"People don't read ads. They read what interests them and sometimes that's an ad." --Howard Gossage

I don't think people hate ads.

Or words.

Or information.

I think they hate suck.

And usually ads suck,

These ads were created 30 years ago. 

I love them.

I'll bet viewers did too. I bet they would today, too.

We don't seem to care for copy anymore. Or writing for that matter.

It makes me sad.

Because I think ads like this worked.

P

Apologia.

I've been jammed of late.

Too busy by half.

Mostly with things I wish other people had the wherewithal to handle.

No such luck.

So, Ad Aged has suffered.

Today's post has no topic, really.

The topic is that I'm using my phone as a wifi connection and writing the thing in a cab.

I'm not getting the time or the space to properly think.

Amid all the chronic crises at work, I've finally plotted out something I think might work as a novel

Or knowing my attention span and proclivities, at least a novella.

You know.

Something completely unsaleable.

My Mexican Baseball League stories into a high-falutin' bildungsroman.

That's pretty deep-dish for an ad blog.

And maybe I'll never get past page 11 before I have some goddamned banner ads to write.

Or some waste of a meeting to attend.

In any event, apologies for this.

What I call stream of cabsciousness

It's all I could get to today,

Razing the Tempus Fugit.

All over New York, and people could have written this sentence from the 1600s on, old buildings are coming down and new buildings are going up.

There are two old school diners near my current office. One, Market, occupied a large corner lot on 43rd Street. The developers have been salivating over the lot way more than they ever had over Market's food.

It's shuttered now, Market is. Soon to be a 57-story econobox high-rise for high-risers.

I joke that the city of Houston is rising on Manhattan's far west side. But it's really no joke. Between Hudson Yards and a dozen other projects a new world is being built. The old bricks are pulverized, and with them the memories of dreams gone by.

In their place, steel and glass and gleam.

This is New York--emphasis on the new. Where people and buildings my age are kicked to the curb, thrown in a dump truck then land-filled in Staten Island.

It was therefore with trepidation that last night--or rather this morning--at 3:13, I threw on a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt and walked with Whiskey, my three-and-a-half year-old golden retriever to my sudsy sanctuary, the Tempus Fugit.

I wasn't even so much in the mood for a brew or some bartendery camaraderie. It was more just to see if the old place, nestled down stairways, and up stairways, past egresses and beyond the garage in an old six-story Verizon warehouse/parking lot was going to meet the wreckers' ball anytime soon.

The bartender did what he does. Like a virtuoso short-stop or a fleet wide receiver, he was around the hardwood in a trice--or even a nano-trice--with a small wooden bowl of hydrogen and oxygen, and he placed it by Whiskey, near the foot of my stool, my favorite one, one in from the end.

Then, back home, behind the teak, he pulled me, expertly and foam-free, a juice-glass full of the sweet amber that is Pike's Ale (the ALE that won for YALE!) He slid over, as always another wooden bowl, this one filled to the brim with salted Spanish peanuts. I, as always, demurred. Dismissing the legumes with my usual, "A pound in every nut."

There were two men and a woman sitting at a table in the back, against the wall, near the signed photograph of the ex-Heavyweight Champeen, Gene Tunney, which the bartender had hung-up when Tunney visited the joint--with half a dozen show girls, naturally, back in 1924.

I drank down my Pike's in one simple swig. The bartender whisked my glass away and in one motion returned it, brimming with suds.

"What's with the suits?"

"They seek to raze this building. They are going over plans for a 42-story luxury co-opdominium. It will have a screening room, a gym, a swimming pool, a running track, gleaming views of the river and the park. It will have so many conveniences, including a porte cochere, that you will never need breathe actual city air. It will be gated, hermetically sealed and wrapped in richophane, a cellophane-like material that will shield its tenants from the vagaries of the poor and middle-class."

"That's it? No more Tempus Fugit?"

He pulled me another Pike's and wiped down the hardwood with a soft terry rag.

"They have a problem," he said, ringing me up for the night.

"An intractable problem."

I pushed two twenties his way.

He returned the volley.

"The place is mine through 2924," he said. "Perpetually renewable thousand-year-lease."

"Thank god," I said. And Whiskey and I walked home through the night.

My tongue would get a hernia.

Maybe it's a function of my advanced age.

But I'll admit.

In nine meetings out of 10, I have no idea what anyone's saying.

Viktor Klemperer, living in a "Jew's House" in Dresden during World War II, called the invasion of Nazi semantics, Lingua Tertii Imperii--the language of the Third Reich.

I'm afraid we have created our own pernicious language.

A language that elicits nods of understanding due to familiarity, but that is still devoid of meaning.

This is the discourse of buzzwords and bushwa.

And it has taken over.

We talk, seriously, of 'high-level strategic roadmaps.'

We iterate.

We engage in actioning.

We contextualize and unpack connective tissue while deconstructing our use-cases as they funnel through the pipeline on their way to KPIs.

Fuck a duck.

If I tried to speak like this, my tongue would get a hernia.

Or sue me for abuse.

I understand that carpenters have their language. Lawyers, theirs. I know Air Force personnel call 5-52s BUFFs. Big Ugly Fat Fuckers.

But we are in the communications business.

We are in the business of precise words.

This stakeholder is having difficulty making a pivot into this brave new whitespace.

Starting and finishing.

Back in America, our baseball season ended last night with the Royals of Kansas City defeating the Mets of Queens, New York, four games to one.

