People often ask me how I've written a new blog post approximately every working day for the last eighteen or so years. I almost always answer the same way.
I say, if I were a baseball scout in a good baseball territory like Southern California or the Dominican Republic, I would never go anywhere without my notebook, pen and camera. Whenever I saw a long-armed lad who could throw a pork chop past a hungry wolf, I would take notes, write it down, take some pictures and follow up.
I've always had a similar perspicacity when I comes to advertising, which is my profession, and blogging, which is my best new business tool. You always have to be looking, learning, taking notes and adding to your arsenal of potential ideas and even phrases and techniques you can steal.
Naturally, I am idiosyncratic in how I do this. I don't watch TV and I seldom go to the movies. My brain runs better on old octane than new-fangled fuels, and so far my myopia hasn't too badly f-ed up my quest to make a living.
In today's blog post, I'll give you an example of what I call "my wide-field of vision." A lot of being creative is seeing things other people don't, storing them and being able to call on them when you need them. Even when I played ball, my wide-field of vision helped me both in the field and at the plate. I could see the ball where other people couldn't.
One.
If you have the money, I'd recommend finding a way to subscribe to The Economist. Not only is their world view wonderfully measured and non-sensational, they also keep their articles to a single page. You can get deep thinking in about a minute.
The Economist also has a subscription newsletter they call Bartleby after Melville's Scrivener, perhaps the first "quiet-quitter" in history. Bartleby provides good advice. I take it to heart and often share it with people I love. Today, I read this piece, which brought to my attention the "mis-communication" that's woven into so many communications.
The ELBW example below is striking. To neo-natal teams it means "extremely low birth weight" and therefore a "drop-everything" emergency. However, in this one instance, ELBW was interpreted as "elbow," something you don't have to rush for.
I wonder how many people read ASAP as "a sandwich and pickle." It often seems that way.
When I started at Ogilvy during my first stint, an account person briefed me on my first or second day. She told me I needed to write some crisis ads directed at C-Level employees. I had never heard the term before, and understood it at sea-level. I figured it was people with beach houses. Fortunately, when I don't know something, I usually ask, rather than fake it till I make it. But I think I am unusual in that.
A long way of saying, what Orwell said in his great 1948 essay "Politics and the English Language," his fifth rule of six:
Business | Bartleby
Broken workflows—and how to fix them
Extremely chaotic and incredibly simple
Very premature babies need lots of immediate medical attention. Which is why one neo-natal team in an American hospital texted the acronym “ELBW”, shorthand for “extremely low birth weight”, to relevant clinical staff if they wanted them to get to the unit fast. Unfortunately, some recipients of this message took it to mean that a baby had a problem with its elbow, and did not require an urgent response. This excruciating story is one of many told in a new book, “There’s Got To Be A Better Way”, by Nelson Repenning, a business-school professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Donald Kieffer, a one-time operations executive at Harley-Davidson who also lectures at MIT.
Two
The second thing I noticed this morning was from the sports page of the Times. I care little for sports but somehow this caught my eye, a story about a football quarterback coming back to New York to defeat the team who castigated him and fired him.
To me a person who carries around the anger of childhood abuse and maltreatment, the sentence highlighted below was the phrase that pays:
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Aaron Rodgers was walking out of MetLife Stadium when a tall man wearing a camouflage jacket and a backward-turned Yankees cap offered a parting word of encouragement and advice....More than anything, [that man] was among the rare fans in attendance Sunday who understood exactly what professional athletes feel when they are traded, waived, fired, told they are no longer wanted.Told they are no longer good enough.
When I was fired by Ogilvy, Mark Read their holding company's CEO at the time (and a man who has never written an ad) essentially libeled me and the others I was fired with for being old. He said, "we harkened back to the eighties." That was a lie. That was a smear. That was an anger-making barb that inspired me to avenge.
No one should insult and impugn without consequence. And, I am not a turn the other cheek sort. Steve Hayden, my boss and mentor, called me stiff-necked. Stiff-necks are not good for cheek-turning.
Three.
Speaking of Steve Hayden, I read this last week in Steve's obituary. It is as good a summary of the man, and what really stellar agencies can do for a brand as any I've ever read in my entire life. That this ability is neither understood by agencies nor marketed by them, and not understood or demanded by clients is, more than anything else responsible for the utter decay if not destruction of the entire industry.
No one, not even 99.9-percent of people who work in the industry realize the true power of what we can do. When we start selling this again, we will win again.
Steve's gone.
And we can't be afraid to charge plenty for those words.
No comments:
Post a Comment