Baseball season opens today. A couple weeks too early if you're a traditionalist as I am and, this season anyway, the weather agrees with me. It's 40-degrees and rainy in New York and they're predicting snow tomorrow, hardly baseball weather.
When my brother and I were little our world revolved around the Yankees. We didn't live all that far from the stadium, a fifteen minute drive if traffic was light and we had men like Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra and Elston Howard to idolize. In those days things weren't licensed like they are today. So we made our own "Yankee" shirts. I think all my brother's t-shirts had a magic-marker written "7" on the back for Mantle and mine had "16," signifying Ford.
CBS, the television network owned the Yankees in those more civil pre-Steinbrenner days and on their New York station on opening day, they played the movie "Pride of the Yankees" starring Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig and Teresa Wright as his beautiful and intelligent wife.
The problem was, CBS aired the movie at 9 and that was our bedtime. These were pre-VCR days. We were out of luck, but undaunted.
The next day we wrote a letter to CBS saying how unfair it was to play to movie past our bedtimes. A few days later we got a phone call from someone at the network. He invited us down to Black Rock, CBS's 6th Avenue headquarters for a private screening.
There, my brother and I sat on either side of an old film projector in a small projector room and watched the flick. A cigar-smoking projectionist would come in, say "hiya fellas" and change the reels every 30 minutes or so when they were done. They even gave us Yankee caps, a box of popcorn and a pepsi.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Accenture's year-long review.
Accenture has been looking for a new agency now--an official search, for more than a year.
One of the smartest guys I ever worked with was an account guy running the business end of an account on which I was the creative director. He eventually left the agency business and became a big marketing muckamuck at a major financial services company.
When his business was up for review I called him to chat. I said, "Fred, how do you pick an agency." I'll never forget how he answered.
"George, what I've found is the work from all the agencies is pretty much the same. Basically you choose based on who you want to have to spend a shit-ton of pressurized hours with. Who gives you a proper vibe."
Therein lies Accenture's difficulty in finding an agency.
You pick agencies, or should, on human attributes. And they can't understand human attributes. They are consultants.
One of the smartest guys I ever worked with was an account guy running the business end of an account on which I was the creative director. He eventually left the agency business and became a big marketing muckamuck at a major financial services company.
When his business was up for review I called him to chat. I said, "Fred, how do you pick an agency." I'll never forget how he answered.
"George, what I've found is the work from all the agencies is pretty much the same. Basically you choose based on who you want to have to spend a shit-ton of pressurized hours with. Who gives you a proper vibe."
Therein lies Accenture's difficulty in finding an agency.
You pick agencies, or should, on human attributes. And they can't understand human attributes. They are consultants.
George Tooker, 1920-2011.
I go to art museums with some regularity, but I'll be the first to admit I had never heard of George Tooker, whose obituary ran in yesterday's "The New York Times." It was their headline that caught me "Painter Capturing Modern Anxieties." You can read the death notice and see a slide show of Tooker here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/arts/design/george-tooker-painter-capturing-modern-anxieties-dies-at-90.html?hpw
The Times said his painting's "haunting images of trapped clerical workers and forbidding government offices expressed a peculiarly 20th-century brand of anxiety and alienation."
I think that's something most people--and certainly most of us in advertising--can relate to.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Something I miss.
I always, since I started in advertising, did a lot of print. In fact, if I didn't worry about making money and moving up within agencies, I would have been happy being a print copywriter.
There was something special about print before digital came around. Something more careful somehow. Primarily I think this had to do with what was a cumbersome process of setting and getting type and making sure it looked good and fit in the ad. A last minute client change meant a mechanical artist had to go into the repro type and with the writer sitting over his shoulder, had to construct words out of the type that was already there. This was dangerous. Because type was simply glued onto mechanicals in those days. If you monkeyed with it, it could fall off along the way and you'd really be in a pickle.
What I miss--in addition to the labor I described above--is that the door closed on things. Things were done.
I can't help but feeling that in our digital age--in which changes can be made with such ease, we actually make more changes. And many of those changes which we can now so easily make are done at the whim and caprice of someone either without the confidence and/or brains to resist making changes for changes sake.
Well, it ain't never coming back.
But I miss it.
There was something special about print before digital came around. Something more careful somehow. Primarily I think this had to do with what was a cumbersome process of setting and getting type and making sure it looked good and fit in the ad. A last minute client change meant a mechanical artist had to go into the repro type and with the writer sitting over his shoulder, had to construct words out of the type that was already there. This was dangerous. Because type was simply glued onto mechanicals in those days. If you monkeyed with it, it could fall off along the way and you'd really be in a pickle.
