Stats. And Obfuscation.

When I was a boy, many things were simpler.

Let me start with something that was always meant to be simple: Baseball.

For as long as people were playing baseball, we evaluated players in roughly the same way. Below are some stats of the great Roberto Clemente.

Maybe we were painting with a broad stroke, but by looking at batting average, home runs, runs batted in and a few other bits of data, a fan could swipe right or swipe left on a player.

Today, things aren't so simple to evaluate. 

I took a look at Aaron Judge, the mammoth Yankee's right fielder and the data used to evaluate his career. It's a much more complicated picture. I don't understand 78% of them and I've ardently followed baseball for most of my 65 years.

Maybe this is my fault. 

Because I'm not willing to make following sports a full-time job. But I recall some words from Proverbs, that for years Forbes magazine used for its inside back cover:

"...with all thy getting get understanding."

Understanding doesn't seem the point anymore. I understood the game just fine when I looked at Roberto Clemente's baseball card. Now I think the surfeit of data could render the biblical quote above as, "with all they getting get confusion."

In "When McKinsey Comes to Town," authors Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe write on McKinsey's data infatuation when they worked for the Houston Astros and helped them cheat their way to a World Series championship. They write:

"A new generation of video equipment produced massive amounts of granular data on every pitch and every batted ball. As a result, some long-held assumptions about how to win games were challenged. 

"Now batters were instructed to pull the ball, to change their swing plane to produce more home runs, rather than line drives. Pitchers were told to throw more curves, fewer sinkers, and more four-seam fastballs high in the strike zone rather than at a batter’s knees. 

"The most extreme practitioners of baseball analytics believed that the entire game could be reduced to numbers, uncontaminated by human sentiment, emotions, or, as it would turn out, even ethics. The question lurking beneath all this was at what point does data analysis cross over from helping athletes perform better to dehumanizing their sport."

Now, here comes the advertising point of today's post.

Today it's easy for me to go one month, two months, half-a-year without seeing any marketing communication that makes me even grudgingly admit, "I wish I did that." Most of what I see is so remarkably bad, I believe it has a negative impact on the brands paying for it. I've always hated Verizon and Speculum cable. After repeated exposure to their anthrax-level ads, I hate them even more.

Meanwhile, in an alternate universe, every day in the trade press we read (and then we see the 'news' amplified on social media) about someone being ranked 'the world's top this,' or the 'world's top that.'

We have holding companies that have shed tens of thousands of employees over the last half decade as well as one-third of their revenue being named 'network of the year,' 'international network of the year,' 'global network of the year' and 'globular network of the year.' 

However, all those networks and agencies and C-suiters have a smaller and less-consequential seat at Fortune 500 tables. It's no mere coincidence that agencies used to be located on Madison Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Lex, Park and Third, have since moved to the nether-regions of American capitalism. Eastern New Jersey, as I called Ogilvy's former 11th Avenue exile.

We do work around the fringes. So we're located around the fringes. 

The accolades, the awards and the data we create around ourselves are a modern-day binary replica of the empty villages Grigory Potemkin built for the Czarina.

As Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, CA: There's no there there.

Before I'd call myself "Blank of the Blank," I'd show some real data. Not my performance at a variety of spuriously authentic award shows.

Is my business growing?

Are my clients growing?
Are current clients giving me more business?

Are current clients recommending me?

Do people like my spots?

Why is my employee attrition still around 40%?

And so on.

I remember a client telling me that based on some ads I wrote, he told his boss sales had doubled.

His boss said, yeah. "From two units to four."

I'll happily trade you a liter bottle of Coca-Cola for two half-liters. 

Soda, like a lot of things in the world, is fungible. 

Truth is not.

A Guest Post from the Great Bob Meagher.

Editor's Note:
Bob Meagher is one of those rare birds. Not only did he stay at a single agency--The Martin Agency--for a total of 28 years, he produced good work for all that time. 

I saw a note from Bob last week that he was finally hanging up his advertising spikes. I asked if he'd oblige this humble blog with a post. Voila. A couple days later, Bob came through with the gem below.

That's probably a large part of how you last in this business. 

You do what you say you're going to do. On time. And with skill, passion and wit.

I asked Bob if he got that advertising Hope-Diamond-rarity, a retirement party. Sadly he did not. Though former Martin CCO, Joe Alexander threw him a 25th Anniversary Party. That's a rarity as well.

As is the ingenuity and dedication on display in the story Bob tells below. Not to mention work that hands you a laugh. Enjoy.

And if you can, thank Bob.

The whole industry should, for making us a little better.

--

Bob's post:

I remember where I was when I heard the devasting news.

