Ad Aged--Will Madison Avenue Become Detroit?

Doing what it takes. Whatever it takes.

2012-02-02T17:53:00.000-05:00

There's a terrific obituary in today's "New York Times" of the great boxing trainer and cornerman Angelo Dundee. Dundee guided Cassius Clay--who later became Muhammad Ali--to his championship over Sonny Liston. He also trained Carmen Basilio to his welterweight and middleweight titles, and Sugar Ray Leonard to his welterweight championship. He also trained champions Jimmy Ellis, Willie Pastrano, Luis Rodriguez and George Foreman. You can read the obituary here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/sports/angelo-dundee-trainer-of-boxing-champions-dies-at-90.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

One thing that marked Dundee's success was his ability to think on his feet. The obit reports: "When Ali sought to regain his senses after being knocked down by Henry Cooper in the fourth round of their June 1963 bout, Dundee stuck his finger in a small slit that had opened in one of Ali’s gloves, making the damage worse. Then he brought the badly damaged glove to the referee’s attention. Dundee was told that a substitute glove wasn’t available, and the few seconds of delay helped Clay recover. He knocked Cooper out in the fifth round."

Another reason behind Dundee's triumphs was his ability to "read a room." "In the hours before Ali fought Foreman in Zaire in 1974 — the Rumble in the Jungle — Dundee noticed that the ring ropes were sagging in the high humidity. He used a razor blade to cut and refit them so they were tight, enabling Ali to bounce off them when Foreman unleashed his “anywhere” punches from all angles. Ali wore Foreman out, hanging back with the “rope a dope” strategy Ali undertook on his own, and he went on to win the bout."

Thinking on your feet, reading the room, and being smart enough to do whatever it takes is what it takes to succeed in brutal businesses.

Like boxing.

And advertising.

20,000 brises.

2012-02-02T07:28:00.000-05:00

There's a slight article in today's "New York Times" about a man named Philip L. Sherman, a mohel (a practitioner of ritual Jewish circumcision) who since 1978 has performed over 20,000 circumcisions. You can read the article here: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/bringing-decades-of-experience-to-the-bris/?scp=1&sq=mohel&st=cse

As I head out this morning to yet another client meeting--I average, counting conference calls, probably ten a week--I think about performing 20,000 of anything. No, I haven't attended 20,000 client meetings. It just feels that way.

Nevertheless, I think there's something to be learned from Mr. Sherman.

Come prepared.

Don't kibbitz too much.

Cut fast and clean.

Shake hands.

Get the fuck out.

Collecting.

2012-02-01T13:58:00.000-05:00

Years ago, and at a very young age, I worked on a new business pitch of some magnitude and was selected to present the work to the client. I flew out to Indianapolis with my boss, the eponymous co-owner of the agency, and a senior account person.

While on the plane I began writing in a notebook notes to myself that would explain what I wanted to say. I put enough thought into this as to keep my notes short and bulleted. The account guy saw me writing and when we got into the rental car he asked me what I had been doing.

Collecting my thoughts, I answered.

He said, I've never seen a creative do that before.

Today we live in an era in which we employ Weapons of Mass Deckstruction.

Every little movement in something as important as new business seems to be scripted and choreographed and rehearsed.

We lay on page after page of powerpoint.

We positively swill in our own importance.

Me, personally, I still prefer a few sentences typed out--not late at night, not during the heat of the moment--that tell the story.

Rejection continued.

2012-02-01T09:09:00.001-05:00

I wrote a few days ago about a poet, editor, playwright named George Hitchcock who gained some notoriety through his poetry magazine "Kayak." The sources of his fame were two-fold. One, he published some of the leading poets of the second half of the 20th Century and two, he rejected poetry submissions with a wit and bite that is rare in these days of politesse.

I ordered last week and it arrived last night a book on Hitchcock that included a passel of his rejections. They're dark, most of them, but somehow brightened my lousy mood.

Reflections on the Oscars and truth.

2012-01-31T09:21:00.000-05:00

The Academy Awards--the Oscars--are just about upon us with nearly, it seems, every movie trumpeting its
nominations and hailing itself as one of the decade's best (even though we are but two years into this decade.) With this spate of awards shows looming, I got to wondering what were 'best pictures' like through the ages? What, if anything do they have in common with the best of today? And finally, would they, given our current mania for "cuttiness" be watchable today?

I decided to order from Amazon the first Oscar winner for Best Picture, "Wings" which was directed by William Wellman in 1927. (Wellman went on to direct the original "A Star is Born," "Beau Geste" and one of my childhood favorites, "The Oxbow Incident," featuring evil incarnate, Jane Darwell, a compellingly laconic Anthony Quinn, not to mention young Henry Fonda and his sidekick, the somewhat dim Harry Morgan.)

"Wings" arrived on Friday and I watched it last weekend, all 139 minutes of it.

There is a tendency in our business to think that the present has no precedents and the past has no value. That we cannot learn, admire, marvel over things that went before. "Wings" belies those notions.

First off, it is a simple, seminal story of two boys and one girl (Clara Bow--the "It" girl.) Second, the action takes place in the heightened intensity of wartime. A good portion of the movie are some pretty stunning bi-plane dogfights (a bi-plane is an aircraft that has sex with both male and female planes) replete with color special effects enhancing the action.

Finally, there is love, laughter, the death of a hero. All the requisites that are resonant today.

I'll admit, I approach a movie like "Wings" with more than a little trepidation. I warn my wife away from the TV. "You probably won't like this," I tell her. I understand the pacing of movies from eight decades ago doesn't jibe with today's tastes. And all that.

That said, "Wings" was great. It was a little gung-ho about the glory of war for my tastes, but it was a good story, well told. And if you can imagine your father or grandfather who had probably rarely even seen a plane 85 years ago, watching aerial battles up close, you realize the movie was really onto something.

All this to say, as Sam sang in "Casablanca,"

"You must remember this
A kiss is still a kiss,
A sigh is just a sigh...
The fundamental things apply,
As time goes by...

"Moonlight and love songs, never out of date
Hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate
Woman needs man, and man must have his maid
That no one can deny...

"It's the same old story,
A fight for love and glory,
a case of do or die...
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by."

Summertime.

2012-01-30T13:52:00.000-05:00

Gershwin and DuBose Heyward's opera "Porgy and Bess" is slated to open soon on Broadway and accordingly, it's received a lot of coverage from "The New York Times."

Joe Nocera, a Times financial writer and op-editorialist wrote about it in his blog today, a follow-up from a piece he'd written a couple of weeks earlier. http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/summertime-rendered-25000-ways/?hp

Nocera writes, "no song has been recorded more than “Summertime,” which has been covered more than 25,000 times – by rockers, country singers, jazz musicians and blues artists."

He then gives us about 10 versions to sample.

I haven't been able to hear them all, but the three I did hear--Miles, Billie, and Ella and Louis represent the high-water mark of something.

If you want something you have to pay something.

2012-01-30T12:23:00.001-05:00

One of the universal truths of our species is that, since the beginning of time, we have always tried to get something for nothing.

Humanity has utilized slave labor since our beginnings.

Similarly, we have engaged in extractive activities since the beginning of time. Taking from the earth, consequences be damned.

I've often thought that the explosive growth of online advertising, syndicated content and the like was contingent of media metric magic. We've all sat in those meetings. Trillions of eyeballs promised to the advertiser for next to nothing.

Today in the world there is a hue and cry about Google and Facebook and the like taking our data and using it nefariously to sell us, track us and whatever else us.

There is also a mini-outrage over Apple products being made in China by labor that often works literally around the clock, or at least in 12 hour shifts, for $17/day. You know, roughly what the people who are outraged spend per diem on Starbucks.

Again, there is a similar tsimmes over oil and chemical companies who are using hydraulic fracturing in areas populated by people's country homes. People are protesting "fracking" (what could go wrong when you high-pressure pump toxic chemicals into the ground water) as they fill up their SUVs with cheap gas. God forbid they take the train.

The point is that few people, businesses, religions, or governments do anything for purely benevolent reasons.

The world hasn't really changed since we became erect.

It's pay as you go.

More New York memories.

2012-01-29T10:41:00.001-05:00

When I was a kid growing up in the 60s, the wheels had really fallen off the societal bus. If you look at world violence rates graphically, there is a fairly steady decline from World War II to present, except, of course, for bursts of violence like the explosions which began during our "Peace and Love" era of the 60s (through the 80s) when murder rates and other violent crime rates jumped through the roof.

I was mugged twice as a pre-teen or early teenager. Once two kids caught me on my bike as I rode through a rough neighborhood. I was able to startle one of them with a "karate chop" to the back of the neck and get away. The second time I took a shortcut on the way home from a friend's house, I cut through a Gristede's parking lot and a kid named Glen Hall came after me and any money I might have had on my person. Glen Hall was one of our neighborhood's few "negroes" and, as such, was considered bad and dangerous. I was able to commandeer a shopping cart and chase after him using it like a jousting lance and I got away from Glen with whatever change I carried. Later on when I was a 7th-grader Glen and I got into a fight--he pulled a knife on me--but I was able, somehow, to pin him to the ground before things were broken up. I think the fight, really, was over a nickel, or maybe a quarter.

We used to listen to the radio a lot in those days, primarily because we watched less television. After school we often went to Wilson's field, a large open lot covered in rocks and struggling grass where we would play whatever "ball" was in season--football when it was cold (we still had cold weather in those days) and baseball when it was warm. Usually one kid or another would bring a $3.99 transistor radio that you could buy at Korvette's, a discount store that was the Walmart of its day.

We would listen to music when we played, or the Yankees or Mets if they were playing a day game, which they did more often in those days.

There was a local manufacturer that made noodles called "Country Kitchen" that had a beautiful jingle that sounded like it might have been written and recorded by Harry Nilsson.
It went like this and was accompanied by a really wistful and beautiful melody:

"I was looking for a noodle
A different kind of noodle
That was golden right
Tastes so nice.
Then I found what I was after
With the taste as light as laughter…
Country Kitchen, pure egg noodle."

Despite the scrapes and bruises we got from playing ball, and the scrapes and bruises we got from neighborhood toughs, the world seemed an easier place than it seems now. We could get an ice cream cone for 17-cents and see a movie matinee for 50-cents.

Last night my wife and I treated ourselves to some frozen yogurt. Some teenagers came into the store after we did. One, with an ass as wide as the M-15 bus, ordered a banana split. She was charged $8.

Stop it.

2012-01-27T10:07:00.002-05:00

Below is an 145-word sentence from "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" by Laurence Sterne. Many people, and I am among them, consider the novel (which was one of the first ever written in English) to be one of the greatest novels ever.

"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me."

I'm not sure if people today can fathom a sentence of this length. If, in the "Interruption Era" we can unravel its meandering complexity.

One thing I am sure about, utterly and completely positive about is this: No one, no one, no one gains even a scintilla of value from a brand positioning statement that is 56 words long.

Rejection(s).

2012-01-26T09:09:00.001-05:00

I've been a bit under the weather of late. Fighting both a stomach virus and some long-running fatigue. I haven't been, as I usually am, bursting with energy. Perhaps the world is too much with me. Maybe I'm worried about my wife who has been afflicted with a bit of hearing loss. Or maybe the actual prospect of Newt Gingrich as president has so frightened me that I've crawled under a metaphorical rock.

But yesterday, I had a good day.

I was rejected three times.

Once, a short story I had written was turned down from a prestigious small press. That was followed by two other exogenous rejections.

Rejection, no matter how used to it you are, no matter how 'long the shot,' no matter how
trivial is never easy to take. It's no fun.

However, there is something reassuringly life-affirming about it.

It means you have tried something.

It means you put your ass out there.

It means you're challenging yourself.

That's only my point of view, of course.

You can reject it.

Help.

2012-01-25T16:05:00.003-05:00

I have often thought that my generation was the last where you could get rapped in the knuckles by your teacher (or your parents) for being a lousy speller. While I in no way condone corporal punishment--except between two consenting adults, of course--the state of our language is severely under duress.

I've just run across three indiscretions in short order on Linked In. All from people for whom communication, clear, cogent, intelligible communication is part of their job description.

I've been asked to accept an invitation from "an intergraded copywriter."

I've been told a friend is looking for "recommendations from her piers."

And the apotheosis from a young copywriter looking for a job: "____is a strategicly fun thinker with outstanding will power... Young and eager, ____ is climbing up the todum pole to a successful career in the ad world and strives to work with a team of intellegent left-brain thinkers..."

Showing up.

2012-01-25T09:12:00.001-05:00

As I've written about over the past few weeks, just about everyone in my agency is burrowed deep inside a World War I style trench, cowering for protection, covered in mud and filth, keeping their heads down and writing reviews.

Like most things in our technocratic age, questions are asked and answered in reviews so that they are as abstruse, obtuse, diffuse and confuse as possible. When I read reviews they make me think of my new "least favorite" politician, Newt Gingrich who calls, for example, Barack Obama the "food stamp president" because you can no longer call someone a nigger. Though the effect and purpose is the same.

In any event, having nearly finished writing my reviews, I am now reading reviews others have written. In other words, reviewing reviewers. Which, of course, begs the old Roman question "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who will guard the guards?

It occurs to me that maybe the best review you can possibly give is a version of the old Woody Allen line: "80 percent of success is just showing up."

Today, we are infected with choice and many people simply choose not to show up.

They turn up missing by attending and scheduling meetings that produce nothing but wind. They are absent when the phone rings and someone is looking for help. They are present when sweeping and grandiose proclamations are made but they're missing when the campaign needs to sold by dint of the small, but important pieces that bring it to life for the client.

Thomas Paine, the great essayist (today we would call him a motivational speaker) called such people "summer soldier(s) and ...sunshine patriot(s)..."

An ex-boss of mine called them--in a phrase I'll never forget--people with "Titanic attitudes and minnows in the engine room."

Woody Allen called them people who don't show up.

Spoken by a planner.

2012-01-24T16:20:00.001-05:00

"We need to do some talking where we just listen."

Sometimes you need a kayak.

2012-01-24T09:20:00.003-05:00

I just read a memoir by Roger Rosenblatt, "Kayak Morning." It's a rumination about the death of his 38-year-old daughter and the nature of grief.

We read and use phrases like "getting over grief," "coming to terms with grief," "making peace with grief," "learning to live with grief." Such phrases are well and good--they seem to make sense. That is, until you're actually grieving. Then, they have the emotional perspicacity of a Hallmark greeting card.

In "Kayak Morning," Rosenblatt introduced me to George Hitchcock, the editor of a small but prestigious poetry magazine called, as you might expect "Kayak." The journal was published for 20-years, 64 issues. At which point Hitchcock shut it down. "Any more," Hitchcock said "and it would risk seeming an institution. After that, ossification and rigor mortis.”

There was a motto that was printed with each issue of "Kayak." “A kayak is not a galleon, ark, coracle or speedboat. It is a small watertight vessel operated by a single oarsman. It is submersible, has sharply pointed ends, and is constructed of light poles and the skins of furry animals. It has never yet been successfully employed as a means of mass transport.”

In this era of fascist collaborationists, of insistent know-nothingisms, of pompous
pontificators, it's nice, for me anyway, to think of someone who did something by himself. The world is too much with us, and all that.

What no one talks about or laments in our open-work-plan, interruption-phreno-genic offices is the power of setting out on a spiritual kayak. Where nothing but heaven is above you and nothing but water below.

That might be when peace occurs and good work happens.

Career advice from Freeman Dyson (still working at 88.)

