Fighting fire.

I was up at 5:30 this morning, earlier than I usually wake up. I have a client meeting out in the wilds of New Jersey that starts at nine, and, therefore, a 7:12 train.

I guess you could say I've been busy of late. Working bits of three or four full-time jobs.

A lot of what I've been doing is, I think, not what I like doing best, but what I may do best. That is I extinguish fires and calm nerves. Someone can't get something done, or there's 20 minutes to do it, or it's complicated and there's no brief and someone needs to figure it out.

After literally a lifetime in the business, I am handy with a fire extinguisher. I'm not afraid of the smoke or the heat. I put the nozzle in the center of the conflagration and I handle matters.

I'd be lying if I didn't say I was jealous of the cool kids who seem to get the big jobs and their pictures in the trades. I'd like to, every once in a while anyway, strike a pompous pose and have a holier than thou attitude. I'd like to say, every once in a while anyway, 'you got us into this mess, you get us out of it.'

I'd like to say a lot of things, about the advertising equivalent of the legal profession's ambulance chasers--award chasers.

But I'm a freelancer now and it makes sense to try to button, not flap, my lips.

There will be a time when something stinks to high heaven. Or there's a nut that can't be cracked. Or a client who is cracked.

I'll get the call then.

Uncle Slappy at the 'Genius Bar.'

The home phone rang just as I was leaving my apartment this morning. Of course, it was Uncle Slappy, the last person on earth to call my land line, and to call me at 7:20 AM.

“Anyone who calls himself a genius, definitely isn’t,” Uncle Slappy began.

I stumbled for a moment, but quickly recovered. “You went to the Genius Bar I assume.”

“You assume correctly, Mr. Smarty Pants. The ferstunkener Genius Bar. The MacBook Air you gave me, it’s on the fritz.”

Last year for Uncle Slappy’s birthday, I presented him with a brand-spanking new computer. I loaded it up with Skype, created gmail accounts for he and Aunt Sylvie and even book-marked all of Uncle Slappy’s favorite periodicals, from “The New York Times,” to “Holocaust Digest,” a monthly review of death.

“Did you get it fixed? It’s covered under warranty.”

“It’s working now like a top. But this morning I couldn’t turn it on.”

“But it’s ok now and they didn’t charge you?”

“When I came in the first thing they asked me is if my memory is saved. My memories are right here, I told them. Right in my head.

"Then it was, did you back up your memory?"

In my opinion that’s a dangerous question to ask a wag like Uncle Slappy. I wouldn’t go near that one with a 10-foot Latvian.

“Back up my memory, I said. Oy, half of my memories I’d be better forgetting.

“So Mr. Tattooed Genius tried again. ‘Have you backed up your hard-drive?’ he asked.

“At my age, I told, my hard-drive ain’t so hard.”

“Uncle Slappy, did you get it fixed? Did they erase your data?

“Data,” he quipped “I hardly know her.”

I gave him an Oy that encompassed 6,000 years of Jewish suffering and over 50 of mine.

“It’s fine now, boychick. All is right with the world”

“That’s good, Uncle Slappy. I’m glad.”

“Maybe tonight during the basketball, we could do the Skype a little.”

“I miss your face, Uncle Slappy.”

“Don’t be maudlin,” he answered as he hung up the blower.

Thanks, Uncle Slappy, I said to myself. I may be many things, but maudlin won’t be one of them.

Confetti. And branding.

Often when I get an assignment, the first thing I notice is that those working on the assignment or on the brand forget that they know more about the brand than 99.999% of ordinary people. So in concepting work, or presenting work, they often make leaps that make things all the more confusing to the viewer.

I'm beginning to think we as an industry have forgotten the original intention of what a brand should be.

A brand is supposed to bring clarity and order into the universe or the supermarket aisle. If you think about the derivation of the use of the work, I'd suppose it comes from the marks farmers would put on the cattle to identify which were theirs.

So, you take 500 bovine owned by 50 different cowboys. A brand allowed you to say, "that's mine."

A brand served to focus the viewer around a certain entity with a certain set of values.

I think focus is becoming undone due to the proliferation of media channels and integrated marketing communication's attempt to optimize each of those channels. All of a sudden, when your ad is festooned on a baseball stadium ticket booth, or on the turnstile at the subway, the consumer is confused.

More often than not it seems we are being beamed blandishments completely out of relevant context. What's more, because each of these venues contains a slightly different brand message what we get is a mess of messaging, not clarity.

