Auto upheaval.

There has been, to put it mildly, a bit of volatility of late in the world of automotive advertising. Mazda has fired Doner. Chrysler was dropped by Fallon. GM switched its Cadillac business from BBH to Fallon and its Chevrolet business from Publicis to Goodby. Jeep now resides at Wieden after a short stint at Global Hue and a slightly longer one at Cutwater. And Dodge Trucks is knocking around like a ping-pong ball in a Cuisinart. There are a few others I've neglected. VW is at Deutsch LA and Hyundai appears agency-less. Rumor is Nissan is unhappy with TBWA/C/D.

One precipitant behind all this upheaval is the sorry state of the auto industry. Sales have sunk and when sales sink the easiest recourse is to find a new agency. GM's GM, Joe Ewanick slugged a couple of these moves into action, exhibiting his power by displacing incumbent agencies with newcomers.

My question amid all this roiling is simple. Does any of this make a whit of difference? Goodby will, I suppose, do their usual exemplary and compelling advertising. But anything short of 45-minutes with Heidi Klum will not get me into a Chevy showroom.

The fact is that most people shopping for a car have their minds made up. It's like a presidential election. The democrats and the republicans will each get about 45% of the vote no matter who they nominate. A great deal of the money and shouting goes to swaying a small group--the undecided--one way or another.

Here's a numerical way of looking at it. GM sold just under three-million cars last year and it cost them just under $3 billion of advertising to do it. So they spent $1K in advertising for every unit sold.

Not sure how the greater math adds up. But I do know that my calculations show that moving metal is an expensive proposition.

I wonder what would happen if Detroit just pulled the plug on it all.

I'd still be taking the train to work.

Agency Math.

More time is spent interrupting than listening.
More time is spent saying what will be done than doing it.
More time is spent meeting than working.
More time is spent gaining consensus than gaining perspective.
More time is spent on power point than getting to the point.
More time is spent tracking productivity than on being productive.

Houses of cards.

When the Soviet Union collapsed they possessed something like 20,000 nuclear warheads and 40,000 tons of biological and chemical pathogens. Powerful.

A couple months after their collapse a leading nuclear scientist was being paid in vacuum cleaners. Another was being paid in pickles. Another wrote to a colleague in the West that he was "down to his last sack of potatoes."

I suppose you could marvel at the suddenness of this implosion. But I don't marvel. I worry.

I worry because in the final throes before collapse all resources are spent on propping. But what the proppers are propping is too far gone to be propped. So once they stop, it's not decay that sets in. It's complete nothingness. Boom.

A sand-castle too close to water's edge. A balloon let loose amid a herd of charging porcupines. A house of cards.

I worry about entities that seem strong and vital but are really just holding on. I worry what happens when the match stick that's keeping it all in place is removed.

I can feel it coming, my fourth night in a row of insomnia. And so far it's been resistant to Ambien.

Relief.

From Andre Kertesz.
Snow on a fence.

Ungrammatical advice during a heat wave.

I heard this today:

"Stay safe. Drink plenty of water and lots of sunscreen."

Work harder.

I have been at 10 different agencies over the past 26 years and while I've been doing my time I've noticed a few things.

The brief will always suck.
There will never be enough time.
The client will always try to jam a lot of shit in there.
Feedback will not be consolidated.
There will never be the money you want to do exactly what you want.
You probably should have chosen a different director.
You will always be out-spent by your competitors.
You don't have the money to do it right.

Above are just a few of the myriad excuses that potentially greet us with any project.
They are there to welcome you no matter where you work and who your client is.

My point is really simple.
Regardless of all the issues, you need to quit your carping and find a way through them.
Find a way to do good work

Almost any challenge is faced with the same sort of obstacles.
You can choose to throw in the towel.
Or you can work harder.

Working harder isn't a panacea.
But it helps.

But not in advertising.

It's the 4th of July, the day we in America celebrate our democracy or what passes for democracy at a time when our entire civilization seems to be coming apart at the seams.

It was Churchill, I think, who said "democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." And I suppose I'd agree with him with the possible exception of the rare times on earth that there has been a decent absolute monarch.

In any event, this isn't about politics, it's about advertising.

Since it's about advertising, I'll make it simple: Democracy doesn't work in advertising.

Finding consensus about work doesn't work.
Treating people absolutely equally doesn't work.
Listening to public opinion doesn't work.
Finding something for everyone doesn't work.

There's a great impulse in our business to be inclusive. To make sure we're all pulling on the same oar. To make sure everyone gets a vote. To share accolades and to mitigate blame.

All that is pig swill.

Good advertising is balls out.
It demands notice and takes a stand.
It is meant to make people uncomfortable.
It is meant to effect.
It is not meant to be nice and safe.

I spend time with my father.

Much of the time I spent with my father when I was a little kid was in the car alongside him as he went on errands and looked for parking spaces. I was his silent companion during these weekend trips. Me, not my older brother, I suppose my mother wanted me out of the house more, probably because my brother and I, being only one grade apart, were nearly always quarreling and she just couldn’t take it.

And as we would drive through a nearby shopping district, he would on occasion tell me something slight about his job or talk to me about the Yankees. Most often, we would each sit silently listening to the crackle of his car’s AM radio, Frank Sinatra singing or something about missiles and Nikita Khrushchev. Most of what I heard during these trips I couldn’t understand. I was young, maybe four or five but I enjoyed the trips anyway. First off, I was with my father, and secondly, I got to sit in the front seat, something which didn’t happen when anyone else was around.