2012-01-23T09:13:00.002-05:00

Ever since I was a teenager and came across Freeman Dyson's long essays in "The New Yorker" on the horrible perils of nuclear holocaust, I have been a fan of his. When the reactionary Reaganites were telling us "everyone would survive if they had a shovel and enough dirt, I would always shake my head and say, first, did you read John Hersey's "Hiroshima"? and second, "Have you read Freeman Dyson?"

Dyson was everything I respected in a thinker. He stuck to no ideology. And he was unafraid (and still is) to take controversial positions. He's the rare scientist who thinks global warming isn't something we need worry about. You don't always have to agree with someone in order to admire and respect him. He also believes in the efficacy of nuclear energy and backs up his position with what seem to me to be fairly valid facts.

In any event, I've just come across a short piece about Dyson in "More Intelligent Life," the "life, style and culture" adjunct to "The Economist." In it, the 88-year-old Dyson is asked three questions:

(1) why he remained hard at work;

(2) what were his strengths and weaknesses now compared with earlier in his career; and

(3) what advice would he give to those who have been working for
(a) one year,
and (b) 30 years?

Here's the reply received by email the next day:

1. I continue working because I agree with Sigmund Freud’s definition of mental health. To be healthy means to love and to work. Both activities are good for the soul, and one of them also helps to pay for the groceries.

2. In my younger days my work as a scientist was deep and narrow. Now, as I grow old, my work grows broader and shallower. As a young man, I solved technical problems of interest only to a few specialists. As an old man, I write books about human affairs of interest to a broad public. In both halves of my life, I tried to make the best use of my limited abilities.

3.
(a). Advice to people at the beginning of their careers: do not imagine that you have to know everything before you can do anything. My own best work was done when I was most ignorant. Grab every opportunity to take responsibility and do things for which you are unqualified.

(b). Advice to people at the middle of their careers: do not be afraid to switch careers and try something new. As my friend the physicist Leo Szilard said (number nine in his list of ten commandments): “Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become.”

Something I've never been able to do.

2012-01-20T07:48:00.001-05:00

It's a new feature of Ad Aged, "Poetry Corner" where we lay down with iambs and meter not just our electricity but our feet. This is by e.e. cummings

let it go – the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise – let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go – the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers – you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go – the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things – let all go
dear

so comes love

Politics.

2012-01-18T09:47:00.001-05:00

Berlitz Advertising.

2012-01-18T08:55:00.004-05:00

I had a nice conversation with my eldest daughter this morning. It's always nice to witness cogency and intelligence before 8AM.

Sarah is 24 and a first-year Doctoral student going for her degree in Clinical Psychology. Her university adeptly seems to mix course work (theory) with clinical placement internships (practice.) Accordingly, Sarah is challenged with, say, learning something in a classroom on a Monday and then bringing that learning to bear with a client on a Tuesday.

It's a pretty grueling regimen. And Sarah, who is what some might regard as a 'Drama Mama' often feels the effects of her 70-hour work weeks.

There's not much I can say to her when she's feeling downtrodden. I usually just try to get her to take a step away from the ledge.

What I said to her this morning though seemed to work. It made me think, too.

"Essentially, you're learning a new language every term and forced to speak that language in your clinical placements."

She sighed heavily and (for once) agreed with me.

Then she asked, "How do you do it at work when you pitch a new piece of business? How do you know what makes a bank or a car or an air-conditioning unit 'different and better?' How do you know about the 'style' of the companies you're pitching? Do you hire category experts? I guess what I'm asking is, 'how do you learn their language?'

I took a deep breath.

"Well," I answered, "everybody wants everything in a rush. So, often, especially on pitches, we don't learn the culture of a company, their language. We speak in broken phrases. We emulate patterns we learned from other clients. Or we seek a universal language, an advertising 'Esperanto" I call 'Cooleranto.' We just try not to do something true, but something cool. We take a Berlitz course in our clients. We can find our way to a hospital or a toilet, but not much more. I think that's why most advertising sounds so phoney."

Thoroughly depressed at that point, I told Sarah I loved her and was proud she was pursuing her dream.

Thank god.

A first.

2012-01-17T18:08:00.005-05:00

Ever since I was a little boy and would go to 247 Park Avenue to visit my father at work, I've always wondered what it was like to operate one of the old timey elevators run, usually, by a dark man expertly handling a lever to make the elevator stop and go.

There are still a few buildings in New York that haven't been scraped and modernized and which haven't had their old elevators replaced by high-speed machines. I marvel at the men who run these boxes. They start and stop their car exactly on the floor requested. They seem to know exactly where they are in the building. They hardly have to look at the floor numbers as they chug by. They do it by feel.

The building I work in was never nice and by now it's probably 80 or 90 years old. It has three elevators. Two, the ones for passengers, are of the push button variety. There is nothing spectacular to report about these.

However, there's a third elevator, the freight, that is run by the Puerto Rican porter who keeps the building in its present state of architectural deshabille. Over the 27 months I've worked in this building I've come to know the porter. If I'm waiting in the lobby for a passenger elevator, he will often give me a "lift" in the freight.

He did today and I asked him if I could run the machine.

"No,"he said shaking his head.

But then as he shut the gate, he relented.

The lever is of the "dead man's brake" variety, like on the subway. If you stop holding the lever over to the left, the lever will spring to the center and the elevator will stop.

I pushed the lever over and counted up the floors, paying careful attention once I got to 10. (I work on 14 and there's no 13th floor.) I released the lever but was off by a couple of feet. I tried it a smidge. Again I was short.

"Line it up with this bar," he instructed.

I did and fairly well hit the mark.

I thanked him and got off on 14, having to step up only a couple of inches.

Running the elevator was a lot more interesting than the media meeting I was late to.

I can't write any more.

2012-01-17T13:03:00.005-05:00

OVER the past few weeks, as my wonderful younger daughter admonished, I've really been slacking on my blog. While I try to write every day, of late, I haven't felt like I have much to say. Usually, ideas find me when I think but lately if they've been knocking on more door, no one has been home.

Of course, my lack of ideas troubles me. Maybe it's a function (or lack of function) of my aging brain. Maybe its crenellations have smoothed. Maybe my synapses have withered. Maybe, thanks to the insistent dings, bings, bongs and pings that come from the various devices that I'm surrounded by have mitigated my brain function, have deteriorated my focus, have destroyed my whatchamacallit to such a degree that I can no longer write.

I'm sorry if I've been missing of late. I'm sorry if recent posts have sucked.

Let's just hope it's a slump. Not that I'm turning into a cretin.

Sorry.

2012-01-16T13:18:00.002-05:00

I just heard a report on the radio about a test given to four-year-olds here in New York City for entry into "Gifted and Talented" programs. Only children who score at or above the 90th percentile gain admission to such programs. The moderator asked why. The interviewee answered "Because they're gifted and talented programs."

What's happened in the world is that today everyone is "gifted and talented."

The media team, who can barely show up for meetings much less contribute original thinking, are told they're the agency equivalent of "gifted and talented." They're told they're "creative."

No.

Everyone is not gifted and talented.

Everyone is not a genius.

Everyone is not creative.

The new group think.

2012-01-16T06:27:00.004-05:00

One of the greatest frauds perpetrated by HR-"professionals" or Organizational Architects, or, simply the quacks and charlatans who issue proclamations from on-high is the notion of collaboration. You know, if we all sit together in a room, we'll get to a better place creatively than if we toil alone. If we work in a noisy, cluttered, chaotic workspace, a free-exchange of ideas will result, bettering our creative output. If no single person has responsibility, we all win.

Yesterday's "New York Times" has a long and important article that deflates these myths. It's called "The Rise of the New Group Think" and it's written by Susan Cain. You can read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?pagewanted=1&sq=brainstorming&st=cse&scp=1

Cain writes, "Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

"But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature."

That just about sums it up for me.

Don't make me sit in meetings which take away the time I need to actually think and, instead, demand that I think (for all) on demand. Don't make me sit out in the open where focus is often beaten by distraction. Don't tell me to collaborate when what you're really doing is watching.

This open plan, "let's all work together," bs is yet one more example of modern myopia. Let's do something completely different from how it's been done through all of recorded history--that'll work.

Leave me alone.

Karma.

2012-01-12T17:48:00.003-05:00

On Tuesday I had a fight with a cab driver. It doesn't happen often that I blow my stack but I did in cab 1 B 44. The fare was $10.40, I tossed him $11 and got out of his car and into another open cab I saw across the street.

Karma bit me in the ass.

I had left my iPhone in his cab.

Mutha fucker.

I did what I was supposed to do. With my near-photographic memory I had his medallion number and I called 311. They gave me the number of the garage he rented from. I reported the loss there.

Of course, I never heard back from the garage.

Instead the driver of 1 B 44 found my office number (I had a business card in my phone case) and called me.

Just now I ran out to 39th and 8th and met him. Of course it occurred to me that he was going to shoot me at close range in the face.

But instead, he handed me my phone.

I handed him $80.

Karma's a bitch.

Steve Hayden.

2012-01-11T09:18:00.003-05:00

I've been lucky in my career to have been close to some of the greatest creatives in the business.

I worked for Hall of Famers Ron Rosenfeld and Len Sirowitz. I worked for Amil Gargano and Mike Tesch. And while not Hall of Famers, I had my copy picked over and parsed by Harold Karp and Ed Butler. I worked for too short a time for Kirk Souder. And I partnered with the mercurial and brilliant Jeroen Boers and the simply brilliant and the brilliantly simple Tore Claesson.

But most of all, I got to sit with and talk to and love Steve Hayden.

Steve retired yesterday, after 18 years, from Ogilvy & Mather.

There's not enough I can say about the man.

Most of what he did, it seems to me, is believe in you.

I was new at Ogilvy and in a van with Steve heading out to location early one morning. He got a call on his cell phone from the client. Two hours before the shoot, they killed one of the spots we were supposed to be shooting.

He turned around to me and handed me his IBM Think Pad.

"Write a new spot," he said.

I did.

And 30 or 45 minutes later and with great trepidation I handed him his computer back with my script.

"Good. That's great." He laughed at my last line.

He got on the phone and read it to the client.

We shot the spot.

I've been a copywriter since 1982.

Thirty years.

I was never as good as I was when I worked for Steve.

'Tis the season.

2012-01-10T11:46:00.003-05:00

It's review season at my agency. And I have in my inbox requests for about 168 reviews, roughly half of them about account people.

I hate writing reviews. Usually because the "form" you're meant to complete was created by someone (or some committee) that has no understanding of how to do a job well. They essentially ask you to review a house painter based on his cooking ability.

In any event, I give you this, which I've been carting around for parts of four decades.

1. Be smart about everything. Be an expert in your client’s business. Be an expert in “agency mechanics”…Learn to listen.

2. Be 100% buttoned up. Get inside and control the “boiler room”…Plan for disasters…Proofread as if typos could cost you your job.

3. Be curious. Question everything and everyone. Get out of the office and look around. Learn from others.

4. Commit yourself to “original thinking.” Be more than an advertising mechanic. Set aside a part of every day to “blue sky” big thoughts. Be seen as one who can serve up fresh ideas.

5. Create your own opportunities. Don’t just look for “handouts.” Constantly do the little extras. Deliver products that are consistently excellent.

6. Gain respect of everyone around you. Expect that you will need to “win” support from everyone. Always recognize others when they do good work for you.

7. Learn to express yourself effectively. You will go nowhere if you can’t advocate ideas. Rehearse. Rehearse. Rehearse. Learn how to talk to different audiences. Always be enthusiastic.

8. Build a broad foundation early. In the beginning be a jack-of-all-trades. Get involved with everything. Go back to school. Never stop exploring.

9. Wash windows—willingly. Face it, every job comes with drudgery. Always volunteer to pitch in when asked. But, always look for ways to do dirty laundry as efficiently as possible.

10. Learn to manage your business well. Get early agreements on assignments. Always be realistic, honest. If you disagree, say so. Make clients a legitimate part of the team.

11. Smother your clients with care. Be in constant touch. Make them feel that you think of them often. Dream up reasons to gain broad access to key client contacts. Never neglect clients at lower echelons. Know the “big issues” on your clients’ minds at all times. Lead.

12. Treat your clients’ money as if it were your own. Show them that you are both fussy about quality and frugal. Don’t simply accept the cavalier attitudes of others. Give appropriate direction on cost parameters. Make people meet expectations.

13. Don’t be meek and nervous. If you do your homework you will succeed. Act with confidence. But if you don’t have answers don’t fake them. Remember, most people want you to succeed.

14. Develop your own ideas about how to be a good manager. Watch your supervisor and others. Prepare now to take on more responsibilities.

15. Constantly build trust. Be 100% reliable. Be 100% honest. Do what you commit to do 100% of the time. Be respected by 100% of the people with whom you work. Be nothing less than 100% professional.

We made the next round.

2012-01-09T10:18:00.001-05:00

On a new business pitch I helped out on.

We are speaking to the prospective client now, who began our conversation with this loaded phrase: "Thank you for your submission."

Agency leaders.

2012-01-09T07:56:00.005-05:00

The genesis of this blog was my constant rumination over the ossification of the American advertising industry. Having worked in traditional advertising, in direct and in digital, I thought, perhaps somewhat arrogantly, that I had a unique perspective on the failings, the group think, the myopia of Madison Avenue. The industry as a whole seemed to be an industry as a hole.

As this blog enters its fifth year, I still think about the parallels between Madison Avenue and the decrepitude of Detroit. But today I'll spend a few moments thinking about how, as an industry, we pick our leaders. For that, I think, we can learn something by looking at the Republican presidential candidates and their endless debating and posturing and mud-slinging as Republicans throughout America select a "winner" to face Obama.

There are some agency leaders we pick because they're like Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry. They look good on paper and we overlook their obvious shortcomings and wallow in with rose-colored infatuation and say "he's the one. He did such and such campaign for Pigeon Rights that won Gold at Cannes. He can help resurrect us from our current malaise."

Infatuation leaders usually last one to two years and then leave to pursue other opportunities or to spend more time with their families.

Then there are the agency leaders we pick because they're like Newt Gingrich. They sound smart. They are supremely sure of themselves and speak as if they have all the answers. They understand new media modalities and shifting paradigms. When we pick them we say, "He must be very smart because I don't understand a thing he says."

Blather leaders usually prosper. They're considered too smart to fire. They're too lofty to do any work. Blame, therefore, never attaches to them. So they usually hang on like a barnacle until they get a higher holding company job and sow confusion globally.

Third, there are the candidates who are like Santorum. They appeal to a small group of core agency leadership and reinforce that core's eccentric world view. They are hired because they have a transformational system that will roll back the clock to a time when agencies were profitable and could actually afford the rent on Madison Avenue offices. These candidates will "bring us back" to a time when agencies mattered.

I call these leaders "Cleaverites." After the Cleaver family in "Leave it to Beaver." They promise a technicolor black and white future. When they don't deliver, they rise. Because we like their vision so much.

Then there are agency leaders who are like Ron Paul. They are close to Cleaverites in that they've constructed an alternate reality for the world, but whereas Cleaverites are pinned to the past, these leaders appeal to the zany. Their world-system has no sense of history, its apocalyptic and evangelical. Agencies buy this sort of leader when they are so desperate they need to believe in an unhinged reality.

These are the Zanies. They usually last about a year then go to work for small media companies. They then declare that all that went before is dead and then they promote a new sort of channel that "will change everything." Not only do these people have no sense of history, they have little sense of reality.

Finally, for today, there are candidates like Mitt Romney. They are Zelig-like. Saying exactly what needs to be said at exactly the right moment. There is a subject-object split between their words and their deeds. But their malleability is their most persuasive selling-point. They are easy to buy.

I call these leaders the Blands. They are most successful agency heads. They take credit for the success of others and excoriate failures as not their fault.

