Reporting from the Super Bowl.

Phoenix, AZ.
Ad Aged has knocked off a couple days early this week to report on the scene at Super Bowl XLII. As an homage to the use of Roman numerals, this post was to be translated into Latin, but the priest I had hired to do so decided to make-out with a twelve-year-old boy in a hot tub instead.

The steroid-hopped players as large and heavy as longhorn steers arrived earlier this week. No one in the media has asked how they got so large and what kind of pharmaceutical cocktail they've been ingesting since their tween years in Texas--the state that leads the world in executions but lags even the Democratic Republic of Congo in reading scores. Instead the press presciently pressed the players, "how does it feel?" they asked. The players responded by snorting, with braggadocio and a slurred affirmation that some supreme being is on the side of the Pats or the Giants.

Meanwhile advertising and marketing trons arrived like Roman plutofats at the trough, where they will revel in the largesse of too many too manys while their companies lose marketshare and money, but, hey, they've got a spot on Super Bowl XLII. This year, by the way, it's been discovered that all the spots running on the Big Shame are not consumer-generated like last year's but instead are computer-generated. A program selects and "mashes up" a single raised eye-brow which represents the viewer's cue to snicker, a pendulously cleavage-laden babe, two un-shaven representatives of a phantom target, a product shot, an animal and a body sound, preferably some reference to a fart.

This is all happening while America's sub-prime IQ rate drops with the government and the media vessels and vassals reporting on Heath Ledger-gate leaving fetal polar bears going under for the last time, the ice they had lived on for millions of years having finally disappeared.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one more frequently traveled by,
Paid with easy pass and did what I was told and financed a $trillion offense budget.
And that has made all the difference.

The best 30 minutes in the history of American movies.

There's a movie that no one has ever heard of, certainly the scurvy likes of you has never heard of it, that captures more of the sadness, that stasis and stultification of vigor and imagination in the technocracy of the workplace than any other movie I have ever seen. These 30 minutes include cinematic mastery, technique and intelligence and a litany of the aphorisms of the American way skewered like a chicken satay at a fat kid's Bar Mitzvah. The writing is satirical on the order of an Orwell or Swift. The acting is superb. By turns sad, comic, pathetic, riotous, depressing, mournful, uplifting.

The movie is The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, directed by Preston Sturges. You can buy it online. I can't find but one clip on YouTube and no script on line. But as they say in Yiddish, trust me.

Stupor Tuesday.

It's coming. Right after the Bud Bowl.

I'm already deadened by the politics, posturing and pusillanimity. Gad! It's just like agency life,

Once I heard a client laugh.

How many times have you presented things to clients that were funny, only to have them look at you like they were staring into an abyss, waiting with a bayonet in their backs about to be stuffed into a cattle car on their way to Treblinka?

Emotion is something clients clinically remove from their cosmology like a cardiologist scrapping plaque from a fat man's arteries. Don't laugh. Don't react. Analyze with clinical detachment in a way that consumers don't look at ads.

Years ago I presented work that made a client laugh. I stopped the meeting and said, "Remember that laugh. It's what matters." In the course of the presentation he, and my vaunted account people, tried to find every good reason to kill the work I presented. But at the end of the day, I reminded them, it made you laugh.

Planets must have been aligned that day. The work was bought. The work ran. Some permutation of that work still runs. Laughter is good. It beats gloom. Or formula. Which is what most clients find affirming.

Buying two seats at the movies.

Next time you go to the movies, buy two seats for yourself alone and leave one seat empty. Then, in that empty seat, put your intellect, put your educated self, put your discernment, your judgment, your taste, your standards, your morals.

Get up at the end of the previews and take your other self with you. Go for a cup of slave-labor-picked $4 coffee. Have a heart to heart with your other self. Ask your other self what happened to this country. How in my generation we went from Billy Wilder to Van Wilder.

How did it all go so wrong, so fast?

Scher and Scher alike.

The sameness of much of what we see on the screens that surround us is oppressive. The candidates are the same, their signage, their false promises and shrill imprecations. Movies all pick from the same pool of special effects to the exclusion of character, plot and moral. The pervasive use of stock images and words, even when "originally" shot deadens our senses. All communication becomes little more than a stringing together of cliched words, images and emotions. You go girl! The existential "APPLAUSE" sign lights and we clap like Rhesus in a lab. Give me my banana already.

Jeff Scher is an animator who sees the world differently. His work has been featured in The New York Times for about a year now--about once every two months or so. So every 60 days, in other words, I get to see, hear and maybe feel something that hasn't been folded, spindled and mutilated like cheese in a can or Americans in a Dumbmocracy.

Three minutes and twelve seconds of originality. Brother, can you spare a hundred and ninety-two seconds? Nah. Why bother? The expected, the routine is so much easier. Unfortunately, we live in the neo-dark-ages equivalent of WWI trench warfare. No movement forward. No movement backward. The threat of death if you lift your head up. O tempore, o mores.
http://scher.blogs.nytimes.com/?WT.mc_id=OP-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M012-ROS-0108-PH&WT.mc_ev=click&mkt=OP-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M012-ROS-0108-PH

A Hungarian found.

Born Endre Friedman, the world's most famous photo-journalist, reinvented himself at the age of 25 as Robert Capa. He took the pictures reprinted here and in so doing practically invented photo-journalism--at least war photo-journalism.

Capa had always assumed that hundreds and hundreds of his negatives were lost to the Nazis. Capa died, killed by a mine explosion during the early days of Viet Nam. Recently a trove of his unprocessed negatives were discovered. They are being developed and archived now.

Vita brevis. Ars longa.

You can read about it all here.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/arts/design/27kenn.html?ref=arts

Another one bites the dust.

To my knowledge, Tim Kelly's dismissal after eight months as Sprint Nextel's CMO is what will be the first of many 2008 CMO-axings. CMOs are dropping these days like pants on prom night. And no wonder, most CMOs, like Tim Kelly are attempting to solve 2008 Marketing problems with 1985 briefs.

Here's what I mean. Sprint spends $1.2 billion on advertising. Kelly oversaw Sprint's switch from agencies TBWA/Chiat/Day and Publicis & Hal Riney (an alma mater of mine) to Goodby. But Sprint's problems are not problems advertising can solve. In fact, what Chiat and Riney were doing for Sprint was fine. Even if Goodby's work were a thousand times better, Sprint's problems do not stem from advertising, or integrated marketing communications, or their tagline.

This is from Ad Age: "Last week, Sprint reported a fourth-quarter loss of 683,000 postpaid customers, those billed monthly for service and who are considered the industry's most valued." In other words, Sprint lost almost 7,500 customers a day--despite having contracts with their customers that are "Shylock-ian" in their rigidity.

No advertising can fill a "bucket" that leaks that quickly. Mr. Kelly has been canned because he was throwing money at advertising to continue to re-fill Sprint's leaking customer bucket. I've learned over the years that it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain one. Kelly's $1.2 billion of marketing spend should have been focused on treating consumers well.

Then he would still be employed.

January Haiku.

The crocus risen.
Global warming's impetus.
They know. We deny.

Heath Ledger. More important than 4,000 young men.

Nearly 4,000 young Americans have died in Iraq. The total rises most everyday. They have been pushed off the front page by Heath Ledger. Get your priorities straight or when you're tuned into another banality, more of your soul will be stolen from you.