Risk.

For about the last ten years or so, maybe more, giant entities--corporations and concentrations of money, have acted as if their behaviors are completely risk free. They've acted with hubris--that arrogance that doesn't just insult man, it insults the gods.

How can drilling a mile-deep be risky? We're so smart it can't be. How can NINJA mortgages and credit default swaps and the like be risky? We are annointed therefore they must be safe. How can re-insuring insurers be risky? We've looked at the numbers.

We've seen over the past twenty-four months as we've tiptoed on the brink of Great Depression II--we might still fall in--what the results of ignoring risk are. Tremendous arrogance leads to tremendous disasters. Likewise, tremendous arrogance has caused tremendous environmental damage in the Gulf and perhaps even worse damage via Chevron-Texaco in the Ecuadoran Amazon. (Read about that in Bob Herbert's "New York Times" op-ed today.)

Tremendous arrogance has marked the advertising world as well. Our holding company leaders (if that's not an oxymoron) have forgotten about risk. They think they know the answers. And they've discovered a modern alchemy. They can turn shit into gold. They can treat employees like shit and still get work out of them. They can treat clients like shit and in turn still expect loyalty from them.

Clients, of course, have also forgotten about risk. If we test enough, if we parse enough, if we committee enough, there is no risk in creating ads.

Obviously risk-hubris in client-ville and Madison Avenue does not constitute disaster. A few jobs are lost. A few hundred more rotten commercials run.

There's no risk when that happens.

Hipsters in hell.

Look, I don't care what the hipster-ocracy is saying direct from Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Wearing a wool cap in the 93-degree heat isn't hip, it's dumb. Wearing cowboy boots with a short skirt isn't cool, it's dumb. Wearing your hoodie with your hood up when it's so hot the cab drivers are steaming vegetables in their turbans is dumb.

It's dumb.
Not cool.
Not hip.
Not au courant.
Dumb.

Toxic Happy Meals.

The New York Times just reported this morning that Shrek glasses sold at McDonald's for $2 contain Cadmium, a carcinogenic element. 12 million glasses are being recalled.

It leads me to this conclusion.

Merchandise with logos cause cancer.

Fear.

Yesterday and the day before there were, at least for Ad Aged, quite a lot of comment activity on a particular post of mine. Much of that commentary centered around the notion of fear. As in, you should be afraid of speaking your mind to superiors because you'll be crushed like a gnat if you do.

Though I have as many if not more neuroses than most people, I am blessed (and cursed) with a big mouth and, I think a concomitant lack of fear. Sure I get nervous that my work isn't good enough and at times am timorous to show my work. But somewhere along the way I overcame my fear of "superiors." I've always reckoned that they paid me for my mind and my insouciance. Though it troubles agency organizations at times, I have pretty much always been somewhat fearless.

Steve Hayden, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy has always said, "All power comes from the barrel of a client's gun." So perhaps the key to fearlessness is forming the sorts of relationships--relationships based on trust that allow you a certain amount of internal impunity. I have always served, not catered to, clients. Fought with them over the course of their business. Been blunt and at times caustic when I think they're doing something boneheaded. This course has always served me and serves me today.

Fear is a cancer. And if you live with fear, like a cancer, it will kill you. It's that simple. I've been at 10 agencies over the last 26 years. Only a couple were "Fearocracies." Those two places I left as soon as I was able (FCB and Momentum.) I wish the denizens of those Houses of Usher the worst of every Yiddish curse ever, delivered by my mother without makeup.

So to those people who live their careers afraid to argue or challenge creative directors, upper management or client, I suggest you find a different profession. Accountancy. Sales at Saks. Teaching middle school.

My biggest successes, such as they are, have always come from speaking my mind. What's the worse that can happen? If I get fired, I didn't belong there anyway. I've been fired twice in my life. Sure there were moments when I cried into my hands--but more moments where I got introspective, figured out a plan and moved on.

And living as a coward (because if you live in fear, you are a coward) is not at all living.

Another one bites the dust.

This blog, as I have stated many times, started as an analogy. Would the ad industry--Madison Avenue, replicate the bureaucratic ossification of the auto industry--Detroit, and collapse under its own, aggressively stupid weight?

