Word.(s).

More and more I don't understand the world.

For about 4,000 years, since the development of the first written alphabet, humankind has written things down. That's how you keep records. That's how you can recall things. That's how you can say, "this is what I said, promised, did, saw."

Some archaeological sites in the what are now Syria or Iraq have shards of hundreds-of-thousands clay tablets. They're buried or laying around. When archaeologists had access to those regions, they began translating the writing on those tablets. They were usually records of transactions, trades, inventories or debts. 

Those things were written in media that were fairly permanent. Writing, for about 4,000 years, was a way of recording facts and statements and promises. Hammurabi's Laws, the Justinian Code, the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights are all examples of this age-old practice. 

The written word has advantages over other forms of communication. 

The word is there and easy to find. It's written and permanent. It's accessible and can be recalled. You can pick it up and put it away and pick it up again to see if you're getting what was promised. 

That used to be the function of a lot of advertising.

The confines of a printed piece and its tactility forced you the advertiser--the one making the promise--to clarify and codify things. Writing them down forced decisions, clarity and and what we would call today, "transparency." "But you said"- accountability.

Then, as an industry, advertising stopped writing things down. We let print perish.

Sure, print as a medium has all but disappeared. But we allowed writing to disappear with it. We decided it was ok to never to the hard work of figuring things out and writing it down so people knew and could refer to it over and again.

For years when I worked on IBM I asked every media person I worked with, and there were plenty, give me the digital equivalent of a double-truck with gutter. (Journalism does it.) They came back with a 300x250 banner. All but invisible and 97% of the time blocked by (b)ad blockers.

Last week, I had dinner with a bunch of my-age advertising people. As we all talked about how our agencies were doing, I did my usual thing. I said "My belief is that most people don't know what anything does anymore or why they should buy one thing over another. I work closely with CEOs and founders to help them understand what they make and sell."

One of my friends lit into me.

"Your problem, George, is you're too smart. You're too rational. No one cares anymore. They buy a feeling."

I've gotten that comment virtually every day of my 44-year career. And I don't believe it.

Just moments ago in "The Wall Street Journal," I read an article on a $1,000 wastebasket. As the saying goes, I toss nickels around like manhole covers. But I read this article and I want this thing.

I'm not looking for rational reasons why if I'm buying a can of soda. But if I'm thinking about something expensive and important, I don't want the nagging neuroses that I made a dumb or hasty decision. I want what in bygone advertising days we used to call "permission to believe." Someone will surely say that's not how Gen% or GenZ or GenJen does things today, but I don't buy that. Everybody says whatever generation is completely different, but their kids are just like they are.

In what used to be amerika, we're about to have an important election.

You know what I want from the candidates, I want a print spread in every major newspaper that says in simple language, this is what I intend to do when I'm president, these are the sort of people I will hire, this is who I will defend, who I will tax. This is what I believe. 

Politicians will do no such thing because it pins them down.

And that's the point of writing things down. To be pinned down. So you can be held to the standard of truth.

My point is simple.

We see more messages than ever. More messages that say nothing.

I'm tired of always-on marketing that's always empty.

I want a promise.

I want it in writing.

A Guest Post from Rich Siegel.

Rich Siegel and I are growing old together. As Rich writes below--in a blog post I never asked for--we met decades ago and have been friends ever since. 

Rich is good.

I've been around a lot of great creatives in my life. I've worked for six Hall-of-Famers. No one's done a campaign as laughed about and ubiquitous and shared as Rich's "ABC Yellow" campaign.

Rich and I met through blogging. His Round Seventeen is Chandler's Philip Marlow to Hammett's Sam Spade. They both do their job with inelegant efficiency. Rich, a lightweight, takes Friday's off from blogging. But outside of that, he's as stony and permanent as a Greek Kouros.

Thanks Rich. For being you.

And for the post. And for day off.

xxx

From an undated photo. 
Rich and George in the Bronx.
At play in the fields of the lord.

