Five minutes with our CTO.

AD AGED:    So, you’re a CTO. Back in the day, that stood for Chief Technology Officer. I suppose it stands for something different now.

CTO:              Well, the Chief Technology Title is very passé. In today’s modern agency,  CTO stands for Chief Talk Officer.

AD AGED:     I see. And what does a Chief Talk Officer do?

CTO:              Do? Don’t make me laugh! It’s not about doing. A Chief Talk Officer talks.

AD AGED:     Please explain.

CTO:               Well, I talk about projects but I say things like:

                        Don’t play attention to the art—that’s FPO.

                        And, don’t pay attention to the copy—that’s FPO.

AD AGED:      So you don’t make anything.

CTO:              No, I feed the beast with the currency of our age. The minute something  needs to be done, I’m needed at an edit.

AD AGED:     And what are you doing at the edit?

CTO:              Talking about the edit.          

 Talk is the grease that keeps the wheels of our industry turning. Talk is the  lubricant of capitalism. Talk makes the world go round.

AD AGED:     Well, thank you for your time today.

CTO:              Thank you. It was a pleasure talking.

                        

The Case-Study Video.

One of the great deceptions of our age is something called “the case-study video.”

It seems that every day about a million 90-240 second blathers of stock footage are produced by American ad agencies. According to those videos, every business in America is growing exponentially and gaining new customers like sorority girls gain cold sores.

Everybody is getting everybody else to tweet, taste, dance, share, laugh and kvell about products and services that in real life elicit no such responses. I’ve seen videos where people go apeshit over a bank made with gingerbread, or who crochet entire billboards in Times’ Square.

Also these videos involve a lot of throwing paint and jumping in the air and doing a backflip. Also, spontaneous dancing, usually while wearing a fedora.

In short, according to these videos, America—and the world—exists in a sort of interactive Elysium where people can’t wait to get their hands on your product and fricken tweet about it.

In fact, I suppose with a nod to David Letterman and also Reality TV, the whole of the world—according to the case-study video—seems to be engaged in some version of “Stupid Human Tricks.” People replace their teeth with bottle-openers, cook sausages on the back of a flatbed truck while racing down a highway, or upload pictures of themselves to salutary effect.

Years ago a client of mine was positively gushing. We had run a single ad and, according to him, sales were up 400%. I pushed him about his data—data that would have made a great case study. The single ad had upped sales from one unit to four.

Here’s a sample script—what these videos usually sound like:

VO:                Breakfast is changing.

People are fast-moving, hard-charging.

They no longer have time for a sit-down meal to start the day.

So our client “The House of Toast” was suffering.

Same store sales of toast had decreased by 3% a year for six years running.

Toast sales were plummeting.

White toast was down an aggregate 26%.

The situation was even worse for pumpernickel.

House of Toast came to us for answers.

We came up with a multi-channel campaign

designed to make toast a destination again.

A series of “twoasts,” targeted tweets to lapsed toast eaters.

A targeted campaign of stickers on toasters urging people to “toast toast!”

And wild postings that put toast on everyone’s lips.

And it worked!
Toast sales did more than just pop up.

They soared.

Rye up 19%

Whole wheat up 31%.

And sourdough up a staggering 49%.

But our toast renaissance didn’t stop there.

Knowing our market had changed,

that both moms and kids wanted a faster toast alternative,

we brainstormed “Tube Toast.”

Toast on the go for today’s on the go consumer.

Tube Toast became the fastest growing entry in the Fast Moving Toasted Goods (FMTG) category.

Redefining breakfast.

Redefining toast.
Redefining delicious.

So let’s do what all of America is doing once again.
LET’S MAKE A TOAST!

An apology wrapped in a mea culpa inside an 'I'm sorry.'

After almost 4,200 posts on this blog, I'm finding it harder and harder to find things to say about advertising that I haven't said before or that Rich Siegel over at Round Seventeen or Bob Hoffman, the Ad Contrarian aren't saying better.

I'm also in the unfortunate position where it seems like half of the people I work with on a daily basis are reading Ad Aged. I don't want to reveal any antipathies. I don't want to grumble too loudly. I don't want to choke on the teat that nourishes me.