Sensible.

2012-01-08T09:14:00.002-05:00

My exquisite younger daughter just admonished me, once again, not to be so "judgey." Oh, OK. I'll try not to be, but since it's the start of the new year, let me state some things I regard as truths, or facts, or common sense.

Shirt tails have been tucked in for almost as long as people have been wearing shirts. I am not being a hater. I don't understand what's wrong with tucking in.

Backs, arms, vaginas, necks, knuckles, forearms, thighs, abdomens, bosoms and their like are not meant to be tattooed. There's a fat man where we are staying who has tattoed across his back "The truth is the only way." I'm incapable of understanding this.

It reminds me of some graffiti found in Long Island scrawled presumably by a coven of middle-class teenage wikkan wannabees. "Satin Lives." It's just dumb.

Hats. Hats are to be worn outdoors in the winter. Your mother probably told you that you lose 40% of your body heat through your head. Don't wear wool pullovers in the summer. And don't pay more than $12 for one. If you do, you're a fool.

Finally, pants. They are to be worn above the buttocks. Not below. Buttocks were invented by Samuel Buttock in Lancastshire in 1754 for the sole purpose of holding up pants. Further, underwear, butt cracks, incipient pudendal regions are for the sanctity of your bedroom. Cover them.

The above is not be being judgey. It's me being sensible.

Ronald Searle, 1920-2011.

2012-01-04T18:50:00.003-05:00

When I was a kid there was nothing I wanted to do more in my life than be a cartoonist. One of the cartoonists I admired most was Ronald Searle, who died last Friday in France.

Searle did the opening credits of a movie I liked, "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines" and occasionally my father would bring home a copy of the English magazine "Punch" where I could also see Searle's work.

Years later, when I was close to 30, Searle published a book "To the Kwai — and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945." And "The New York Times" wrote a story of a reunion Searle had with a Japanese captor--a captain who allowed him to sketch clandestinely while he was a POW.

Searle's obituary is worth reading. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/arts/design/ronald-searle-british-cartoonist-dies-at-91.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

I particularly liked this part:

Mr. Searle became a satirist, he once said, because “in the late ’30s, things in general and politics in particular were no longer neatly divided into things black and white.”

“On top of this,” he added, “there was the irresistible impulse to draw. I cannot remember wanting to be anything else other than an artist.”

I reckon most people in advertising can relate to that--or some other--irresistible impulse to create.

The Four Questions.

2012-01-03T18:58:00.003-05:00

I'm on vacation and don't really have the time to "write." But yesterday's "Times" had a great article called "Even a Giant Can Learn to Run." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/business/how-samuel-palmisano-of-ibm-stayed-a-step-ahead-unboxed.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Palmisano&st=cse

The article tells of IBM's continued resurgence under the leadership of Sam Palmisano, their CEO.

I haven't time to go into depth, but it seems Palmisano boiled his guidance down to four questions. They're probably four questions that everyone should ask themselves everyday. And agencies too.

• “Why would someone spend their money with you — so what is unique about you?”

• “Why would somebody work for you?”

• “Why would society allow you to operate in their defined geography — their country?”

• “And why would somebody invest their money with you?”

Flying with Uncle Slappy.

2011-12-31T10:31:00.003-05:00

My wife, younger daughter and I are flying to the Cayman Islands for a week in the sun. Our flight connects through Miami, so we decided to fly down with Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie.

I got up early, 3:53 to be exact. Like my father before me (and, of course, like Uncle Slappy) I am a lousy traveler--neurotic about missing flights. Uncle Slappy was up in the kitchen drinking his coffee when I walked in just before 4.

"You slept in," the old man taunted.

"Morning Uncle Slappy. Can I make you an egg, some oatmeal?"

"Has the Times come yet?" Slappy asked.

Uncle Slappy has been staying with me since mid-December. He knows the paper doesn't arrive till around 8 on weekends.

"I thought maybe you told the girl we were leaving early and early she could come one day it wouldn't kill her."

"The Journal is here," I told him.

"Fascists." He muttered.

The ride to the airport wasn't any better. There were five of us so I had to hail a mini-van taxi so we could all fit. After waving a few cabs off, I got a creaky old Toyota Sienna.

My wife and daughter piled into the far back seat and I helped Sylvie and then Slappy into the car.

"It's like climbing Kilimanjaro," the old man said as he moaned into his seat.

It was a lot to take at 5:15 in the morning, fortunately he was quiet the rest of the way.

We checked in at Business Class, my wife being Executive Sapphire Diamond Platinum Elite, and Uncle Slappy as is his wont, kibbitzed with the woman behind the counter.

"Sir," she asked "would you prefer a window or an aisle?"

"I hope I'm flying a wide body," he answered. "And I'd like a seat near the stewardess."

The woman behind the counter ignored him, which was fine by me and Sylvie.

The flight took off and went off without incident.

After two weeks in New York we said goodbye to Slappy and Sylvie when we arrived in Miami. Cousin Dot was there to greet them at the gate.

"How was he," Dot took me aside to ask me.

"Same old Uncle Slappy," I answered.

We said in unison, "Thank god."

Some thoughts on the past and the future.

2011-12-29T09:12:00.005-05:00

It's the end of the year, the last day of work for most people in what has been a challenging 2011, or 5772, or 1432, or 4706 for a good portion of the world.

The economy and our industry seem mired waist deep in Big Muddy, to pilfer a phrase from the Vietnam era. Unemployment, cupidity and stupidity remain high. But nonetheless, we slog on.

I am reading right now, speaking of slogs, Steven Pinker's tome "The Better Angels of Our Nature, Why Violence Has Declined." It's an amazing book. It's generated reams of debate and discussion. It's been named a "New York Times" notable book of 2011 and from what I gather from my bookish friends, is an early favorite for one of the big prizes--a Pulitzer (Pinker has twice been a finalist) or even a National Book Award. You can read a fairly recent book review here. That is, if you're still awake and reading this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-by-steven-pinker-book-review.html?scp=7&sq=steven%20pinker&st=cse

Pinker's point in all this is that the world is actually getting better. Less violent. More liberal. More livable. Fairer.

He backs up this seemingly preposterous assertion with oceans of data, charts and graphs up the yingyang and a logic that even my harridan of a mother couldn't unravel.

Now, while I'm thinking of macro trends, let's turn to 2012 but first think back a bit more on 2011.

Most thinking people would agree that over the last 50 years or so, our economy has transformed from one in which we made "stuff" to one in which we make "information." The great five-mile-long assembly lines of the Willow Run Ford plant (that saved democracy it can be argued by producing a B-24 bomber every hour) are closed. The outskirts of just about every major city in America are girded with shuttered factories and abandoned warehouses. Waste paper, I'm told, is America's largest export.

The same trend has afflicted the ad industry. From a highpoint in the 60s and declining since then, the ad industry made "stuff." We made TV commercials and print ads and radio spots. We made the billboards that dotted American roadways. We produced, aired, printed, propagated, promulgated.

Then, as manufacturing stuff declined, we switched to generating "information." Meetings grew in importance. Decks became our shibboleth. Planning became our product. Clients paid for this. But increasingly questioned what they were buying. How did a deck, or a meeting or a "strategy" advance their ball?

As you might expect from a cockeyed optimist like me, there are glimmers of hope. Manufacturing is rebounding in the States. Factories--albeit ones run by robots--are slowly being built. Old ones are being reclaimed and repurposed. It's not "morning again in America" but by fits and starts, we are beginning to understand that as a nation you can't just be a pontificator. You have to make stuff.

Perhaps we will see a resurgence of "stuffiness" return to advertising, too. A premium placed not on what you say or "deck" but on what agencies make or do.

Maybe the pendulum is beginning to swing back from theory to practice.

Maybe we will find a proper heading again.

--
Thanks to my 10101101 friends at Sell! Sell! for the wonderful cartoon pasted above. Theirs is an excellent blog.

http://sellsellblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/fifty-years-of-progress-in-advertising.html
--
And here's to a "Stuffy" New Year. If we make stuff, it will be a Happy one.

Joseph Farrell, 1935-2011.

2011-12-27T07:02:00.003-05:00

Over the long weekend there was an interesting obituary in "The New York Times" of Joseph Farrell, a market researcher and film producer. You can read the whole obit here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/business/joseph-farrell-dies-at-76-used-market-research-to-shape-films.html?hpw

Farrell, who had been an executive at the research company Louis Harris is credited with making the movie "Fatal Attraction" a success. As originally shot by Adrian Lyne, the Glen Close character killed herself--conducting ritual suicide to the music of "Madame Butterfly."

Farrell researched the movie and concluded "this is a great movie until the end..." and "They didn’t want to see her [Close] do herself in...They wanted to see her done in.”

Adrian Lyne reshot the ending. "In the revision, Ms. Close’s character and her paramour, played by Michael Douglas, have a violent struggle in which she is nearly drowned in a bathtub and is finally dispatched by a gunshot fired by his wife (Anne Archer)."

The movie went on to gross more than $300 million worldwide.

Of course, attitudes about research and its effects on creativity vary--in both the film business and ours. The "Times" reports:

"Whether Mr. Farrell’s influence was positive or malign was debated. Ron Shelton, the director of “Bull Durham” and “White Man Can’t Jump,” complained to The Los Angeles Times in 1992 that Hollywood’s reliance on marketing “contributes to the lowest-common-denominator mentality and the proliferation of formulaic movies and genres.”

A walk with Uncle Slappy.

2011-12-25T18:39:00.006-05:00

Uncle Slappy, thank god, is about as spry and active as an 85-year-old can be. Not only is he still as sharp as a tack, he thinks nothing of taking the elevator downstairs to the health club in our building and working out for 20 minutes or so on the stationary bike.

"The bike is good enough for me," the old man told me. "Not like that meshuggenah epileptical."

"Elliptical, Uncle Slappy."

"Whatever," Slappy replied, pedaling a bit faster through his laugh line.

Despite working out in the morning, Uncle Slappy announced after lunch that "he had spilkas. Ants in his pants."

Usually when Uncle Slappy needs a walk, we head over to the promenade just a block from our apartment. It's as sylvan a walk you can get it the city with sweeping views of the East River and the Hell Gate and Triborough bridges. Today, however, we piled into a taxi and headed over to New York's newest park, the High Line.

Slappy had never been to the High Line. It was railroad tracks when he was young and derelict most of his middle and old ages. Slappy eschewed the elevator at 23rd Street and braved the 27 steps (he counted each one) at 22nd. I give the old man credit. He wasn't even winded when we reached the modest summit.

We walked south from 22nd toward Gansevoort, strolling slowly, watching other walkers. At around 15th Street we noticed a huge and ugly billboard fouling the beauty of the scene. It was advertising a "Gentleman's Club" called "Scores."

"Those are no gentlemen who go there, to that Scores," said Slappy, "And those are no ladies."

We looked at the billboard for a second when Slappy noticed that some clever graffiti artist had climbed up the sign and bearded one of the ladies, subtly and well.

"In my day, we had show girls but show girls didn't have beards," said Slappy. "Not even mustaches."

We walked a few blocks further, then descended to street level and took a taxi home.

Slappy went to lay down. He's still sawing wood in the guest room.

Uncle Slappy gets a gift.

2011-12-22T20:14:00.003-05:00

Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie arrived from Boca last week ostensibly to celebrate Hanukkah with us. Tonight is night three of a promised eight nights and while I love Slappy--he is after all my father's brother--I can clearly understand why my wife has lately been rolling her eyes--even more than usual.

The truth of the matter is, Slappy and Sylvie should probably never have left New York for Florida. I think they felt they had to. That it was some obligatory journey they had to make like Muslims to Mecca. In any event, Boca's been no Mecca for them and they seem to be spending more and more time in our guest room and less and less in their two-bedroom condo not far from the beach.

We've been renovating the room over the last six months and unfortunately the painters had to come today to finish their work. Uncle Slappy and Sylvie don't like to complain but the smell of the paint is a little much. Nevertheless, we've thrown open the window, turned on a fan and given the place a good airing out. It's a little dusty, but I'm sure Slappy and Sylvie will sleep like logs.

On Hanukkah, it's traditional each night to exchange small gifts. Nothing lavish, certainly like nothing you'd find in the Neiman-Marcus catalog, but, instead, little tokens to show you care.

I took the train downtown after work today and bought Uncle Slappy a baseball cap from Sammy's Roumanian Steak House--one of the last of the old Jewish Restaurants in New York. I also bought for him a quart of kasha varnishkas with onions and mushrooms with the gravy in a separate container so things don't get soggy.

We lit the menorah this evening and I gave Slappy his gifts, wrapped.

I've known the old man my entire life but tonight I really struck a chord. He unwrapped the hat first and quickly put it on, not even taken off the tags. Then he opened the container of kasha varnishkas. His eyes suddenly became as big as kreplachs.

"For me you got," he said, "kasha varnishkas from Sammy's?"

"For you, Uncle Slappy," my wife answered.

"A fork please, you'll give me." And he dug right into the container.

I think I saw a tear in his eyes.

And it wasn't from the onions.

The Availability Heuristic.

2011-12-22T10:19:00.005-05:00

Right now I'm reading two-time Pultizer-finalist Steven Pinker's new book "The Better Angels of Our Nature, Why Violence Has Declined."

It's a tough book to read. Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard and he's not above getting a little technical and statistical for a "lay-reader" like myself. Still, the reviews and praise this book received upon publication was so fulsome that I bought it the day it came out.

According to people who know about these things, "Better Angels" is on the inside track to win perhaps the 2012 National Book Award and the 2012 Pulitzer. I read a lot of books that have won such awards and winning them is not like winning a daytime Emmy or even a Clio. The quality is pretty high.

Pinker's book analyzes about 6,000 years of human history and shows that, contrary to how we all feel, we are currently living in the least violent period in human history.

Here's a bit from what I read last night that I think has bearing on our industry today.
He says, in a section called "Was the 20th Century Really the Worst?" "The twentieth century was the bloodiest in history" is a cliche that has been used to indict a vast range of demons, including atheism, Darwin, government, science, capitalism, communism, the ideal of progress, and the male gender. But is it true? The claim is rarely backed up by numbers from any century other than the 20th, or by a mention of the hemoclysms (blood floods) of centuries past. The truth is that we will never really know which was the worst century, because it's hard enough to pin down death tolls in the 20th century, let alone earlier ones...."

Now, here's the part that has a bearing on what we say and do in advertising and it involves a concept propagated by Nobel-Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky. It is the notion of "the availability heuristic." In short, "the easier it is to recall examples of an event, the more probable people think it is."

So, we think of the 20th century as the bloodiest because it has the most bloodshed that we remember.

Likewise, we issue proclamations like "nobody watches TV," or "mobile websites are vital to a brand's success," or "Facebook 'likes' are the new currency" because they're the latest things we remember seeing, hearing or experiencing. They may have no relation to reality other than "recency."

A POV. Revised.

2011-12-21T15:10:00.004-05:00

I was asked a brief while ago to lend my considerable heft and gravitas and help guide a pitch. Much of my complaints about meetings, posturing, empty-headed jargon was propelled by my experience on this assignment.

But now, with hours to go, another POV emerges. The whirlwind has slackened. The tornado is now only gale-force. The jabbering is abating. Individual specialists are sitting at their desks and doing what they do.

It's a nice thing when professionalism takes over a process. When muscle memory of how things should be done cancels out megalomania. When people zero in on their strengths and do the work they should have been doing all along.

Years ago as I was leaving Ogilvy, my boss and mentor said something to me that I think about almost every day. "George," he said, "You're never going to be happy because you get places too fast and grow frustrated with the pace of everyone else coming along."

That's the trouble with things like pitches.

