Doing what I've always done.

A couple of days ago I got a call from a reporter who was writing an article about, among other things, blogging. She asked, as reporters do, how I started blogging. I answered as I usually do.

I started blogging, I told her, at the behest of my dear friend and erst-while partner, Tore Claesson. I was out of work and Tore suggested that keeping a blog and writing on it everyday, or nearly so, would allow me to keep my "name" in front of people who could potentially hire me. I couldn't call and nudge people everyday, but I could put something out there that they might want to read.

Second, my blog impelled me to write everyday. It gave me cause, purpose and deadlines. All of which I need for my sustenance.

The final reason, I think, is most important.

Ever since I was young in the business, I would get to work early in the morning fairly brimming with things that excited me, intrigued me, annoyed me or, most often, all three. When thing were going right for me, I would share these observations with my partner.

Later, when I started moving up the agency ladder, I still arrived at work early. But now, too often, I worked alone. Either as an ECD, without a partner, or as head of a creative department, also without a partner. Nevertheless, most days a couple of fellow early-ers would show up in my office and I would rant. One group of guys who often plopped down in my office used to call it "George's Breakfast Club."

Today, it seems we don't have the time or the intimacy to have a "breakfast club." What's more, there are sites that let you, simply, write down your thoughts and publish them to the world.

So, in short, I'm doing what I've always done. Now, I'm just doing it online

It's everywhere.

My cousin, I'll call him Myron, was in town last night and came up to my apartment for an early night-cap. Myron is a mensch of a man. Good, honest and a no bullshit kind of guy.

Myron's spent his life working in the luggage business. His family manufactured briefcases starting in 1919, and somewhere in the late 80s or early 90s, they sold out to a giant manufacturer. Myron went to work for that manufacturer.

The company he works for now sells luggage, accessories and business cases and by all accounts are hugely successful. They have gone from being unknown to being a "hot" brand in just a few years. A testament to this is the fact that, for what it's worth, they have almost 81,000 Facebook "likes."

At his heart, Myron is a sales guy. After all, what would his company's business be if they had one-million likes but sold no luggage. Myron believes that sales drive the company. Perhaps causally, he leads the divisions that account for both the largest and the second largest number of sales in the company.

Right now he's engaged in a ongoing battle with the CEO of his company--a guy worth probably $60 million because guys like Myron sell. (The company had $400 million in revenue last year.) Myron's boss told him this: "we're not in the luggage business, we're building a brand. Sales aren't important, our brand is."

One of the great maladies of our age is the obfuscation of work. It's not enough for us to be in advertising anymore. We have to be "brand stewards." Or we have to be "product innovators." Or we have to help clients "navigate the changing media landscape." (On a separate note, I've never pulled the car over into a scenic overlook to view a media landscape.)

Life, if you can filter out the horseshit, really is simpler than all that. Without a good product, good brands don't exist. Apple became a strong brand because they built better products. BMW ditto. Nike ditto. Very few brands are so strong that they can tolerate bad products, bad service or bad sales.

The "Obama" brand, which seemed so strong just four years ago might be out of business in three months. The product didn't live up to the branding.

I had no words of wisdom for cousin Myron. Except maybe he should call my brother Fred, the lawyer. Howard has a lot of stock in his company. It might be time to sell.

My new business ventures.

When I get down on the world, when I feel the world is too much with me, it is almost always the result of a feeling that despite all I do--both at work and at home--I am neither understood nor appreciated.

It is times like these when I feel like punching a heavy bag, going for a long run, or playing a couple hours of full-court basketball.

However, as I age, these physical pursuits are harder to come by. My wrists ache for a week after the punching bag, my knees similarly after a run and my whole body is torn apart after basketball.

At lunch today I had an idea.

I'm planning on opening up a business called "I'm Stumped."

I'm going to rent a storefront in the city and position every few yards or so a sturdy tree stump. Then, for just $20-30 an hour, stifled executives can grab an axe, a maul and a wedge and go at it, knocking the hell out of a stump.

I suspect if I can arrange the capital, the "I'm Stumped" concept will spread like wild-fire, with [ahem] branches opening everywhere.

