The Cape.

When I was young, in my late teens, my friends and I would get summer jobs to pay for our expenses in college. Summer was 13 weeks long and we would take the 13th week off and with $100 head up to Cape Cod for drinking, beaching and carousing.

We stayed at a place in South Dennis, a place that had seen better times, but it was fine. It had an outdoor heated pool and lax supervision. They also didn't care if seven of us piled into a kitchenette room for a week, as long as we were quiet at night which we were.

Our days were pretty simple. We'd get up early and go for a run, then hit the beach and stay all day. Even in late August the water on the Cape was in the low 60s, so that pool came in handy when we wanted a dip, though we were brave enough and scared enough at being considered a sissy that we swam for hours in the ocean as well.

The rest of our days were divided neatly in three. Try to pick up girls, playing "home run derby" with a wiffle ball and bat in the parking lot and finding beer and sub sandwiches.

One summer we struck out completely in the girl department. There seemed to be no one our age, or every one our age was with their parents or we just couldn't find anyone. We would go out walking in the evening, pretending we were Dylan Thomas in "Just Like Little Dogs," our hair curly and roughly handsome from the sea. We came home one night to the hotel and the night clerk asked if we had "struck out in Snatch Alley."

That made us laugh that we were staying at a place called Snatch Alley. Especially since to our eyes there was very little snatch about.

I returned to the Cape this weekend with my wife, two daughters and one daughter's boyfriend. The Cape hasn't changed much in 35 years. Some wise people have kept Route 6, the main highway down to one lane each way, and that's kept development away.

I am staying at the nicest place on the Cape, or nearly so. I have seen no signs of Snatch Alley.

The tyranny of the rational mind.

I am in the midst of a pro-bono project for The School at Columbia University, a middle school that operates under the auspices of Columbia University. Somehow, the director of admissions of the school got Milton Glaser to design and illustrate a poster for the school. I was asked to work with Glaser and work on the copy. Our efforts--an early version--are above.

Now we are hearing from our client that the poster is "too young" to represent grades 6, 7 and 8. Not sophisticated enough.

Rationally, she might be right. Maybe it's too whimsical. Maybe the colors aren't limbic enough.

But I kinda like it.

America, 2011.

I'm in Chicago and they asked to pat down my hair.

Dick Wimmer, 1936-2011.

There's was an obituary in "The New York Times" on Tuesday that's worth considering. It told the story of a writer called Dick Wimmer, "Whose Persistence Got Him Published." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/arts/dick-wimmer-74-irish-wine-author-is-dead.html?ref=obituaries

Wimmer was determined to be a novelist. He submitted to publishers manuscripts for 25 years. He got more than 160 rejections. He ultimately laid claim to being the "most-rejected published novelist in history.

Finally, Wimmer got published in 1989.

I think about Wimmer because I believe seeing creative or creativity through is never easy. It takes stamina, heart, persistence. Talent and creativity alone are not enough.

I often say I know what Muslim heaven is like.
Whenever I create something we go through 72 versions.
Bad joke.

Giving up trying is the surest route to failure.

How it used to be.

While I'm on the subject of my early days in the business, I thought I'd trip down memory lane and tell you what it was like in 1980 to work in catalog advertising in the days before computers.

One of the jobs as a copywriter was to talk to the buyers and find out what items were meant to go on a page and which should be featured. You would take that information and then have to do something called a "paste-up." You would take a large piece of oaktag with safety, trim and bleed delineated on it in black dotted lines and paste scrap art in place onto the oaktag.

Traffic would collect your paste-up, log it into the system and deliver it to your art director who would--magically--turn it into a tissue layout. The art director I worked with most often was an old Scotsman, Angus MacLennan. He could turn out a layout literally in seconds.

The art director would also draw rectangles where your headline and body copy would go. We seldom knocked out copy because it was more precarious if something should change.

The layout would then be taken by traffic to a type guy. He would measure the rectangles and tell you how many lines of copy you got and how many characters per line. A typical copy box might be 7 lines at 44 characters.

Then the traffic person brought the spec-ed layout back to you and you had to write the copy to spec. You would write it on a special piece of copy paper that had lines counted out on one axis and characters on the other. You'd draw a line down the page so you didn't write wide.

Then your copy and layout would go to editorial who would check your copy against the info pages the buyer provided. If everything was ok, the whole thing would go to the typesetters who would re-type everything you typed. In a day or so, they'd get a "velox" of the type and a paste-up man would put the type into the layout.

Meanwhile, the art director had shot the merch and gotten chromes back from the studio.

Finally, the whole thing would come together and they'd make a 600-page catalog that much of the nation used for toilet paper.

Some thoughts on Advertising Schools.

When I was a kid in the business I worked as a copywriter for Bloomingdale's. I literally wrote and produced maybe 15 ads a week. I was with Bloomingdale's for two years. 100 weeks X 15 ads = 1,500 ads.

Before I worked at Bloomingdale's I wrote catalog copy for a shoe company. I probably produced 100 pages a year. Again I was there two years. So I produced 200 pages.

