Customer experience.

Some weeks ago I wrote a post about how the best thing management can do--and you don't need an MBA, research, focus groups, or tasks forces to do this--is "buy something from their own store."

That is, if you run a telco or a cable system, try to make sense of the monthly bill you get. Try to get an explanation for a service outage. Try to get help when you need it.

Or, if you run an airline, take a flight, in coach with your family and see what it's like. See what it's like being unable to cross your legs. See what it's like flying seven hours with a bar in your back from a shoddily made and maintained seat. See what it's like getting luggage from baggage claim, or getting information about a flight.

We hear a lot in our business about "experiences." People go on about the customer experience, the web experience, the shopping experience, and so on.

I think the people who talk most about experiences exist almost wholly in something like an experience lab. A hermetically sealed and unreal world where lights always turn green just as you're pulling up to them, the weather is always sunny and smiles are more than merely plasticine. 

Yesterday, I happened across an article called: “Digital Disappointment - The Customer Experience Disconnect Between Companies and Consumers.

Basically, the point of the item is simple.

Customer experience sucks. It sucks aggressively.

You can blame the usual culprits. That service workers don't care. That they're slovenly and lazy.

But I think the fault--the real fault--lays further up the corporate ladder.

Wages are low. There's no incentive to do a good job. Job security is nonexistent and corporate expectations are unyielding.

I'll be blunt.

There are days when I feel like bringing an old Hillerich and Bradsby "Louisville Slugger" to work and pummeling the first person who says aloud the phrase "customer experience" as if it's a good thing.

By my calculation 97% of all customer experiences suck. Online copy and instructions are full of jargon and confusing. I almost always feel victim of an aggressive hard-sell or a transparent bait and switch. And in store customer service--whether it's an airline like United, a telco like Verizon, an Internet Lack-of-Service Provider like Speculum, or any of a thousand others almost always sucks.

If I were a CEO, I'd try to return something to my own store, or order a burger from my own restaurants, or buy a ticket to my own basketball team.

Maybe then things would improve.

How to write a New York Times (or any) headline.

Adapted from “The New York Times,”

The “New York Times,” if you subscribe (which you should) sends “Insiders,” people who pay a premium, the occasional special feature.

On Sunday, I got an article called “How to write a New York Times” headline.

I’ve provided the link here.  And excerpted and adapted some thoughts below. BTW, if you’re an account person, you may want to share this with any enlightened clients you might have. As they say, it couldn’t hurt.

“I think of it as a puzzle,” Ms. Schneider, copy editor at the “Times” said. “You have to condense the essence of a story into a very finite space, and you’re governed by — well, by a laundry list of rules.”

1.        Look for “gifts.”  Occasionally a line will come to you. If it does, get out of its way and type it down.

2.        Get to the crux of the story but don’t give away the ending.

3.        Don’t end a line with a preposition, adjective or article.

4.        Don’t use your first line of copy as a headline.

5.        Or your last line of copy.

6.        Avoid cheap punning. (“Rubber Industry Bounces Back”)

7.        Find the right tone for the subject matter.

8.        But don’t be stiff or boring.

9.        Strive for vivid wording, conversational tone and internal tension. (When two elements of a headline are at odds, it creates a mystery that can be solved by reading further.)

10.    Work with accompanying pictures. Make everything work together.

What I learned while freelancing.

A little over three years ago, after about 30 years in the business I lost my job. I was 56 and petrified. Had I "aged-out" of the business? Would I ever, again, find work.

This abject fear of my own obsolescence grew in intensity as weeks went by with no one offering me work. I tried to keep busy making calls, sending notes, walking my dog. But frankly I hadn't enough to do to fill my idle hours.

I was pretty blue.

Nevertheless, I made a commitment and affirmation to myself.

I looked at a hundred "competitive" portfolios I found on LinkedIn. I looked at my portfolio.

Then I told myself, rightly or wrongly, that no one in the world is better than I am at doing the things I do. Yes, that may be solipsistic, but most affirmations are.

The other thing I did was commit to myself to not cut my day rate under any circumstances.

I figured, the best in the world at what you do deserves what I am asking.

Slowly, and perhaps inexorably, the phone started to ring. Agencies began calling. I began getting freelance and more freelance. I began getting more and more gigs. I began becoming exceedingly busy, while getting, still, more calls.

I bring this up not to boast.

I bring this up because I was able to emotionally do something most brands today cannot or will not do.

I valued myself. 

I respected myself.

I charged for my time fairly.

When I look at incidents like the United Airlines debacle, or when I see how "always-on-sale" retailers act, like phone companies, or the aforementioned airlines, or even, I suppose advertising agencies, I worry that they have demeaned themselves.

That they don't believe in themselves. They don't have standards for themselves. And they have variable pricing depending on how desperate they are for business.

I'm sure I lost jobs by being stiff-necked. I'm sure I made enemies. I'm sure I pissed people off along the way.

