Water is wet. Heat is hot. And other big news.

Jaguar the nearly defunct automaker is at it again. Jaguars have had at least a forty-year reputation of breaking down, burning up, or simply not running. As they used to say "Ask the man who owns one." (In fact, in the early days of Jaguar in the US, if you drove through the mountains, you had to open up the carburetor on the way up the mountains, and close it up again on the way down. Jaguars were built only for the UK where the highest altitude is 3000 feet. But, as usual, I digress.) What's more, Jaguar competes in the classiest and most competitive niche in the automotive marketplace--the sphere dominated by Lexus, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Infiniti. All manufacturers that make attractive machines that actually work and that actually maintain their resale value.

OK and whew. That's a roundabout way of saying Jaguar's reputation for mechanical integrity and reliability sucks. What no one has ever ever questioned is that Jaguars are beautiful. So now, as 7000 Jaguars languish on lots, as sales are virtually non-existent, Jaguar launches a new car via a new ad blitz. Their headline? "This is the new Jaguar." Wow. Seminal.

Nothing else in the ad except photos that show how gorgeous the car is. Nothing that says the car works. Nothing that says anything--that it's fun-to-drive, innovative, safe, as good as a Lexus.

There is or there should be when possible, a news element to advertising. The best advertising is NEWS. News isn't that Jaguar is gorgeous.

Maybe when Jaguar finally closes up shop because they can't sell any cars, that won't be news either.

Does a brick have an inside?

As the world has grown increasingly dumber, I've found some solace in reading books by or about the brilliant. It turns out that many of these bona fide geniuses are scientists--physicists in particular. Though I understand nothing of physics, what I've discovered is that these people are artists of the highest order. They solve problems not with cyclotrons and particle accelerators but with the sheer force of their creativity and imagination. Also these physicists are almost always relentless--they don't stop until they breakthrough. A lesson all of us in advertising can learn from.

Right now I am reading a book by Nobelist Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman." It's basically little anecdotes about his love of unraveling. This short passage particularly struck me. Feynman was a graduate physics student at Princeton in the 30s and his peripatetic mind led him to audit a graduate philosophy class. Naturally he is called on by the professor and asked "would you say an electron is an essential object." Like me, Feynman had no idea what an essential object is, so, like a good account guy, rather than answering the prof's question, he asked one instead. "Is a brick an essential object?" He writes: "What I had intended to do was to find out whether they thought theoretical constructs were essential objects...my next question was going to be, 'What about the inside of the brick'--and then I would point out that no one has ever seen the inside of a brick. Every time you break the brick, you only see a surface."

What I find important here is Feynman's questioning. He doesn't merely accept an assignment from his professor. He works hard to find what the professor is really asking, challenging the professor the whole way, learning himself and teaching the professor.

This is what we should do with clients. The ad business needs more creative questioners. Not rote answerers.

Five years in VietRaq.

As we approach our fifth annihloversary in Iraq, I happened upon a website that keeps a running total on what we've spent to date on the war that Rummy told us would pay for itself.
http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home

Browse the site for a couple of minutes. There are trade-off calculators that show you how many schools we could have had if we hadn't been so busy killing 4,000 American teenagers and 700,000 Iraqis.

The death of Firebrand.

Firebrand, a company that ran a website that basically let you watch commercials and was hosted by bosomy vixens, and who launched to great fanfare (and great disappointment--full page ads in the trade press announced their launch before their site was ready) has just announced that they're going belly-up.
http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/media/e3i4347da1880a63bba640379e906b61ff7

I could never really figure out why they were in business in the first place. Now I don't have to worry about it.

Is honeyshed next?

Wiki-Everything.

As an amateur historian (who is, with all due modesty, better read than most professional historians) I've always decried graffiti as evidence that the Vandals are taking over, as they did in ancient Rome. Now, I wonder (not that I approved of writing on walls) if the explosion of graffiti that seemed to start in the late 70s was really the harbinger of today's Wiki-World. Edifices have collapsed--they have little meaning--see the top photo--a courthouse on 161st Street in the Bronx. Today people want to be heard. They don't sit in straight rows and wait to be spoken to. No, they believe, rightly or wrongly, that they deserve a voice.

Perhaps that is the class struggle we're really facing in America now, and the world. The plutocrats versus the democrats. The same class struggle the world has faced from the very beginning. The same class struggle that gave us Moses, Jesus and Marx--both Karl and Groucho.

Say goodnight, Gracie.

Two words.

Politics, like advertising, is often a battle of the words that take hold in people's minds. Pepsi's brand value is greater per sales than Coke's because Pepsi was able to stake out and claim the word "young." That immediately put Coke down as "old." Same is true I think for Amazon vs. Barnes & Noble.