Warren Buffet wanted us to do testimonials with actual GEICO customers. I was sick to my stomach. Steve Bassett, the creative director on the account, apologized. I believe he said he would make it up to us with a better project down the road. Creatively, testimonials were deadly. Plus, viewers never really knew if the testimonials were real or actors reading from a script.

 

The client provided us with a huge stack of unsolicited letters where policy holders had written to GEICO praising their claim service. GEICO had been known for saving people money but got little credit for their amazing service. Art director Adam Stockton and I were determined to do testimonials “GEICO style” and not the usual boring way.

 

Knowing that there was some skepticism of testimonials in general, we thought, how do we let people know that these testimonials were real and how do we make it not boring. One early idea had the real customers telling their story while it was being interpreted through modern dance.

 

As we kept working on it, we kept thinking, real people are boring and that’s why most testimonials are boring. Then we thought, celebrity testimonials are also suspect that they are just being paid to praise the product. But there is a reason advertisers use them. They get your attention and they are not boring. Even if they just do it for the money.

 

So, I wrote a line that set up the whole premise of each spot. That what they were about to hear was a real story from a real person and not a paid celebrity. But because real people are boring, we got a celebrity to help tell their story.

 

Now, all we needed was celebrities we could afford.

 

We did not have a lot of money but this turned out to be a blessing. It forced us to go after celebrities you may not have heard from in a while. 

We also chose celebrities that had a certain audio or performance trait that we could have fun with. Burt Bacharach would perform a song, Little Richard would use his trademark “wooooooooo”, Don LaFontaine would deliver his lines in his famous “In a world” movie trailer voice.  

A bit of trivia is that Little Richard was originally James Brown. He was signed on and approved but his agent came back and wanted more money. Ted Ward, the client, wasn’t about to be held over a barrel. Hence, the Little Richard script was born and talent manager SuzanneWieringo went to work.

 

Another challenge was making these 30 seconds. Not easy with the long setup line I had written. Basically, I had to distill their entire GEICO claim experience into three short sentences. And then write three short celebrity interpretations. Ending with the VO, “GEICO. Real service. Real savings.”

 

After we presented the campaign and everyone was on the floor laughing, we had to go out and make these. The first thing was casting. What if the people whose stories were in the script could not speak. Or had stage fright. Or just didn’t work on camera. Adam and I split up and traveled the country going to each person’s home with a video camera where we interviewed each person. These tapes were used to determine which stories we would use. In many cases, I had to re-write the celebrity part to correspond to a new story.

 

Once we had approved scripts, we needed a director. Since these were real people, we thought it only fitting to use a documentary filmmaker. With the help of producer Holly Flaisher we chose Chris Smith. In addition to documentaries, he had also done some commercial work.

 

There were some funny moments during production like when Adam read Little Richard’s script for little Richard as Little Richard. Or when I was scared to death to meet Joan Rivers at the wardrobe fitting as all the lines I had written for her were about her getting plastic surgery. Turns out she complimented me saying she usually has to re-write all scripts given to her but did not need to change one word of mine.

 

BTW, Joan was so professional that after we had started breaking down the set and she was watching the video assist of her takes, she wanted to do more. We had to set everything back up so she could do more takes. We ended up using one of those takes.

 

After Dick Gordon edited the spots, we knew we had magic. What started out as a shitty assignment turned out to be my favorite campaign of my entire career. A career I have officially just ended.

 

I believe we shot two rounds. The celebrities included, Burt Bacharach, Little Richard, Don LaFontaine, Joan Rivers, Peter Graves, Vern Troyer, The Pips, Peter Frampton, Mrs. Butterworth, Charo and Michael Winslow.

 

Years later we were asked to bring the campaign back. It never came to be and I don’t remember why. But I looked in my files and found this script with Casey Kasem of American Top 40 radio fame. Pretty funny. At the time anyway.

 

Ah, the memories.

 

--

Links to Bob's "Testimonials."

(and next time you get a lousy assignment, think of silk purses from sows' ears, and the efforts of creatives like Bob. Who don't  give in to the urge to mediocre.)

Little Richard:

https://vimeo.com/210263311/ad878e3637

Mrs. Butterworth:

https://vimeo.com/210263410/ecb515c67d

Joan Rivers:

https://vimeo.com/210263617/938da15ff2

Peter Framptom:

https://vimeo.com/210263500/f33bc69013

Burt Bacharach:

https://vimeo.com/210262927/0fd7808679

Don LaFontaine:

https://vimeo.com/210263121/0521e461bd

• --

• View Bob’s profile--

CASEY KASEM

:30

 

 

OPEN ON KEVIN AND CASEY KASEM SITTING NEXT TO EACH OTHER IN KEVIN’S HOME.