The goal, I think, of a brand should be to focus the consumer as to the promise it makes. It shouldn't be making promises out of context and it shouldn't alter the promise merely to optimize a channel it shouldn't be in in the first place.

I think in our multi-channel world, brands have become like confetti.

We need focus.

Not dispersion.

Myself.

I have to say I see nothing remarkable about Google's self-driving car.

I'd wager that no copywriter does.

That's because since I began in the business, people have been saying to me and other copywriters, "that copy practically writes itself."

In other words, "self-writing copy."

In real life, though we're often treated like drones, copy doesn't happen by autopilot.

Especially copy that seems so simple and so right and so...ineffable.

That copy took work.

The simpler, the righter it feels, the more work went into it.

I've been in and around the advertising business literally my whole life.

Since dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Or before man was erect if you want to get dirty about it.

And virtually no copywriter is faster than I am.

That's not because my copy writes itself.

It's because I write it.

Myself.

Crisis. Management.

Last night, late, I got a call from a friend of mine, an advertising friend. He's the managing director of a small agency with a big reputation. And he was in a bit of a jam.

I get a lot of calls when people are in a bit of a jam.

He needed print ads written for a meeting the next day.

The people who work full-time at his agency had come up short.

He briefed me, and it was a good brief. By the time we were half-way through his 61-page powerpoint, I was half-way through writing a couple of ads.

In other words, I got it.

I sat down for three hours and wrote three ads. "One more ad," I said to Whiskey, "and then I'll take you to the park."

I wrote another ad then left the house for an hour to exercise the pup.

When I got back, I wrote four more ads and re-wrote the four I started with.

After three more hours, I felt I was in pretty good shape and I sent things off.

The best way to get through a crisis is to act as if it's not a crisis. Act like the ads you have to write or the deck you have to put together are just bricks in a wall. Pile one on top of the next. Step back every once in a while to make sure your lines are straight, but keep going.

And when you're done and you feel good, hit the send button.

And don't look back.

It's not that hard.

I have a habit, or perhaps a propensity, of making things simple. And the simplest way of making things simple is simply to start doing them.

In fact, I think fear of how much you have to do does more to stop you from actual doing than anything else. 

When I used to run marathons (many years and many pounds ago) I never thought about running 26.2 miles. I thought about running one mile, or running across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Once done, I thought about running another mile, or making it through the nethers of 4th Avenue in Brooklyn.

I tried my best not to be overwhelmed by the task.

Yesterday I heard a client in full panic because he has 15 things to create in short order.

Can we do this? Or better, how can we possibly do this?

I thought back to my first week at Ogilvy 15 years ago when I was faced with a similar problem of having a lot of ads to do in a short amount of time. 

The first thing you do is make the problem simpler. You find a format or a template or a style sheet that allows you to repurpose one piece for other, subsequent pieces. 

Then you close your proverbial door (15 years ago we had wooden, not proverbial doors) and start writing. You get one piece done. You put it away. And then you write another. Before long that giant, insurmountable mountain of barbed wire is cut down to size.

You move things from the 'to-do' pile to the 'done' pile.

The best way to make progress is to progress.

It's not that hard.

If you want to know how to do it, do it.

Notes from Hipster-ville.

So many scarfs
It makes me larf.

Heading west. Again.

Getting to work is no longer a straightforward affair. The weird thing is, I mean that almost literally.

When ad agencies were located near the clients they served--say back in the 90s, they were sited in midtown. It usually took one train to reach the office, because like the old saying went in ancient Rome, all roads lead to Rome, as all subways lead to midtown.

Today of course it's as if the entire industry has never heard of Christopher Columbus and has fallen off the face of the earth. You don't need a metrocard to get yourself to work, you need an operational plan.

Today, since I don't have to be in until noon, I've decided upon the M31 bus. It stops on York Avenue across the street from my apartment, heads down York until 57th Street and then cuts across town to 11th Avenue. From there, I'll walk the half mile to my office.

It's not the actual commute that rankles me or the actual location of agencies. I see nothing wrong with saving money on rent and an extra half-hour a day on buses or subways really doesn't matter.

What strikes me as tragic is the semiotic.

Advertising when it was vital to the success of the world's Gross National Product was in the center of things. Today our work is on the fringes and so are our agencies.

Maybe it's because in the new world order of advertising, nothing seems to work. Or clients seem unwilling to pay for what has always worked: that is, creating likeable communications and saturating media channels with those ads.

So we flounder as an industry. We beat the bushes searching for a silver bullet and so far all those bullets seem to be duds.