What I miss--in addition to the labor I described above--is that the door closed on things. Things were done.
I can't help but feeling that in our digital age--in which changes can be made with such ease, we actually make more changes. And many of those changes which we can now so easily make are done at the whim and caprice of someone either without the confidence and/or brains to resist making changes for changes sake.
Well, it ain't never coming back.
But I miss it.
The Einstellung effect,
I read an article in "The New York Times" this morning that mentioned something called the Einstellung effect. This is basically our predisposition to solve a new problem in ways that we have solved previous problems--regardless of whether or not simpler methods of solving that problem are available.
Like most everything else, this makes me think of advertising.
Where we focus on what's done before and amend it. Where we rely on the tried and true. On best practices rather than next practices.
I'm on deadline this morning. Working on the Einstellunging of some new spots. I gotta go.
Like most everything else, this makes me think of advertising.
Where we focus on what's done before and amend it. Where we rely on the tried and true. On best practices rather than next practices.
I'm on deadline this morning. Working on the Einstellunging of some new spots. I gotta go.
Monday, March 28, 2011
The woman loved fish sticks.
I don’t think you can imagine the pressure if you weren’t there, if you didn’t live through it. If you weren’t—pardon the excess—present at the creation. It was crushing. Soul-sapping. Non-stop.
Here’s the “back-story.”
When we were a junior team, my partner Craig and I had somehow sold a spot to the Gorton’s Frozen Fish people that featured a fish stick playing chess with Death like in Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.” You can read about it here: http://adaged.blogspot.com/2007/07/ingmar-and-me.html
We outdid ourselves, Craig and I did, and even got the famously reclusive Swede to direct our spot.
You can imagine the fanfare, the success, the raises, promotions and awards we accumulated. We were drunk on our own power. How do you follow something like that up?
They said we couldn’t. But we did. First for our “Uncovering a Better Fish Stick” campaign which we shot with the beautiful and sultry stripper Bettie Page.http://adaged.blogspot.com/2008/12/bettie-page-1923-2008.html
We followed that award-winning spot with a campaign Gorton’s “Signature” Fish Sticks, where we did a spot featuring the great John Updike. http://adaged.blogspot.com/2009/01/john-updike-1932-2009.html
What now? Three award winning campaigns. And now our boss was breathing down our necks wanting more.
Five straight weeks of late nights and weekends had yielded us nada. Oh, we came up with great spots, of course we did. But nothing worthy of Gorton’s and their new “Giant” fish sticks. “These say big,” I said to Craig, tossing another sheaf of tissues into the trash bin. “They say big, they don’t say giant!”
Craig hit it. Or rather lightning hit Craig. “Giant! Starring Liz Taylor. We recreate the scene at the end where she waves goodbye to James Dean, only we have her wave goodbye to a Gorton’s fish stick!”
“Criminy!” I ejaculated. “That’s it.”
Craig and I quickly got on the blower with Liz’s people and in just a few hours the spot was sold through to Liz and Mr. Gorton himself.
Liz was a doll to work with. Took direction like well-trained golden retreiver. And at the end of the shoot, she gave us each a small diamond—a chip off the 66-carat one Burton (the cad) gave her. A small token of remembrance.
I’ll miss the violet-eyed beauty. Heck, I already do.
Most of what is wrong with the world in one quotation.
I was just now flipping through the digital edition of "The New Yorker" when I ran across an ad for James Gleick's new book, "The Information." The book is currently on my night table, likely the next thing I read if something else pressing doesn't knock it down a peg.
In any event, to the "blurb" I found in an ad for the book, I am struck by the phrase "sexily theoretical." That hits me as wrong.
What makes something sexy is not the theory behind it, rather, it's the promise--no matter how prolonged--of consummation. A letch does not see a lap dancer as "theoretical."
Likewise, nice girls don't get theoretical on their first dates.
I guess my point is obtuse in its simplicity. Theory is not sexy, or shouldn't be. Only the visceral, that which you can one day touch and experience is sexy. By calling theory sexy we elevate and extol that which is only meant to be a passage onto something real.
Living off your hump.
I was watching, studying actually, Alec Guinness in the early 1980s mini-series, "Smiley's People." It hardly matters that the plot was Byzantine--inscrutable even, watching Guinness and his "gift of quiet," is to watch genius at work. He conveys more with a glance or a twitch than lesser actors do with a speech.
One phrase in the mini-series hit me. It came from an associate of Guinness' character, George Smiley, who was urging Smiley to drop a case, to go back into retirement. "George," he says, "it's time to live off your hump."