When I was a kid, baseball used to be called "the Summer game," but now the rapacious owners and the rapacious television executives who run the major leagues have extended the season into November, pursuing mammon straight into the heart of the football season and the start of basketball's.

Be that as it may, a lesson was taught over the past week.

A lesson all of us in advertising, and life, can learn from.

It's this: It's not how you start games, it's how you finish them.

The fact of the matter is, the Mets started each game with a bang but ended nearly every one with a whimper.  At the halfway mark of each game, they held a lead.

In game one after five innings they led two to one.

They led one-zip after four and a half in game two.

Game three, the only game the Mets ultimately won, they were up five-three after five.

Game four, three-one after five.

And in the final stanza, two-zip after eight.

In advertising there are a lot of people who get out of the gate fast. They seem to have things sewn up early.

But somewhere along the way, something goes amiss.

They forget it's not about writing the copy once that matters, it's the 15 times you re-write it after it's been approved that counts.

This is true at both the macro and micro levels.

There are legions of people who seem to, at 28 or 32, set the business on fire. After winning an award or two at Cannes, they're vaulted skyward to lofty heights.

And from there, they disappear.

The Mets and others would do well to think about their starts and their finishes. They'd do well to take the long view. They'd benefit from thinking like Kansas City, who lost the World Series last year.

You might say it took the Royals two seasons to win one championship.

Sometimes that's the way it goes.

Hang in there.

Casey at the Bat.

One of the things I did when I was a young father and raising my two daughters was to try to give them an introduction to what I consider "foundational" stories.

I fairly bludgeoned them with the Greek myths, with the Iliad and the Odyssey, with Dr. Seuss and things like E.B. White's Charlotte's Web and the Trumpet of the Swan.

But the thing I hit them hardest with was "Casey at the Bat--A Ballad of the Republic Sang in 1888."

As the World Serious (as Ring Lardner's busher would say) returns tonight to New York, I think you could do worse than taking a couple of minutes and reading Thayer's poem, or listening to it out loud, or reading it out loud yourself.

I've included Lionel Barrymore's rendition here. But there are plenty on You Tube and you can find your own. You might like Disney's version narrated by the great Jerry Colonna, or James Earl Jones' stentorian recitation.  (BTW, my one issue with Barrymore's version is the variations he introduces into the text. But his reading is so, to my ears, perfect, that I enjoyed it.)
We talk a lot in our daily orbit around the sun about story-telling. But we take damned little time listening to great stories, much less writing our own.

So like I said, maybe when you're watching the game tonight, turn off the volume during a commercial break and listen to the above instead.

Not a bad way to spend six minutes. Or 12. Or 19.

Repetition.

The other day, though buffeted by the daily sturm und drang of work, I woke up with a tune in my head, an ear worm I could not shake.

Into the shower I went singing lyrics to a song I haven't heard for literally 45 years.

Meet Cathy, who's lived most everywhere,
From Zanzibar to Barclay Square.
But Patty's only seen the sights
A girl can see from Brooklyn Heights --
What a crazy pair!

But they're cousins,
Identical cousins all the way.
One pair of matching bookends,
Different as night and day.

How is it possible, I thought that I still remember this?

Then I thought some more.

I remembered all of this, too:

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale
A tale of a fateful trip
That started from this tropic port
Aboard this tiny ship

The mate was a mighty sailing man
The skipper brave and sure
Five passengers set sail that day
For a three hour tour, a three hour tour.

And all of this:

Green acres is the place to be
Farm livin' is the life for me
Land spreadin' out so far and wide
Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside

New York is where I'd rather stay
I get allergic smelling hay
I just adore a penthouse view
Dahling I love you but give me Park Avenue.

And even this:

There's a hold-up in the Bronx,
Brooklyn's broken out in fights,
There's a traffic jam in Harlem
That's backed up to Jackson Heights.

There's a Scout troop short a child,
Khrushchev's due at Idlewild,
CAR 54, WHERE ARE YOU?

I thought some more and wondered. Is there some splendor in a child's amygdala--or somewhere in his grey matter that endows him with a Watson-like memory? I thought about my struggles with learning Latin and Spanish and even Hebrew. No, my memory of these ditties couldn't be attributable to a super-human memory.

Why we remember these things is exactly why we remember commercials and taglines from long ago, and forget the ones we saw between the 4th and 5th innings.

As an industry, I believe, we have forgotten the power of repetition.

We change messages, campaigns, ideas, taglines too often. We fail to use mnemonics, jingles, memory signposts that would make our work enduring and, yes, memorable.

We change because we are bored.

We change because clients need to justify their jobs.

We change because that's what we do.

I'll bet if you wrote down five taglines now that you like, three of them would be 30 years old.

There's a tremendous amount of wind blowing about what sort of marketing "works," what channels are most effective, how we can use embedded fucking content to inveigle our way into the hearts and minds of consumers.

There are all sorts of theorists who will spout all sorts of theories. Theories usually predicated on getting something for nothing. Earned media my ass.

As an industry, it seems to me, we never think about what makes Top 40 radio so pernicious, or memes so memorable.

We never think about Marilyn Monroe's dress billowing or Bert Lahr dressed as the devil saying "Betcha can't eat just one."

Effective communication isn't small. It isn't cheap. It isn't once.

Effective communication is like the songs I cited above,

It repeats itself.