Not getting it.

I won't say outright that I don't understand sports sponsorship. I suppose in some instances there are links between products and the sport that make sense. So slathering your company's name all over a stadium has some efficacy. Budweiser and baseball makes sense for me. I suppose Canon cameras and the Yankees add up. But Citibank and the Mets? Naw, that I can't fathom. I'm not thinking about my checking account while I'm at the ball park. And I can't for the life of me imagine saying, "I think I'll put $25K in such-and-such a bank because they sponsor a Venezuelan shortstop who can go to his left."

I just went onto the United States Tennis Association's website, I'm not sure why and listened in to about 30 seconds of US Open Tennis radio. The first commercial I heard was for Citizen's watches: "the official timekeeper of the US Open."

Now I know I'm stupid.

I always thought that one of the joys of tennis is that's it's played without a clock. In tennis (Am I getting this right?) you win when you score a requisite number of points. Time has nothing to do with it, ergo, why an official timekeeper?

Tennis having an official timekeeper is like football having an official tablecloth.

More racism from major advertisers.

My post from last Friday was about a Microsoft banner ad which was revised for Polish media in which a black man was removed and an imbecilic white model was stripped in. Just now I saw something that topped that blight--or, rather, bottomed it, in my digital issue of The New Yorker magazine.

I'm talking about an ad for international coverage from Verizon. The headline, such as it is, reads "Coverage in Mexico. And more than 220 other countries." Of course the awful test guy is featured, but in the background there are scores of Mexicans. And did you know that Mexicans aren't like you and me? Nope. According to this Verizon swill, representative Mexicans all play in Mariachi bands. Yep, there they are, dressed like the wait-staff in a third-rate resort in Playa del Cockroach. Wearing sombreros, and little monkey jackets, holding or playing instruments with the women furling their long, colorful skirts like flags. This is some cartoon characterization of Mexico. At least the Frito Bandito and Speedy Gonzales were meant to be funny. This, I presume, is meant to represent Mexico.

When Verizon runs ads overseas about service in the US, how do they depict us? Are there Hasidic Jews selling diamonds, gun-toting high school kids, watermelon eating black people playing basketball. Are there overweight, pants-suit wearing Bible thumpers and abortion-doctor-killing religious zealots? Are there defense contractors with their sleeves rolled-up, up to their elbows in innocent blood. Radical right wing haters spewing lies?

Verizon's advertising is always offensive because it is demeaning and stupid. This ad is worse than usual. It's demeaning, stupid and racist.

A new ism.

Over at AdScam (http://www.adscam.typepad.com/) George Parker has a post about a Microsoft banner ad being racist. Apparently in the Polish version of the ad a black man was exed out and a white man was photoshopped in .

Looking at these photographs I don't see a case of racism, I see a case of Grin-ism.
The client-enforced, HR-enforced, prozac-enhanced requirement that everyone in every ad is happy. Unless of course they're a heroin-addicted model.

No one in the world looks like those grinning fuck faces in the ads above. Forcing those sorts into ads is blatant grin-ism.

A bit more on ambition.

Last week it was announced that 38 years after the murderous slaughter of dozens of Viet Namese in the small village of My Lai, former Lt. William Calley expressed contrition for what he did.

Reading a NY Times editorial on this I was reminded of something a mother of one of the soldiers said to Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the story: “I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer.”

My point about ambition in my last two posts or so isn't that we shouldn't be ambitious, it's that much like our military-industrial-educational-entertainment system turned good boys into killers, the holding-company and client technocracy seem to be turning good creatives into functionaries and rationalizers.

Good ideas, if they emerge at all from agencies and clients today, are a distillate that have somehow survived thousands of pages of powerpoint, hundreds of mindless meetings, the magnified inspection of cost consultants, dozens of hours of consumer research and of course petty office politics, back-biting and GND (generalized nastiness disorder.) There was a PBS special about sharks on the other evening, and the sonorous announcer told of one sort of shark that can sense a single drop of blood amid 25 million drops of water. Sometimes it seems that clients can hone in on a single drop of creativity amid 25 million pixels. (An ex boss of mine once referred to a certain set of clients as "wit-seeking missiles.")

