Lost in Miami.

Yesterday from out of the blue I received a note from a young copywriter who is looking to move. She wondered if I would take a look at her book a provide some feedback. And, if I would help her insinuate herself into the agency at which I work.

There was a campaign for a kid's toy. A toy that's sold well for probably 60 years and needs no advertising, though their ads (spreads, of course) regularly festoon the pages of awards annuals. There was a campaign for a sneaker company impelling young wearers to graffiti rooftops rather than streetscapes. There was an ad for a dog food that talked neither about dog food nor dogs.

In all, a typical book from Miami Ad School.

Oh so cool. And oh so irrelevant.

Here's what I wrote to the young copywriter:

"I need to start this note by admitting that, while I'm not old, I am somewhat old school.

I think your portfolio is good for what it is.
But there are no ads in it.
No things that are hard to sell.
Nothing that feels like it takes a mainstream brand and helps it sell what they make
or helps regenerate and revitalize their brand.
I look for books with that kind of rigor.
Cool is not the only strategy.
How do you sell a Nissan Maxima?
What makes it better than a Camry or an Accord?
Not just cooler, but what's important about the machine,
the design, the engineering, the experience it delivers.

Yes, I come from Ogilvy and Ally & Gargano.
We examined real products with real in market problems.
That's the day in day out job of advertising.

I worry with your book.
How do I put you on an assignment for a client that spends
$10 million with my agency when I don't see any ads for
products or services?

Sorry if I'm being harsh.
And I'll admit, I think Miami Ad School has lost their way.

77% of the wealth in the US is controlled by people 55+.
Where are ads to those people?"

Trust.

One thing I've learned in my life, my life in advertising, my life as a leader of groups, my life with my two daughters, is that it's hardly worthwhile, or in any event, it's significantly less fruitful, in the absence of trust.

Maybe the notion of trust is rattling around in my brain because it's the center of so much of what goes on in jury duty.

In any event, what occurred to me yesterday is that so much of the infrastructure of client organizations is based on the absence of trust. You need to run your work through a gantlet of levels, through a labyrinth of reviews because of that absence.

Showing work to clients isn't about doing what's right, it's about doing everything they "asked" for.

And then going through eleventeen layers to show them you listened.

Don't tell me to cheer up.

Considering the paucity of "comments" I get on this blog, I get a fair amount of advice that I need to cheer up. That I am expressing disdain for my current place of employment, my clients or--my calling, advertising itself.

Let me explain why I ignore these.

I am a perfectionist. I see the world and like Ahab, I curse the gods that it is not a better place. My drive, my anxieties, my goals and my passion is to create an environment where people (including myself) can excel and by excelling create work that works for the client and touches and inspires people.

That is often not possible. I should relax and make, I'm told, "tactical retreats." To that I say, "Bosh!" and "Bosh again."

As I have written in this space before, George Bernard Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

I'm told my spirit is not a long-lasting one. And the people who tell me that may be right. Even my therapist tells me to take a deep breath and "let things go."

I'm sorry. That's not how I was made.

And by the way, George Bernard Shaw lived to the age of 94.

Observation from an account planner.

You don't look at the mantle piece when you're poking the fire.

Jargon.

Jury Duty isn't a great deal of fun. But like with most things, you can learn a lot from it.

Over the past few cases I've noticed that cops and their associated law enforcement officials speak a language that's entirely their own. It's a combination of street slang for narcotics, acronyms and other threads of language that make up jargon.

It's not unusual to hear a sentence like this, "An undercover from ICE picked up the perp for a hand to hand of an 8-ball."

That means and undercover agent from Immigration Customs Enforcement picked up a perpetrator for exchanging 1/8 of an ounce of cocaine."

Most businesses, clubs, tribes, religions, even families, have their own languages, their own patois, argot or...jargon. Charitably speaking, jargon is linguistic shorthand that helps a group communicate.

It only becomes a problem when the prevalence of jargon begins to change the way you actually think. And for the purposes of our business, has a negative impact on our language of communication.

Years ago when I worked on IBM personal computers, the client insisted on saying a particular machine was "just 1-inch thin." I fought them vociferously. No one--except a jargonnaire says "1-inch thin." It's not the way people talk and rings phony and false.

I was taught by one of the best writers in the business never to use jargon, never to use a big word when a small one will do.

That's how you make the complex simple.

Which is one of the toughest, and most important, jobs in advertising.

Mugged.

When I was a kid, say about nine, I was riding my bike home from school and was mugged. Just to shake things up a little bit, prior to being mugged I had meandered around a bit and rode home a different way than usual, through a different neighborhood.

I wasn't in that neighborhood long before I sensed that I was being chased--chased by two older kids on their bikes. They caught up to me and forced me to stop by a vacant lot that ran alongside the road.