I read George Tannenbaum’s blog every day, that is from Monday to Friday, and the occasional times he feels compelled to chime in on a breaking news story that through some Georgian machination is related to advertising.

 

George and I are friends, more in the digital arena than the one where one agrees to meet on a Tuesday afternoon for a cuppa. In fact, to the best of my knowledge we’ve only broken bread once when he and his lovely wife Laura were passing through Los Angeles to see one of his daughters.

 

Nevertheless, I feel a closeness to George.

 

And not just because we are advertising copywriters and life doppelgangers. Consider this: we are both native New Yorkers, born a mere 3 months apart. Both from The Bronx. Both of lapsed Hebraic Seasonings. Both have two daughters. And both happily married for a long, long time.

 

In fact, when George and Laura found out about my late wife’s liver cancer they went out of their way, pulled some strings and arranged for us to have a one-on-one consult with Dr. Fong, a leading liver cancer specialist, and worldwide speaker on the topic, who worked out of City of Hope in Los Angeles.

 

It was the menschiest of menschy things he could do.

 

You can imagine how shocked I was to read one of George’s posts last week when from deep in the ether sphere, George wrote:

Thems’ writing words, my friend.

 

When I showed this to Ms. Muse, she mused (that’s her job), and suggested I write a retort. I went one better and said ,”No, I’ll demand equal time to contest that scurrilous contention and request an opportunity to refute my alleged stubbornness.”

 

Stubborn? Me? How am I stubborn.

 

Do you mean because I refuse to sleep with a top sheet. And haven’t for a good 66 years and 7 months? And find all unnecessary bed linen-age to be excessive and disruptive? No, I thought, that’s personal and George knows nothing about my lifelong top sheet abhorrence.

 

Perhaps George was referring to my bull-headed obsession with Donald Trump. As well as my compulsive need to “burn” him, cryptically and non-cryptically, in the public arena of social media. I don’t see that as stubborn as much as I see it as a relief valve for the synapses that are still firing but are no longer getting paid to pimp brown sugar fizzy water, underpowered SUV’s and overpriced men’s toiletries via Dollar Shave Club.

 

Bear with me, I think I’m getting closer.

 

Advertising, that must be it.

 

Ironically enough George is good friends (IRL) with Rob Schwartz my former TV writing partner and colleague at Chiat/Day. Rob can speak with a certain authority about my alleged obstination. And like all good Ad Aged blog posts it always comes back to advertising.

 

When in the gainful employ of ad making:

 

I picked apart briefs written by freshly minted college graduates who despite having no life experience would nevertheless assume they had the wherewithal to solve major brand problems.

 

I fought with account people who, having never written or art directed an ad, even a lowly disposable banner ad in their entire career, would tell me, a one-time seasoned veteran 44-year old, how to “fix” what we had created.

 

And I occasionally went toe-to-toe with CCO’s, CEO’s and even clients, in the spirited stubborn defense of work that I rightly, and perhaps wrongly, believed could have changed the playing field. Had I not engaged in a little obstinacy, there is a good chance I would have surely been destined for a dirty nursing home, laying on 75 thread count sheets and sucking on pureed chicken tetrazinni.

 

OK, I’m stubborn. But I’ll take that as a compliment.

Thanks George.
--

 

A Lesson from a Stranger. And My Father.

For the first twenty years of my advertising career, I never told anyone who my father was. 

My father, a prominent advertising person, and my mother, a prominent witch, were dead-set against me going into the ad business and did everything they could to discourage me. They did everything they could to discourage me from anything but law school.

As Maimonides once said, "that didn't work out."

In the first half of my career I kept mum about my father because I didn't want people to think I was a "Nepo-baby." That he had used his connections and lifted a finger to help me. He didn't. So I built a Maginot Line between his successful career and my career--which was a struggle to get started.

