Ooops. (A Life Story.)

As readers of Ad Aged probably know, this blog, which I started almost eighteen years ago was started pretty much on a lark. 

My ex-partner, the great Tore Claesson, suggested I write one. I was out of work and Tore knew I needed a forum and an audience, and that I needed to write. This blog began as an itch to my perennial scratch.

I'm either a jerk or a genius when it comes to trying new things. 

I started writing this blog without ever having read a blog or talked to anyone about blogging. I didn't know the rules, or the highways or byways, or what blogs were supposed to be like. I just went ahead and did it all wrong until I found out what worked for me.

About three years ago, I was invited to give a TedX talk in Lisbon, Portugal and I went through somewhat of the same process. I never bothered to watch another Ted talk. The idea of watching someone talk about something for eighteen minutes and trying to learn their techniques and their style repelled me. I found myself walking down the winding avenues of Lisbon on my way to deliver my Ted talk having never seen a Ted talk.

Come to think of it, I think I followed a similar course when I decided I wanted to put a portfolio together and get a job in advertising. All sorts of people recommended books to read on how to put together a portfolio. And people came out of the veritable woodwork who were willing to tell me how to put a portfolio together and that I was doing it all wrong.

I didn't listen to any of them, and barely looked at anyone else's book while I was putting together my own. 

That might have been detrimental to getting a job. There were a lot of agencies in New York in those days, and I think I got turned down by about 99-percent of them. It was very depressing. 

But finally I had a book, I got a job, and the job, and my book was by me. I wasn't imitating anything or anyone else.

If all three things above, my blog, my TedX talk and my early portfolios were voyages of self-expression, or even discovery, I think I saw value in finding my own path. It makes me think of this book and this opening sentence from the review in The Wall Street Journal.

I wonder if part of the malaise in advertising in specific and the world in general (rates of growth, despite all the hype about the internet, computers, AI, quantum, and elon musk's nose hair are less than half of what they were in the world I was born into) is because we're following playbooks and best-practices and cosmic idiots' guides for dummies that will tell us how to find the new new thing. We're no longer seeking. We're finding a pundit and assuming he knows the way. 

We're following, not experimenting.

It's really hard in life to replicate the results of someone else's experiment. 

The real secret isn't the how, it's the do. It's not how you experiment, it's that you experiment. Experimentation leads to progress and advancement. Guide books seldom do.

Here's one example I cut out of the Times almost three years ago and have been thinking about ever since. It's a story by Charles Blow, a Times' essayist, and how he got his break.

"I got my internship at The Times by not taking no for an answer. When I arrived at The Times’s booth at an Atlanta job fair in the early ’90s, the recruiters told me I wouldn’t be able to interview because applicants had to sign up in advance, and their dance card was full.

"I said that I understood, but that I was going to wait there until someone didn’t show up for their interview. I sat for about six hours, so long that they seemed to forget I was there. 

"I listened in as other applicants sat for interviews, and as the recruiters discussed each candidate when they left. It was the absolute best opposition research. When one of the recruiters finally relented and offered to interview me, I knew the perfect way to answer. 

"The next day, the recruiters told me that I had so impressed them that they called back to New York overnight and created a graphics internship just for me."

A lot of life in an agency is a desiccated scrunched scrotum telling other people how to do things. How they did things. A lot of our social media inundation is lists and guides and pontificatory posing. As Alban Barkley is said to have said about the vice presidency, it's not "worth a bucket of warm spit." Except Barkley used a word that rhymed with spit.

Being a human is a tough row to hoe in the best of times. It's even tougher if you're trying to be someone you're not like a Patricia Highsmith character and your work is imitative rather than imaginative.

A lot of life today is seeing what someone else has done and trying to walk in their footsteps. It's why there are so many sequels and Marvel movies like Spiderman 27 Return of number 26. It's why ads look like ads look like ads and no one looks up.

That's part of the reason why, as long as brands and people care about creativity, I don't worry about AI. AI is, tautologically, capable of matching patterns, not matching nuttiness. AI is a sameness machine--taking what's already been done and rejiggering it.

That sameness is bad.

It's even worse when people do it to themselves.

__

BTW, this post is a good example proving that I know nothing about blogging. First off, it's just a day after New Year's and I'm sure readership is very low and people's brains are pudding. Yet, I've written a 970-word post, not counting this addendum, on a fairly complicated topic. What's more, I didn't dumb anything down, those 149 "issues" are because I use longish sentences and big words.

I'm sure my posts could reach many more readers if I dealt in platitudes. If I godinized them, shortenized them, and dopeyized them. But I write for myself, and I assume my readers are here for my thoughts expressed in my way. I'm not changing that even if it would makes sense for me to.

I don't care.

.