 

ANNCR:       
Kevin Davis is a real GEICO customer not a paid celebrity, so to help tell his story we hired a celebrity.  

KEVIN:         
A neighborhood kid hit my parked car with his bicycle.

CASEY KASEM:
It was a smash hit that year by a young boy from North Carolina.

KEVIN:        
I went on geico.com and filed my claim.

CASEY KASEM:
This long-distance dedication goes out to GEICO. 

KEVIN:        
GEICO got my car fixed like new.

CASEY KASEM:
Holding at number one for a third week it’s Kevin Davis with, “Keep your bratty kids out of my driveway.”

SUPER:       GEICO® (LOGO)

 

VO:               GEICO. Real service. Real savings.

An Advertising Lesson About AI, from the 13th Century.

There's a great bookstore in Manhattan about a mile from my apartment, called The Corner Bookstore. Though it looks like it might be a front for the Mob, run by Vinnie "Two PhD.s" Luciano, it's a real live bookstore. Not at all like the fronts in my neighborhood which I lovingly call, "the candy stores that sell no candy."

The Corner Bookstore is not vast like the Strand (eighteen miles of books) or specialized like Rizzoli's was (giant artbooks you needed a U-Haul to carry home) but it has three attributes that lead me to put it in the great category

1. It's small. 
Unlike Barnes & Nobel, the Corner Bookstore doesn't have every book. They have a nice, concise selection of books in about five or six areas: Kids, Fiction, Non-fiction, Art and 'Quirky.' (I'll get to quirky in a minute.)

2. The staff actually reads and...
Back when I was in college, Salter's on Broadway between 115th Street and 116th Street was the campus bookstore. The staff was mostly angry-PhD's or even angrier PhD students. 

They'd help you find what you were looking for and insult you--sometimes in Latin--at the same time. At the Corner Bookstore, the staff is well-read without being condescending.

3. There are places to sit and flip pages.
A bookstore should feel like a library, not a Gap.

Now to the quirky bit.

I was in the Corner Bookstore a couple of weeks ago and bought this book, above.

Not only is my ex-partner, the great typographer and art director Sid Tomkins coming to stay with me in April, but I had also just finished reading The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. 

I was therefore on a bit of an illuminated manuscript and incunabula jag. I might be the first person ever to have been on such a jag, or at least to put it in those words.

It occurred to me this morning, about twenty minutes before the start of yet another daily marathon, that putting together some thoughts from these two wildly different books might help us understand artificial intelligence and Chat GPT more and fear it a little less. 

The monks and nuns who did the bulk of copying manuscripts onto vellum and/or parchment did a good job doing what they did. But their skills were not unusual. A few more skilled did marginal illustrations to brighten up some of the darkest texts. 

The top of the top did "illuminations" for illuminated manuscripts. These illuminations, literally the bringing of light, were limited to the most important and most valuable books from about the 13th Century to the 16th Century, when movable type displaced copyists.

What occurs to me is that maybe in the 21st century, we could learn some things from the 13th.

A lot of content is fairly mundane, like in Fig. 1. That's the kind of content done by moderately-skilled copyists. Today or tomorrow, that might be done by ChatGPT. 

The kooky, spooky illustration in Fig. 2., might be done by a skilled creative, while the text in Fig. 2, could be done by machine.

By the time you get to Fig. 3, ChatGPT is out of the picture. Such work is rarefied and takes rare skills. NMNA. (No machines need apply.)

It occurs to me while writing this that if you want to bolster your salary or day rate as a creative, or increase your revenue or margin if you're an agency, we might want to bring back the word "Illuminated."

The ad industry and clients have been great and highly productive churning out tonnage. Sometimes it seems we make more ads than there are eyeballs.

But there are some in the industry, by dint of talent, experience or both who can bring illumination to clients.

It's time we cherished the clients and the creatives who can illuminate. Illumination is a skill it often takes a lifetime to cultivate. Illuminators should be well-paid and well-treated. 

They are not machines and they make a big performative difference.

Back in earlier times, we'd call that paecuniam in pecunia.

You know, return on investment.

A Session in the Clouds.

It's not very often that I find people to talk to who get me. To be fair, it's not very often that I feel I get me. 

But Thursday morning, ensconced in the Vienna-dawn of Dr. Lewis' purposefully-designed Mittel-European office, I felt gotten.

I started by talking about my trip up to City College of New York to attend the memorial service for George Lois. And to herald his gift of the donation of his archives--they must take up as much room as a Chinese spy balloon--to CCNY.