Yesterday The New York Times announced that Ford is discontinuing its Mercury brand. Mercury has been selling cars in the US since 1939. 1978 was its peak sales year when they sold 580,000 cars. Last year they sold about 1/6 that total 93,000 vehicles.

My first car was a Mercury, a 1964 Park Lane convertible that was as long as a football field and gushed oil like a BP well. The bumpers were heavy and chrome and once when the brakes gave out I slowed the car down and crashed head-on into a telephone pole and no one was hurt. In the summer when the roof was down, you could pile half your high school class in the car and head to the beach.

In the past two years or so Mercury, Pontiac, Saab, Plymouth, Saturn and Hummer have ended. There hasn't been a similar shuttering of ad agencies (outside of Enfatico and Lowe) though I suspect that certain entities have seen their staffs and revenues decline precipitously.

I'm not well-connected like George Parker. But my guess is there are now nearly as many empty offices in Ad Land as there are empty suits.

Mental silos.

Here's the scenario. You work to advertise a brand where 80% of sales are attributed to customer referrals. Half the people in your agency immediately latch onto that statistic and begin saying things like, "this means we have to optimize social networks. We need a Facebook strategy." And so on. Further they trumpet this data to proclaim, once again, the obsolescence of traditional advertising. After all, it makes little sense to spend 80% of your ad budget on traditional advertising is 80% of your sales come from word of mouth.

I started as a copywriter in the advertising department of Bloomingdale's department store here in New York. The store's service was woeful. They had stock-keeping issues and often ran out of products a store of its ilk should never run of. Nevertheless, everyday the place was packed like sardines on the 6 train.

Once in a meeting I asked a big wig executive why the store was so crowded if service and selection was so spotty. "We succeed," she told me "because people are insecure. They figure if they buy something at Bloomingdale's--whether it's a blouse or a dining-room table, it indicates they have taste, because at Bloomingdale's, we have taste."

Here's my point. Most people don't know what to think about a product until some sort of superego informs them. That, in part, is a role of television. It's a taste maker. It gives people permission to advocate for a product or service.

It's been said that 1/3 of all auto-advertising, for instance, serves not to drive sales but to validate purchase. That is to give buyers permission to propagate word of mouth.

The silo-ites, in an effort to dominate the internal life and assume power within agencies, don't see things this way. They want to believe that "their" medium, and their medium only, is the only one that matters.

Dr. Paul R. Garabedian.

I entered college at the tender age of 17 and began studying to become an aeronautical engineer. When I was a freshman I was lucky enough to have a seminar class with Dr. Paul R. Garabedian, who passed away on May 13th.

Garabedian was a mathematician whose computer computations helped lead to fuel-efficient wings for modern jetliners. Oddly enough, Garabedian didn't work on a computer at all. He did his calculations long hand on 4x6-inch pieces of paper and would leave them to his students to verify and test.

After I worked for him for a year, he had decided to leave Columbia for the west coast to do some esoteric work on nuclear fusion. He began looking for magnetic field structures that could better hold and harness hot gases for future power plants. He was, I was told, still working on that problem at his death.

After Garabedian left Columbia, I was without a mentor. Aeronautics seemed less interesting without him. Fact is, for the first time in my life I became wayward. I drank too much. I cavorted with too many co-eds and, eventually, came close to flunking out of school.

I had lost my keel, my rudder.

It wasn't until I was a junior that I snapped out of it. Switched my major to literature and decided to try to become an English professor. I didn't succeed in that dream either.

However, if Garabedian were here today, he'd say this to me, as he said to me so many years ago. "Alfred," (he always called me Alfred no matter how often I corrected him) "A tree-legged donkey can go down hill as fast as a stallion."

Somehow that always made me feel better.

Some clarification.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j9tHPJlSJA&feature=related
We use words and phrases nowadays with such utter imprecision that they have lost much of their meaning. Last summer I went to Egypt and saw the pyramids and the Sphinx. They were awesome. A tuna salad sandwich from Starbucks is not awesome. It's good. Maybe very good. If your standards are low, maybe it's excellent. But awesome. Naw.

