Kid Stuff.

Forgive me for this one. This will be painting with an extremely broad-brush. Like something the felon-in-chief might use to groom his cranial merkin.

I’ve just spent a week with my daughter, S, my son-in-law, Ry, and my 4-year-old grandson, J, and my 18-month-old grandson, Ri. Not to mention their Loki-like Boston Terrier, T.

This week of cacophony, of incomplete sentences, of a constant stream of interruptions, of too much going on, of too-many adults talking at cross-purposes, of asking J to leave Ri alone, of telling J and Ri they can’t do ____ until they do _____, of trying to get the kids to sit at the table and a million more “parenting things,” made me think of advertising. 

Start here. With my gently annotated chart of amerikkkan birthrates from 1950 to today.

In 1960—around the time DDB, Carl Ally and a few others created the greatest advertising ever, there were about 23 kids births per 1,000 people.

That means the people writing and art directing and producing and planning and selling and buying ads likely had a gaggle of kids about. 

Homes were smaller then, too. So in all likelihood, you had more chaos per square foot.

Because of those conditions, ad people might have learned  if you wanted something to “sink in,” to be remembered, to have impact amid all the noise in a modern home, you had to repeat yourself.

J, I said it’s time to leave the pool. J, I said it’s time to leave the pool. J, I said it’s time to leave the pool. J, I said it’s time to leave the pool. J, I said it’s time to leave the pool. J, I said it’s time to leave the pool. J, I said it’s time to leave the pool. 

That’s why advertisers came up with mnemonic devices. Little hammers banging away at sinuses. A crown that suddenly appeared on someone’s head when they tried Imperial margarine, slogans like “two, two, two mints in one" for Certs mints. It’s why “Anticipation,” sung by a Carly Simon-sound-alike sold Heinz ketchup. “It takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’,” sold Timex watches. There are thousands of examples old-timers like me extol.

Today, the birthrate is less than half what it was during the golden age of advertising. Today there are about 11 kids born per thousand people. I’d imagine in precincts like Williamsburg, where half the ad industry seems to live, it’s much less than that.

There aren’t plastic toy garbage trucks making back-up-beeping sounds echoing through your apartment. There aren’t every twenty seconds chocolate milk spills to be attended to and babies crying because babies, simply, cry.

There are one-third fewer kids running through your neural-network today than there were 20 years ago. And one-half the number of kids as 50 years ago.

This may be stupid.

But if you’re not used to having kids around, or if you never had kids around, you might think you deserve attention. You might think being a grown up counts for something. And speaking and listening are somehow related.

Without living in the noise-o-sphere, ad people might not know that you have to actually do something attention-getting to get attention. 

I spent the week just gone by with various small trucks and/or plush animals balanced on my head. I still couldn’t get through a single highly-recommended kids’ book. Of about eight pages. Not even something as artful as this. By a Pulitzer-Prize winner. Kids don’t care about awards—not even Cannes!

About forty years ago, I had a very tall, very blond and very beautiful friend I’ll call C. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning or even nathalie harp, she walked in beauty like the night. After Halloween one year, I asked C what her costume had been.

C said, “I dressed entirely in black and pasted stars and moons on my clothing.” Pause or Caesura. “I went out as the center of the universe.”

The thing about having 97-thousand kids in your house, even if it’s only two, is that you can’t be the center of the universe. In order to get attention you have to give something of value. You have to make a promise. You have to be funny, or memorable. And you have to repeat yourself. And you have to repeat yourself. And you have to repeat yourself. 

And then to actually be heard and heeded, you have to get like one-in-one-hundred lucky.

I’d have much more faith in ad testing and focus groups and double-income-no-kids CCOs and CMOs, if they didn’t feel like the work we do, the powerpoints we create, the “culture” we appropriate was the center of the universe. If they held a focus group in a first-grade classroom, it would deliver marketers much more value.

Right now, everything we say and try to impart to viewers all means much less than a diaper change. 

Even less than what’s in the diaper.