Doing the work is not that hard.

Dealing with all the meandering, the waffling, the inability to make decisions is.

Advertising advice from Holden Caulfield.

2011-12-21T09:08:00.004-05:00

As 2011 draws to a close (you could shoot a cannonball through my office right now and not hit any living thing but maybe a rat or two) I started thinking about what would make 2012 a better year.

The first thing that came to me was a quotation by Holden Caulfield from "The Catcher in the Rye." Obviously he isn't talking about advertising but, nevertheless, there's a lot of wisdom contained below.

"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddamn stupid, useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They'd get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life."

First, we could improve 2012 by having "fewer goddamn stupid, useless conversations." Take the time to coalesce your thoughts before you "think out loud." Actually, think before you speak. Actually, don't speak unless you have something to say.

Second, "write it on a piece of paper." In other words, commit. Put something down. Put some skin in the game. In advertising we make things. We do not merely speculate. Grow some balls.

Third, "I'd be through with having conversations..." Our daily routine should be about creating work not creating meetings. Meetings are not our reason for being, work is. So stop booking meetings to bring yourself up to speed or to have the "group" do the thinking you were supposed to do.

I'm sure there's more we could do to make 2012 better.

We could not interrupt someone when they're typing.
We could not book meetings from 12-2 and not supply lunch.
We could show up on time.

But this would be a good start.

A meeting is not a solution.

2011-12-20T09:49:00.002-05:00

In the days before Microsoft Outlook ruled our lives, we did not start our days by printing out a Microsoft-generated schedule of our meetings. In fact, if a meeting was needed, a "secretary" would walk over to your desk and say, "Steve and Harold want to see you guys at 2." We would show up at 2 and chat.

Today, we live in a meeting-centric universe. And meetings have become conflated with work. Specifically, there are hordes of people, yes, hordes, who define their jobs by the meetings they make.

Meetings, to bastardize Protagoras, become the measure of all things.

There are meetings to discuss things that were discussed at previous meetings. Meetings to set up subsequent meetings. Meetings labelled "work sessions." Meetings to discuss the status of various projects. Meetings to discuss schedules.

Setting up a meeting is not advancing the ball.

All meetings do is generalize responsibility so that no one is responsible.

It's a couple days before we have a couple days off.

Vacation can't come soon enough.

Kim Jong Il. Some memories.

2011-12-20T07:34:00.006-05:00

This happened 25 or 26 years ago, yet I remember it like it happened yesterday. I was sitting with my partner, Craig, in my office. We were just coming off the high of winning a raft of awards for a small fast-food chain called El Pollo Cubano in which we named their new fish sandwich "the Fidel o' Fish." The sandwich was a huge hit and Craig and I were riding high. I wrote about it some years ago and you can read it here: http://adaged.blogspot.com/search?q=Fidel

Now we were charged with bringing El Pollo Cubano's new Korean BBQ fish sandwich out of the test kitchen and right into the very fabric of American culture. This was to be more than the introduction of just another sandwich. We knew we needed to start a movement. We needed to synch with and have an impact on popular culture.

Craig was flipping pencils up at the ceiling when the phone rang. I picked up the Ameche and heard a crackling on the other end of the line. "Hold please for the great and exalted leader of all Koreas."

I snickered and just about put down the blower when I heard a heavily-accented voice on the line.

"This is Kim-Jong-Il. It would do me a great honor to have, like my comrade Fidel, a sandwich named after me."

Apparently having an eponymous sandwich was now a mark of honor among the world's dictators. I could see Tito Taters. Noriega Nachos. And of course, fish and Gorbachips.

I put the phone on speaker. Craig took over.

"We shall do our best, Exalted One" my partner intoned.

Then we heard a peremptory click from Pyongyang.

I think I was the one who said it, though Craig swears it was him.

"The Kim Jong. The Il-lest Korean Barbecued Chicken."

We ran that up the client's flagpole and in a few short weeks, we had a hit on our hands.

We tried phoning the Exalted One, but could never get through to the North.

I'll miss you, Big Guy. I'll miss you.

Katz's.

2011-12-19T09:19:00.002-05:00

Years ago I worked for a brilliant and eccentric Creative Director at Ally & Gargano called Ed Butler. Ed was like a lot of successful people in the agency business. He was incredibly passionate about advertising. In fact, often when Ed saw an ad he really liked, he would find out who created it and phone them with his compliments.

Today, I came across some copy on Katz's Deli's web site. I think it's pretty damn good.

"Hanukkah

The same thing happens at the big Hanukkah celebration every year. Someone, maybe your grandma, your mother or whoever wears the apron in your family, is stuck cooking for the big Hanukkah meal instead of spending time with the family. After finally having brought out the latkes, knishes and the rest of the meal, he or she sits down and tries to enjoy a few spare moments with the family. But you can see in that face with the frustrated look of someone already thinking about doing dishes. Why should a loved one be slaving away in the kitchen? It defeats the whole purpose of Hanukkah.

You can see the problem. Maybe you have even heard the complaints. Rather than commandeering the kitchen like a pirate (watch them look over your shoulder), you should sweep in with food. You will be more like a superhero (cape is optional). Granted, few places make food appropriate for Hanukkah (although there is a lot of Chinese food options for Christmas), and you sure as hell can’t insult the cook by fetching food from your corner bodega.

Only Katz’s Deli will be worthy of the apron. We’ve been at the table as a family for over 123 years. That’s more than 963 days of Hanukkah. That’s a lot of latkes. Our legendary meats will kill the worries that occur when a cook relinquishes the kitchen. You may even transform your cook into an animated conversationalist (or chatterbox). But other than being designated the best daughter, brother, step-son or niece, think about the jealousy you’ll engender from the rest of the family. That’s its own reward. You always were the smart one anyway.

The rest is pretty easy. Place an order. Pick it up or we’ll ship it to you. We prepare it (pastrami, corned beef, rugalach, etc.) and you take the credit.

The dishes, however, are up to you."

Time frames.

2011-12-19T08:46:00.003-05:00

About two weeks ago I went to a symposium at the Times Center which featured economic historian Carmen Reinhart. Moderator Thomas Friedman asked Reinhart to speculate on the economy in the first six months of 2012. Reinhart took the question, slowly closed her eyes for a moment and then answered. "I am an historian. I don't work in six-month time frames. That's less than a blink of an eye. I deal in 60 or 70-year sweeps."

I've been thinking about Reinhart's statement since I heard it.

Lately at work we are creating voluminous decks on our "Facebook strategy." These are intelligent and well thought-out and the product of people who really know how Facebook is being used today. These decks show how people can connect, share and form communities on Facebook. They are the stuff are dissertations. Gems of insight, data visualization and vision.

But there's a problem.

We are looking at the future in a six-month time frame. We are assuming an orderly, predictable universe without breakthroughs, without disasters, without upsets.

Only five years ago or so it looked like Lonely Girl 15 was going to take over the world of advertising. Today, Facebook is ascendant. Ascendant though no one I personally know uses Facebook the way decks say people do.

Tomorrow, however, who knows?

Maybe Facebook will elect presidents, find spouses for the lovelorn and build potent brands that would make Steve Jobs envious.

Maybe in three-years-time, Facebook will be on life support or dead.

The point is, no one knows.

We need to look at the proper time frame.

Uncle Slappy on Marriage.

2011-12-18T10:31:00.003-05:00

I suppose it's a holdover from another, more decorous era but "The New York Times" still dedicates about eight pages in its Sunday Style section to announcements of engagements and wedding. For as long as I know him (which is my entire life) Uncle Slappy has been reading these pages and commenting as only he can.

He started with a linguistic thrust like Errol Flynn in one of those old swashbuckling movies.

"Everyone talks about gay marriage," Slappy began. I put down my coffee waiting for the punchline. "I'm tired of all the coverage. Gay marriage discussed in the Senate. Gay marriage discussed by the ferstunkenah Republicansches. Gay marriage this, gay marriage that."

"Well, it's a very important issue to some," I temporized.

"Gay marriages, fine" he continued. "What about morose marriages? That's the real issue. Almost everyone I know has a morose marriage. 55 years Sylvie and I are married. She still doesn't know what size spoon I like to eat my honey nut with."

I grabbed the sports section and left the old man alone in the kitchen.

Joe Simon, 1913-2011.

2011-12-16T16:21:00.004-05:00

Joe Simon, who created the comic book hero Captain America died on Wednesday in New York. You can read his obituary here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/books/joe-simon-a-creator-of-captain-america-is-dead-at-98.html?hpw

I loved comic books when I was a kid and still, on rare occasions read them today. I used to love Captain America when I was about 12. This was during the peak of American involvement in Vietnam, when our country seemed to be crumbling, and there was something reassuring about the comic. What's more, comics in those pre-inflationary days cost 12-cents. I had a paper route, and could buy eight a week for less than a dollar. My brother did the same. We were careful to avoid getting doubles. These comics were much of our education growing up, though my brother is a lawyer and wouldn't admit that now.

In any event, this is the part I really like from Simon's obit:

Simon "moved to New York, where his first job was for Paramount Pictures, retouching still photographs of movie stars. 'I retouched some of the most famous bosoms in motion pictures — Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard and Dorothy Lamour,' he wrote. 'Good bosom men were considered experts and got lots of work. I could hold up a sagging bust line with the best of them.'”

Hello, sports fans.

2011-12-16T14:27:00.004-05:00

I just happened upon a list drawn up by ex-Major League baseball player, pitcher Don Carman. Carman pitched for 10 major league seasons for the Philadelphia Phillies, the Cincinnati Reds and in the junior circuit, the Texas Rangers. When he wound up his career he had lost one more game than he had won.

It seems that even a mediocre pitcher like Carman was still beset by sports reporters after the game, so in order to avoid having to answer their banal stock questions, he posted the following list on his locker:

"1. I'm just glad to be here. I just want to help the club any way I can.
2. Baseball's a funny game.
3. I'd rather be lucky than good.
4. We're going to take the season one game at a time.
5. You're only as good as your last game (last at-bat).
6. This game has really changed.
7. If we stay healthy we should be right there.
8. It takes 24 (25) players.
9. We need two more players to take us over the top: Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig.
10. We have a different hero every day.
11. We'll get 'em tomorrow.
12. This team seems ready to gel.
13. With a couple breaks, we win that game.
14. That All-Star voting is a joke.
15. The catcher and I were on the same wavelength.
16. I just went right at 'em.
17. I did my best and that's all I can do.
18. You just can't pitch behind.
19. That's the name of the game.
20. We've got to have fun.
21. I didn't have my good stuff, but I battled 'em.
22. Give the guy some credit; he hit a good pitch.
23. He, we were due to catch a break or two.
24. Yes.
25. No.
26. That's why they pay him _____ million dollars.
27. Even I could have hit that pitch.
28. I know you are but what am I?
29. I was getting my off-speed stuff over so they couldn't sit on the fastball.
30. I had my at 'em ball going today.
31. I had some great plays made behind me tonight.
32. I couldn't have done it without my teammates.
33. You saw it... write it.
34. I just wanted to go as hard as I could as long as I could.
35. I'm seeing the ball real good.
36. I hit that ball good.
37. I don't get paid to hit."

What occurred to me when I read this is how we in advertising can likely come up with similar lists. One set of lists would pretty much cover any meeting you might be forced to attend.

1. We're trying to start a conversation about the brand.
2. It's part of an integrated ecosystem.
3. We need to put the consumer in the center of things.
4. We're going to own the color blue.
5. Media has some slides on that.
6. This game has really changed.
7. We want a clean, simple, uncluttered layout.

And so it goes.

Please stop sharing.

2011-12-16T12:44:00.003-05:00

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for "The New York Times" and a National Book Award winner for his brilliant account "The Worst Hard Time," the account of "Okies" who didn't leave the Dust Bowl when the Great Depression (the last one, not the current one) struck.

Today he has a wonderful op-ed in the digital paper called "Please Stop Sharing." I feel compelled to repeat that title in all caps. PLEASE STOP SHARING. You can read his thoughts here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/please-stop-sharing/?hp

There's a lot I like about Egan's piece, here are a few selections from it:

"...there is only one difference between the knuckleheads of yore — me, for example — who did numerous stupid things between the onset of puberty and a late adolescence lasting to nearly 30, and those Twit-iots of the 21st century.

"And that is technology. Facebook, Twitter, cell phone text messages and palm-size appliances yet to sprout from Apple’s labs allow all of us to be banal in real time."
--
"People I once admired, even looked up to — smart, literate, funny folks — have gone down several notches in my estimation after they decided to reveal their every idiotic observation via Twitter."
--
"I cheered the news from my colleague Jenna Wortham this week that the march of Facebook into every facet of our lives has slowed at last. Of course, with 200 million active users in the United States, Facebook has won the war. It’s all over but the arguing among corporate overseers about how to divvy up our private information for profit..."
--
"The imperative of Facebook — maximum exposure of the personal “brand” — is by itself a form of poison to lasting relationships. It’s hard enough trying to stay close to say, five good friends. Why have surface relationships with a hundred of them?"
--
Read the whole article.

You might even want to share it.

Uncle Slappy and the mushroom barley.

2011-12-16T08:37:00.005-05:00

With Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, beginning next week, Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie pulled into town last night. I was working late and unable to meet their train from Florida at Penn Station but somehow my favorite octogenarians made it into a cab and up to my apartment.

Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie reached my apartment before I did last evening. Fortunately I had left my house keys with the doorman and they let themselves in. When I arrived home around 9, they were sitting in the guest room--which my wife and I are in the process of redecorating--in virtual darkness.

"Aunt Sylvie, Uncle Slappy. Why are you sitting in the dark?"

"There's just the overhead," Slappy said "you are missing some bulbs."

"Why didn't you turn on the lamp," I asked.

"What's there to see? Aunt Sylvie I've been looking at for 55 years."

I knew enough to change the subject.

"Have you eaten?" I asked, knowing that talk of food was always fertile ground.

"Sandwiches I packed for the ride," Sylvie said. "But Mr. Big Mouth finished his before we hit Georgia."

"It's a 24-hour trip by train," I reminded them. "You haven't eaten since yesterday?"

"Yesterday, schmesterday," rejoined Slappy with one of his trademark dismissals. "When you're my age, the days all run together."

"Let me get you some..."

Slappy cut me off.

"Mushroom barley would be nice. Not too hot so that it burns. And four saltines."

Slappy has, I knew, a weakness for mushroom barley and I had therefore gotten some at Park East, a kosher grocery on 2nd and 84th. I microwaved a bowl for he and Aunt Sylvie.
They shuffled their way into my eat-in kitchen and sat down. I brought the soup to them.

Slappy, as he's been doing for nearly nine decades blew on it.

"Not too hot, is it?" the old man asked.

"No, it's just the way you like it Uncle Slappy. And," I said bringing over a plate with a short stack of saltines, "your crackers."

"Low sodium?" he asked.

"Of course."

Uncle Slappy dipped his spoon in the mushroom barley like a surgeon making the first cut. He blew at the spoon, then tasted the soup.

"Ach, you microwaved," he asked.

"Yes, Slappy. I zapped it."

"It's not good hotting with a microwave." He ate slowly and deliberately two saltines. Then he got up, left the kitchen and went to sit alone in the dark.

A note from Harper Lee.

2011-12-15T12:28:00.001-05:00

I don't usually do this but I am incapable of topping or adding to a post I just found here: http://www.abebooks.com/blog/index.php/2011/12/14/letter-of-advice-from-harper-lee/

"Letter of Advice from Harper Lee

"I love stories like this. People can sometimes go out of their way to be so lovely. This must have made that one reader’s whole month.