I might even open another business. In this one I'll cover the floor in a thick strata of dirt and stone. I'll rent shovels and pick-axes.

You dig?

Some thoughts on how holding companies work.

Some years ago I was at a small agency in a big holding company. Like many such agencies, there was a kitchen that had coffee machines, coffee in little "K cups," assorted teas, sweeteners and creamers.

This one particular agency also made available Quaker instant oats in little sealed envelopes. You can buy a box of ten of these little envelopes for about $5. That's 50-cents an envelope.

One day, my little agency lost a piece of business. Before our 90 days were even close to being up, the oatmeal disappeared. Never to return.

I can't imagine more than 20 people a day ate oatmeal at the agency. It would have cost them $10/day to keep those 20 in oatmeal. A whopping $2,500/year.

The price of a bottle of a typical bottle of wine ordered by a holding company honcho.

But still, it disappeared.

I wish they would.

Curvin O'Reilly.

I never knew Curvin O'Reilly in the way that I never knew Mickey Mantle. But I stood in awe of him all the same. Mr. O'Reilly's death was reported yesterday.

His homeruns were ads for Saab, BMW and dozens of other brands that we take for granted today. His words brought them to life.

When I was knee-high to a cockroach in this business and poring over One Show and Art Director annuals, his name was attached to many of the ads I liked the most.

I read the ads he wrote over and over again. Particularly his ads for Saab. These ads were as well-argued as a legal opinion by Clark Clifford. They were beautiful--euphonious even--and accompanied by wit, logic, persuasion and an underlying sense of intelligence that made you, the reader feel that the brand thought you were intelligent, too.

Tom Messner, whom I met just once, has written in his usual trenchant style a lovely, deeply-felt eulogy on George Parker's blog. http://adscam.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/08/tom-messners-remembrance-of-curvin.html

Like the work of O'Reilly, it is well worth reading.

Cleanliness. And piss.

Just about every time I write something, I try to come up with a line or a thought that "makes" the piece. Something intrinsic on which the piece turns.

When you write a commercial, this is the money line. The seminal bit of "truth" that makes the spot work.

In a print ad, it's often the linchpin on which the logic of the ad rests.

In an email, it's often a scintilla of humor that makes a weighty subject less onerous.

There's something they're teaching now in MBA school. And they've gotten very good at it.

They're teaching clients or arming them with wit polygraphs that allow them to zero in on the corpuscles of humanity.

It is these milligram slices of life that make work work.

But clients are fast to remove them.

All over American they've put hand-sanitizer in lobbies, bathrooms, hallways and more. This sanitizer is meant to kill the germs and grime that presumably can grow on your hands like mold on a locker-room floor. They're meant to make the world air-brushed and anti-septic.

In the process, the world has been scrubbed so clean that we are no longer as resistant to illness as we used to be.

We are, in short, cleaning ourselves to death. Or if not to death, then we are left with work that has the soul of an in-flight video. Sparkling smiles, flaccid prose, spineless, insipid, bland.

Or in the words of the late, great Ed Butler, my boss for three years when I was at Ally & Gargano, work that's "as flat as a plate of piss."

Some thoughts on 51 years in the business.

I've been making money in the advertising business since 1961.

That's right, 1961.

I was three years old and was cast in a commercial with a bunch of other kids for a cereal from Nabisco. Then, because I was cute with big blue eyes and platinum blonde hair, I was cast in another commercial for another Nabisco cereal.

In this one I was the sole on-camera talent. I had to sit and eat a bowl of cereal with vigor. That is, I had to look like I liked it.

I made about $4,000 for these two jobs. Which wasn't bad money in 1961 when the average teacher made just about $5,000, a VW Beetle cost $1,800 and the minimum wage was $1/hour.

I also had to join SAG and AFTRA.

However, at the point where I started making money, my parents feared I would become "one of those kids," so I retired having just two spots under my belt. Maybe I lost my cuteness 51 years ago.

In any event, I went 20 years--from 1961 to 1981 before I re-entered the business. I was fresh out of college then and began writing catalogs for Montgomery Ward.

So, when I say I've been in advertising virtually my whole life, I mean it.