I'm not sure what these hooligans intended to do with me. Kids in those days hardly carried any money, so they could scarcely go through the trouble of chasing me for 35 cents. Maybe they just felt like beating the shit out of a little kid, a perfectly acceptable hobby in the late 60s. Or maybe they thought they could do well by stealing my bike out from under me. Chances are, they were bored and I was something to do.

The two kids shoved me around a little bit. They called me a fuck. Then one of them bent over to let the air out of my front tire. As he was doing so, I karate chopped him on the back of the neck. He fell down and I rode off.

"Hey," they called after me, "We we're just messing around. Come get your tire cap." Naturally I ignored them and rode to safety.

I guess I think about this this morning because work can so often feel like being mugged--ganged up on by fools or bullies.

The only difference is there's no one to punch and you can't just ride off.

A dolt education.

Oh, you meant adult education.

Little boxes.

Last week was my birthday--or the anniversary of my birth, as my punctilious brother would point out. My wife gave me a book called "The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms" by Nassim Nicholas Talem, a Distinguished Professor at New York University.

I'm not sure about Taleb. I began a previous book of his "The Black Swan," but didn't feel he or it had the gravity to warrant a week of my leisure. I'm wary, and always will be of people who have crap like this written in their "About the Author." "...which has spent more than a year on The New York Times bestseller list and has become an intellectual, social, and cultural touchstone." Oh, just kill me now.

"The Bed of Procrustes" is a book of aphorisms. Reading it is like reading a carton-load of fortune cookies. Talem is Seth Godin with 20 more points of IQ. Or 30.

Nevertheless, here's one I liked. Maybe because it suits my mood on a crappy Monday. "They are born, then put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they go to the gym in a box to sit in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box. All boxes, Euclidian, geometrically smooth boxes."

Two kinds of writers.

There's a wonderful "appraisal" in "The New York Times" sports pages today written by veteran sportswriter Harvey Araton. The piece is called "Mensches and Mentors in the Press Box" and it's an appreciation of what Araton learned from two famed New York writers who died this past year, Maury Allen and Vic Ziegel. You can read the piece here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/sports/12araton.html?ref=sports

Here's the part I really liked because it seemed to me to explain how so many of us in advertising deal with the pressure of our trade:

“The deadline is the enemy,” [Ziegel} once wrote in standard Ziegelese. “It’s there, at the same time, every night. You relax your fingers, and it comes closer. You can’t fake it out because it doesn’t move. It grows closer and towers over you. It doesn’t understand that you’re trying to do the yeoman thing. Or that you need a better word than fast to describe a base runner. Very fast is very bad. Fleet is a bank. Swift, nimble, speedy, no, no, no. Fast is starting to look better. There’s coffee spilled on my notes. And the stranger in the next chair is on the phone telling somebody named Sweetie he’s on the way home.”

"Allen was that proverbial neighbor, packing up as others bogged down on the transitions between their first and second paragraphs. “A billion Chinese don’t give a damn,” he would say on his way out. As the years passed, as my generation filled seats around him, some wondered if Allen gave a damn. What they missed was that in the process of writing countless articles and 38 books, he had come to realize that natural storytelling — Allen’s specialty from ballparks nationwide — was not brain surgery, as long as the ego got out of the way and the story told itself."

I guess I've always been more a Maury Allen than a Vic Ziegel. Never sweating too much a deadline, confident that the right word would be there and the larger idea was more important than the mot juste.

Or not.

There are times, of course, I struggled. I gnaw my fingers and sweat out something good.
Or try to.

New York, 1979.

I just read an obituary in "The New York Times," of a jazz musician named James Moody who died just yesterday at the age of 85. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/arts/music/11moody.html?hp Though I never heard Moody play, at least I was never aware that I heard him play, his obituary brought me back.

When I was just 21 and a graduate student at Columbia University, there was a bar in my neighborhood, on 114th and Broadway called the West End. It was a big, dusty place, with no cover charge, where you could buy a beer for two dollars and pretty much spend the night communing with that.

But the real attraction of the place wasn't the beer or the lack of incandescence. It was the jazz. Jazz has been pretty much dieing since it was born, whenever that was, and the West End was home to dieing jazz musicians.

Just about every night featured a combo, four guys, three or five, who had played with Basie and Ellington and were now out on their own. Supplementing their social security or their savings by playing from 10PM to 2AM for, primarily, Columbia grad students.

The musicians were old pros, Ellington himself had said this about Russell Procope, a saxophonist and clarinetist whose band I used to hear: 'He's an utterly sober and reliable musician, always to be depended upon." The musicians were restrained. They were in for the long-haul. There was no longer any big time to be had. They were playing not for a hit but for their lives.

One bass player I remember, though I've lost his name, never opened his eyes. He pawed at his huge instrument like a bear at a beehive, leaning on his bass for balance. He looked like half of a couple at a dance marathon. He wouldn't be standing if it weren't for his partner.

Regardless, every once in a while, from his stand-up bass, a line would emerge, and for a riff or two, all was perfect in the world.

You might even be moved to buy another beer to nurse.