"In 2006, a young reader who loved the book To Kill a Mockingbird wrote a letter to 85-year-old author Harper Lee, in the hopes she would send him back a signed photo of herself.

"While Lee did not grant the photo request, she did respond, personally, in handwriting, and offered him life advice, instead:

“06/07/06

Dear Jeremy

I don’t have a picture of myself, so please accept these few lines:

As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don’t think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, “I’m probably no better than you, but I’m certainly your equal.”

(Signed, ‘Harper Lee’)”

"What an incredibly lucky fan. Not only did she give him some beautiful, sound advice, but frankly, Harper Lee’s signature usually costs quite a bit."

All my life's a circle.

2011-12-15T10:46:00.000-05:00

Hedy, not Hedley, Lamarr.

2011-12-15T07:11:00.004-05:00

There's a new book out by Pulitzer-winner Richard Rhodes on the surprising life of Austrian-emigre and film siren Hedy Lamarr (not Hedley Lamarr.) It's called "Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World." And you can read the review here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/books/hedys-folly-by-richard-rhodes-review.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=hedy%20lamarr&st=cse

Louis Mayer, head of MGM called Lamarr “the most beautiful girl in the world.” I've always been more inclined toward Rita Hayworth or Madeliene Carroll, but why quibble over callipygian peaks? In any event, Lamarr was also an accomplished inventor and during WWII, invented a remote control torpedo, a precursor to today's spread spectrum technology.

But here's the part of the review I really liked, a beautiful last paragraph:

"Lamarr longed for people to see her as more than another sultry face. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she once said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Concrete.

2011-12-15T06:31:00.003-05:00

Not all that terribly long ago I was the head of the flagship office of a large digital agency. I guess because they paid me a lot of money management felt the need to punish me periodically by making me attend two-day symposia led by HR. I've been to a dozen or so of these brain-drains over the years. They always leave me feeling homicidal.

This particular one was centered around, it seemed to me, being concrete. Concrete. That was the word they used. And they used it as a pejorative. They meant rigid, hard-assed and unyielding. These attributes were, according to the outside consultant who ran the sessions, bad things. We should instead be welcoming, open to all points of view and work styles, and we should seek a sort of ethereal amity--the agency equivalent, I suppose, of rainbows and unicorns.

Right now at work I am spending a few spare hours a week helping out on a new business pitch. Just about every day some producer or another schedules a two-hour "touch-base" or "work session" where about eleventeen-dozen fairly high-paid people crowd into a too-bright conference room and stare at their handhelds.

What I've noticed in these meetings is that everyone is HR-correct. No one is concrete. No one comes in with a thought, a fact, a thorough reading of the potential client's annual report.

Yesterday I brought in two well-written manifestos. Two paths I think we could chase down to get to a tone, a feeling, a point of view.

I was concrete. I did something. I put thoughts on paper.

One of the eternal debates in advertising is whether or not we are in a service business. You hear it all the time, usually from account people or brainwashed creatives.

No.

We are in a product business. We make communications that transform businesses. That's our product. It's that simple.

If you don't come into a meeting with something real, something concrete, stay home.

Truths.

2011-12-14T09:15:00.003-05:00

As long-time readers (if there are any) of Ad Aged know, I am a nut about old movies. This is not because I am living in the past. It is because I find moments of truth, humanity and wisdom in them that I seldom see in newer works.

Jean-Pierre Melville's 1956 movie "Bob le Flambeur" starring Roger Duchesne had one such seminal moment. Bob is an aging crook looking to get out of debt and to make one more killing before he retires to a life of leisure.

Bob is "too old for this" and he knows it. He is staring down the barrel of his own mortality. It's a painful moment for him. An admission that he's lost his looks, his physicality, his elan. Melville communicates all this in about 48 frames of film. Bob, getting dressed in front of a mirror closes up on his face. He is immaculately groomed, ready to face the world. Then, just before he leaves the mirror, he pinches his throat and wiggles an inch or two of excess skin, skin he never had before. That's it for Bob. That excess skin defines his destiny. There's no escape from it.

Another such moment I love is from Ernst Lubitsch's small 1937 comedy "Angel" which featured a drop dead gorgeous Marlene Dietrich, the great and under-rated Herbert Marshall and the greater and still more under-rated Melvyn Douglas.

Lubitsch was the master of the small cinematic touch that conveyed big meaning. In "Angel" Dietrich is married to Marshall but is embroiled in an affair with Douglas. Lubitsch illustrates the character of his characters with a few simple lines of dialogue.

Dietrich: (At her dressing table. Marshall enters the room. She looks at him, indirectly, through the mirror. She doesn't like what she sees.) "The op-wa starts at eight, doesn't it?"

Marshall: "Oh, the opera."

Dietrich: "Oh, darling, you promised."

Marshall: "And I'm going to keep my promise. You love the opera. I hate the opera.
So, why shouldn't we go?"

Their entire dynamic, her imperiousness, his attempts to please, all in a few lines.

Good communications relies not on platitudes and puffery.

It is contingent on minor moments of reality, of truth.

There is beauty, laughter, wisdom in these small moments.

Find them.

What's wrong.

2011-12-13T15:53:00.000-05:00

It’s hard to be conscious and not be inundated (and depressed) about the sorry state of affairs in American politics.

Our Congress, that branch of our government that makes laws, no longer functions. The 47 or so Republicans slinging it in the hopes of gaining their party’s nomination so they can run for president seems to have yielded a gaggle of half-wits. Some are incapable of finishing a sentence. Some don’t have even a basic grasp of world issues. Virtually all of them deny established truths like Climate Change and evolution.

Here’s where the trouble lies:

Today candidates are asked their opinion on almost every conceivable topic, from a pipeline across the center of the nation, to the gold standard, to whether or not all people have the right to marry. These opinions get aired, discussed and debated. Constantly.

We wind up considering about 75 viewpoints of each candidate. And in our “absence of hierarchy” era all of them are important.

That’s a problem.

Because you’ll never find someone who agrees with you on every “issue.” So we wind up having candidates that no one really likes. A candidate could hit on 67 of those 75 viewpoints but you could hate him because he disagrees with you on those missing 8. That’s why, today, no one has any real support.

It goes something like this: “I agree with him on almost everything, but I just can’t vote for him. In 1958 he came out in favor of protecting the migratory path of the Latvian Lake goose and I’m against that.”

Unfortunately, advertising has fallen victim to the same “everything for everyone” syndrome.

A television ad can have everything going for it and then some pipsqueak consultant will grab the floor and ask: “I don’t think this ad will build community and conversation.” And poof, your ad is dead, though it was never meant to build community and conversation.

In short, our list of expectations is so vast that we can only be disappointed. That’s what’s wrong.

Smart work, well executed.

2011-12-13T09:03:00.004-05:00

I was watching TV a few weeks ago--I confess, it was "The Hitler Channel," one of those stations at the dusky end of the "dial" that caters to the esoteric, obscure and the downright strange. Usually the commercials on such channels suck. They're for cleaning solutions that wipe out mold and mildew like republicans eviscerating the middle class.

But I saw the ad above for "Ballroom Jeans" and was enchanted. I googled Duluth Trading and found a couple more pretty wonderful little commercials.

I've never heard of the agency that created these small pitch perfect masterpieces. Google, again, tells me they're produced by Planet Propaganda out of quaint old Madison, WI.

It doesn't matter from whence it comes. This is nice work.

Read me.

2011-12-12T14:06:00.003-05:00

Years ago, back when typewriters roamed the Earth, I got a raft of insipid and politically-driven changes from a client named Ken.

I was pissed. And I worked hard to show it in my copy. In fact, if you read down left-hand column it would read:

K
e
n

I
s

a

F
u
c
k

I finished this little copywriting insurrection and walked down the hall to show my copy to my account guy. I should say here that on the account I was working on I produced probably 50 ads a year. The client loved me and generally loved my copy. The fact of the matter was I made the lives of my account people pretty easy.

I sat there while the account guy read my copy. He was a pretty good guy, pretty smart and dedicated, but he had a bit of a stammer.

"G g g George..." he started "it's f f fine, b b but it's not as as as good as your u u usual copy."

"Read it closely," I said.

He read it again. After a minute he said, "It j j just doesn't f f flow."

"Read down the left-hand column."

He did and got it.

"Y y you know if you d d didn't say anything, I I I would have f f faxed this to K k Ken."

Here's my point.

This particular account read my copy. He even gave it some thought.

Today, it seems, no one reads anything. Account people, "producers," no one seems interested enough in either the work or their jobs to bother.

Who knows what's sneaking through because of that.

Catherine. The Great.

2011-12-12T08:41:00.004-05:00

I am reading Robert K. Massie's magisterial new biography of Catherine the Great. (I know it will disappoint George Parker, but 3/4ths of the way through, the Empress has so far avoided doing anything with horses outside of riding them.)

Be that as it may, next time you think your agency is a nest of vipers, pick up a tome like this. The politics, the intrigues, the back-stabbing and gossip are, literally, murderous. 18th Century Russia makes agency life seem like skipping through the tulips.

After Catherine led a coup d'etat to knock Peter III, her putative husband and full-time weirdo, off the Throne, she spent a good amount of time and showered rubles, titles and other largesse on her lover of the time Captain Gregory Orlov. Orlov was a rough, crude man who had designs on marrying the Empress. That and an attempt by Lt. Fedor Khirtovo to release Ivan VI from imprisonment in the Schlusselburg Fortress, and thus challenge Catherine's right to the Throne, led to a lot of gossip and speculation that Catherine's hold on Mother Russia was, at best, tenuous.

So Catherine did something we could all learn from.

"To end this chatter, she issued on June 4, 1763, a so-called Manifesto of Silence. To beating drums, people across the empire were summoned into public squares to listen to heralds reading her proclamation, which declared that "everyone should go about his own business and refrain from all useless and unseemly gossip and criticism of the government."

Ah, a Manifesto of Silence. Golden.

A contradiction.

2011-12-10T18:35:00.003-05:00

I just came upon this photograph by the unmatched photographer and Hungarian emigre Andre Kertesz. It got me thinking.

At a time in world history when we are more pressed for time than ever before (in every time in world history we have been more pressed for time than ever before) there are more ways to fill our lives up with junk than ever before.

Just sticking with photography for a moment, we are Flickr'd and Instagrammed into mediocre submission. We are bludgeoned with snapshots of cats playing polo. We are pinioned with pics of people we hardly know.

We hardly have time for great because we are so besieged (and besotted) by the deluge of daily dreck.

There is greatness in the world. Greatness and originality. In art and in work.

But we're too busy looking at shit (and in looking at shit proclaiming that "everyone is a photographer") to notice.

The question.

2011-12-10T09:11:00.003-05:00

There's a simple question that, in these days of multiple touchpoints and "surround-sound" strategies, seems is never asked. Because every agency now has 32-million "practices" each fighting for their own bottom line, the question is never posed, never considered, never even brought up. We don't ask it because we're more concerned with what WE need as a practice or an agency (to hit our holding company numbers) than with what our clients need to succeed.

The question is this: "How can we do the greatest good, influence the greatest number of people for the money we have to spend?"

What we have barring this question is competing fiefs. We have the mobile people spending like crazy developing WAP sites that few people will use. We have legions of tweeters and Facebook zealots creating "experiences" that have, at best, dubious return on investment. We have data-viz visionaries. The content confab. The video vehements. And they're all saying to clients who are also trying to hold onto their jobs "ME ME ME!"

In our nation right now which is so wracked by sectionalism and divisiveness, no one asks the question. In the multiple wars our Offense Department is waging, the question is never asked. I've been in the agency since 1984 and I've never heard the question asked by anyone but me.

So oceans of people are running around agencies and in client organizations producing myriad media pinpricks that viewers swat away like flies.

Because no one asks the one simple big picture question.

A lesson in copywriting.

2011-12-09T04:21:00.003-05:00

Almost 40 years ago I got my first lesson in being a copywriter.

It wasn't from a course in school or even from a book. I got it at the New York Auto Show.

Like a lot of teenage boys I was a bit of a car nut growing up. Every year I would go to the Auto Show at the old New York Coliseum. The Coliseum was a hulking space on Columbus Circle (gone now and replaced by the gleaming Time-Warner Center.) It smelled of concession-stand hotdogs and cigarette smoke. The Coliseum was built ugly and quickly went down hill.

My lesson came when I walked over to see the new VW Super Beetle. This was one of the last of the original bugs made for America. I remember it was the first time I'd seen taillights with an amber turn signal.

The salesman at the booth started talking about the turn signal. "The minute you flip it on," he said "the turn signal starts." A few people in the audience laughed. "The turn signal on some cars doesn't turn on for as long as a second." The audience snickered again. Finally he said, "If you think that doesn't matter, at 60 miles per hour, a car travels 88 feet in a second. So the Beetle's turn signal turns on 88 feet faster."

I was floored by that fact.

Suddenly I believed in the VW. If they cared that much about a turn signal, these must be very good cars.

It was certainly very good copy.

I met an older woman on the train today.

2011-12-08T09:34:00.002-05:00

We were sitting next to each other and I could tell she was an older actress--that she was reading a typewritten play was a giveaway.

I turned to her and asked her, "Any good."

"Yes, it's the story of Leni Riefenstahl. Do you know her?"

We went on from there, chatting about Nazis, underwater photography and shooting in South Africa past 81st Street, 72nd Street, 59th Street all the way to 42nd.

Anyway, Nazi or not, propaganda or not, the clip above is well worth viewing.

Quiet please.

2011-12-07T09:23:00.004-05:00

Maureen Dowd, that is, the brilliant Maureen Dowd, has a surpassing column in today's "New York Times" that puts a finger on much of what is wrong with our industry and the world today. Her column today is titled "Silence Is Golden" and if you have a couple of minutes (that you're not wasting on Facebook, Twitter or some other diversion) you can read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/opinion/dowd-silence-is-golden.html?hp

Dowd's column is about our loss of silence.

Near its start she provides this 50-year-old quotation by Swiss philosopher Max Picard:
“Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence,” once as natural as the sky and air.

Dowd continues: "fiendish little gadgets conspire to track our movements and record our activities wherever we go, producing a barrage of pictures of everything we’re doing and saying..."

What's lost today is all this:

Silence is something you hear.

Quiet and solitude are things you can do or seek out.

Repose and "being in the moment" are special activities and should be cherished.

She points out, silence is like a zero in mathematics.

It's not nothing.

It's powerful.

It can lead to actual thought.

That's what she said.

2011-12-07T07:14:00.004-05:00

Last night I went to a discussion at the Times Center, a 300-seat auditorium in the new New York Times building. It was moderated by three-time Pulitzer-prize winner Thomas Friedman and the panel featured Nobelist Paul Krugman, National Book Award finalist Joe Nocera and author-historian-economist Carmen Reinhart. Together and for the next 90 minutes the four had a lively discussion about the economy and the trouble the entire world faces.

At one point, Nocera brought up two factories he visited recently in North Carolina. One built by the German mega-corporation and Nazi lubricant Siemens, the other built by Caterpillar, the tractor people. Together to build these factories the companies were given $36 million in tax relief (socialism for the rich) and together these factories employ a whopping total of 1,200 people.

In Obama's Osawatomie speech yesterday, he mentioned "Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100."

Everywhere such realities are present. Except perhaps in our industry.

Yes, I know most agencies have dramatically downsized. Yes, I know that basic digital work is being "off-shored" to places like Costa Rica or Minsk. Yes, I know all that.

However, I also know that I have a purportedly big client meeting tomorrow to discuss 2012 planning. I know that to put a deck together has probably, so far, cost the agency 500 man hours. And I know that, unsatisfied with the meandering group-think that is the output of all these banal and wasted hours I sat at my table and wrote the deck we eventually decided to use. It took me one hour.