It can be a frustrating business at times. And I know I have friends who castigate me for being such a curmudgeon.

The fact is, I have intermittent serotonin issues and stupidity-tolerance issues.

In all, advertising has been good to me. I've been able to buy my home, send my kids to private schools and private colleges, and lead, generally speaking, a fulfilling life with travel, comforts and even a luxury or two. Most important, my kids have found ways to do what they love. Advertising helped make that happen.

Sure, I wish my 401K were larger. Sure I wish I had more job security. I wish a lot of things.

But mostly, I've enjoyed these years.

Dealing with crap.

For two years running now I have been working on a campaign which uses a noted Oscar-winning actor as on-screen talent. This actor was chosen for his persona--of a no-nonsense man of integrity. In real life, or as real as it gets when you're shooting him, he is to curmudgeons what Stalin was to mass-murderers. Or maybe Mao.

There's a lot of crap we have to deal with in our business. From clients, from bosses, from account people.

If you're going to survive, you need to do a couple things. Among them are 1) Develop confidence in the quality of your output and 2) Develop thick skin.

Today I shot a two-minute industrial film with my talent. And it went like this.

He came in and immediately said, "Who do I see about this script? It's unreadable."

I stepped up to the plate and in ten minutes had worked things out. It turns out, he doesn't like sentence fragments. Ever.

After he had settled down, my producer grabbed the script sheet with his notes on it.

Like I said, there's a lot of crap we have to deal with in our business.

You have to face it. Handle it. Work around it. Make things work. And keep moving.

Oh yeah.

And don't forget to find a way to laugh now and again.

Data vs. Dada.

Yesterday I had one of those conversations with a "data-ist." Not a dada-ist, that I could understand. A data-ist.

A data-ist is someone who has "data" that proves whatever they say. Chapter and verse. The only thing they never question is where the data comes from.

Years ago I was sitting in a meeting where we were told Coke was the most valued brand in the world, IBM was second and The Learning Channel was third. The account guy asked rhetorically, "the Learning Channel?" and I blurted, "they paid for the study."

But back to yesterday's meeting.

I was told by the dataist that QR codes really are the real deal. They're working for Macy's who's incorporated them into their logo.

OK. I said. People might use them if they think they're getting 40% off.

Have you ever scanned one?

But but, the dataist stammered, I have the data.

We know better than this.

But dataists insist data trumps logic.

Why, because we want to, at our very core believe in magic. We want to believe that tiny ads work. That "content" syndicated can be delivered virtually free. We want to believe we can get something for nothing.

If you really believe the world works that way, I have a bridge to sell you.

Chico Marx and Neuroscience.

I think the most annoying aspect of the pseudo-sciences that afflict our business, is how much real science it's forced out of the equation.

Dilettantes have usurped thinkers. Poseurs have surpassed those of substance.

As I stated last week, I am reading Eric R. Kandel's new book "The Age of Insight." Kandel is the real deal. Not only is he the founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, he also picked up a little bauble called the Nobel Prize, for his work on memory storage in the brain.

As even my mother would concede, he's no slouch.

And, he makes it pretty clear over the course of the book's 600 or so pages that brains do not respond cognitively to stimulus. Rather, the most visceral responses occur emotionally. We do not look at a Klimt or a Van Gogh and say, "my, what brushstrokes you have." We react. With emotion.

Of course, this is the opposite of how we view work in the advertising industry. We take hold of the paper. We read it again. We examine every frame. We deconstruct every word for alleged meaning. We read it again. We pore over things microscopically. We subject work to committees, interns, wives, focus groups. We do everything to it under the guise of understanding it, except letting it be understood.

A little over 70 years ago the Marx Brothers made one of the great movies of all time, "Duck Soup." In it, Chico (Chiccolini) utters the famous line of charlatans, pimps, bunko artists and planners everywhere: "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"

As a culture we have ratiocinated our way to never hearing, seeing or believing truth. We fall prey to "experts." Pseudo-science has replaced real thought. Bluster has replaced brains.

BTW, look at this by my friend Drew Christie:
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2012/07/31/opinion/100000001695225/allergy-to-originality.html