Living off his hump is something Smiley can't do. He cannot go gently into that goodnight. Instead, with persistence and resolve, Smiley moves slowly and inexorably forward. Finding loose ends and knitting them together. Smiley is obviously old. He doesn't have the energy he once had--he lays down and naps now and again, but nothing stops his forward motion.
Living off our hump is something we in advertising should never, can never do either. We are only as good as our last assignment, our last commercial. Our next assignment doesn't care what our last accomplishment was. The same goes for agencies, too. They cannot live off their humps, either. Nobody cares about a campaign done four years ago.
Of course, there are those who seem to pull it off--living off their humps. The people with a Titanic attitude and a minnow in the engine room. Living off the fumes of something they said they were going to do, or something they almost did, or something an agency they once worked at did.
Sooner or later though, the great scorekeeper reads your tally. There are the workers and the blowhards. As the great Grantland Rice wrote a century or so ago:
"For When the One Great Scorer
comes to write against your name,
He writes – not that you Won or Lost
but How You Played the Game."
What are you doing now?
One phrase in the mini-series hit me. It came from an associate of Guinness' character, George Smiley, who was urging Smiley to drop a case, to go back into retirement. "George," he says, "it's time to live off your hump."
Living off his hump is something Smiley can't do. He cannot go gently into that goodnight. Instead, with persistence and resolve, Smiley moves slowly and inexorably forward. Finding loose ends and knitting them together. Smiley is obviously old. He doesn't have the energy he once had--he lays down and naps now and again, but nothing stops his forward motion.
Living off our hump is something we in advertising should never, can never do either. We are only as good as our last assignment, our last commercial. Our next assignment doesn't care what our last accomplishment was. The same goes for agencies, too. They cannot live off their humps, either. Nobody cares about a campaign done four years ago.
Of course, there are those who seem to pull it off--living off their humps. The people with a Titanic attitude and a minnow in the engine room. Living off the fumes of something they said they were going to do, or something they almost did, or something an agency they once worked at did.
Sooner or later though, the great scorekeeper reads your tally. There are the workers and the blowhards. As the great Grantland Rice wrote a century or so ago:
"For When the One Great Scorer
comes to write against your name,
He writes – not that you Won or Lost
but How You Played the Game."
What are you doing now?
Saturday, March 26, 2011
While I was on the West Side.
Of course I stopped into Zabar's, perhaps the greatest delicatessen, food and housewares emporium in the world. I've been stopping into Zabar's for nearly 40 years and during that time the store has constantly expanded--both its size and what it offers--and constantly gotten better. http://www.zabars.com/
You can learn a lot about marketing from going into Zabar's. You can really see how--from an integration point of view it all works together.
First, you have a strong brand. A brand that has been consistent and consistently innovative for more than half a century. Then you have the store itself. They constantly "broadcast" specials over the loud speakers. These, because they are targeted, well-written and timely. These "broadcast" announcements are enhanced by "print." In this case, hand-written signs that describe the delicacies being sold. Then come the little tables with people handing out samples. Sampling drives word-of-mouth. You see people and hear people smacking their lips.
My guess is Zabar's earns more per square foot than probably any store in creation. Anytime of the day or night, they're mobbed. People "advocate" for the brand in the form of carrying their shopping bags, toting their totes. I have a baseball cap with a Zabar's logo. When my father was alive, he'd drop by on every visit to the city.
Advertising isn't a complex business, though we have layers and layers of people with titles that make it so.
Part of me thinks that the best training for a career in our business might be learned from a place that sells lox.
You can learn a lot about marketing from going into Zabar's. You can really see how--from an integration point of view it all works together.
First, you have a strong brand. A brand that has been consistent and consistently innovative for more than half a century. Then you have the store itself. They constantly "broadcast" specials over the loud speakers. These, because they are targeted, well-written and timely. These "broadcast" announcements are enhanced by "print." In this case, hand-written signs that describe the delicacies being sold. Then come the little tables with people handing out samples. Sampling drives word-of-mouth. You see people and hear people smacking their lips.
My guess is Zabar's earns more per square foot than probably any store in creation. Anytime of the day or night, they're mobbed. People "advocate" for the brand in the form of carrying their shopping bags, toting their totes. I have a baseball cap with a Zabar's logo. When my father was alive, he'd drop by on every visit to the city.
Advertising isn't a complex business, though we have layers and layers of people with titles that make it so.
Part of me thinks that the best training for a career in our business might be learned from a place that sells lox.
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