To date, the Right has been superior to the Left in the war of the words. Ronald Reagan's phrase "card-carrying liberal," has demonized liberalism to this day. The Right has had success with phrases like "anti-abortion." No one is pro-abortion. Though a majority of the nation is pro-choice. You can say the same about myriad other phrases that permeate our language, like Clean Air Act, or No Child Left Behind, or Exit Strategy (which is a strategy about how to stay longer. A take on Groucho's "Hello, I must be going."

Recently, I have noticed that the Left has caught onto this. About a week ago, I saw the phrase "E-coli conservatism." This is basically a castigation of those Right-wing ideologues who believe government is so inherently bad that it's better to have e-coli in the food supply than government protection.

A word I saw just today is VietRaq. I don't have to explain what that means. But it will be interesting to see how John McCain does.

Two charts that explain it all.

There are natural laws in the universe that apply to advertising. One of the most powerful is regression to the mean. We make things for the masses to consume and therefore there is a comfort in making what we make usual, comfortable and beige. That is, we create work and then judge it by criteria such as "it must be ok, it feels like something I've seen before." You can put virtually every ad into that category, every politicians' commercial, virtually every non-indie flick, and virtually all counter-culture. For instance, I grew up in an era where everyone wore jeans in order to be different.

This is from Goodby's website, that is Goodby the winner of Agency of the Year the last two years in a row: "Finally, we believe in treating our audience with respect. This means presuming they have a certain level of intelligence, discrimination and sense of humor. In doing so, we think we will be awarded a better form of interest and engagement."

That's pretty good.

Dead or dying brands.

I guess because I wrote yesterday about Sears, I started thinking about brands that are dead or dying and are highly unlikely to be resuscitated.

I saw recently a banner ad for Lincoln automobiles. Does anyone remember Lincoln? Does anyone feel positively about it? Does anyone associate Lincoln with anything but a New York City "Black Car" with 375K miles on it and no suspension? Is there anyone under 70 in the US who shops for a Lincoln? Naw. It's one of the seven or nine last cars you buy before you die.

That said, I went on Lincoln.com. The site has all the cliches of every other website, auto or otherwise. Bad synth music. A car that rotates. And a headline so banal, so meaningless, so empty, so devoid of TRUTH that it makes me sick and sad. "We started with a dream, and built a car around it."

No, you started with a Ford chassis and built an obsolescence around it.

As I have said before in this space, dead brands are legion: Lincoln, Buick, Pontiac, virtually all American airlines, perhaps Dell, and so it goes. Other brands are still alive but only because a better competitor hasn't yet come into the market.

So to the agencies that handle these brands and to the CMOs that run them, here's an offer: give me a call at 1 646 638 5505 and give me a week. If I come up with something that revitalizes your brand pay me $1 million cash. If I don't just pay my expenses and go out of business.

I'm dumb.

Today's New York Times advertising column reports about a new campaign for Sears. Also on the back-page of at least two sections of the four section paper, two full-page ads heralding the acquisition of AG Edwards by Wachovia Securities. Both campaigns are way over my head--I don't get what they're saying or what it means to me. And last I checked my IQ was in the high, Republican double-digits.

Let's start with Wachovia's. Their ads exalt the word "with," because, I suppose AG Edwards is now with Wachovia. One ad features a photo of four young boys laying in the surf on the beach. The headline reads, "WITH IS A POWERFUL THING." The first line of copy proclaims (fasten your seatbelt Vladmir Nabokov) "With. Four letters allowing you to declare a choice that you've made." Wow, if that isn't profound! Like, when I declare "I won't have relations with a woman who has oozing leprosy." That's proclaiming a choice I've made. The first line of a second ad that has a stirring headline that simply says "With" is this: "A simple, unassuming word that's nonetheless powerful. It connects. Creates a bond. Defines relationships." Jeepers. What this has to do with two financial services companies is thoroughly beyond me. I mean really. I just don't get it.

Now onto Sears. Sears' ads beckon the reader to "Reimagine You." The CMO of Sears explains it this way: "“We have to do a better job of collecting our products and turning them into experiences." OK. So, the ad shown here with a guy and a riding mower, "Reimagine yourself as the alpha neighbor" is now an experience? Does anyone anywhere think the average American knows what the adjective "alpha" means?

This is "brand" advertising. And the reason agencies and CMOs so quickly get the axe. It's obtuse, masturbatory and vapid. Maybe it should run for president instead.

A Shakespearean Jewish Grandmothers' joke.

Beware the Idas of March.