Doing your job.

Too many people don't do their jobs because they do the job.

They do only what is asked of them or what is scoped or what the time allotted (by people who have never created an ad) allows. More often than not, there are branches that grow off the original assignment, there are ways to make the original task larger, broader, better for the client, the agency, your portfolio.

The client asks for one commercial, your job is to show them how they can shoot a campaign. Or the original commercial and some web content.

This is how good sales-people work. If I go to Barney's to buy some pants, a good salesman will show me shirts, belts, shoes and more. He's not being a goniff or a handler, he's being smart, helpful and ambitious. (goniff--Yiddish for thief; handler--Yiddish for peddler.) That is our job too.

Years ago an ECD I worked for berated a group of his creative directors this way. "I'm not mad that the worked sucks, I'm mad that our level of ambition has started to drop."

Our real job--whether you're a "creative" or in account, media, project management or make coffee in the coffee bar, is to keep your level of ambition high. To keep trying, keep pushing, keep selling.

That's the only way to succeed.

A light.

Last night we landed in Albuquerque, New Mexico at about two in the morning, picked up our rental car and began our hour long drive north to Santa Fe. We were weary, my producer and I, having been casting for two straight days under the intense view of our intense director, with not a moment's downtime or to ourselves.

We were driving north on interstate 25 when through the front windshield we saw an incredibly bright green light. Then a fire ball glowing greenish-orange with a long flamed tail streaked past us and hit the desert ground. We had seen a meteorite fly by up close.

There is a lot of bullshit in the world. You're not mad if your world view is pessimistic. So much seems wrong. Our problems as a species, and a nation seem, at times insurmountable. A meteorite glowing, pulsating and trailing flame, obviously, does not change any of that.

But it does remind you, forcibly, of the splendor and beauty of the world. That despite the greed and small mindedness of so many, despite rampant ugliness and cruelty, there is the incalculable and fascinating. There are pure occurrences where your imagination isn't hamstrung.

I am 53 years old and have never seen anything remotely like I saw last night. I may never see anything like it again. But let's not stop looking.

Thoughts from some casting sessions.

I've been all over hither and yon of late, casting for a bunch of commercials I am shooting. These spots will have fairly large casts--about 15 principals in each of the three spots, so we've seen, over the last couple of days literally hundreds and hundreds of actors.

If you're an actor, I imagine, casting is no picnic. You have about four seconds to make an impression. You stand on a strip of masking tape, you're asked your name, and you have to stand out. You have to get noticed. Be interesting. Intriguing. Funny. Or shocking.

In short, you have to do something.

Of course, this is precisely what we have to do with our work and in our jobs. There are a thousand other people competing for like assignments, or for the attention of viewers. To get noticed, it's simple, you have to do something.

There are a lot of people in our business who don't do. They are waiting for the perfect brief. They are waiting for ideal conditions. They are waiting for the planets to align.

I'm sorry.

You have to do something.

Myth.

There's a falsehood running through our industry that says that everyone is creative and collaboration amongst many people is how to arrive at an answer that is original, relevant and interesting. This falsehood, as near as I can determine, is propagated by the same people who give trophies to every little league participant, who festoon their home with their children's "art work," and who believe that everyone is above average.

The simple fact of the matter is that some people--a few--don't fit neatly onto bell curves. You find them way off to the right, the top 10% of the top 1%.

These people mitigate the notion that because everyone at all times carries with them digital image capturing tools, everyone is a photographer or a director. They're not.

Just as everyone cannot write.
Or even spell.

Frankly, I'm tired of this plasticized egalitarianism. It's saccharin sweet. It turns a lot of mediocrities into pontificators and participators when they should be in a back-office somewhere filing.

Anyone can take a picture of a fork.

There was only one man, Andre Kertesz, who could turn a fork into a sculpture.

Are we not tomatoes?

There's a book review in today's "New York Times" that is about tomatoes but is really about creativity. You can read it here. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/books/tomatoland-barry-estabrooks-expose-review.html?hpw The meat of the matter is that the tomato-industrial complex through its size, strength and dominant market position has changed the tomato fundamentally and for the worst.

Winter tomatoes, almost all those sold in America, come from the nutrient-free sandy soil of southern Florida. There, to compensate for the lack of sustenance they get naturally, these hard greenish-pink balls--uniformly sized for efficient packing--are grown in soil pumped full of chemical fertilizers... [they] can blast the plants with more than 100 different herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness’s arsenal.

"...It’s no wonder generations of Americans have grown up thinking tomatoes were a fraud perpetrated by God, their parents or Taco Bell. I remember biting into one of these objects in a salad and thinking: Now there’s a supposedly tasty thing I’ll never eat again."

Much of the work we create in our industry is similarly synthetic, artificial and tasteless. But it will last long on a shelf. It is infused with dumbness like "rule the air," or "I like it in the can." It is offensive in its lack of taste. It reflects poorly on all associated with it.

(99% of Hollywood is no different. Advertising and other "creative" pursuits are industrialized. Humanity with all its quirks and nuance has been removed as thoroughly as a less than round aberrant tomato.)

Rage against the tomato. Rage against airlines calling certain seats "comfort plus," (what are their other seats? Comfort minus?) Rage against the dumb, prescribed and tepid.

Have we, thanks to HR and their proscriptions, thanks to our worries about staying employed become like industrial tomatoes? We're uniform. We don't dent. We are artificial. And tasteless.