My point about ambition isn't that individuals, agencies or holding companies lack it. My point is that a system has emerged that seems to enforce mediocrity, like our reign in Viet Nam seem to induce horror. It's kind of like working at the Sheboygan County Fair for a summer, surrounded by bratwurst, beer and fried corn dogs while trying to lose weight. Your intentions may be noble, your will power may be stoic, but the odds are daunting. The question for agencies and holding companies is how to create a system that battles the system.

A bit of a retraction.

Earlier today I wrote about how holding companies and marketing departments have destroyed ambition. Actually, they've created its opposite. Antibition. But that's not totally true.

Cabbing home tonight I realized holding companies are extremely ambitious. In the way that banks are. If banks have a branch every eleven blocks, their ambition is to have a branch every nine blocks, then every six blocks. Their ultimate ambition of course is to have all the money in the world, to have a harem of Heidi Klum look-alikes, to live inside a dormant volcano and rule the world while never getting old.

I suppose the same can be said for advertising holding companies. They won't be happy until they own everything. Until they can control those "assets" who leave the building every day and can exercise influence over media channels so that every square inch of every bit of matter on the planet is given over to the buying and selling of crap. "This State of the Union Address is brought to you by beechwood-aged Budweiser with the cool, crisp taste that takes the edge off a failing economic system."

Ya, things are bad alright.

But let me switch gears for a second. Preston Sturges, one of America's greatest movie makers (I've written a few posts on him if you'd like to learn more) had a keen insight into the struggles of ordinary men and women who yearn to be great, who yearn to make a difference. If you can find his 1940 movie "Christmas in July," you'll see what I mean.

I thought about a passage from that flick tonight. In the scene Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell) is a young clerk who enters slogan contests in an effort to get ahead. Daydreaming about winning led him to add up some numbers incorrectly and he is being upbraided by his boss, E.L. Waterbury (Harry Hayden.)

Here's the bit:

Jimmy MacDonald: Well I... I guess it's the contest, Mr. Waterbury - the Maxford House contest. I had no idea it was hurting my work.
Mr. E.L. Waterbury: How much is the prize?
Jimmy MacDonald: The *first* prize is $25,000.
Mr. E.L. Waterbury: Unnh
[smiles ironically]
Mr. E.L. Waterbury: I used to think about $25,000 too, and what I'd do with it. That I'd be a failure, if I didn't get a hold of it. And then one day I realized that I was *never* gonna have $25,000, Mr. MacDonald.
[reflecting]
Mr. E.L. Waterbury: And then another day... uhh... a little bit later - *considerably* later - I realized something else - something I'm imparting to you now, Mr. MacDonald. I'm not a failure. I'm a success. You see, ambition is all right if it works. But no system could be right where only half of 1% were successes and all the rest were failures - that wouldn't be right. I'm not a failure. I'm a success. And so are you, if you earn your own living and pay your bills and look the world in the eye. I hope you win your $25,000, Mr. MacDonald. But if you shouldn't happen to, don't worry about it. Now get the heck back to your desk and try to improve your arithmetic.

I think my point here is pretty simple. Life and the business kind of sucks. Or, maybe, it sucks a whole helluva lot. But stick to your guns, do the best you can do under the circumstances, keep trying, keep pushing. In crappy times that's ambition. It may not be what you want, but it beats the alternative.

PS. Included here is a five minute clip from "Christmas in July." Not the one I quoted above, but good nonetheless.

Being cursed.

An older friend and I were having a conversation. This friend, who at one time in his life had often succumbed to a well-turned ankle, was telling me that he was settled now, no longer susceptible to the allure of flesh. His exact words to me were, "The trumpets of lust have quieted."

I am reading now a book by the late, great David Halberstam that he wrote about JFK's administration and the hubris that nearly destroyed the US by embroiling us in Viet Nam. It's called "The Best and the Brightest" and one of the many Plutarchian portraits in the book is of Averell Harriman. An aide of Harriman's was once asked "What makes Averell different from other men?" The aide responded "Well, he's the only ambitious seventy-seven-year-old I've ever met."

