.

No, not really. 

They were just bigger. 

They turned that into a better.

I'm not sure marketers think like this anymore.

To the detriment of their success, their brands, and their agencies. And their careers.

So, every ad looks the same. Sounds the same. A tale of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

That's us.

We make an excuse not to work to find something interesting. We talk about story telling, but we forget to tell stories. Or to make them real. Or to base them on facts, humanity and feeling.

Nothing new here either. In fact, old. Imagine being given a brief that said "Hovis bread has wheat germ." Well, bust my buttons.

We forget that before you sell a product, you have to believe in that product. No really, believe in it.

Believe in. Live it. Breathe it. Try it. Buy it. Become an ambassador for it.

Not saying, "no one cares." Or, "no one reads." Or, "they're all the same." "Or, we'll use data." Or AI. Or programmatic. Or social. Or bots.

When you raise kids in the city you have to use advertising. 

You have to somehow, against hordes of bribing investment bankers, get your kids into private schools. 

They have the money to donate wings and gymnasia.
You have to advertise.

There are many more kids than spaces. The competition is fiercer than anything you'd face on Wall Street. And the stakes are higher. 

They're about your kid. Giving your kid a chance to make it.

I would never in a trillion times a trillion years say any of the things people say about the brands they work for about my own children. 

I'd never say, "they're parity kids--they're no better than anyone else's." Or, "no one cares." Or, "the only thing I can do is make my daughter a part of popular culture." (Whatever in god's name that means.

No. 

I'd dig and find a way to express how great they are. 

How fun, smart, different and energetic.

You have to believe.

In kids. In ads.

Nothing works if you don't.

Every one of these ads was done by the same agency that did the Hertz work above. Every one of these ads was created based on belief that the brands involved had something important to say. Not just a clever way to dress up nothing. Or a phony smile. Or a triple-play bundle. Or a summer sale-a-bration. 

Every one of these ads are better than anything running today.

And would work today.

If anyone believed today.

 

 

Be Leave.

I had a client meeting last last week that was refractory.

It hurts me when things don't go well. I believe it's my fault and I take it personally. Not only did I feel I let my clients down--they pay me a lot and they rely on me--I let my team of art directors and an account person down.

But then, just now, three days later, up at 6:30 AM on a Saturday, and walking Sparkle, our eleven month old golden retriever, I had an epiphanette. (A small epiphany.)

The problem wasn't the work. The problem was that my team believed in the client and the power of the work, and the client themselves don't believe in who they are and what they do.

The client didn't believe in the client.

Quickly, that thought rattled through what's left of my brain. 

The problem with the ad industry itself, is that the ad industry no longer believes in advertising.

Think of how many times you've heard:

All products are the same.
No one believes advertising.
No one watches TV anymore.
No one reads.
People don't like facts.
People don't have attention spans.
Advertising doesn't reach people anymore.

The list is nearly endless. And why we've looked for salvation via data, AI, and a thousand other appurtenances to advertising. Everything but advertising itself and the hard thinking/crafting work it demands. We search for panaceas while abandoning the perennial quest for simple, timeless human truth.

Advertising for the last thirty years or so has believed in everything but advertising. Clicking. Interactivity. Conversations. Influencers. Personalization. Turning straw into gold.

Everything but ideas and execution.

Quickly, that thought rattled through what's left of my brain. 

And it led to an even darker thought.

About trump, Harris, America and the Manichean battle being waged for the future of the nation.

Nearly fifty-percent of our nation doesn't believe in our nation anymore. 
For all its flaws, its arc that bends toward justice.
The sanctity of elections, voting and the transfer of power.
One person, one vote.
No one above the law and equal justice.
The American dream.
All that jazz.

Nearly fifty-percent of our nation doesn't believe in our nation anymore.

I'm not a pollyanna. I know America is flawed and always will be. That ain't the point. For all America's original and persistent sins, people came here with nothing and grew. Their children grew. 

That's something to believe in.

On Sunday, August 18th, this article appeared in the New York Times.

It turns out that the 47-seconds referenced in the headline above included thirty-seconds of a TV spot. The one that according to the article, saved Kamala Harris' political career and, yes, could potentially change the course of world history.

Harris was running for California Attorney General, and she was getting her ass kicked by a better known, "he-looks-the-part" tea party candidate, Steve Cooley. Forty-five minutes into their hour-long debate, according to the Times, "Mr. Cooley gave an answer that was frank, fateful and foolish." 

LA Times reporter Jack Leonard asked Cooley if he would continue to collect his state pension if he was elected Attorney General. Cooley said, honestly, "Yes, I do. I earned it." I can't seem to download the spot, but you can view it here. 

Harris' ad person had this to say:

The election wasn't decided until three weeks after the polls closed. Cooley had been leading the whole way, and actually had declared victory.