As a consequence, I find myself in this space often chasing down a whirlwind of digressions. I am spending more time talking about my sojourn south of the border when I played ball in the Mexican Baseball League. Perhaps my Jorge Navidad is to me like Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, except when I am down in Saltillo, I am not, like Rabbit, growing older. I am stuck as a 17-year old, playing a boys' game for workman's wages.

The same is true with my long nights and short days drinking Pike's, "The ALE that won for YALE!" at the Tempus Fugit. Of my hundreds of visits to the place, only once have the bartender and I spoken about advertising. That, you may recall, was a disquisition on resisting the ever-loving appeal of mammon when the bartender was tempted by an offer to "franchise" the Tempus Fugit and make it something like a Chili's or a TGI Fridays.

I also spend time, not on Madison Avenue, but with my Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie. I thought of them, of course, this weekend when I tripped upon a place at the junction of Allerton Avenue and East Gun Hill Road in the Bronx that serves a really superior bowl of kasha varnishkas with an artery-clogging gravy that is, quite literally, to die for. And this just four days before my visit to Dr. Blumenthal, my cardiologist.

I tell my work partner every day that the hardest thing about being in an agency when you're the oldest one around is my personal abatement of anger. It's not that things don't piss me off and make me want to howl at the moon--of course they do, agencies are stupider than ever, chasing their tails and spending 11-cents of man hours to get the last dime of client budgets, but I am no longer rabid.

I know we will muddle through. And at the end of time, most agency problems, and most client problems, too, can be solved by a really good rectangle--that  is, a good tv spot or print ad. I know if I get caught in a maelstrom of hate, anger and venom, that good rectangle will be harder to come to, harder to create and harder to sell.

So rather than fulminate and huff through my mouth, I go quietly back to my desk. I try with headphones and concentrated brain-power to blot out modern agency din. And I try to do my work. I guess you could say that part of my  p  r  o  c  e  s  s  is visiting with the characters mentioned above.

That's all for now, really.

Sorry I couldn't write something that would make you chuckle knowingly about the banality of agency life, or something that would put you in high dudgeon, whatever that means, or something that would entice you to throw your laptop through the nearest plate glass.

Preston Sturges once wrote, "A man works all his life in a glass factory, one day he picks up a hammer."

No more hammers for me. No more crashing and bashing and trashing.

For that you should have known me 20 years ago.

I am just not there right now.

An email from Mexico.

I got an email last night just as the Republican debate was driving me away from my living-room. It was from Jesus Cordes, a former right handed pitcher for the Saraperos for seven seasons, and now the club’s Director of Player Affairs.

Cordes came up to the club in the early 90s and I never knew him when he played—and I probably played before he was born, but over the years we’ve gotten to be nodding acquaintances as he’s invited me to one club soiree or another.

This email was to invite me to down to Saltillo on Sunday, April 3^rd for a fund-raising game before the club’s home-opener against the Acereros. The Acereros weren’t around when I played ball. They entered the league just as I left it, replacing the Mineros de Coahuila in 1976.

In any event, the exhibition game is to benefit the Club de Ninos y Ninas de Mexico, the Boys and Girls Club, which is surely a worthy cause, so it was with some sadness that I had to demur.

Not only am I exceedingly busy at work—what else is new, I am going in, finally, for arthroscopic surgery on my wounded right shoulder. As my shoulder stands now (mixing a very fine metaphor) I can barely lift my right arm and even doing simple tasks like emptying our expensive Upper East Side German-made dishwasher causes me to shimmy with pain.

Truth be told, there’s little in life I would rather do than hang up my advertising cleats and—especially if the Orange One becomes President—relocate down south of the border, and become an old man involved in a boys’ game. I have stayed close to the management of the Saltillo club and I’d love to lend my years and my accumulated baseball gravitas to the betterment of the team.

We have become, en el Norte, too serious for me. Work now—every decision seems to be made as if we were defusing a roughly-wired nuclear device with an impatient and unpredictable timer. We pretend the most minor of pursuits has importance—all, I think, to make us feel more important along the way. I often feel that I am the last one in business meetings who still makes a joke, who cuts the tension, who laughs at himself. And maybe it’s this proclivity of mine that makes me feel less and less at home in the modern world. More and more vox clamatis en deserto, as the Romans said.

It’s not that I don’t take life and work seriously, or even games in the Mexican League, of course I do. I just sometimes feel that we are running full-tilt chasing our own asses like Jesse Owens on hop.