When Google streams ads into our houses through our Nest Thermostats or on our wearable connected boxer shorts, we will ignore that shit too.

What we can't ignore is that which we've never been able to turn a blind eye to. Well crafted messages that are impactful, interesting, honest and valuable.

Making those would return us to midtown.

Why you hate work.

There was a long op-ed in yesterday's "New York Times" about the state of work in America today. As you might expect from an article titled "Why You Hate Work," the findings were not positive. You can read the article here and I wholly recommend it. 

Years ago a brilliant planner friend, Teresa Alpert, did some research on what makes small and mid-size business people tick, what makes them feel fulfilled, what makes them go. It wasn't complicated, really. They want to be rewarded. They want to be recognized. They want some control. And they want a room of their own.

This article confirms Teresa's findings. The authors report:

"Employees are vastly more satisfied and productive, it turns out, when four of their core needs are met: physical, through opportunities to regularly renew and recharge at work; emotional, by feeling valued and appreciated for their contributions; mental, when they have the opportunity to focus in an absorbed way on their most important tasks and define when and where they get their work done; and spiritual, by doing more of what they do best and enjoy most, and by feeling connected to a higher purpose at work."

It seems to me--and I've worked freelance and fulltime at more than a dozen agencies--that it's not unusual for agencies to be set up in ways antithetical to satisfaction.

• Workplaces are noisy, messy, shared and anything but private
• We extol multitasking instead of allowing focus
• We steal credit and assignments
• Talentless toadies get the best assignments
• We load people down with dumb or mundane tasks rather than what's important
• There's always an inflexible and usually unreasonable deadline to be met
• We don't praise people
• We don't raise people

Despite all that, I happen to love work. I love the interaction with people. I love when I have to clean up the shit that others have thrown into the fan. I love those early morning hours when no one else is in when I crack an assignment wide open. Most of all, I think, I love seeing something I did produced and on the air.

I'd love to hear what the HR moguls at the holding companies have to say about the "Times" article. More, I'd love to see if they do anything about it.

A day at the (rocky) beach.

We woke up early as we had for most every weekend morning since October. Whiskey knew what was coming and she led the way down to the garage. She hopped into the back seat of the car which we had covered with a tan quilted affair, hoping to keep the leather upholstery free from the hair and grime of a city dog.

We then took a sharp left out of the driveway and headed north to the littoral just beyond Rye Playland amusement park. We drove up the war-torn FDR Drive which is still marked and potholed from the travails of both heavy traffic and a rough winter. We navigated the worst roads in the area--and the worst drivers--and made our way across the Bronx without kissing another car or being swallowed by a giant highway crevasse.

Finally, we emerged into the greenery of southern Westchester and found our way into the dirt, sand and rock parking lot of the Edith G. Read Wildlife Sanctuary, which abuts a rocky stretch of beach girding the Long Island Sound.

Whiskey leapt from our car and over a small railroad-tie barrier and made her way down to the clear cold water. I popped the trunk and removed a small urethane bumper that hunters use to train their dogs to retrieve.

Whiskey ran and I walked to the water. When my shoes were fairly soaked through by the saturated sand, I unveiled my strong right arm and slung the bumper a good 75-feet or so into the shallow sea. Whiskey galloped into the drink and ran toward the float. The tide was out and the water was so shallow Whiskey never even had to swim.

She brought the bumper back to me, and I tossed it out again, searching for a deeper area where she would have to swim. After a few tosses, I found the zone and she and I settled into a good throwing and fetching rhythm. She ran, swam, fetched, swam, ran, dropped and readied herself to do it again.

We repeated this for literally two hours. Along the way, my wife and I watched a seagull drop a clam in order to get to its succulent meat. We saw two great white herons hunting in the muck and further up the coast we watched three Puerto Rican fishermen surfcast in the hopes of bringing home a striped bass or two.

Over the course of maybe 100 throws, Whiskey's gait slackened. Her entry into the water went from gallop, to run, to trot, to tentative. Her swimming stroke also slowed accordingly. My shoulder, after those 100 throws, began to ache.

Finally, it was time to go and we be-collared and be-leashed our tired and wet puppy. We walked the mile of boardwalk from Edith G. Read's beach to Oakland Beach. We sat on a bench and Whiskey sat under it, panting, drying off and drinking the water my wife had brought for her.

When she was mostly dry, we walked back to the car. Whiskey lay in the back seat thoroughly tired. And I steered my way through the taxi-yellow bumper cars to home and the rest of our Sunday.