He lost.

And she won.

About thirty-five years ago, I worked for ad legend and creative Hall-of-Famer Mike Tesch. I never spoke to him much. He was too high-falutin' for me and I was too intimidated by him. But I remember reading an article about him that had a quotation in it. A quotation I've remembered for all that time.

"Tesch believes there's no marketing problem so big that a great 30-second spot can't solve it."

Of all the people reading that sentence, half will shake their heads and decry the simplicity and naiveté of Tesch. A man who wrote the commercials that made FedEx a multi-billion dollar brand. Who in a headline or two destroyed DDB's Avis' "We Try Harder" campaign.

I don't think Tesch was naive.

I believe.

I believe in the power of what we do. And the tools and reach we have at our disposal. I believe that agencies that are growing, GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, Mischief, maybe there's another one somewhere, believe in that too. And we've somehow persuaded our clients and prospective clients to believe the same. 

A big part of our job is to back up belief with ideas and work and facts and emotions that make a difference to people.

I believe I can do that job.

Do you believe we are fated to just produce shit that annoys people that has no effect on markets, brands and the economy.

Or do you believe as Churchill said about the brave, out-numbered and out-gunner pilots of the Royal Air Force who vanquished the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain in 1940, thus saving the world.

This is my agency belief system, my American belief system, my love thy neighbor belief system.

I don't know any other belief system.

Too Mean to Regress to the Mean.

When I was just fourteen, I made the varsity baseball team at the elite private school I went to. Not only did I make the baseball team, I was anointed the starting third-baseman. It was quite a feat for a kid of 14 to be playing alongside 18-year-olds, especially since I hadn't had my growth yet and stood only about 5'5".

I was, as a third-baseman needs to be "stolid." I read a scouting report once written by the great old timey baseball genius Branch Rickey (the guy who signed Jackie Robinson) of a great third baseman for the 1960s St. Louis Cardinals, Ken Boyer. 

Rickey blasted Boyer because Boyer wasn't stolid. Meaning he didn't stand in there and allow the ball to hit his body on his way to fielding it. A third baseman is a hockey goalie. Your attitude at the hot corner is straightforward. Nothing gets by me.

While I was stolid and sturdy as a third-bagger, I was less impressive with the lumber. So, Babich, my coach had me batting seventh. Against some of the stronger arms in the league, I wasn't sure if I could even get a foul tip. Especially challenging were benders. The pitches that went every which way, and usually at the last moment.

However, I hung in there.

In my first home game to the surprise of everyone, including myself, I hit a hard grounder directly back through the box, splitting the middle of the infield. Their second baseman fielded it and the throw to first would be close. I knew that as I was running to first. 

Their first baseman fucked up. He was standing directly on the bag. When I saw that the ball and I would arrive within milliseconds of each other, I took advantage of the fielder's miscue. Though I was 5'5" and he was probably 6'1". 

I ran right into him like Pete Rose (my baseball idol at the time) had done to Ray Fosse at the 1970 All-Star game.

I knocked the shit out of him and he dropped the ball and I was safe. They scored it a hit. 

This sort of combativeness will strike some people as wrong-headed.

But combativeness wins jobs, assignments, accounts and gets you on base.

I don't really care that in the parlance of today's HR-language-pablum we're all supposed to be "collaborative bridge builders."

I don't buy that. And never will.

When I got fired from Ogilvy, I knew I'd be competing for jobs against the 92,678 other copywriters who have been excised from our miasmatic "share-holder-value" industry that pays its CEOs 300x what median workers' salaries are.

I did one thing that was smart.

I chose someone to go after salary-wise. I chose to run into them head-on.

It wasn't another creative. 

It was one of a dozen or so Ogilvy CEOs. Not remotely a creative.

I said to myself, "I'm as smart as XXX. And I can write. She can only powerpoint. So if she gets $XXXX a day, I'm going to get the same."

That's as close as I could get at the age I was fired (62) to being the 14-year-old boy knocking over a first-baseman who had 50 pounds on me.

Like I said, I don't really care if it ain't all kumbaya.

I'm not in business to get along.

I'm in business to win.

WTF.

Yesterday, I sent H, my account director and recently-licensed psychotherapist (one word) an article I thought would infuriate her from "The Economist."

Much of what I see in our troubled world is because of our societal descent into childish moral absolutism. Millennia ago, we might have called it Manichaeism, the Third Century AD religion embracing a cosmic dualism that saw the world as a constant battle between light and goodness and darkness and evil.

Certainly certainty is to blame here. And amerika's current political discord is evidence of our miasma. Our collective societal intelligence is devoid of nuance and over-flowing with judgment. Any transgression, whenever it took place, whatever the circumstances, and the result is banishment--cancelling.