Nevertheless, I treated myself and my customers well. I always delivered and over-delivered and over-over-delivered.

I had a rule, I always wanted to be able to sincerely say, "I'm the biggest bargain in the business."

Or, "I'm expensive, but worth it."

Not to be arrogant, but more businesses could learn from that.

The Weekly Slap.

The Weekly Slap is here. A once-every-seven-days observation on life, on advertising, on me from the inimitable Uncle Slappy.

Formula vs. quality.

I was doing a bit of research yesterday--doing something relatively old-fashioned, that is chasing down an idea, seeing if I could make it work.

I'll admit, I've been in a little bit of a funk for a couple of reasons--the recent Pepsi commercial being one of them. The idea, which seems to be prevalent, that reaching people is "math," annoys me. It makes me shake my head, add up my net-worth, and then look for a small cabin in an out-of-the-way place where maybe I can escape from this latest mania.

While doing research, however, I stumbled upon this. It's by Paul Rand--something he designed and wrote way back in the early 1960s for a client of his.

I guess you could say it's horribly dated.

You could criticize the writing.

Even criticize its design.

But I wonder if we'd all be better off if we pinned it to our walls. And considered it once-in-a-while.

A rotten formula.

The big trouble in the agency world has nothing to do with broken business models or declining viewership or the vagaries of digital doohickies.

The big trouble in the agency world is this: In the long-running battle of creative versus science, science has won. And won resoundingly.

There’s no better evidence of this than the recent Pepsi debacle. A two-and-a-half minute “commercial” that was taken off the internet practically the moment it was put on the internet.

This film was the very apotheosis of formulaic. Take this trend, this demographic, this “moment in time,” this star, this clichéd casting, this music and you’re sure to have a success.

Formulaic—the very word we so often use to disparage a movie or a mini-series or a TV show—is exactly what we’re buying into when it comes to making advertising.

Make an ad that looks like other ads. Cast people who look like other people. Use the same, acceptable, hackneyed language everyone else uses.

So everything looks the same, feels the same, says the same. And works the same. Like shit.

Because we have followed the mandated formula. We’ve adhered to best practices.

In fact, programmatic advertising, that oh-so-courant mutation of creativity is, practically by definition formulaic.

It’s advertising based on if-then propositions.

If we cast a celebrity, if we buy a hit song, if we show beautiful millennials, then our creative will be successful. If we send this message to this person, then our click through rates will soar.

The sole reason for agencies to exist and to do creative for clients is because clients can often suffer from group-think. They know the party line, so they act in accordance to that party line.

Creativity is oppositional. You laugh at a joke because it surprises you. You admire a film because it shows you something real. You linger in front of a painting because it tells you something new.

The things you like to do, to eat, to hear, to date, to talk to, to kiss, to love are things that surprise you. Things that are unexpected. Things that don’t follow formulas.

I guess you could look at it this way.

Science is a brick.

Creativity is a wine glass.

When they bump up against each other, the brick always wins.

That said, you can’t drink wine out of a brick.

Ned Doyle returns.

Some time ago, as my wife and I were preparing for the renovation of our apartment, I was deep inside the walk-in closet in our master-bedroom. There, I found an old cardboard shoebox filled with sepia-toned and brittle old letters tied up with a ribbon, bank-statements, a few dozen silver dollars, and a leather-bound diary.

I opened the diary and quickly realized it had belonged to one of the previous owners of our apartment, Ned Doyle. The diary is the personal story of Doyle’s immigrant experience.

I had started, in this space, excerpting the diary, but then, frankly, amid our renovation, I lost the diary. I turned my apartment upside down looking for it to no avail.

Oddly enough, just last Saturday, the diary suddenly seemed to appear out of nowhere. So once again, I will published sections in this space…the story of Ned Doyle, 16, in olde New York.

--

7 March 1902

With spelling and grammar unimproved by the Editor

Like I wuz saying, the Rebbe came clumping up the stars to his flat with his heavy boots like to wake the dead from h’every footfall. He bursts in troo the doorway and swings into the vestibool with his heavy black bag swinging in fronna him and crash, his black bag falls on the linooleum and is in two flicks of a lamb’s tail crashing oopen like a cloud burst on a soomer day.

Cooming out oov the Rebbe’s bag as it crashes oopen is a coolection of tools of turture, and impleements of pain, the likes of which I ha’ never seen, and they are scattered like mousies all oover the floor.

“Ach,” sez the Rebbe in their Yiddish langwitch which sounds like Dutch. “Ach, me tools!”

“Ye mean, yer impleements of turture, ye divvel! Wot kind oof a man d’ye suppose ye are? A divvel incarcerated?”

He larfs at that, the Rebbe does, his belly jiggling with addypose and shaking like a too sma’ ship inna too big sea.

“Thems his the tools a’ me trade,” the Rebbe sez.