In the second half of my career I kept mum about my father because his career had blossomed so long ago it would be like a Homo Sapiens praising his Australopithecus ancestors. Or like Aaron Judge, the Yankee Slugger of today, praising Frank "Home Run" Baker, who led the American League in homers  with 11 in 1911, 10 in 1912, and a whopping 12 in 1913. By today's judgments, those numbers are almost comical. It's better off cosigning people like Baker, and maybe my father, too, to Comrade Nikita's "ash heap of history."

To say I had a fractured relationship with my father would be like saying j.d. vance has charisma issues. As the grey-eyed, owl-holding goddess Athena said to Odysseus, "Few sons are the equals of their fathers. Most fall short, all too few surpass them.” Suffice to say, I saw the fist-side of my father more than I had wished, and never quite adjusted to the taste of full-frontal linoleum. I fell short in that. And so many other ways.

Now and again, I run across an old old-timer. As opposed to me, a mere old-timer. About once a year one of these people will ask me about my dad. It's been almost a quarter of a century since he died, and he and I have found more peace than we ever before shared when he wasn't dead, drunk or en-coma-'d.

Just yesterday my scheduled Friday post was pre-empted.

From out of the blue, I got a note from ad legend Tom Yobage on LinkedIn. I had heard of Tom. In ad circles he was well-known. However, though we had 18 connections in common (a full 25% of his total connections) we had not LinkedIn. 

I dunno what prompted Tom to write to me. But he did. And I bring you his note in toto, and a lesson he learned from my father without changing a single poignant word.

Thanks, Tom.

tomyobage@xxxxxx.com <tomyobage@aol.com>	10:32 AM (6 hours ago)
to me

George –

Many years ago, when I was a young copywriter working at Doyle Dane Bernbach on the Volkswagen account, late one night my TV producer Jim de Barros and I were flying west when we met your father on the plane.

Those were the glory days in advertising.  Full 15% commissions.  We flew first class.

Your father, Jim, and I were the only ones sitting upfront.  We quickly learned we all worked in advertising.

Jim and I were heading west to meet up with DDB art director Charlie Piccirillo. We were over-the-top with enthusiasm.  We were about to shoot a network TV spot.  A full :60.  Big budget.  Famous name director.

Your father said he was Chairman of Kenyon & Eckhardt. Said he was on his way to a big Lincoln Mercury dealer meeting/convention.

“Oh, are you going to present a new campaign?” asked Jim.

“No. Something more important,” said your father.  His goal, he said, was to have the Lincoln Mercury dealers stay with their current campaign -- and not ask for a new one.

Your father said the current Lincoln Mercury campaign was a rarity.  Something really special: The client loved it. The agency was proud of it.  And it was working with car buyers.

He said conventional wisdom in Detroit was:  new model year = new advertising campaign. 

But, he said, before you throw out a campaign that’s pleasing the client, pleasing the agency, and working with consumers --- you should look very carefully at what you have that’s working so well for you before you replace it with something new, something you’re doing just for the sake of doing something new.

A few years later, I moved on from VW --- and created campaigns for cameras, copiers, breath fresheners, antiperspirants, frozen entrees, gasoline, motor oil,  airlines, typewriters, computers, and tater tots. (I stayed at Doyle Dane Bernbach forever.)

Not often, but every once in awhile, I’d hear a client say:  “Great campaign, Tommy.  What are you going to do for us next year?”

But why change a campaign that both client and agency like and that’s working?  I always thought of your father and used the arguments he outlined that night on the plane. They always made perfect sense to me. Sometimes I’d win. Sometimes I’d lose.  But I always used your father’s thinking.

That night on the plane, your father taught me one of the most important lessons in advertising.

-

Thanks, Tommy.

For teaching me something I didn't know about my father.

 

Decisions.

The article above from last week's Wall Street Journal really gave me pause. And I'll tell you why.

It's about mechanizing decision-making. 

Which I think is impossible.

Because I think calculating the calculus of decisions is the hardest thing on earth and no one quite understands why people do what they do and when they do it and so on.

