Take the Paper Away.

Of all the frustrations of running your own ad agency, or working for one, or even more broadly, selling your imagination and creativity for a living (and a loving) the most heinous of all are the many slips 'twixt cup and lip.

Put into plain English, it's selling the client something good, startling and attention-getting (and therefore with a greater propensity to be effective) and then seeing it chipped away assiduously, like if you crossed Michelangelo with a cocaine-fueled beaver.

The short way of saying that can be summed up in one made-up word: Blanderization: The process of putting good work in a blender with convention, best-practices, milquetoast and a general 'everyone will like it' inoffensiveness that induces a kind of malaise--an insular un-caring-ness--upon the (non) viewer.

Some of this Blanderization is endemic, I suppose, to the very construction of advertising today. And even GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is not immune. 

Clients buy your ideas and creativity. After a short and finite amount of time, you are cut out of the picture--and oftentimes you work is turned over to hordes of "marketers" with even more hordes of opinions. Even worse, too often, your work is turned over to in-house teams. 

By definition in-house teams can't "fight" like agencies. As I once said not too many long years ago, an in-house creative department offers the objectivity of going to your mother-in-law for marital advice.

I've dealt with two clients lately who paid me top-dollar for my ineffable insouciance and then on the way to producing my ideas sullied them to the point of yuck. 

Before they did me dirty, I told each of them the same story.

It's an old story inveterate readers of this space might recognize. It's about the head-mistress of my kids' pre-school, a brilliant educator I'll call Mrs. Mandlebaum. A parent stood up one evening at a parents-group meeting and said, "my kids art sucked before she got here. And it sucked after she left. But it was great while she was here. What's your secret?" With Buddha-like serenity, Mandlebaum answered, "It's simple. We know when to take the paper away."

Back when I was a tween, Billy Hamilton and I were the best "artists" in our class. Billy went to art school and became skilled. I reached my apotheosis at twelve. I drew as well then as I can draw now. 

I remember spending a rainy afternoon drawing alongside Billy. He took me to task with these words I've remembered more than half-a-century: "You've improved it to death."

I draw exactly this well.

Not too long ago, I read a book review on a new book on the towering intellect, Harold Bloom, called "The Man Who Read Everything." It must be up my alley, because a friend sent it to me, as well.

This was the bit that got to me.

Many in the ad industry are ravenous digesters, too. While I'll be the first to admit, those of us in advertising are not Harold Blooms, we have some Bloom-isms in us. We think about people, brands, film, music, words in ways that most people don't. And that extraordinary-ness often finds its way into the best of our work. 

Even something as prosaic and terse as "Got Milk," launched a thousand advertising ships. It's Bloom-like in its genius.

However, the power of our own modest Bloom-isms, gets whittled away or smoothed over by those who haven't got it. Those practitioners of 'best practices,' who spend their days and nights pondering how many focus-groups can dance on the head of a pin.

That's how this:

Turns into this:

I don't know a single person who's not 98.79-percent bot who uses the word "holistic." Or anyone who has the foggiest notion off what financial parenting is, unless they're in the counterfeiting business.

I do know that when after five days a Linked in post gets just five  responses, it's woeful. And agencies get fired for not doing it. No matter how much they fought having to do it.

5.

More than they deserve.