We would go into stores and my father would attend to something with a salesperson and leave me to find something to amuse myself. In one store, a men’s clothing store, there was an engraved sign and a small running tap at street level right near the entryway. The sign said “Dog Bar,” and I remember wondering why dogs would need to go to a bar, because bars were places only grown-ups were meant to go. This same store had an automatonic parrot on its countertop not far from where the cashiers stood. When you pressed a button that was on the base the bird sat on, the bird would swing slowly into life, swivel its head, tilt it and squawk, “Polly want a cracker” or “What a beautiful day” or “Hello, how are you?”

To my eyes and ears the bird was incredibly lifelike. Its feathers as bright as a cereal box. And even though it was activated by my touch and even though the bird often repeated itself, I spent a fair amount of time debating in my mind whether or not the parrot was real and alive. Occasionally the men behind the counter would activate it, unbeknownst to me, “Hello, handsome,” squawked the machine. That further confused me.

The other thing my father and I used to do on these trips was to endlessly (it seemed to me) search for some obscure item my mother desperately needed for some reason or another. She might have us hunting for forest green tapered candles because someone important was meant to come over for dinner, or she needed a bronze finial for a lamp she was planning to refinish or a certain kind of screw with reverse threading.

These expeditions sent us all over the Bronx and southern Westchester counties. To myriad small strips of shops and village centers. To little dusty hardware stores with walls covered by hundreds of small cardboard boxes filled with oddly-purposed doodads. We were not just shopping anymore, we weren’t running dumb, pointless errands. We had been sent on a quest, and like Coronado searching for the Lost City of Gold, Ahab hunting the white whale or Aguirre searching for god knows what, we would return triumphant—finials in hand—or we would die trying. Often our expeditions would take all day. We would start in the morning and not come home until just before dinnertime. This was a tribute to our perseverance or, perhaps, my father wanting to be far from my mother.

At each of the little stores we stopped in, of course, we had to find a parking space. This was where the magic of my father really came to the fore. First we would drive to the store, hoping there’d be a space upfront magically waiting for us like there always were on television detective shows. Finding no spot, we would circle the block. If we still hadn’t found a place for the car, my father would proclaim, “we’ll find a space or we’ll make one.” I imagined my father somehow pushing cars away to open up a slot for his Studebaker. But usually we found room at a meter which ate the nickel my father allowed me to feed it.

When it was raining during our quests and we had parked a distance from our destination, my father would say, “we’ll just run between the rain drops.” And then we’d zig-zag our way to the store, getting wet all the same despite our effort.

Around lunchtime during these excursions my father would start complaining about his prodigious hunger. He wouldn’t say anything as prosaic as, “I’m hungry. Let’s go get a bite.” He was much more dramatic than that. “Son,” he’d say “my stomach thinks my throat is cut.”

Statements like these were my father’s norm. They were the things he said and he said them often. For all I remember, they might be all he said when we were together. It’s not that he was withholding or laconic, it was more that he was usually lost in his own thoughts. Some people solve their problems externally, their problems become property of everyone around them. My father worked his all out in his head, playing out every option, every conversation, every angle they would entail. Then he would have his solution. The troubles or situations either at work or at home I wouldn’t be able to understand. So he didn’t involve me.

So we passed our time together in quiet, silently looking for parking spaces, our emptiness filled only by ballgames, mechanical parrots and dashes toward stores in between drops of whispering rain. We would find a way to be together, or make one.

Youth. Age.

Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer for "The New York Times" wrote an article the other day called "Second Act Aces." http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/second-act-aces/?scp=2&sq=jamie%20moyer&st=cse It was primarily about Jamie Moyer, the 47-year-old pitching ace for the Philadelphia Phillies. Last week, he became the oldest pitcher ever to defeat the Yankees. Egan writes, "Almost 20 years ago, Moyer was told he was through — to get out of baseball. That was followed by 10 productive years in Seattle, where I watched the ageless Moyer befuddle the steroid-bulked behemoths of the performance-enhancing-drug age.

Egan goes on and cites Clint Eastwood and John Huston, both of whom enjoyed creative and directorial success in their late 70s and 80s. Huston directed "The Dead" from a wheelchair, with oxygen tubes running up his nose.

Mark Twain wrote "Huckleberry Finn" at 49. And Norman Maclean wrote "A River Runs Through It" when he was 74.

Now there's a counterpoint of course. Melville wrote "Moby Dick" at 31. And Hemingway wrote "The Sun Also Rises" at 27.

Agencies seem to throw out people once they reach 50, though their lawyers would deny this. I ask them to consider this from Malcolm Gladwell, in his commentary on Moyer. "His advantages were experience, deception, guile — skills that usually come with added years on the odometer.... For endeavors that require knowledge of craft, and constant experimenting to get it right, age may actually be a benefit..."

Smoking and advertising.

One of the weird, Microsoft-generated agency phenomena is the proliferation of meetings. It's not unusual to look at your calendar in the morning and see every half hour block filled in with a meeting request, or even competing meeting requests.

I may be a voc clamatis in deserto (a voice crying in the wilderness) but I happen to believe that we have Microsoft to blame for all these meetings.

Here's what I mean. Years ago before Microsoft meeting maker if you wanted to show your ACD work, you walked down to her office and said "Florence and I have work to show you." She would look up from her desk and say something like, "let's meet after lunch, say 1:30."

And you would. Further, if she liked the work and deemed it ready to show account, she would call account and say, "can you come up now and see some work?" And account would come up and look at the work.

Now we set a time to review the work (ready or not.) And review it again. And then we have a time set to review it with the client. We have so many meetings not because we need them, but because we can set them.

Here we are in late 2010 when everyone is blathering about cost control and runaway expenses and we can't hop off the meeting train.

If I were a bit more inventive I'd create a wearble anti-meeting patch. It would infiltrate a drug into your bloodstream to help stop you from going to meetings. Meetings are like smoking. Everyone knows they should stop but no one does.