No one understands how decisions are made. Though everyone claims they do. As Matthew Cobb wrote in his book, The Idea of the Brain," "As to the human brain, with its 90 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses and its billions of glia (these figures are all guesstimates), the idea of mapping it to the synapse level will not become a reality until the far distant future."

Yet, we have whole agencies spieling their clients silly saying they can use data to great effect. (How come I can't think of one instance where it's worked on me? Or one time when I've seen it work?)

Advertising and marketing have tried to make sciences out of decision making and understanding the motivations and the complex processes of why someone chooses to buy something or try something or like something or switch to something. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to formalize our understanding of such complexity, but I'm not sure that anyone actually takes the time to understand the very complexity of the complexity they're trying to understand. 

In breaking down how people make decisions, we reduce the variables to a size we can understand, decrease our understanding along the way. It's hubris to think we can understand anything. The human brain consists of something like one-hundred-trillion synapses. Do we really know which leads to which and why we like one thing over another?

Can we ever?

Right now, I'm about three-quarters of the way through Ian Frazier's new book, "Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough". Wall Street Journal review here. 
New York Times review here.

If you grew up when and where I did--born in the late 1950s in the fourth largest city in New York, Yonkers, abutting the Bronx, the near death of the Bronx was a big story, maybe the biggest.

A million decisions led to the devastation of the borough. Not one of them was intentional. In most cases, decisions were made without people even realizing they were making decisions--or that decisions can have vast and unpredictable unintended consequences.

Many attribute the devastation of the borough to the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway. The decision to build that road was made in the hopes of speeding traffic to white suburbia.

Instead, it displaced upwards of 40,000 families. The road bisected the borough and wound up being most expensive road ever built anywhere. The 6.5-mile highway cost almost $2 billion to build, that's $4,800 an inch or about $58,000 a foot. The consequent loss of Bronx population was jaw-dropping in magnitude. During the 1970s, south of the Expressway, the borough lost 47-percent of its population.

Frazier writes, "People left the Bronx and so did jobs. The radio and the phonograph had put the piano factories out of business. Consumers stopped buying iceboxes when gas and electric refrigerators took over, so the icebox factories had closed... The garment industry began to leave, and what had been 354,000 garment center jobs in New York in 1948 declined to 150,000 jobs by 1984.... Moving the main port facilities to New Jersey erased thousands of longshoremen’s jobs in New York...

"...The Regional Plan’s recommendation that New York City get rid of its factories proved all too achievable. Just in the Bronx, the number of factories went from 2,000 to 1,350 between 1958 and 1974...

"How many jobs left New York City in the 1960s and ’70s is hard to say. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, New York City lost 660,000 jobs in just seven years in the sixties. Other sources estimate the loss at half a million jobs between the late forties and the mid-seventies....

"...Between 1934 and 1962, 98 percent of government-backed homeowners’ loans went to borrowers who were white."

Again, decisions set these events in motion. Ostensibly benign decisions. No one "decided" to destroy millions of lives and cause tens of thousands of fires and destroy billions in property. Those things happened based on decisions that had nothing to do with consequent occurrences.

I think most decisions unfold that way. Not that they're all disastrous. Just that they're all unpredictable. 

You make a decision.

You think and plan.

Then stuff happens.

Often unpredictable and uncontrollable.

We can pretend we know which way the wind blows. You don't need a weatherman for that.

But we're probably wrong.

That's life.

 

Advantage.

Many years ago when I was barely into my first year of my twelve years on the IBM account, when I was just beginning to understand what IBM did and what they offered, I was working closely with the most senior art director on the account.

S, I'll call her, was very intimidating.

She was fully in the club with the people at the very top of the IBM/Ogilvy creative heap, and I was a newcomer, pushed off into the deep-end with very little guidance other than "sink or swim."