“An’ wot wood yer trade be?” I ast him. “Wot wood yer trade be? Turturing young children fer your God’s sacred rituals? Drainin’ the blud of innycent bairns

t’ make ye bread?”

“No, me boy, no,” sez the Rebbe, as he walks me into the room they calls the pallor. “No, me boy. Sit here aside me,” sez he as he set in his large arm-chair. “And let me explain to you some facts o’ the Jewish rituals of life.”

Here, I stop for the day, Diary.

Mourning becomes morning.

Another busy mofo of a morning. 

I was up at five, a perfunctory kiss for the spousal unit, a pat on Whiskey's head, a cup of viscous motor-oil coffee, then off we go to the Elysium that is the modern advertising agency.

The streets are empty this morning. And the traffic streams down second avenue, hitting the timing of the lights just right so we make it all the way from 83rd to 57th without the interruption of a light. Twenty minutes worth of drive completed in four.

Now, we head across town, heading west on 49th Street, avoiding the Trump tumult a few blocks further uptown at 56th.

I have a thousand words to write this morning, an essay, as it were, on the state of the state. I can't tell you more than that. Just that I have to do it. And, like a hummingbird, my fingers are itching to go.

It's the part of the job I love. And the part of the job I hate.

When you have a pure writing assignment, you are naked. There are no partners or art directors to hide behind. There is little but a cacophony of information--like stray pieces of cloth--that you, alone need to make into presentable quilt.

You take a little from this document. A little from that annual report. Something your boss said goes here. Something else there. Oh! I heard that in a client meeting. That makes sense, I'll frizz it here.

When you have the piece assembled (perhaps that's an "if," not a when) you look at your watch and consider when it is due. Ah! You have an hour. You snip here, you move this there and that here. You cut that--why'd you write it in the first place...what were you thinking, and add that instead.

You read it through, if you have the time. Take a walk around the hall to try to come at it fresh, then read it again.

Like Will Kane in "High Noon," murder is coming on the next train. Are you ready? 

That's my morning.

Have a nice day. :)

Miscellaneous Monday.

It being Spring--and with Passover just around the corner--the weekend was filled with getting our apartment ready for the dozen or 14 guest who will be coming over for dinner next Monday night.

Of all the sorts of people I envy in the world, the highest among those are not the ones with untold cash reserves, it's the ones who have, somehow, an apartment not littered by too many books, too many clay sculptures by your daughters that you just can't throw out, and financial statements from the ten or six banks you, unfortunately, have to do business with, each of them, the statements, not the banks, thick with information you'll never read or use.

My apartment is more than bursting at the seams. And though I know I will never again read Kipling's "Kim," or Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped" again, I somehow can't bring myself to throw them out.

Throwing out books, seems somehow anti-Jewish, like a Nazi book-burning from eighty years or so ago. Of course, there is no place any longer--at least that I know of--to whom you can donate books. Everything seems to have been digitized and Kindle-ized to the point where the hundreds of shelf-feet I have along every wall in my apartment seem as superfluous as principles in Washington, D.C.

Perhaps, if I were smart about real estate, which I decidedly am not, I would buy a small cabin by a lake someplace two hours north of Manhattan, and would load the place up with Updike. That would leave my New York aerie ready for the pages of "Architectural Digest," or at least "Mad Magazine." Not only, in my dreams, would that place in upstate quadruple in value, also my apartment, newly sterile would skyrocket in value, and I could retire a fat rich man--to go along with old and bitter.

Nevertheless, try as I try to bring myself to expel literature and history and art and...learning itself, from my apartment, I cannot seem to do it. I was brought up in a different time. A time when books were counted as one's friends and, in many ways, more important than things like wealth as measured by the sheer accumulation of Mammon.

There was a time, of course, when I had an office as big as the Ritz, with built in book shelves and cabinets and coffee tables and the like. Along those shelves I'd have old awards annuals--the books I learned from, the books that got me into the business, the books that were Socrates to my Alexander.

I have hundreds of those old annuals up in Boston in storage. A storage space I have been paying for monthly since I left a benighted agency up there and assumed that the next place would accommodate my vast collection of advertising history.

The truth is, no one cares anymore about the past or where we came from, unless you're a Supreme Court nominee--a reputed Originalist, who believes African-Americans three-fifths of a vote, and women and non-property holders no vote at all.

So, try as I might, I dream at night as I go to yet another fitful sleep of clearing out the towers of books that have piled in every corner of my apartment, like row after row of empty apartment blocks of unfilled homes in Communist China.

All this to say that some years ago, I found in the back of one of the closets of my apartment, as I was moving in, an old shoe box filled with silver dollars, old letters, and a small diary from a man called Doyle who arrived on the Lower East Side in 1906, or so, and kept a diary.

From this point forward, Diary again in hand, I had lost it in my clutter, I will now and again post something from Doyle--regularly, and see where that takes us.