More lost tweets from Gary Fuckaduck.

August 11

#Headache all day. Terrible migraine. Almost makes me want to take my knit cap off when its 97-degrees out.

August 23

#When you’re done crushing it, crush it some more. Good advice for life, careers and killing cockroaches.

Sept. 3

#Life is all about balance. Especially if you start it with your father’s banking balance of $50 million.

Sept. 14

#I’m really crushing it lately. Figured out how to have three-days of stubble after just two days.

Sept. 19

#Losers can be winners if they win at losing losing.

Sept. 29

#There’s no excuse for not getting what you want. Get up at 4AM work until 3AM, curate t-shirt slogans for an hour. Who needs sleep?! If you love the hustle, you crush it.

Oct. 2

#I misplaced my hustle this morning and went to work with merely a sidle. Fortunately, I found an amble which filled in till I found my hustle again.

Oct. 15

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#Don’t just sip at life, drink from the firehose. Unless there’s a fire.

Oct. 22.

#Haters gonna hate. Graters gonna grate. Waiters? Where's my gluten-free kale and quinoa salad?

Great work 101.

About a thousand years ago, long before Gary Vaynerchuk was doing the "hustle" and "crushing" it and churning out bromides he calls books, a wise businessman wrote a wise book about business.

It was called “Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits” and it was written by a guy called Robert Townsend. Townsend was the CEO of Avis and it was he who selected Doyle Dane Bernbach as his agency.

(Copywriter Paula Green came up with the slogan that captured the ethic Townsend was trying to instill in his company: “We try harder.”)

Bill Bernbach told Townsend, "If you promise to run whatever we recommend, every creative in my shop will want to work on your account."

Townsend went on to promise Bernbach and DDB that Avis would only approve, disapprove but not try to improve ads. Further, and this is key, he insisted that DDB submit only those ads it truly recommended. "They will not ‘see what Avis thinks of that one’."

The result of this wisdom and collaboration is, of course, legendary.

Great work does not come from cracking the whip, or impossible demands, or unreasonable timetables, or even working all night and weekend. It comes from trust.

Trust that you’ve hired the right people, that they care about your business, and, if you give them your trust, they’ll return to you work that will change your business.

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Do this or die.

My friend Bob Hoffman, the contrary Ad Contrarian has done a better job than anyone uncovering and exposing the degree to which modern marketing has become not a marketer, but rather, a surveillance state.

Even if you adjust your privacy settings all the way to 11, chances are your every blink and every keystroke is being tracked by someone somewhere. Further that data on you, from your site visits to shopping habits to filling out purportedly innocuous online quizzes is being parceled like a collateralized debt obligation and meted out and sold to hundreds of data miners, aka digital stalkers, spies and parasites.

Online surveillance, despite a sound bite here and there from our fraudulently elected plutocrats will only get worse. Worse, because it seems to me that we live in a world where things like fairness, moderation and ethical behavior are as outmoded as a crossbow. Or, maybe more accurately, moral behavior has been bent and subjugated to the power of the almighty dollar.

But what if...

What if a brave agency, client or holding company, or a collective of them banded together to create a new(old) kind of advertising?

Betraying my Judeo roots, let’s call it Goldenrulevertising. What if, and this is quaint, we treated customers as we ourselves would like to be treated?

What if we believed that the purpose of advertising was not to stalk targets, but existed instead to inform, entertain and persuade? What if we believed—and acted accordingly—in the nobility of our trade. That we don’t chase people into buying our wares but help them, instead, make informed decisions?

What if we said we will cookie no more?

Track no more?

Retarget no more?

What if we used our clout with networks and banded together and said that 25 commercial minutes per hour is unfair to people. That that video bludgeoning is not fomenting sales, but is, instead, driving customers away.

What if, pursuant to yesterday’s post, we reminded ourselves (gendered language notwithstanding) that the consumer isn’t a moron (or a vassal) but is our spouse.

Yesterday in this space, I mentioned the great copywriter from the salad days of DDB, Bob Levenson. Almost 50 years ago, he wrote the ad below. It was art-directed by my old boss, Len Sirowitz, with harrowing limbic intensity.

What if someone, somewhere, or a group of us, re-created it, for today. Better than an ad—what if we started treating others how we wish to be treated.

Do this or die.

Is this ad some kind of a trick?

No. But it could have been.

And at exactly that point rests a do or die decision for American business.

We in advertising, together with our clients, have all the power and skill to trick people. Or so we think.
But we're wrong. We can't fool any of the people any of the time.

There is indeed a twelve-year-old mentality in this country; every six-year-old has one.
We are a nation of smart people.

And most smart people ignore most advertising because most advertising ignores smart people.

Instead we talk to each other.

We debate endlessly about the medium and the message. Nonsense. In advertising, the message itself is the message.

A blank page and a blank television screen are one and the same.

And above all, the messages we put on those pages on those television screens must be the truth. For if we play tricks with the truth, we die.

Now. The other side of the coin.

Telling the truth about a product demands a product that's worth telling the truth about.

Sadly, so many products aren't.

So many products don't do anything better. Or anything different. So many don't work quite right. Or don't last. Or simply don't matter.

If we play this trick, we also die. Because advertising only helps a bad product fail faster.

No donkey chases the carrot forever. He catches on. And quits.

That's the lesson to remember.

Unless we do, we die.

Unless we change, the tidal wave of consumer indifference will wallop into the mountain of advertising and manufacturing drivel.

That day we die.
We'll die in our marketplace. On our shelves. In our gleaming packages of empty promises.

Not with a bang. Not with a whimper.

But by our own skilled hands.

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Dear Charlie.

Yesterday, I wrote a post--a popular post at that--about a memo a CEO sent out announcing the departure of a CCO.

The memo itself was one of the most strained and convoluted bits of writing I've seen in a long time. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it was an insult to the reader in that it assumed that the reader was too stupid, too lazy or too disinterested to de-code the meaning of the note.

David Ogilvy said many years ago, "The customer isn't a moron. She's your wife." Putting aside the gendered aspect of Ogilvy's epigram, consider what it means. It's pretty simple. Treat your audience with respect. (For starters, don't call them a "target." Since no one wants to be one. And also, don't place them in buckets, which is both painful and ugly.)

Bob Levenson, 1929-2013, was widely considered the best copywriter in the world. According to Dave Trott--who knows a thing or two about writing--Bill Bernbach made Levenson Head of Copy at DDB because he was that great agency's greatest writer. David Abbott said Bob Levenson taught him how to write. 

Dominick Inseng, who wrote a great book on DDB and Volkswagen called "Ugly is Only Skin Deep," reported on Levenson's style this way:

"When he was asked how he wrote copy for all those Volkswagen ads, Levenson said, 'I always started by writing Dear Charlie, like writing to a friend. And then I would say what I had to say, and at the end I would cross out Dear Charlie, and I was all right.'"

If more people, including the CEO at JWT who wrote the memo I deconstructed yesterday, remembered that we are humans talking to other humans--one on one--we would improve the quality, and I'd bet, the effectiveness of our communications.