If you're a ball-player and you move up a notch, to a level of competition sterner than you ever faced before, you have to find a way not to think too much. You have to find a way to redouble your efforts and trust in what got you in that position in the first place. If it's your hitting ability, as it usually is, you have to use your eye, your brain and your swing and try to, as much as possible, set how intimidated you feel aside. You have to wait for your pitch and swing.

When I transitioned from baseball to running, I learned much the same lesson. My bone structure is not like that of really good runners, but I was a really good runner--decent anyway. Even though at my thinnest I was never smaller than 6'2" and 185-pounds. Classic distance runner build for men is two-pounds per inch of height. So, at 6'2", I should have weighed 148 pounds.

When I was racing I couldn't keep up with those sylphs. Even to try to made no sense. But when one of them would run by me I'd just decide to go along with them as if we were tied together with elastic bands. I'd hold on as long as I could--usually to the finish line by doing what I do, that is running, and not thinking.

The same held true for me when I was working with S. I was in way over my head but tried to do what I do and keep pace. I relied on my swing, my stubbornness and my years of practice that had gotten me to this point.

Early when I was working with S, I wrote a line of copy--not a headline, a line of body copy. One of hundreds of lines I had written. It read "Technology is a business advantage."

S immediately called me from her office in Paris. "That's fucking great." I didn't even realize it when I wrote it. S forced me to think about it and eventually I saw the saliency of what I had writ. The reason you buy something in the first place--that something does something for you that makes it worth it.

Two decades later when I got shit-canned by Ogilvy though no one there could write like I do and they decided they didn't need writers, I was already 62.

The ad industry isn't clamoring for cranky 62-year-old copywriters with arrogant appraisals of their own value. I therefore said to myself, "If I am ever going to work again, I have to find a way to position myself. I have to make myself "lust-after-able."

I didn't have far to go. 

I went to that phone call with S from back in the year 2000. And I wrote on my LinkedIn, my Twitter and my website, "Good writing is a business advantage.™"

In terms of great lines and the "fearful symmetry" great lines often possess (apologies to William Blake) my line didn't measure up to my favorite tagline of all-time, Ammirati's line for UPS: "We run the tightest ship in the shipping business." It was not as good as Federal Express' line penned by Patrick Kelly at Ally & Gargano, "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight." And it was nowhere nearly as good as Chiat\Day's line for Apple in all its distinct and ungrammatical splendor, "Think different."

But "Good writing is a business advantage™" is better than 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999-percent of taglines written by other copywriters ever since the world began, simply because roughly  99.999009999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999-percent of all copywriters (and creative people in general, and agencies, too, and certainly holding companies) don't bother to position themselves in a memorable or distinctive way.

Last week I went out to dinner with a bunch of advertising creatives of my vintage. Chinese.

I still couldn't shake something I had written about two weeks ago. That BBDO's office in New York employs just 300 people. I asked the people I was with how many people they thought BBDO employed.

Predictions ranged from 1000 to 2,500.

But it's 300. At least according to "Advertising Age," the erstwhile trade journal.

My guess is that in getting to 300 employees from a high of 2,000, about 200 creatives have been fired along the way. If you're reading this and you're a freelancer, that means you have more competition than you ever imagined. And virtually everyone of those competitors will cut his or her price to get the job, which will force you to do the same.

That sucks. To be at the mercy of others for your own sanctity. Whatever sanctity means.

I don't know what happened to our industry. 

Why we no longer think in terms of what makes a Nissan different from a Mazda or a Whopper different from a Big Mac or Jamaica different from the Bahamas.

Alex Murrell not long ago wrote a great essay called "The Age of Average."  About the sameification of everything. I shared it with two dozen friends and four dozen clients.

Everyone tsks and shakes their heads. 

No one says, "I'm doing that to myself."

Not marketers. Not creatives. Not agencies. Not holding companies. 

No one's made the effort to do what third-graders do when their choosing sides for a kick-ball game. 

Make themselves stand out so they get picked.