I do not like writing decks. It's not what I do. But I like even less sitting in massive meetings and "collaborating" with people who are sentencely-challenged.

It does not take a lot of people to do what we do.

It takes, often, a lone person thinking clearly and without distraction.

That "model" is cost-efficient and produces work that is more solid.

I don't know why we make things so hard.

An idiosyncracy and a confession.

2011-12-06T11:12:00.003-05:00

Since I love to sketch and since I have an admiration for some things old, I write primarily with fountain pens. Because I often lose them, the ones I use at work are usually moderately priced, bought in most cases at airport duty-free shops for less than $50. Even so, I'm still a little paranoid about losing them. Accordingly, I think I spend two billable hours a day looking for my pens.

Some thoughts on bras.

2011-12-06T09:04:00.003-05:00

In the book, "The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm," author Juliet Nicholson spends some time talking about a recent innovation that changed a lot. The summer of 1911 was when monied and titled young scions in England began to make the leap from laced-up corsets and mounds of petticoats to a new-fangled invention, the brassiere.

The brassiere did more that damage the whale-bone industry. Suddenly, women could get dressed (and undressed) in minutes, not hours. It no longer became an ordeal to undress. It was much easier, thanks to the brassiere, for couples to couple.

It occurs to me that while simplicity is often good and beneficial, it can, and often is, taken too far.

I am not a fan, for instance, of the state of deshabille in which most young people are attired. I like the feminine form in all its luxuriant softness as much as the next guy. However, I have no desire to see anyone's ass-crack and cleavage, while there's a time and a place for it, does not rightfully belong in an office. Plain and simple, it is distracting. Likewise, I have absolutely no desire to see people's underwear.

I bring this up because I believe that the semiotics of today's dress speak volumes about much of what is wrong with our world today.

While the brassiere might be considered a boon to young lovers everywhere, today undressing is too easy. In fact, most people only walk around half-dressed.

In short, in clothing and most all else, we have made things too easy. In so doing, we have removed the quality of consideration from most actions.

It used to be if you wanted to comment on an article you read you needed to find pen and paper and envelope. You needed to write it down. Address the envelope. Find a stamp and mail it in.

Now, any dickwad with vectored fingertips can write any banality at any time.

Whatever is gained by this freedom of expression. Much is lost.

Likewise, in our business, any In-Design pixel putz can make a professional-looking layout. It can be done in mere seconds. You can slap some blather, some stock and some tautological twatology onto the page and, voila, it looks like you've had a thought. When all you've really had is a semantic belch.

And belching is not thinking.

And even if it passes for thinking in what some day may be called "The Dark Ages 2.0" it isn't thinking.

And I don't care what you think about that.

24 digits and ontology.

2011-12-05T14:08:00.002-05:00

As usual, I am sitting on a conference call.

The producer punches in 10 numbers, then 10 more, then four more--24 digits in all just to get into a conference call.

For all its flaws, the Social Security system operates with fair efficiency with nine-digit i.d.s.

Are the 24 digits for security reasons?

If security is so paramount why not cause us to punch in 100 digits and be really safe.

Graffiti by my friend Lisa.

2011-12-05T10:53:00.002-05:00

http://lisalevyindustries.com/

The best toys of all time.

2011-12-05T09:45:00.005-05:00

I've just been emailed an article in "Wired" magazine entitled "The 5 Best Toys of All Time." It got me thinking.

For the last few decades or so Wired, and journals like it, have run an enormous number of articles that fall into two categories. 1) The "This-Will-Change-Everything" category and 2) The "Things-that-Mankind-Have-Known-Forever-Are-No-Longer-Germane" category.

We've read in recent years about the death of print, the death of television, the death of agencies, the death of bricks-and-mortar, the death of "the death of" articles.

We've also been treated to about a gazillion gizmos that will change everything. Lonely Girl 15. The segway. Just last week in the "Times" we were told to get all heated up by a new thermostat.

All that is why I liked this article so much on the best toys of all time. They are according to Jonathan Liu:

1. A stick.
2. A box.
3. String.
4. A cardboard tube.
5. Dirt.

You can read the piece here: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/01/the-5-best-toys-of-all-time/all/1

The same reductio ad absurdum quality can probably also be applied to our business. We can analyze the quantum appeal of pixel manipulation, we can create apps that allow you to create more apps, we can augment reality while we change the paradigm to decrease costs, but when push comes to shove, a gag, a pratfall, a funny expression or an intelligent appeal do more to drive more business and brand value than any new "toy."

It's that simple, really.

Or, as Preston Sturges noted in his "11 Rules for Writing a Hit Movie,"

1. A Pretty girl is better than an ugly one.
2. A leg is better than an arm.
3. A bedroom is better than a living room.
4. An arrival is better than a departure.
5. A birth is better than a death.
6. A chase is better than a chat.
7. A dog is better than a landscape.
8. A kitten is better than a dog.
9. A baby is better than a kitten.
10. A kiss is better than a baby.
11. A pratfall is better than anything.

My cousin Herb.

2011-12-05T07:55:00.002-05:00

My cousin Herb and his father before him had a small leather goods company that made high-quality attache and brief cases for men. Schlesinger Brothers was founded in 1919 and stayed in business until about ten years ago when in was bought by Tumi. The cases Schlesinger built had fallen out of favor with most men preferring soft-sided bags with straps they could throw over their shoulder.

One weekend I was with Herb, he was my father's age and more of a father to me than my own, and he talked about closing his factory which he had relocated from Camden, NJ to a small town called Berlin, NJ.

"In the old days," he remembered "men would come in and apply for positions. We didn't look at applications. We didn't background check. We didn't ask for their employment history. We didn't care that they 'interviewed well.'

"We gave them space on a bench, leather, wood, nails, hardware and tools and we told them to make a bag. If the bag they made was good, we hired them."

A Saturday in New York.

2011-12-03T15:04:00.007-05:00

My wife, ever-resourceful as she is, and I are members of the Metropolitan Museum which is just a few blocks from our apartment. One great advantage of membership is that you can pop in for 30 minutes and scout the place out and see what you want to go back to see later in more depth.

The museum today was like a flower that just opened. It was so full of beauty it was ready to burst.

We went specifically to see the new galleries dedicated to art in the new Near East galleries which featured art and artifacts from the parts of the world we are trying to blow up, Iran, Syria, Iraq etc. The Met, of course, does an astonishing job and has a breath-taking collection. They've recreated whole rooms, from floor tiles to benches to window treatments. The result is stunning and transformative.

From there we went to a collection called "Infinite Jest." A panoply of satirical cartoons lambasting, among other things, the profligate and pretentious rich.

Then a gallery of about 200 Steichen photographs.

Then, in an effort to battle the persistent cough and cold that's affected me these past two week, we walked to the 2nd Avenue Deli which opened in my neighborhood over the summer and is located, somewhat inexplicably on 1st Avenue. There we had the greatest art of all--a light dill-flavored chicken broth with two really good kreplach.

Art is great and powerful. Many of the pieces we saw were thousands of years old. Others have endured through the centuries. That's all well and good.

But there's nothing like a really good kreplach.

--

For non-Jews:
Kreplach are small pasta dough triangles filled with ground meat or mashed potatoes. Similar to dumplings, they are sometimes called Jewish ravioli or Jewish wonton. Sometimes kreplach is boiled and served in soup. Other times kreplach is fried and served as a side dish. It is customary to eat kreplach before the Yom Kippur fast, on the last day of Sukkot, and on Purim.

Alan Seus, 1926-2011.

2011-12-02T17:17:00.002-05:00

Alan Seus, a comedian on Laugh In just died. He handed me a lot of laughs when I was a kid. You can read his obituary here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/arts/television/alan-sues-a-laugh-in-cast-mainstay-dies-at-85.html?hpw

Industrial advertising.

2011-12-02T09:24:00.004-05:00

This might be a little disjointed but hopefully I'll get around to a point.

I went to work via a different route this morning and saw a billboard festooned with McDonald's golden arches. That, together with some recent media news got me thinking.

What's happened to almost everything that touches our souls--from hamburgers to advertising to publishing--has been industrialized.

We create "marketing engines" that are distinguished not for their interest, motivation or persuasion but instead aim to reach the greatest number of people at the lowest possible cost.

Just as McDonald's has created a "hamburger engine" to distribute the greatest number of patties at the lowest possible cost.

The original intent--to make something distinctive and delicious is gone. The technocrats that run ad agencies and major corporations aren't lovers of advertising or hamburgers.

They are lovers of efficiency. Create multiple communications distributable over dozens and dozens of touchpoints that inhabit a communications ecosystem.

So systematically they destroy the companies they lead by abnegating their original purpose.

The sad fact is, it seems to me, that advertising has little to do with creating great ads. It's about content strategy, ecosystems, fractal landscapes, data visualization, content syndication.

These are the topics which occupy our days.

Outside of a stuffy conference room I've never heard anyone use any of those terms.

They are meaningless.

So is much of what we do.

Thank god for advertising.

2011-12-02T09:14:00.000-05:00

A reminder.

Uncle Slappy has a cough.

2011-12-02T07:31:00.003-05:00

The phone rang at 6:45 this morning.

That can mean only one of two things. One of my daughters has a problem or Uncle Slappy needs to talk.

It was Uncle Slappy.

"A cough," he started, "A cough I have for three weeks and can't get rid of."

"I'm sorry, Uncle Slappy."

"To Dr. Richard P. Cohen I am going this morning."

"Good, he'll probably just give you an anti-biotic and knock it out of your system."

"Richard P. Cohen, the doctor, not Richard T. Cohen, the podiatrist."

"I got that Uncle Slappy." I waited, pregnantly for Slappy to continue.

"I just hope ammonia I don't have."

"Pneumonia, Uncle Slappy."

"That too," the old man said, and he hung up the phone.

Faded New York.

2011-12-01T12:45:00.008-05:00

I just read a book review in "The New York Times" about the fading advertising signs of New York. You can read it here: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/the-handwriting-on-the-wall-says-gigi-young-originals/?hp

Here's a little from the review:

"Advertising murals painted by hand on blank brick side walls in the 1800s and 1900s were supposed to have disappeared by now. Color slides were supposed to have disappeared by now. Books were supposed to have disappeared by now...

"They all survived longer than expected. That happy confluence has yielded “Fading Ads of New York City,” a new 224-page book from the History Press. It showcases...[a] loving record of hand-painted “ghost signs” that lasted long enough to go from eyesore to historical asset..."

I've ordered the book and if I like it, I'll tell you more.

New York, 1970.

2011-12-01T09:24:00.005-05:00

When I was a kid, 40 or more years ago, the world was a very different place than it is today. I was in 7th grade and like my brother who was a grade ahead of me, I had been enrolled in Latin. My teacher, and my brother's was a man named Howard Comeau.

I don't know how Latin is taught today but back in 1970 or so it was probably taught much the same way it was taught in 1870 or 1770 or, even, 1370. It involved an enormous amount of rote memorization, recitations, translations, dictations and mneumonic tricks, many of which I remember to this day. (There are but four masculine nouns in the first declension and they are a PAIN. Poeta, Agricola, Insula and Nauta.)

We were drilled and drilled and drilled some more. All of us had to be able to conjugate verbs like machinery. I can still rattle off Sum Es Est, Summus Estis Sunt, etc. like a sonofabitch. We were also drilled so that we could decline Bonus Bona Bonum, Hic Haec Hoc, etc. through the five cases both singular and plural--30 words with different endings in under 30 seconds. My best was in the sevens, more than respectable, but Connie Jacobs (who once got sent to the principal for calling something asinine) was the class champ--she declined Bonus in under five seconds.

None of this knowledge has really been helpful to me in my life and career. I do enjoy reading Roman history (in English) and when in Rome find that I can muddle through inscriptions on monuments.

The real value of this torture transcended Latin. I was forced to use my mind, to discipline it in ways that I fear have vanished. The power to understand, store and retrieve information--to recall conversations, dates and ideas, is vitally important. Mr. Comeau and Latin taught me that.

Mr. Comeau also taught me a lesson about the semiotics of dress. This was the early 70s when all the old rules about girls wearing dresses and boys wearing trousers to school were disappearing. Kids started wearing t-shirts, jeans and sneakers. The old order was collapsing.

There was a dance one Friday night in my Jr. High. Mr. Comeau was a proctor and reminded us that we would not be allowed in the gym if we weren't wearing a jacket and tie. We were outraged and couldn't understand why the dress code was so strict.

Mr. Comeau explained it simply: "you won't roll on the floor if you're wearing a jacket and tie."

--

BTW, if you're ever in the mood for a good movie I think about when I think about my education, get ahold of the 1951 classic "The Browning Version." It's directed by Anthony Asquith, written by Terence Rattigan and stars Michael Redgrave.

My iPhone.

2011-12-01T07:20:00.003-05:00

I got an iPhone about six months ago and here's how it's changed my life: I had been carrying three devices, a personal Blackberry, a work Blackberry (because I couldn't get my work mail on my personal phone) and an iPod. Now, I carry just one device and, therefore, my life has improved.

Some design stuff sucks about the iPhone. When I cradle it against my shoulder and ear, I often activate the mute button. I lose a lot of calls that way.

The thing that really annoys me about the iPhone involves apps. When I'm in a taxi on the way home, I often play Solitaire. My younger daughter just this past weekend introduced me to a game called "Fruit Ninja." When I turn on these games I get a little pop-down window that cloyingly tells me "Welcome back, George."

You know, I'm kind of embarrassed to be playing the lame-brained games. Surely there's something better I could be doing with my time. So I resent the assertiveness of the apps welcoming me back.

I think of these welcome greetings much the same way I think of a lot of online utility. It's there and we can do it, but it doesn't really serve any important, legitimate purpose.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Line of the day.

2011-11-30T09:02:00.003-05:00

From Maureen Dowd in today's "New York Times" on Repugnant-cant presidential hopeful Rick Perry.

"To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, if brains were elastic, Perry wouldn’t have enough to make suspenders for a parakeet."

A tale of two bridges.

2011-11-30T07:25:00.005-05:00

In New York, we have two ancient bridges that have just been given spanking new names.

The 19th Century Queensborough Bridge, also known as the 59th Street Bridge has just been re-dubbed the Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge. A few dozen blocks further uptown the Depression-era Triborough Bridge (my second favorite bridge in New York) has just been re-named The Robert F. Kennedy Bridge.

There's a problem with these re-namings.

First off, I can't believe that any New Yorker will ever call either of these bridges by their new names. The Triborough will always be the Triborough and the Queensborough, to Manhattanites at least, will always be the 59th Street Bridge. These names are honorifics. I can't imagine they will become part of New York's rapidly moving patois. (Similarly, I know no one who calls Sixth Avenue "Avenue of the Americas." Calling it such marks you as a rube, or worse, a Jerseyite.)

Second, and the real point here, the Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge is named after someone who is living. Never name something after someone living. Their "life story" isn't finished yet. What if Koch is caught in flagrante delicto with a goat? Why rush to change something and risk a debacle?

I think there's an advertising point here as well.

It's great to do something first, to, as clients and account people like to say, push the envelope. But it's not ok to proclaim something as new and improved before you're actually sure it's both new and improved.

In just the last few months more than a couple new, new things have unceremoniously fizzled. When was the last time you checked your Google+ account.

It's simple, really.

Think before you speak.

Look before you leap.

Latex gloves.

2011-11-29T11:33:00.003-05:00

Years ago I worked for a German car company and did some pretty good work and a lot of it. However, every once in a while, the clients would get out of hand and start rampaging and pillaging my work as if they were waging their own advertising version of Barbarossa. After a while, there's not much you can do about that. Clients, ultimately, get the ads they deserve.