I've seen buckets-full of this in advertising. Puffed-out pontificators saying "blank is dead," or that advertising's role is to clean the oceans of plastics when advertising as an industry no longer even pays 85-percent of its practitioners a living wage. Worse are those who absolutely believe that some binary gizmo can reach people through math or data science or surveillance, when the only thing that's ever reached people is a well-crafted (that doesn't mean honest) message repeated often.

Just now, I read another article from The Economist. This one on moral ambiguity. A much richer topic than absolutism.

The article grabbed my attention in part because of the photo above. I spent two starlit nights in Verona, Italy's 1st
-century AD Colosseum while at the Verona Opera Festival with my wife. We saw Puccini's "Turandot," and Verdi's "Aida." I've lived about 25,000 nights in my long life. Those two nights were among the best I ever had.

But onto horror, my metier. The Economist article begins this way:

Ouch. 

Today you get workmen's comp from a paper cut. 

But the point of the Economist article is in the Wally Benjamin quotation below. (I was the only one ever permitted to call Walter Wally.)

"There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism." And the point is this: 

With the escapism and gelato, you get a lesson in the moral complexity of the past.

Graham Greene, Carol Reed, and Orson Welles said it best, as you'd expect, in this scene from "The Third Man." The best lines come at the end. So it's worth hanging in there for the requisite three minutes.

I realize a post on absolutism versus moral complexity is a little deep-dish for a blog on advertising.

I'm funny that way.

So I'll leave you with this, from Czeslaw Miłosz, a Polish poet, writer, diplomat and Nobel Prize winner.  Supposedly Milosz heard it from an ancient Galician Jew. 

Personally, if I worked again for any agency or holding company, I'd have it painted on the walls and I'd make human resources people memorize it.  They'd probably fire me for that.

It's Not Fun. It's Not Funny. It's Unny.*

I've been neck deep in an assignment for the past month and on Tuesday, the work was presented to the billionaire paying for it.

Billionaires paying you = good.

I didn't go to the meeting. My ex-boss, Steve Simpson went. Ostensibly because the billionaire is quirky as didn't want too many people in the room. I didn't really care, but truth be told (which it seldom is) account people have as many reasons to knock creatives out of a meeting as they do to add account people to the same meeting. Generally speaking, they're uncomfortable with people who aren't scripted. Which, also generally speaking, is people with an actual pulse.

In doing the work for the meeting--the thing I really care about--I added a headline to the mix at pretty much the last minute. It was one of those "perfect" ones. Just teetering on the edge of legal and inscrutable. I can't share it here because the work is still being made.

Because I wrote the line probably 36 hours before the meeting, I never even presented it. I just sent it to the super-talented designer/art director and [voila] it appeared in the deck.

Immediately I started getting text messages. 

"Can we say that?"
"Will so-and-so sue us?"
"I'm not sure about..."

It made people nervous. And we had enough work without this line and didn't really need it. But like I said, it was perfect. So rather than respond to the tsunami and edamame of worries, I just ignored everyone. Their frenzy eventually shifted to something else more important. Like should we center page numbers in the deck or put them in the right-hand corner.

Tuesday was the meeting. And late Tuesday afternoon, the eight people who went zoomed me in to tell me how the meeting went. They all had that "my horse just paid 17-1" gushy enthusiasm. That post meeting elation. Like getting the last bagel left behind in an agency.

The sternest of the group, who in about three weeks I could get to break her granite demeanor but once, was the gushiest. I'll call her "P." 

"You know that ad you wrote? "C," the client couldn't stop laughing. He LOL'd."

I really did say nothing, in sharp contrast to my usual "I told you so" proclivities.

One thing I've noticed through the years is how nervous the world is. Maybe because I'm no longer in the belly of the Madison Avenue beast, I'm more aware of some of the warning signs of horrors of the modern workplace.

When zoom calls are meted out in 25 minute increments, when people arrive a little late and out of breath, when one-third of the words exchanged are "I'm gonna have to drop off after 20 minutes," you know the places you're working with and the people too have a troubled pathology.

They've bought into the notion that the work we do is grave and serious. They've bought into the notion of their own importance. That meetings and the endless lip-flapping around work actually works and makes work better.

They've bought into the notion that somehow laughter and human emotion and reactions run counter to productivity because they've stolen time from what most corporate entities do best, which is worry.

When I have a client and it's more complicated than a moon landing to get them all together to take a look at my work, I know there's a problem.

The problem is this: all people really want from an ad is an idea, something interesting, or a laugh. They'll love you forever if you give them a joke they can share.

We take meetings as if we're stuck inside a boiling cauldron. We look for laughter through a thick slab of seriousness and worry that it will find us.

Get over yourself.

--

* Feedback I once heard from Steve Hayden, reviewing a cut.
Thankfully, not one of mine.