In other words, standing out is a business advantage.™

A Guest Post by Andrew Joliffe. The Eminent Andrew Joliffe.

Andrew Jolliffe and I have been friends from afar for a couple of decades now. Though we never worked together while we were at Ogilvy together (Andrew in Paris, me in New York) Andrew was something of a legend.

Often when the Paris office did something special, you'd later find out that Andrew's name was attached. I admired Andrew like everyone else did. He was regarded by many as one of the best--if not the best--of all of the very good Ogilvy manifesto-izers. (Back when Ogilvy was still guiding brands, not doing stunts, the agency used manifestos to set a course for clients. To guide them for years, if not decades. The purpose of a manifesto wasn't pomposity or ego, it was defining a platform that could last for years)

I asked Andrew some weeks ago if he had any inclination to write in this space. Late last week he came across with this gem of a piece.

It might be more poetry than post. A higher standard.

Andrew is a rare bird, and a prized one. He's about the most erudite--and funniest--ad guy around. And maybe the nicest.

Enjoy his:

 

GUT FEELINGS.

 

A million thanks, George. Hope this makes the mark.  

 

Around us, political factions shift towards the brink of self-annihilation. And yet the sun is shining. So far, this year has been a year and a half.   I’ve written from the heart and for the wallet. Cartoons of Normandy lobsters toasting freedom with vintage champagne and adolescent mermaids experimenting with their first makeup. Films starring trembling, multicoloured dragons, talking figs and swirling watercolours of Robin Hood. Essays on the collective power of a thousand human minds. Stories of Victorian gem-hunters, and our mental awareness at temperatures of minus forty degrees.  Poems about how morning train rides make happy minds, and the unbreakable bond between pearls and tears. Rhymes adorned with wild flowers and iridescent bees.

 

Better still, this isn’t some sort of martini-induced fantasy. I’ll leave you to imagine what happens in those. This is real work. It’s for brands. And it got bought. And made. Yet the great world at large will never see the faintest scintilla of it. Never. And no, I can tell you no more.

 

That’s the thing about internal work. It’s a bit like watching kitten videos on TikTok or playing the lottery, more people do it than admit to. Unappealing to some because it’s not bragging fodder.  Bound in secrecy under the silver lock and key of the NDA, its mysterious subclauses and inexplicable codicils. Thanks, Evelyn Waugh.

 

And yet in a thousand ways, it’s the plasma, bedrock and vitamin B12 of all our livings. Movement, change, revolution, moments of enlightenment start from within. Fun and provoking internal things are the golden keys to any of us selling and running stuff of worth. I have this itchy feeling that many of us forget that those who pay us thrive on wonder, intrigue and  gorgeousness like we do. Sitting in offices very often drabber, browner and a tad more utilitarian than our own iced-cake havens and in a daily smog of power-points, bullet-points and action points, intelligent folk are paid to grow brands.

 

Buying lovely brand-raising  stuff while living in a daily grey is like ordering dinner in your dream Parisian brasserie - if you don’t know of one, I’d be happy to help - while not having a small intestine. It doesn’t happen. If we sat for eight hours a day in a white cube with a rubber plant and a year planner for company, what would we come up with? Maybe an image of a rubber plant checking a year planner. And we’d believe there was nothing more to say.

 

As Terence Conran said to me once, centuries ago before I was a copywriter after working on the fireworks to open the Design Museum in London, “brighten up a day, and you illuminate an outlook”. Bit dry, but I loved what he meant.

 

Sell a thought or attitude internally, and the rest will sell itself.

 

I believe that lovely internal work feeds situations that let movements  and briefs become lovely things. Like just the right amount of water, sun and wind that lets a tiny egg become a larva become a chrysalis become an iridescent blue Brazilian butterfly in a rainforest. An ecosystem so gorgeously integrated as we’re all supposed to be.

 

There again, I would say that. I do lots of it.

 

Thanks again, George.