Dr. Lewis and I, both aging Jews, that is alte-kockers, hold City College in high regard. Not only was it the first free college in the United States, it was also a place where people kept out of elite educational institutions like the Ivies could find Nobel Prize teachers and go on to bigger things.

Molly Ivins, the writer, once said about George W. Bush, "He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." Extending that metaphor, City College was built for women and men who didn't live within twenty miles of the baseball diamond.

It was a school for people displaced by poverty, race, creed or just for being a little different than those who controlled the power in America.

We spent the rest of my 45-minute hour talking about displacement. 

He started with a New York City program called "Prep for Prep," which brought black and brown children into New York's elite private school system. Dr. Lewis lamented that many of those gifted students were fine academically, but didn't receive the emotional and social preparation and inoculation that they might have needed. It's can't be easy to live in a housing project in the Bronx while your classmates are flying privately to the Caribbean for a long weekend.

Displacement.

I brought up, as I do, two books and two poems that seemed to me on topic.

1. The Last Negroes At Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever.

and 2. The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League.

And two of my favorite poems, both of which I read when I was just a teenager. Both of which I read often, now that I am an old man.

3. Amiri Baraka's (LeRoi Jones) "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note."

And,

4. Langston Hughes', Theme for English B.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not one-hundred percent sure what this post is about. Or if it belongs in a blog that's ostensibly about advertising.

But this is also a piece about displacement.

That feeling we all have sometimes, maybe many times, that we don't belong, that we're outsiders. Today, some people I suppose call that displacement-ness "imposter syndrome."

What advertising at its best has always done is give people a sense that they're smarter, better-looking-er, keener than others. That they "get it," where other people might not.

If you look at the tagline of Apple's early work, "A computer for the rest of us," that conveyed the sense that it was ok not to be allegiant to the MS-DOS world. You could march to the click of your own mouse. Same with Nike. You don't have to melt into the sofa in a syrup of adipose like so many others. You are an athlete (if you 'just do it.')

I hate the man and everything he stands for, but the trump campaign got this in 2016. Millions of people, feeling estranged from the country they felt they knew, were going to "Make America Great Again." I'm not endorsing him or obeying the dog whistles in the line, just remarking on why the line worked.

Ron Berger of Ally & Gargano and Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer/Euro RSCG renown reminded me of something Carl Ally often took credit for saying. "Advertising should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted."

When brands do that, they very often create a sense of inclusion and belonging around their brand or product. That's not the explicit purpose of advertising, but it might be a necessary precondition for selling things. We don't like to buy from strangers, from people we don't like or from people who don't get us.

I know, there's a lot rattling around in here. I apologize about its headiness--or wooliness.

I'm just trying to improve how I reach people. And improve the person I am.

It's Complicated. It's Frightening. It Hurts.

Ever since I took more than my share of economics courses while in college, I've tried to keep up--in a non-academic way--with what's happening in the world.

How does inequality happen? 
How does poverty stay entrenched?
How do companies shoot up then five years later collapse?
How do some people take home hundreds of millions, even when their companies fail?
What's behind the massive layoffs we're seeing so much of?

Many of the books, magazines and newspapers I read talk about these issues.

Rignt now I'm reading "When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm".
You can buy it here. And read the Times' review here.

The authors go through case after case of what companies look like before, during and after their involvement with McKinsey. I'm not talking about McKinsey's involvement with Perdue Pharmaceutical. In that instance, they helped Perdue devise strategies to sell more opioids. Eventually, McKinsey admitted no wrongdoing, but even though, according to them, they did nothing wrong, they agreed to pay a $573 million fine.

"When McKinsey," goes through case after case of how McKinsey operates today. Their course is so often repeated, I plotted it on a curve. I'm not an economist, but I stand by this general depiction of McKinsey's practices.

In fact, I see much the same pattern in the ad industry. Especially among the Holding Companies that monopolize the industry (they control over 70% of all jobs) and especially the Holding Company that fired me after 12 years with about eight weeks severance and, from an actuarial point of view, 20.27 years of unpaid leave.

That's all for today. And that's enough. But I'll leave you with this:

The George Lois Memorial.

Wednesday night, amid the cold and mist, I headed up to 259 Convent Street--around 140th Street in Manhattan to CCNY--City College of New York for a Memorial tribute to the legendary art director, George Lois.

Much was made of Lois donating his archives to CCNY. As Lois achieved what was once called the American Dream, CCNY was the college of the American Dream. A free school for poor New Yorkers. CCNY was the first free college in the United States--the product of a kinder, fairer, more egalitarian time. 

