The persistence of annoyance.

One of the things that really rubs my goat the wrong way is the very thing that butters my bread.

It is the persistence of advertising. (When I think about the persistence of advertising, my mind naturally conjures up Dali’s painting, “The Persistence of Memory.”  Except instead of melting clocks, we have melting brains.)

Yesterday on my flight back from LA, I turned on the “navigation” function of the eight-inch screen that was, thanks to the comfort of American Airlines’ “comfort class” was about four-inches from the tip of my nose.

All I wanted to see was when we would land in New York.

Instead, I got an ad beckoning me to switch to the telco Sprint.

I thought about the asinine nature of that ad placement. What are the chances that someone seeking to discover whether they’re over Scranton or Cincinnati will switch to Sprint because they see an ad?

Likewise, when I see a sixty-foot Chase logo on the roof of a tennis stadium that my tax-dollars paid for, or the similarly-sized logo atop CitiField, I don’t start frothing at the mouth, reaching for my phone and getting the urge to refinance my mortgage.

No, I feel the way I think a lot of people feel. I feel besieged by messaging at the least appropriate times in the least appropriate places.

I just ran across a link in my LinkedIn feed. It asks: “Can Creative Production Keep Up With The Demand For Content?”

Does anyone for a second really think there is a ‘demand for content’? About 12 seconds of research reveals that over 30% of YouTube videos have fewer than ten views.

If anything most brands today act like the last kid chosen at a third-grade kickball game. Look at me! Pick me! I want to play! Oooh oooh oooh! They’re trying so hard to be “part of the conversation” that they’re turning off the very people they’re trying to woo.

Is anyone not annoyed when they’re trying to get information on a site and instead a survey or an ad pops up? Is anyone not annoyed at the way ads are mixed into everything we do from watching an in-flight safety video, to going to the opera, to seeing the Rustoleum “paint-yourself-into-the-corner” instant-replay?

All of these annoyances betray the original equation that built advertising in the first place. You rented your eyeballs to brands; in return brands gave you sports or television shows or your news for free or for a dramatically reduced cost.

Now advertisers are bludgeoning you two, three, four or four-hundred times after you’ve already paid for something. For cable. For web access. For tickets.

Maybe people don’t hate advertising.

Maybe they hate the Johnstown Flood of advertising that brands and their agencies perpetuate.

Shit. I’d gladly watch ads once again if I didn’t have to pay for cable.

And I might even venture to a ballpark, pay my $75 for a $20 ticket and see a game. But I’d be damned if I’d go to a game, pay my money and then be assaulted with screaming ads on every square pixel.

Give me something in exchange for my attention. Or you won't have my attention.

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BTW One.

Not coincidentally, I just ran across an article in Monday's cheery neo-fascist "Wall Street Journal," that only adds ballast to my contention that there is too much advertising. I'd paste a link here, but the Wall Street Journal has an aggressive paywall, so you'd only get frustrated. 

The gist is that Facebook has asked America's four largest banks, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, U.S. Bancorp and the ever-benevolent Wells Fargo for detailed financial information on their customers so Facebook can "offer new services to their users."

This will boost, says Facebook, user engagement.

The idea that advertising is a useful service is often a charade by brands and advertisers used to assuage their true motives which are to get deeper and deeper into your life and wallet.

A Facebook spokesperson said, “Like many online companies, we routinely talk to financial institutions about how we can improve people’s commerce experiences, like enabling better customer service.” 

I can save everyone a lot of money. If you want to "enable better customer service," answer your phones.
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BTW Two.

Has there ever been a Content Strategist whose strategy didn't include creating more content?

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A tale of two cities.

It's one of those days in New York when you wish we could sell the island back to its original owners--$24 be damned.

It's about 90 degrees already and you could squeeze the air out like an old mop and get dirty water. The pigeons are sticking to the asphalt and the cabbies are taking aim at any living creatures more miserable than they are.

What's more, in old Gotham, the beloved Bronx Bombers have dropped four in a row to the hated Crimson Hose of Boston and you could say a pall has settled upon the old town.

Even my reading glasses--which I didn't need when I started this blog 11 years ago--are fogged up in the 6000% humidity. As my old man might have said, it's so hot I saw a fire-hydrant fighting over two dogs.

I returned late yesterday afternoon from LA where we were once again shooting. There, cool ocean breezes and bright sunshine keep the temperatures and people's moods mild.
But I'll say, despite the prevailing innocuousness of Tinsel Town, on a day like today, it seems more than a little appealing.

On Saturday night my wife and I had dinner at a small Mexican place that, given that it's been there since 1959, qualifies as an institution in Southern California.

There were two thirty-something's at the table abutting ours, gesticulating wildly and laughing like thunder. My wife, naturally started a conversation.

"I'm from Staten Island," one of the men started. "But don't holditagainstme. I was raised in Queens."

The other chimed in, "I was born in the Bronx," he said.