When I was 17 or so my friends and I went to a Woody Allen triple feature. They played "Play it Again, Sam," "Take the Money and Run" and "Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But We're Afraid to Ask." By the time I got to Gene Wilder and the Sheep I was laughing to the point where it hurt. But I wasn't ROTFL or LMAO.

Often I see people talking about some film clip or some such and then the ubiquitous LMAO. Save it for something really funny.

If every response is exaggerated then no response is real and believable.

New York advertising.

Yesterday the great Dave Trott commented on a post of mine, "Random Memories." He referenced a special sort of advertising that thrived here in New York in the 1960s and early 70s. This was advertising that had a tough, roll up your sleeves and no-nonsense tone. And a brusque and unassailable logic that woke you up and changed your perceptions.

"It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken." For Perdue.
"Drive it like you hate it." For Volvo.
"Choosing an airline for its food is like choosing a restaurant for its flying ability." For Pan Am.

And then there was this house ad for DDB. Written by Bob Levinson and art directed by an ex-boss of mine, Len Sirowitz. Below, I've pasted the copy.

As we say in New York, read it. Or get the fuck out of here.

Do this or die.

Is this ad some kind of a trick?
No. But it could have been.
And at exactly that point rests a do or die decision for American business.
We in advertising, together with our clients, have all the power and skill to trick people. Or so we think.
But we're wrong. We can't fool any of the people any of the time.
There is indeed a twelve-year-old mentality in this country; every six-year-old has one.
We are a nation of smart people.
And most smart people ignore most advertising because most advertising ignores smart people.
Instead we talk to each other.
We debate endlessly about the medium and the message. Nonsense. In advertising, the message itself is the message.
A blank page and a blank television screen are one and the same.
And above all, the messages we put on those pages on those television screens must be the truth. For if we play tricks with the truth, we die.
Now. The other side of the coin.
Telling the truth about a product demands a product that's worth telling the truth about.
Sadly, so many products aren't.
So many products don't do anything better. Or anything different. So many don't work quite right. Or don't last. Or simply don't matter.
If we play this trick, we also die. Because advertising only helps a bad product fail faster.
No donkey chases the carrot forever. He catches on. And quits.
That's the lesson to remember.
Unless we do, we die.
Unless we change, the tidal wave of consumer indifference will wallop into the mountain of advertising and manufacturing drivel.
That day we die.
We'll die in our marketplace. On our shelves. In our gleaming packages of empty promises.
Not with a bang. Not with a whimper.
But by our own skilled hands.

Doyle Dane Bernbach Inc.

Stuart Elliott is an ass.

There is no shortage of death knells being rung for print media. And pundits, experts and other assholes forward all sorts of reasons for its demise. But, naturally, they leave out the most salient one. That is, most of the writers suck and don't report on anything relevant.

If you work in advertising the most egregious hack writer of all is the ad columnist for The New York Times. Whenever Stuart Elliott feels like taking a three-day weekend he writes a column that asks 20 irrelevant questions that I suppose are meant to be funny.

Not only does Elliott ignore virtually everything that's of importance to the industry--say Joyce King Thomas' resignation, the decimation of the industry, one of the major accounts up for review, in today's column he asks this odious and tone-deaf question. "Will the executives of an oil company whose extensive, and expensive, efforts to create a greener image are drowning in a sea of black crude tell a reporter, “You ask a lot of questions for someone from Brooklyn”?"

I mean c'mon, Stuart.

1) You can mention BP by name.
2) There are larger issues than your Brooklynite provenance.
3) The subject-object split between BP's advertising and BP's reality demands real investigation. What is BP's culpability in propagating their green lies? What is Ogilvy's, their ad agency? What of the networks? Have we no check on outright lies in advertising--where is the FCC in all this?

Apparently none of these issues matter to Elliott or, even, The New York Times. They'd rather focus on burning matters such as this: "Did anyone who saw the magazine ads for chino pants from the Banana Republic division of Gap, which carried the headline “Live in Chino,” call the chamber of commerce in Chino, Calif., to inquire about housing or jobs there?"