I wrote back to Cordes and explained the situation with my wounded right wing, expressing my regrets that I won’t be able to play or even attend the exhibition game. I even included a check for $100 for El Club de Ninos y Ninas and a PS that, should my shoulder ever heal, I look forward to other games and other liaisons with the Saraperos.

I was pleased that just 20 minutes after my note went out, I got one back, inviting me down around American Memorial Day.

The Club had designated May 26th, "Hector Quesadilla Day."

That, I won't miss.

A walker in the city

Usually I get into work early. But of late, in an ongoing attempt to preserve my remaining vestiges of equipoise, I have taken to getting out of my transportation about two miles from work and from, say 66th and Central Park West or 57th and Lex, hoofing it in.

Today, I am down at an edit on 20th and Fifth and I decided to walk the entire way. In all, it was just over 4.5 miles.

Walking might be the best form of transportation in the city. You get to see faces, construction, architecture. You get to feel the energy, movement and pulse of the city.

I walked and walked.

Through the opulence of the 80s and 70s and 60s.

Through the rich retail of the 50s and the tourism of the 40s and 30s.

Into the oh so-ness of the 20s.

I checked no phone for messages.

I had a gentle assortment of Dvorak playing.

I made it five minutes early.

A good morning.

Note to a disconsolate friend.

Getting the ideal job.

The perfect job.

The job you’ve always wanted.

Very few people get that.

Almost no one gets it on their timetable.
I am not playing centerfield for the Yankees.

I never will.

I am not the CEO or even the CCO of my company.

Also, I do not have the nicest apartment.

The shiniest car.

Or the best abs.

Does this mean I am a failure?

That I am a loser?

That all my work doesn’t make it to Cannes?

And some of it, occasionally, sucks.

That I don’t hit the highest notes in every aria I sing.

The trick I think is not always getting what you want.

But in always doing your best, making the most of the opportunities you do get.

You have a long life and career ahead of you.

And you have already achieved so much.

That’s what put you in position to be turned down in the first place.

Samuel Becket wrote that the secret of success is to:

“Fail. Fail. And fail again better.”

As long as you are ambitious and shooting for the stars

there will always be things you come up short in.

That’s life.

And that’s how things are accomplished.

If you start at the top of the mountain,

there’s only one direction you can go.

PS. Nothing you shoot for is perfect.

That ideal job, has many aspects to it that suck.

That’s also life.

Try not to idealize that which you don’t have at the expense of what you do have.

That gets you nowhere and is frustrating.

Intimations of Mortality.

Just as the weather is beginning to warm in New York, and just as baseball's Spring Training is about to groove into full-swing, I have re-injured my right rotator cuff.

After decades of playing ball, I was always all-but-impervious to arm injuries, but almost two years ago to the day I suffered what orthopaedists call a FOOSH--a fall on out-stretched hand and I painfully wrenched my shoulder.

For six months--while I was day-rating my way through life as a freelancer-- I refused to go to a shoulder doctor. And then, somehow, maybe magically, the pain disappeared and the strength in my right arm returned. As I chronicled in previous posts, I was even able to make the long throw from third to first and throw out a runner in my first Juego de Viejos, my first Old Timers Game in Saltillo, Mexico last May.

Recently, however, my arm and shoulder pain has returned, like the once-beaten Red Army with a vengeance. The truth is it brings me a wince a good two dozen times a day, and I have a hard time doing simple things like opening my sock drawer or even sleeping.

I am slated to see the orthopaedist two weeks from today and from there we'll see if they'll just decide to lop the thing off, send me to physical therapy or perform some kind of remedial surgery.

Last night, laying painfully in bed I dreamt that I had surgery and returned to work with my arm in a sling. I woke up from this nightmare fairly scared out of my remaining wits. How would I type?

The truth is, I use about four fingers now, and if you halved that, well, my famed lucidity would be highly questionable. How would I churn out this blog, not to mention the reams of copy I seem to populate on an almost hourly basis.

My fear, of course, is that the world needs a one-arm copywriter about as much as it needs a one-legged pole-vaulter. Perhaps my boss, finding a well-secreted streak of kindness would find me a job down in the cafeteria; I could restock the salad bar, or some such.

Things got better after I found the meme above.

No one should really worry about copywriters. Me included.

After all, this shit writes itself.