"We're from Manhattan," I said, "If we had a Brooklyn here, we'd have all five boroughs."

They laughed, and the Bronx-ite said, "I'll get my mom on Facetime, she lives in Brooklyn now."

We all laughed, sitting outdoors in the cool LA night, up to our elbows in burritos.

But wishing we were back in New York.

Social media, Chico Escuela. And me.

If you caught me off guard and I wasn't really thinking, I'd probably say I don't truly believe in social media. That's probably because I care deeply about very few brands. I don't really want to socialize with them. 

Further, I regard my social media feeds as private. I don't want anyone in my lap unless I invite them there.

That said, bastardizing the words of the great Chico Escuela, social media has been bery bery good to me.

I've been thinking of late about why it seems to be working for me (a guy who's essentially anti-social) and conversely why it seems to work for so few brands. 

First, I think I understood, somehow, that social media had to have a character, a voice. The writing itself (no matter what form that writing takes) can't be bland and anodyne. You can't be afraid to be who you are. And you can't try too hard to please everyone. 

Many brands fail, I think because they don't have a personality. They don't stand for anything.

Second, I didn't expect too much from my social media presence. In fact, when I started this blog, I didn't even know what a social media presence was. I thought I'd get a few readers and that would be that. 

Now, 11 years later I'm getting on the order of 30,000 views a week. That's good, I'm content with that. Just as I was happy when I was getting 500 views a week.

Third, and maybe most important, I've been persistent. I've written more than one post a work-week day for more than a decade. Those over 5,000 posts eventually found an audience. An audience I wouldn't have found had I not been dogged. 

It seems that every agency and every business today has a blog. If you check some of them out, you'll find many haven't been updated since October, 2013. The only way to do social media is to do. 

Finally, I don't follow "best practices," or someone else's rules. I have more than a handful of friends who are successful bloggers and we are each successful in our own ways. We each do our thing in a way that reflects ourselves and our personalities.

Despite what you hear from social media strategists and content practitioners and digital engagement specialists, I think success in social media can come down to following a couple simple thoughts.

1. Have a personality.
2. Manage your own expectations (i.e. don't believe social media hype or that success is easy.)
3. Be active and keep your viewers engaged.
4. Be true to yourself.

I'm sure these rules don't make sense for everyone. But they've worked for me.

And like I said above, social media has been bery bery good to me.

Nobody Asked Me But...Is it already August edition.

Nobody Asked Me But…is my perhaps too-frequent tribute to the late, great New York sportswriter, Jimmy Cannon. Cannon was prodigiously prolific but even he came up empty at times. When he did, he wrote one of these…

Nobody Asked Me But…

….I don’t think there’s any way to eat popcorn neatly.

….That’s probably very good for pigeons.

….And there’s no way to balance your iced-coffee, cell-phone, reading glasses and pen on the arms of your director’s chair while you’re shooting, without spilling the iced-coffee onto your lap.

….Just as the Jewish holidays always come too early or too late, location shoots are always too hot or too cold.

….I’ll probably get in trouble for calling my next ‘manifesto’ a ‘womanifesto.’

….But I’m doing it anyway.

….Somehow I think when the human-race hears the last ding-dong of doom, Gwyneth Paltrow will still be alive.

….I am by no means a Shakespeare expert, but the line from Henry IV, Part 2 “How ill white hairs become a fool,” frightens me.

….Stop me if I become a fool. (Assuming I’m not one already.)

….The white hairs are inexorable.

….When I’m in LA, I always think the city is actually on green screen.

….And sometimes I wish it were.

….I think life would be 200% better if ad agencies had swimming pools.

….And commercials would be 200% better if people in ad agencies still listened to Bob and Ray.

….To that end, did you know the Komodo dragon can render a man senseless with one swipe of his mighty tail?

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Reflections on a Golden Era.

In the advertising industry we live, we're so often told, in dark times.

There are people, it seems, who have made careers telling people how lousy their careers have been. And other people who have spent their careers telling others how things used to be better, "back in the day."

Sure, there are changes that have wreaked havoc on our business. Mostly, the money men have taken over and taken the lion's share of perks and salaries and advancement and security for themselves.

That's the way of the world, isn't it? Isn't Donald Trump's lackey Steve Mnuchin figuring out more ways for the rich to pay fewer taxes and therefore get richer?

But there's something we little guys get out of the business that the ubermensches, for all their mammon, can't have.

Right now I'm out in Santa Monica shooting a package of new spots. 

We're lucky.

We get the feeling, the exhausting feeling, of making something--something we're proud of, something that goes beyond money. We get the camaraderie of being part of a team--a team all working together, doing something we love. We get to work with some of the top practitioners, some of the top craftspeople, some of the top creative people in the world.

We can be sad about what we don't have, or what we have no longer, or what we might never have again.

Or we can enjoy our few special moments in the sun and conclude with as rousing an affirmation as jaded ad people can muster: This doesn't suck.