The college--the school of the underdog--of the poor, of minorities when the Ivy's wouldn't let them in--has produced ten Nobel Prize-winners. Its list of famous alumni would put nearly any college in the world to shame. 

Lois thought the school a worthy recipient of his work, because he, too, was an underdog. A Bronx-born American-Greek who upset the politesse of what was then the WASP-ish ad industry.

My friend Rob Schwartz was a speaker. As was Senator Bill Bradley, congressman Dennis Kucinich and Tommy Hilfiger, the designer who was propelled to fame somewhat based on Lois' iconic ad campaign.

On display were half-a-dozen or so enlargements of some of Lois' great work. There was a particularly nice assortment of Lois' famous covers for Esquire magazine. As well as some Ali-to-Lois memorabilia.

My favorite magazine cover of all time was there, with a replica of Lois' marker comp. Friends and I debated whether they were comped after the fact, but really that doesn't much matter.

There was a small sampling of Lois' MTV work. And one ad from his campaign to free Rubin "Hurricane" Carter from wrongful imprisonment, and one small poster of Lois' work to help Bobby Kennedy get elected as Senator from New York in 1964. Many hoped that would be RFK's stepping stone to becoming president in 1968 or 1972. 

An assassin's bullet ended that bit of Camelot before it started.

And instead, we wound up with Nixon.

Here's Lois' obituary from the Times.

And here's Lois' site. 

Of all the things Lois promoted, Lois himself might have gotten the most ink.

Deservedly so.

--

I'll leave with this quotation, which I wrote down last night. I'm not sure it was attributed to Lois, but that doesn't much matter. I think the thought is pretty right on.

"Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality."

I'm going to memorize that.

 

Disappointment is Anointment.

Four things happened yesterday that led me to this one post.

One. My wife is out of town for a week, so my mornings are more intense than ever.

I'm usually up before five, writing notes to prospective clients and seeing what kind of responses I've gotten from previous days' notes.

This usually takes an hour during which time I type like a cornered squirrel.

Two. I seem to have work due to various clients almost every day. I use the early morning hours to tinker with that work one more time before I send things off.

Three. I do whatever blogging and GeorgeCo., LLC, writing I have to do for the day. My writing gets me business, like popcorn at the movies sells soda. I'd be a fool not to do it.

Four. I plot out my day. What I have to attend to. Calls I need to make. Work I need to create.

It's about 9AM when I'm done with all that and I'm usually lacing up my sneakers to go for a walk. I feel more deserving of a walk having done a few hours of work. Often, my elder daughter, Sarah, calls around that time. She's as maniacal about time as I am.

"You're going out late," she admonishes me. "Do you start work late?"

I don't want to tell her I've been working since 9AM London time. So I roll with the punches.

It's almost 5PM now as I write this and it hasn't been an easy day.

A lot of my freelance friends call me and send me notes. They want to know how they can be as busy as I am with GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company.

They're friends and many read this blog, so they get a glimpse of my life, and yes, my success as a sole-proprietor. What they don't see are the parts of being out on my own that I very rarely reveal.

If I were a baseball, I'd be resting on the hip of a crafty pitcher, so no one could guess what pitch was coming. You can't see my seams, or how I'm held. You can't see what pitch is coming.

Though I reveal a lot of myself in this space, I keep a lot under my hat or behind my back that no one sees--ever--not even Dr. Lewis, my every Thursday morning therapy appointment since about 1998.

Working, whether you're on your own, a cog in a larger machine, or running a larger machine is about disappointment. And balance.

This has been the case since homo sapiens lived in small bands and hunted, fished, and gathered. It's been the case since, thousands of years on, we switched to agriculture and started living by sowing and reaping. It's certainly the case today, when fewer and fewer people control the means of production and more and more people are fighting over the scraps like hungry seagulls over some fish offal.

Somedays you come up empty.

No game captured. No fish speared. No corn harvested. No assignments won.

Disappointment.

Someone wants to hire you--but not at your price.
Someone wants a $100,000 video--but for $50,000.
Someone calls with a big project but it turns into a lost cause.
A door opens then slams in your face.
A call, or a dozen, don't get returned.

Disappointment.

Just because you're busy doesn't mean you're as busy as you want to be. Just because you're making the money you want doesn't mean you're making the work you want or even doing what you want.

This is not to howl at the moon and raise my clenched fist to the heavens.

This is to proffer a syllogism as old as those heavens.

Work is disappointment and disappoint is work.

I'd say my ratio of things that come through to prospects that don't is about 1:10. That's probably about average.

Just because it's average doesn't mean I accept it.

That's why I try many more things than most.

More trying equals more disappointment.

Disappointing as it is, disappointment leads to more success as well.

And that's the best I can do.