In any event when it came time to sign the mechanical of such ads I refused to put down my name. I wrote, instead, FUBAR--fucked up beyond all recognition. It was my last protest against the wrecking of an idea.

Last week I had a thought, perhaps not as subtle as signing FUBAR. For now on when the client is making me write crap, senseless jargon-filled drivel that's more important to them internally than to real live people, I will conduct the following protest.

This morning I brought in a box of 100 Safe-Touch Disposable Latex Exam Gloves, Powder-Free. For now on I wear them when I'm forced to write shit.

Religion and advertising.

2011-11-29T07:19:00.004-05:00

I'm getting tired of this.

Almost a decade and a half ago, I was asked to lead the integration efforts on the biggest account in one of the world's biggest agencies. The benefits and the how-tos of integration seemed obvious to me then yet, today, twelve years later, we are still plagued by segregationists. (One way I had of leading this effort was to co-opt the language of the American Civil Rights movement. No one wanted to be called a TV-Supremacist or a segregationist. Calling them thus at least gave them pause.)

I was listening to a report this morning on NPR on the elections in Egypt. A lot of it concerned the popularity of the Egyptian political group The Muslim Brotherhood. The brotherhood, according to Wikipedia believes that the Koran is the "sole reference point for ...ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community ... and state." This, of course, appeals little to vast swaths of Egypt's population. Secular Muslims, Coptic Christians (roughly 10% of the state's population) and other minorities. It occurred to me while listening that most agencies are run by the advertising equivalent of the Brotherhood.

That is, they believe that their chosen medium is the "sole reference point for ...ordering the life of communications..."

Religious fervor, as far as I'm concerned, has no place in national politics. It certainly has no place in advertising agencies.

Yet, when you look around, it's all you see. Most agencies have a media axe to grind. Their particular media religion is all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful and all-influencing.

They are Zealots in persecuting and slandering adherents of other media religions. Those "others" haven't found the "one true way." They haven't seen the light.

Pluralism, a blending of views, thoughts, attitudes and beliefs, for all its faults, makes more sense than strict dogma. It's obvious to me. And always has been.

I have an agenda.

2011-11-28T16:01:00.003-05:00

There are many fads and mania that infect our business. A relatively new one, to me anyway, is that you shouldn't hold a meeting without sending out to the attendees an "agenda."

I just ran into someone who holds a regularly scheduled meeting that was slated to begin in two minutes. I've gone to a couple dozen of these meetings. I've yet to derive any value from them.

"Are we having our meeting," I ask.

"Oh, shit, I haven't sent out an agenda" she replied.

As Richard Nixon used to say, let me say this about that.

A meeting should be held when you've got something to actually say or do that necessitates bringing people together.

Not just because you have an agenda.
An agenda doesn't validate a meeting.
A purpose does.

And by the way, I have an agenda too.

Go to fewer meetings.

It reminds me of advertising.

2011-11-28T15:18:00.002-05:00

There's a great French movie by Jacques Brecker from way back in 1960 that reminds me, like most things do, of advertising. The movie is called "Le Trou" or "The Hole" and involves four inmates who attempt to dig a hole to free themselves from prison. About three-quarters of the way through the movie, a fifth inmate is put into the cell. Do they trust him, or do they abort their plans?

The intensity of the prisoners' effort is amazing. The narrow focus on the hole. It consumes the men completely. They can think of nothing else. It is everything, every thought, every conversation.

There is no outside perspective until there is. Until someone enters their closed worlds.

Many agencies, I've found, are closed worlds. Traditional shops forget that people do things other than watch TV. Digital shops forget that a Facebook app will not change everything. In both both instances these sorts of agencies are focused like the convicts and their Trou. Little exists outside of the deepening emptiness.

The truth, of course, is that the world is bigger than a hole. Focusing on one thing--the hole--is great for getting the hole dug. Just like focusing on spots or apps is great for getting those things created.

But marketing is about the "whole" not just the hole.

You need a broader view.

I am not fast.

2011-11-28T12:21:00.002-05:00

After nearly 30 years in the advertising business I have attained a reputation for being "fast." To people who don't know me, I appear to be able to churn out creative both rapidly and prolifically. Once a boss, befuddled and more than a little astonished said to me "you're writing copy faster than I can review it."

Here's the thing: I am not fast.

Over the long weekend an assignment came my way. A stupid piddling putz of an assignment but an assignment nonetheless. I was pissed to get an assignment when I had time off and still more pissed that the account people--ever obsequious--had promised to present to the CMO tomorrow, Tuesday.

Nevertheless, despite all the ass-fucking over-promises of account people, I still have a job to do. I'm not going to let my client down. I'm not going to not come through. (I will deal with those account people later.)

I didn't work for one minute over break. Didn't re-read the brief (which was actually pretty good.) Didn't start scribbling at my Mac.

I did, however start doing mental calisthenics.

By the time I got in this morning at 8:20, I had two ads "in my fingers." Ready to be typed. Typing them, writing copy for them, gave me another idea.

I was done with the assignment by 8:56.

These ads didn't take me the 36 minutes they seemed to take.

They took me all weekend.

As I said, I will deal with those account people later.

A bunch of fucks.

2011-11-28T07:36:00.006-05:00

We have a family tradition that takes place on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. My daughters, wife and I have dim sum and dinner at Shun Lee West Cafe, a deservedly famous Chinese restaurant. Then we head over to the "big top" and see the Big Apple Circus.

I'm a sucker for almost anything that's presented with a sense of humor and even though my kids have probably outgrown going to the circus, we go for the laughs and the nostalgia. (This year, for instance, they had a dog act that featured a cameo by a porcupine--something you don't see every day.)

This year as we walked into the arena we passed two-foot-high red letters printed on vinyl. They spelled out A C C E N T U R E.

I have a long, nasty, holocaust-survivor's memory. I never forget or forgive a slight, a bit of brutality, a lie or an evil done. I remember when Accenture was Arthur Anderson and their Enron lies stole the savings and pensions of millions of little people. I also part only begrudgingly with dollars I've earned. The circus tickets cost me $85 a pop--would they have cost more if there were no Accenture logo?

Everywhere you look now entertainment and sports are "underwritten" by major corporations. Free Shakespeare in the Park is underwritten by the scoundrels of Bank of America. The ones who bought John Thain a $15,000 wastebasket. And stole billions from millions of Americans, then borrowed billions more from the same Americans, then gave themselves multi-million dollar bonuses. As they robo-foreclosed on millions of mortgages.

We hear a lot about the various Occupy movements spreading over the globe. The sad fact is however is that corporations like JP Morgan Chase (they are underwriting the Christmas Rockettes at Rockefeller Center), Accenture, Citibank, Bank of America have occupied us.

They have taken over with their stolen largesse most everything. Their logos as ubiquitous as mosquitoes in a swamp.

Morons.

2011-11-26T17:01:00.005-05:00

I just caught a slice or two of Kurt Andersen's wildly-heralded radio show "Studio 360." He featured a writer and MacArthur Genius named Colson Whitehead who, of course, has written yet another best-seller about Zombies. Whitehead read a portion of his novel that told of a wife eating her husband's intestines and face. He then told of his childhood where he had no parental controls in which he was allowed to watch Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" at the age of ten.

I feel my brains slowly turning into marshmallows.

I jump to "The New York Times" online. The lead story is "Waffles, with a Side of Drama." It is about a restaurant chain called The Waffle House where weird happens. This from the greatest newspaper in the nation.

My head is spinning off my neck.

Maybe, it's likely actually, some inflected pundit will write a PhD. Thesis on the whys of the Zombie craze. We live in a frightening world so we find a comfortable terror--a nostalgic fear to soothe us.

And the people at the Times, the Waffle House people, probably contend that today, Black Saturday or Puerto Rican Thursday or Serbo-Croatian Tuesday or whatever it is, is a slow news day.

No, the fact of the matter is that the world--our disgusting, inclusive, big-tent, "everyone has genius" world, is infested, infected, inundated with morons.

And there are so many of these morons entire industries cater to them.

We can no longer distinguish between important and trivial. Between good and bad. Between culture and, ugh, pop culture.

It's all stupidity.

A late-night call from Uncle Slappy.

2011-11-26T06:35:00.005-05:00

I got a call from Uncle Slappy late last night and I could tell even before I picked up the phone that something was amiss. I could tell from his very ring that he and Aunt Sylvie were fighting again.

Aunt Sylvie and Uncle Slappy have been married for almost 60 years and in those 60 years, they probably haven't gone 60 minutes without having some kind of a set to. You can practically set your watch by them.

The reason behind most of these rows, I've come to realize is that Uncle Slappy is an incredibly ordered man. Once he has his way of doing something, he establishes a routine--that's the way it should be done. Deviance from that routine upsets him. Aunt Sylvie is more haphazard. The minutes on a clock are mere suggestions to her--punctuality is an approximation. And things, even things she's done a thousand times before, are seldom done the same way twice.

Uncle Slappy started this way:

"She's done it again, she's done it again."

"What's that, Uncle Slappy," I asked, already a bit weary of the conversation.

"Junk mail she got last night," the old man continued. "She tore it up into little itty bitty pieces so we shouldn't have our identities stolen, though who would want them--our identities--I can't even imagine."

"That's good then, she shredded," I temporized.

"Shred schmed," Slappy replied, "the torn up mail she left still on the coffee table. And then there's the orange juice," the ancient one continued. "You know I like my concoction, mostly seltzer in a glass with ice topped off with two fingers of orange juice, fresh."

I had made the drink for Slappy a thousand times.

"First the seltzer, then the orange," said Slappy "It mixes that way better."

"I know Uncle Slappy. You explained the physics of that to me years ago."

"Almost 60 years I've been drinking this drink and she first pours in the orange and then spritzes in the seltzer. A backwards drink upside down I don't like. I'm through with her."

"Uncle Slappy, these are baby little things, orange juice and junk mail."

"To her they're little things. Maybe to the neighbors they're little things. To Sylvie, they're little things. But to me, they're big things. I'm through."

"It's ok, Uncle Slappy," I began. I stopped when I heard the old man weeping and laughing at the same time.

He stopped long enough to toss this one my way: "You know," he said, "If I killed Sylvie when I first thought of it, I'd be out by now."

With that, he hung up the horn.

Metaphor for a Wednesday.

2011-11-23T10:14:00.003-05:00

This morning I took one of my long and solitary walks around the Upper East Side. It had rained all night and a lot of people aren't working today, so the usual crush of New York traffic was absent. People were sleeping in this morning. So there were fewer people and fewer cars than usual.

I walked aimlessly with no electronic accoutrements--no mp3-player, no cellphone. Just me and the singular quietude of aloneness in the city.

On Madison, I climbed the start of Carnegie Hill between 86th Street and 87th. The shops weren't opened yet. Kids and their mothers weren't streaming for their exclusive schools. About the only activity was just ahead of me, two garbage men tossing black plastic bags of garbage into the back of their garbage truck.

As I drew closer I saw it was a big pile of garbage they were attacking. One of the garbage men was silent, the other was pissed as he approached the pile. "Look at all this bullshit," he cursed "look at all this shit."

Garbage men cursing the never-ending crush of garbage.

My father and the day after. A reprint.

2011-11-22T18:40:00.000-05:00

By some anomaly of my birth date, I was in first grade when I was just five. I never felt unable to keep up with kids who were, at least from a percentage point of view, significantly older than I, but looking back on being the youngest, I suppose there was a lot I just didn’t get. I don’t know if that had to do with my age and level of development or if I was just not that interested in what was going on around me. I think I spent a fair portion of my time tuned out or tuned into my head. I remember looking intensely at the reading books we had in class and studying the coloring of the drawings—the very dot patterns--and the curves of the serifs in the type.

Maybe if I were a kid today I would have been poked and prodded, analyzed and pronounced ADD or ADHD or even mildly autistic. But whatever the case, I survived being lost in my world probably better than I would have survived participating in most other worlds. Once I remember holding an oval ceramic ashtray over my head in my parents’ living room and letting it drop to the linoleum because I wanted to study its path on its way down. That experiment got me more than a few whacks on my ass though the ashtray still sits to this day in my mother’s house, neatly glued together and barely showing its breaks.

When John Kennedy was shot I was sitting in school in first grade and the principal’s voice came on over the loud speaker announcing that the president was shot. I heard it wrong, or misunderstood what was said, and pictured the president being stood against the bright blue doors at the end of our elementary school hallway and executed. I didn’t understand why or what. But the next thing I knew, we got to leave school early to go home. (This was a simpler time. We could walk home or run—at five years old—without a parent or guardian, even past a small swamp that was overgrown and scary with skunk cabbage.)

The television was on when I got home with my mother watching. My brother and I watched, too, grainy tel-star beamed images from Dallas alternating with sonorous announcers from just miles away in Manhattan. We weren’t allowed to change the channel. My mother was watching.

Usually my brother and I watched after school a show of cartoons hosted by an actor pretending he was a charming and affable Irish cop. He called himself “Officer Joe Bolton” and he bored us with little anecdotes and admonishments to behave and do our homework between playing Dick Tracy cartoons with villains like “the Frog” or “Joe Jitsu” or “Hemlock Holmes.” Or he played old Popeye the Sailor cartoons, with Popeye vanquishing Bluto to win Olive only to have to go through the whole thing again in the next cartoon, though Olive always seemed like a whiner and a two-face to me. But this day we would watch no cartoons. The president had been killed.

My father got home late that night and sat in the living room dominating our sole TV and whispering about the end of everything with my mother. My brother and I ran around the house, trying to figure out how to be busy and silent until bedtime with no TV to watch and no noise allowed.

-
The next morning was Saturday and my father woke me up early, poured some hot chocolate down me and wrapped me warmly in my brown corduroy Mighty Mac winter coat. We got into his 1949 Studebaker and drove into the country. Weeks earlier, long before someone gunned Kennedy down, my father’s boss had invited my father and me to go skeet-shooting.

I’m sure my father protested this. I’ve never even held a gun, I can hear him saying. But it was something his boss wanted, it, therefore represented a chance to get ahead, and my father complied. I was along as his companion, in case he got bored or needed a hand to hold.

I don’t remember much of that morning except that the sky was gray, the color of a wet newspaper and I felt the cold despite the advertised promise of my Mighty Mac. I remember picking up the red cylinders of shot from the ground and being surprised. They weren’t at all what I thought bullets would look like. I remember seeing black discs in the air and then the loud firework report of someone’s shotgun smashing a clay pigeon and taking it down. I remember walking over the ruts of the farmer’s land the men were shooting on and stopping to pay close attention to the dried out and ploughed over detritus of what used to be living stalks of corn.

Something Happened.

2011-11-22T08:54:00.005-05:00

Joseph Heller's novel "Something Happened" has perhaps the most stirring, scary and riveting opening sentences I have ever read. It's a novel of worlds gone terribly wrong. Where balance and equilibrium are gone, and fear and terror are ascendant.

Over the past two weeks I've noticed that Something Happened in our industry. My client has given us two or three assignments that I simply cannot understand.

No, I mean it.

As account people like to say, "I don't even understand the 'ask.'"

They aren't asking for creative, or even "strategy," whatever that is. They are asking for schemas, rollouts, go to market plans. They are asking for decks that help sell notions--not to their customers or prospects--but to their own organization.

Something Happened.

The bloat of marketing organizations, the bloat of agencies is such that we have lost our original meaning.

We aren't about communications. We are about spending retainers, making sure everyone is busy and posturing about what will happen in 2014 if we do X,Y and Z in 2012.

We have become bureaucracized.