In short, by the time I got my first agency job, I had produced something like 2,000 pages of ads.

Today, kids go to four-year colleges and then often go to two years of graduate school to put their portfolios together. That's fine, I suppose if that's your thing. But to my mind, it's a bit like learning to ride a bike from typewritten instructions. You might be able to do it, but it's infinitely inferior to a hands-on experience.

This is all to say that I worry about the artificiality of our business. Kids paying a fortune to learn how to write ads that can flourish only in a client-less, Unique-selling-point-less, deadline-less universe where the only brief ever considered is "will it win an award"?

Advertising is an expensive proposition for clients. I think my agency bills me out at a rate that would make a well-heeled lawyer blush. I have to provide value for the clients who pay my way. I have to make the ads I do not a 'cost center' but a driver of value.

I'm not sure they teach that in advertising schools either.

The quintessence of dust.

One of the high points of English literature, perhaps the apotheosis of Western civilization occurs in Act II, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's Hamlet. They are words expressing the beauty, wisdom, perfection and also the fragility and emptiness of our species. They capture Hamlet forlorn and despairing:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust?

This is all to say, if you ever feel good about mankind, feel like we are purposeful, intelligent and progressing, take a minute and read some Facebook comments.

This was on the feed of Stacy, a friend of mine whose birthday was today.

What do you do when you're stuck.

Every once in a while you have an assignment due and you have no ideas. You joke for a moment that you've run out of ideas for good--a nervous joking at best. For a moment, you attempt to reassure yourself--you have three teams working on this, you can hide behind your "supervisor" title and do nothing. But this joking and your attempt at reassurance don't work. You still have no ideas.

What do you do?

You take a walk around the block.
You browse the web for a few minutes.
You kibbitz with some friends.

But still, you have no ideas. And tempus is fugiting. What do you do?

If you're a writer, there's one thing I recommend. One thing that's worked for me for nearly 30 years.

Write.

Write good old-fashioned prose. Don't try to be clever or "line-y" or anything else. Just try to write about your assignment in the simplest and clearest way you possibly can. If you are working on an assignment about motor oil, write an essay called "On the difference motor oil makes."

Start writing.

You might wind up with absolute garbage. But your brain will start synapsing, you will need to do some research and sooner or later you might trip upon something interesting.

Maybe this won't work for you. It doesn't work for me all the time, but it does work at least seven times out of 10.

It's worth a try.

Belief.

The rapture came and went with seemingly few sinners being thrust into a burning lake or otherwise wrestling with the devil. We had a few major catastrophes over the last few days, the Mississippi overflowing its banks, giant tornadoes crashing into a hospital in Missouri, but nothing out of the ordinary. In New York, we even had sunshine for the first day in weeks.

But thinking about the rapture made me think about advertising and it power, real or imagined. There are critics of our profession who say that advertising creates demand. That it makes people buy things they don't need. Sometimes, these same people declare that no one believes advertising anymore and that traditional forms of marketing communications are obsolete.

Purportedly $100 million was spent on advertising the rapture. I have to believe that that expenditure moved and convinced a lot of people who were predisposed to believe that judgment is coming. They repented their sins, arranged for pet-care and left their dishes in the sink. They believed the signs because they believed. Advertising helped them embrace what they already believed.

I think that's what advertising does best. Helps people believe more fervently what they hope to believe. My mother's generation, the kids of immigrants, believed that becoming an American meant having a certain kind of home. Waxy yellow build-up wasn't going to stand in my mother's way of being an exemplar.

Likewise, American beer advertising works because it tells out of shape layabout males that they have a chance with nubile supermodels. It works because the viewer is willing to believe the fantasy.

Many people who find sports interesting buy expensive television sets that promise to make sports more interesting.

Similarly, Apple's ads work because they let people believe that they'll be cool and creative if they buy Apple products. I don't know if any book written on an iPad will ever be half as good as The Canterbury Tales or any movie edited on a desktop will ever be as good as early Buster Keaton. But you're creative you must have a Mac even though you'll likely never publish a word or produce a movie any more elaborate than Grandma's 80th Celebration.

Yet all of us, in many different ways, buy into mythologizing. We buy beer or laptops or judgment because we want to believe in something.

I'm not sure advertising can make you believe in anything or buy anything you're not predisposed to feel favorably about in the first place.

We don't create belief. We appeal to it.

How we spend our time.

Most of what happens today in an advertising agency has virtually nothing to do with advertising.

We are so busy creating data visualizations that depict how different communications are meant to work together in a seamless ecosystem, that we spend virtually no time actually creating communications.

We are so busy ceding control to consumers, so busy plotting user "experiences," so busy creating testing archetypes that we seem to have forgotten what advertising is meant to do: that is, make a promise to a consumer.

A look at the trade press that distributes creative awards and recognition the way the US Army once distributed small-pox infected blankets to native Americans, is revealing. Last week, the Barbarian Group won accolades for creating a new "Don't Walk" sign for New York City streets. It was creative, I suppose. But it wasn't advertising.

As an industry, we have either forgotten what we're supposed to do or we've grown embarrassed by it.