It's time to fall off the truck and seek to ripen in the sun.

Parallel universes.

In the United States yesterday, an alleged murderess was acquitted of killing her child. That opened up the floodgates on Facebook and other "tabloids." It was all people are talking about. Last week I saw Errol Morris' new movie "Tabloid," which documented the "stranger than fiction" doings of alleged kidnapper Joyce McKinney and the attendant media frenzy.

What struck me about both of these cases is that I had heard not a thing about them. I suppose because I regarded them as tabloid gossip, side-shows that crowd out real news, neither case made it onto my radar screen.

It occurred to me watching a bit of television last night that in advertising we have a similar situation. The airwaves are clogged with women singing to Swiffer mops or rubbing their wrists with arthritis pain. What appears on TV--real advertising--has little to do with that strange parallel universe that appears in awards shows.

What we've constructed in life and in our industry is an Empire of Illusion. This is a state where an elite few govern. These elites don't work on things like mops or sale ads. They work on things you never see. Then they fly to conferences where they speak to other members in their closed circle. Then they judge their own work in awards shows.

When I was a kid I had some friends who would play wiffle ball in a park around my house with an oversized bat that looked like a caveman's club. They could swat the ball a mile with that mallet. But there was no correlation to hitting with that bat and hitting with a real bat.

I suppose it made them feel good and powerful.

But it was fundamentally meaningless.

One minute of joy.

Kino, the film archivists are releasing some early Buster Keaton shorts. If your Tuesday is feeling like a Monday, as mine is, this minute-long clip might perk you up again. As Preston Sturges once famously said, "a pratfall is better than anything."

John Coltrane on advertising.

There was an article and a wonderful slide show in Sunday's "New York Times," on the house in which jazz great John Coltrane wrote "A Love Supreme." You can read, and see the whole thing here, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/opinion/sunday/03sun4.html?scp=2&sq=john%20coltrane&st=cse but I thought I'd pick out a few sentences from a particularly well-written article.

"There is a ranch house out in the middle of Long Island, just south of the expressway in Dix Hills, where the saxophonist John Coltrane lived, started a family and composed “A Love Supreme” in the spare bedroom. The album is a hymn of praise and thanksgiving by a man who found peace and God after alcohol and heroin. It is the work that helped make Coltrane a jazz immortal.

"While it will live on, the house is another story. It has been empty about seven years. The bricks are crumbling. The raccoons have been evicted, but not the termites. Lexan panels cover the windows; a fan blows futilely to keep down the mold. That’s about as far as the restoration goes."

As our industry spends its energy chasing awards, it's worth thinking about the mutability and transitory-ness of what we do.

Our work, with one or two exceptions that perhaps break in to popular culture, will not last. Our houses will not turn into shrines.

The best we can do is do our best. Comport ourselves with integrity. Listen well and try to do well for our clients, our agencies and ourselves. Also, we can try to be mensches. Help young people. Help them get jobs. Help them learn.

A friend of mine wrote me about a year ago. She knew I had worked for Hall of Famer Ron Rosenfeld. She was in a second-hand store in Williamsburg and stumbled upon an old corrugated box full of his ancient awards. Did I want them?

They were being sold for a dollar each.

One word.

Dave Trott has a post today about shooting, early in his career, with the great director Alan Parker. http://www.cstthegate.com/davetrott/2011/07/do-it-then-fix-it-2/

It made me think back about a decade ago, when I had the great good fortune of shooting a television campaign for IBM personal computers with the director Tony Kaye.

There wasn't much of an idea behind our spots. We were trying to capture that moment when people actually hold a ThinkPad and see how wonderful it is. Accordingly, our spots were unscripted, though my partner and I had formed a list of a couple dozen questions to elicit reactions from "real" people.

Tony and I, for whatever reason, hit it off. He would barely talk to anyone else on location but he kept me literally by his side for 12 hours a day.

We were shooting film in those days and you had to change the film magazine about every seven minutes. That meant Tony would talk to me every seven minutes. "What do you want them to say," he would press me.

"The machine is beautiful," I would answer, "it feels more solid, more elegantly put together than I expected."

"One thing," he would reply, his nose just inches from mine, his eyes staring unblinkingly.

I would again attempt to answer in a sentence.

He would cut me off.

"One thing."

As the four days of shooting wore on, I began to get the hang of answering him. I would answer in one word.

There's nothing that forces you to reduce and eliminate the extraneous like having to coalesce it into a single word.

When we were done shooting, Tony thanked me for my one-word answers.

I thanked him for making me work harder and think better than I ever had before in my life.

Empty office, 9:07 AM.

As I have written many times, I cannot for the life of me figure out why people—and it’s not just creative people either, can’t get in by 9 in the morning.

But punctuality isn’t the point I’m going to try to make today.

Today’s post is about having a plan.
It’s about showing up for work with an idea of what you want to accomplish that day.
About how you’re going to do something that’s good for your client.
Or good for your agency.
Or good for you.
Or, best yet, good for all three.

Too many people, most people that is, come into work and let work come to them.
They wait for assignments.
They wait to be told what to do.
Instead of figuring out what needs to be done.

You’ll never get if you don’t ask.
Ask for more.
Ask for smarter.
Ask for better.
Or better yet, as they say, just do it.
Figure out why it’s needed.
How to sell it.
Why the client can’t live without it.
Think it.
Do it.
Sell it.
Succeed.

Sound like a plan?