We have become powerpointless.

We have become meeting moguls.

Something Happened.

A dichotomy.

2011-11-21T11:40:00.004-05:00

When I was a little boy, my Cub Scout "den" took a trip up the New England Thruway two-and-a-half hours to New London, CT. New London was the birthplace of the world's first nuclear powered submarine and during these Cold War years was still a thriving submarine base. Even so, the sailors welcomed us and showed us around the place.

The thing I remember most was the guided tour we took of an actual WW2 submarine. I remember seeing six or seven rising suns painting on the conning tower which indicated how many Japanese ships the sub had sunk. I remember the claustrophobia of ten or twelve excited boys in the sub--I could only imagine how cramped the teenagers and 20-year-olds must have felt in their tiny quarters and the crushed corridors.

We saw dummy torpedoes in their racks. The racks of cots for the sailors. The shoe-box cabins for officers. The rudimentary oscilloscopes. And rows and rows of switches and knobs.

The thing that struck me even back then was that there was no concession whatsoever for design that wasn't strictly and completely functional. The sub we were on was built without a single concession to anything but utility. Design was all function, no form.

Just a few minutes ago a friend directed me to this site http://www.artisanalpencilsharpening.com/ which sells the services of Artisanal Pencil Sharpening. "REACQUAINT YOURSELF" the copy pleads "WITH THE PLEASURES OF A HAND-SHARPENED PENCIL. In New York's Hudson River Valley, craftsman David Rees still practices the age-old art of manual pencil sharpening. His artisanal service is perfect for artists, writers, and standardized test takers. Shipped with their shavings and a "certificate of sharpening," these extra-sharp pencils make wonderful gifts."

Somewhere between the pure and absolute utility of a 1940s submarine and the pure and absolute lunacy of artisanal pencil sharpening there is probably a happy medium, a balance between content and design.

I laugh, often, at the youngsters I work with who crave $170 woolen hats that by rights should cost $3.99. I shake my head as they troop by in $200 canvas sneakers and $300 jeans.

I think for our business and our world there is a continuum between function and form. Advertising today seems, to me, to be remarkably content free with everyone using the same color palettes to appear different.

Maybe earlier eras were too utilitarian.

No point, really, except to say that there must be a balance somewhere.

The Herring Maven.

2011-11-20T14:28:00.007-05:00

Long before Sam Breakstone sold cottage cheese for the Breakstone company, before Fred the Baker sold donuts and dedication for Dunkin' Donuts and Frank Perdue created branded chicken for Perdue, "The Beloved Herring Maven" roamed the radio airwaves of New York, exhorting listeners to "Make your day a little brighter with a little herring from Vita."

Some years ago, a friend and I got to talking about "the Beloved Herring Maven." He was played by the unparalleled voice-actor Allan Swift and written by the great Marty Solow for the Vita Herring Company. And if you listened to the radio in New York in the mid-60s, he became a crazy, funny friend with a Runyonesque turn of a phrase. The Beloved Herring Maven is credited with bringing the Yiddish word maven into the linguistic mainstream.

As we were talking about the spots my friend said, "I know Marty's son Michael."

I said, "Give me Michael's email address, I've been trying to find those old Herring Maven spots everywhere."

In November, 2009 I wrote to Michael and told him of my quest to find scripts or recordings of his father's spots. He promised me he'd find some and mail them to me. Just today "the Complete Herring Maven" arrived on two-CDs. An hour compilation Solow created for The Museum of Broadcasting and a separate CD of 36 :60 second spots. I've spent the last two hours listening to radio commercials for pickled herring products.

They are every bit as funny as I remember them.

Full of silliness, wisdom, ethnic humor and sales spiel.

I hate herring but I started thinking about going out to buy some.

I'm going to ask a producer friend to re-dub the MP4s to a video format so I can post a few. And over the next couple of days I will post some of the maven's bon mots.

By the way pasted below is part of the Wikipedia entry for Herring Maven.

"The word comes to English through Yiddish, which in turn derives from the Hebrew mevin (מבֿין), meaning "one who understands," and relates to the word binah, which denotes understanding or wisdom in general. It was first recorded in English around 1952, and popularized in the United States in the 1960s by a series of commercials created by Martin Solow for Vita Herring, featuring "The Beloved Herring Maven." The “Beloved Herring Maven“ ran in radio ads from 1964-1968, and was then brought back in 1983 with Allan Swift, the original voice of the Maven.

"Many sites credit Vita with popularizing the word Maven. An example of print advertisement including the Maven: "Get Vita at your favorite supermarket, grocery or delicatessen. Tell them the beloved Maven sent you. It won’t save you any money, but you’ll get the best herring"."

Eat up.

Rene Morel, 1932-2011.

2011-11-20T10:00:00.006-05:00

There's a really excellent obituary in today's "New York Times" which tells the story of Rene Morel, a master restorer of rare violins, violas and cellos. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/nyregion/rene-a-morel-master-restorer-of-rare-violins-dies-at-79.html?hpw

For whatever reason, perhaps it's the DayQuil I'm od'ing on as a fight a virulent head cold, I found some wisdom in Morel's life and work. Morel worked on the rare and expensive instruments of Pablo Casals, Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman and Isaac Stern among others. The centuries old instruments of these masters are touchy things. The Times notes:

"Violins, and their siblings, violas and cellos, are temperamental creatures. With tops of spruce and backs and sides of harder wood — often maple — they are fundamentally trees, reconfigured in strange and glorious ways that nature never intended.

"For these instruments, every bump and jostle, every change in temperature or humidity, is occasion for protest. Wood shrinks and swells and strains against itself. Cracks can appear. Their sonorous voices can be reduced to growls and grumbles."

Morel was a master at adjusting these instruments, using his hands and his ears to achieve perfection.

A musician would enter Morel's shop and play. Morel would listen, then go to work adjusting the instrument's vital organs. The player played some more, and Morel adjusted more.

Here's the part I especially liked, Morel's "failsafe way" of knowing when an instrument is right.

As Itzhak Perlman said, "He would put up his sleeve and say, ‘You see the goose bumps,’ ” Mr. Perlman recalled. “He said as long as he didn’t get the goose bumps, it was not properly adjusted.”

Machines, computers, experts, apps and so on can do a lot of great things. We cannot ignore the magic of modernity. The glory of technology.

The question is, however, will it produce goose bumps.

The value of Facebook.

2011-11-19T08:00:00.003-05:00

There is tremendous sturm and drang in our industry over the value of Facebook. Enormous expenditures have been dedicated to building Facebook pages, creating conversations, inciting likes, promoting events. Countless meetings have been convened to discuss Facebook, its power, reach and efficacy. The phrase "Facebook will change everything" has rumbled through the valley, rattled in the dell; knocked upon the mountain and recoiled upon the flat.

That's all fine.

But I think I know the real value of Facebook.

It serves to remind you that a large number of your friends can't spell. And don't know the difference between there, their and they're and its and it's.

Pissed.

2011-11-18T12:22:00.003-05:00

I took my two-year-old Mac to the help desk this morning knowing full well that by all rights it ought to be called the hurt desk. It's been three hours now and I've yet to hear anything back from them. This is my first-ever post written on my iPad.

The stupidity of agencies never fails to amaze and befuddle me. How a bunch of technicians can hold someone getting paid like a decent lawyer hostage. But that's the way it is.

In an era "where everyone is creative," creative is so devalued that they are treated like shit.

Decking halls.

2011-11-17T10:47:00.002-05:00

It being mid-to-late November it seems that every third store in my neighborhood is garishized with Christmas sentiment--a sickly treacle that gives force to my natural misanthropy.

I walked by the windows of one such store this morning and was hit with window decals beseeching customers to deck the fucking halls. I immediately thought of the nonsense the great satirist Walt Kelly brought to these songs.

Lambert, Hendricks and Ross also had fun with Deck the Halls, above.

Deck Us All With Boston Charlie

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash, and Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,

Swaller dollar cauliflower Alleygaroo!
Don't we know archaic barrel,
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou.

Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola Boola Pensacoola Hullabaloo!

-
Another version:

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker n too-da-loo!
Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope cantaloup, 'lope with you!

Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon,
Willy, folly go through!

Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo!
We also have this third version:

Duck us all in bowls of barley,
Ninky dinky dink an' polly voo!

Chilly Filly's name is Chollie,
Chollie Filly's jolly chilly view halloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, Woof, Woof!

Tizzy seas on melon collie!
Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, Goof, Goof!

Leaders.

2011-11-17T06:56:00.004-05:00

Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Thomas Friedman had an important op-ed in "The New York Times" yesterday. While it was about the larger issues facing the world today, as almost always, I saw parallels in it to the Advertising Industry. You can read the whole thing here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/opinion/whos-the-decider.html?hp

Here's the part that made me think about us:

"Yes, it’s true that in the hyperconnected world, in the age of Facebook and Twitter, the people are more empowered and a lot more innovation and ideas will come from the bottom up, not just the top down. That’s a good thing — in theory.

"But at the end of the day — whether you are a president, senator, mayor or on the steering committee of your local Occupy Wall Street — someone needs to meld those ideas into a vision of how to move forward, sculpt them into policies that can make a difference in peoples’ lives and then build a majority to deliver on them.

"Those are called leaders. Leaders shape polls. They don’t just read polls. And, today, across the globe and across all political systems, leaders are in dangerously short supply."

And that in a nutshell is part of the trouble in Advertising today. We have tactics and theories bouncing around caroming everywhere like atoms in a cyclotron. What we don't have is a plan. A mission. A linkage to a brand idea.

You know, we are missing "with all Thy getting, get understanding."

We are all shouting.

We are all making things.

Multiplying tactics like rabbits mainlining Cialis.

And it is all so much noise.

What we need is clarity, direction, vision.

That's how you separate chatter from matter.

A drink.

2011-11-16T08:20:00.005-05:00

I had a drink last night with an old friend of mine. She was my account person when I started at Ogilvy well over a decade ago--one of the first people who was decent to me. About seven years ago she switched from account services, where she was a superstar, to a job she created--helping agencies manage and retain talent--and to treat that talent right.

If an ordinary person had this job, I'd roll my eyes heavenward and sneer to myself, "HR." And that would be that. But my friend, I'll call her Diane for the purposes of anonymity, is extraordinary, one of those rare people with a heart. And a person with a mind large enough to tear away all the cliches of "talent management," and actually properly manage talent.

We were celebrating a bit. Diane returned from the UK earlier this year for a job at a large agency, and now she had gotten a new job at one of the world's leading companies. After 15 or so years, she's out of the agency business.

A lot of what Diane's had to do in her "talent management" role was to fire people. That's the way it goes sometimes. She told me a story about someone she had to fire a few years ago.

"He was super-talented. Super smart. Super ambitious. He just didn't fit in with the CEO. The CEO was threatened by him.

"I didn't hire this guy, but they made me fire him. I fought to make sure he was treated right. Fought to get him the severance he deserved. Fought to let him know it wasn't him.

"After I got this new job, this guy called me. He was working at my new company--in charge of Interaction Design.

"Thank god I was good to him."

Diane's story brings up two points.

One is it reminds you of the tiny size of our world. I remember reading once in the 80s in "Advertising Age" that the entire American advertising industry would not fill the University of Michigan's football stadium.

Two is even more important. It's that despite then omnipresent banality of our world, the corporate callousness of the companies that "buy our time" and "allocate us" as "resources," we are people.

Whether you're rich or poor, big or small, black or white, green or yellow, you have to be a human and treat people as humans.

I came across this ditty from the late 19th Century about a month ago and posted it once before but at the risk of being repetitious it seems like a fair way to end this:

There was an old owl lived in an oak
The more he heard, the less he spoke;
The less he spoke, the more he heard
O, if men were all like that wise bird!

I would rather be dead, Mother Fuckers.

2011-11-15T11:36:00.002-05:00

My agency has a spam filter that is so acute that sometimes it blocks emails sent out from our own HR Department. Sometimes emails from our corporate parent wind up in our junk folders. Sometimes someone who's e'ed you 100 times before suddenly ends up as junk.

Nevertheless, despite that Teutonic efficiency, emails from some asinine company called CareerTrack continue to invade my desktop though I always click on the icon that says "block sender."

CareerTrack seems to subscribe to the insipid notion of positivism. That the world and you're life would be so much better if you hitched up your pants, let a smile be your fucking umbrella and we all pulled on one lame-brained oar.

Today they invited me to a 1-hour long seminar on "Creating a positive, productive work environment by preventing bad attitudes and negative situations from disrupting your team's performance."

Here's their Ziggy-esq, Care-bear-like copy:

"Let's face it, not every member of an organization is going to be 100 percent happy all the time. Negativity often invades your workplace due to insecurity, boredom or even resentment, and it can spread like wildfire and attack an entire department's morale and ability to perform. Detecting potential problems before they spread is key to defusing harmful situations and stopping them in their tracks.

"Dealing with negativity requires open communication, good listening skills and the ability to focus on solutions rather than the problem. This informative program will provide you with proven strategies, tips and techniques to help you renew motivation where negativity may have taken hold within your organization.

"How to Deal with Negativity in the Workplace will show you how to combat negativity by working out conflicts with constructive criticism, active listening and an optimistic attitude. In one informative hour, you'll learn:

"What a negative atmosphere could be costing you and your organization

"How to deal with different problem attitudes (complainers, pessimists, gossips) with open communication, top-notch listening skills and effective questioning strategies

"How to assess your own attitude and understand how it's affecting your team

"Strategies to effectively respond when upper management is identified as the cause of negativity

"How to act rather than react when presented with a difficult situation

"And much more!

"It only takes one negative attitude to hinder the productivity of an entire team, which can ultimately affect your organization's bottom line. This 1-hour Audio Conference will teach you how to identify, work with, and remove negativity before it plagues your workplace — so that you will enjoy a more creative, dynamic and professional environment!"

Silent movie.

2011-11-15T07:30:00.004-05:00

I just heard about a new movie, a silent one, that has a lot of people talking. I haven't seen it yet but the trailer looks promising. And shows the power of "silence."

And for no other reason than I love it, a short clip from a "screwball" comedy nobody knows. Jean Arthur and William Powell (just watch his face) in "The ex-Mrs. Bradford" which was overshadowed by "The Thin Man" when it was released but in many ways is as wonderful.

National Nothing Day.

2011-11-14T12:47:00.005-05:00

Everywhere you go today people are doing meaningless things ostensibly in support of a cause. You can't buy a donut, a bag of mothballs or a cup of coffee without donating 1/100th of a cent to something more noble. If I buy a pair of shoes and the shoemaker donates therefore a pair to charity, it likely means I paid too much in the first place.

We buy water in plastic bottles to help the environment. We grow mustaches to cure cancer. Our lapels, our wrists, the bumpers on our cars, even our very skin have all been festooned with ribbons, pins and slogans declaring our support for something or another.

Fart for a cause. Donate a dime to fighting global warming every time you fart. And wear a pin on your blouse--a little puff of smoke--to symbolize your largesse.

Well, on my lapel this morning I pinned a translucent pin--you can't see it. On my shirt I've affixed a cellophane ribbon, again it's invisible to the naked eye. On my car I pasted on a clear decal showing my support--for nothing.

That's right. For all the world to see, I support nothing.

If I feel like donating to Haiti, I feel no need to announce it social media. I have no need to turn my profile picture maroon or to brand my suit jacket.

I just do it.

I need no affirmation.

No self-congratulation.

No acknowledgement of my contribution.

I don't need a calendar, or return address labels or a sticker for my door or a holiday card.

I, then, hereby proclaim next Monday "National Nothing Day." Show your support for nothing. Wear nothing, say nothing, post nothing.