It occurs to me that perhaps the worse curse you may visit upon someone is "may you remain ambitious." There's no room for ambition in advertising today. Against the machine-like hegemony of massive holding companies and massive client "marketing" structures.

I suppose straying afield from advertising into America itself, the dreams of upward mobility, of health, hearth and happiness seem further removed than ever. After all, as Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman pointed out in an op-ed in last Sunday's Times, "To be sure, the wealthy benefited enormously [from "Reaganomics]: the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third its growth over the previous 27 years." In other words your potential for economic advancement is roughly 1/35th as great as the already mega-wealthy.

Which is why ambition today consists of attempting to win at the lottery, play in the NBA, win America's Next Top Model or some such or American Idol. Ambition for teens consists of SAT coaching and taking up the oboe so they can get into a elite university and settle into lifestyles less accomplished than their parents'. Ambition in advertising consists of doing fake ads, 32 second spots for Scrabble or pro-bono ads that never run, so you can get a better job yet still be rendered superfluous at 50.

Ambition is futile against such odds and leaves me coining this slogan:

"Give up and live."

The first and last Ad Aged circumcision tagline contest.

I've written a couple of posts of late about circumcision. Each of those posts have generated a fair bit of conversation. So I thought I'd keep that conversation going by starting a circumcision tagline contest.

There are no rules.

You can be for or against circumcision. Or both.
You can enter as often as you like.
I am entering too.
I am the judge.

Here are my entries to date:

PRO:
Circumcise. Circumwise.

ANTI:
It's your schlong, keep it long.

This might get a bit woolly.

I see the world, at times, in a Manichean manner. That is, there are forces of evil and good and they are in a constant struggle for the soul of mankind and the fate of humanity. Well, maybe I'm not that absolute, but you get the idea.

In the past, I've always believed that you could divide agencies, clients and even people into two categories. There are the "Yes, we cans" and there are the "No, we can'ts." You don't have to be at an agency long to determine which attitude impels your agency.

Now I'm adding to that dichotomy. There is another way to segment the world. There are those who feel talent is a value vs. those who believe talent is a cost. Right now I am battling against my own internal Maslowian need for security and fighting myself. I am being wooed by an agency that seems--at least it seems their HR people feel this way--that talent (i.e. me) is an expensive drain on the company. I am feeling the opposite of welcomed.

I have been working for a long time, supervising people, running groups or agencies. I've been a dad for over two decades. The only time I really ever get pissed at people who work for me or my daughters is when they say something equivalent to "Well, I guess I'm just lucky to have a job." Words to that effect are self-deprecating and destructive.

I don't want to work at a place that seems to want to put me in that vassal position--regardless of how shitty the economy is.

For now, I suppose in the twilight of my career, I am unwilling to accept that this is the twilight of my career. I still believe whatever I ask for I am worth it and then some.

And recession or not, I'm not giving up on that belief.

Pursuant to my circumcision post.

Check out this "clipping." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/health/policy/24circumcision.html?em

Logos 'R' us.

Since creating logos seems like it is today's au courant substitute to actually having an idea, I guess the "service" below was inevitable. An online service to "create a unique, lasting brand for your business."

http://www.logomojo.com/logo_mojo/bnr_LM_PACK_FINAL_v2.html

There is so much wrong with the logo-ization of brands that I'm not exactly sure where to begin. But let me start here. A brand is not defined by a logo. A brand is defined by the way it acts and the way it serves. The nazis had a great logo as did world communism. Those brands have fabulous marques, systems and branding, but who wants to do business with them?

Logos, and as James Thurber wrote, "you could lookit up," developed as signs in preliterate societies so people could recognize a business or, more likely, a tavern.
In and of themselves they have no meaning.

Maybe I am so anti-the-logoization of our business because the dopes who create logos are the biggest arses in the world. Both reductionist and masturbatory in their use of logic to explain why the logo works--why it makes sense. "The bird flying off to the right means freedom" for a logo on a maximum security extraordinary rendition facility.

You get the idea.