It is what it is.

Last night during the Olympic 100 Meter Women's Breast Stroke, there was a official's error at the start, and one American swimmer, responded to an errant tone and jumped in the water at the wrong time.

Then, a couple of minutes elapsed before the race went off for real during which the officials rejiggered their devices and made sure everything was now in apple-pie order. After those minutes, the chime chimed and the swimmers swam their race.

The swimmer who mistakenly dived in finished, I think, fifth. Her American team mate finished with the Silver. Afterwards the pair were interviewed by a suitably blonde and vapid "reporter."

Did the mishap effect you, the swimmer was asked.

"It was bad, real bad," she replied. And then she uttered it: "It is what it is."

There are many stupid things to say after a set-back or a tragedy. And most people, when rebounding from one, utter one or another banalities. But, it is what it is, perhaps, takes the cake.

It seems to me a perverted variation on the Old Testament's "I am that I am." Which, coming from Yahweh, I can understand. Or even Popeye's "I yam what I yam and I can'ts be no more."

But 'it is what it is' is so stunning in its banality. It's not nearly as good or as real as "shit happens." The worst part of it is the feeble self-help quality it embraces.

Listen. You've trained your whole life for an event. The starter fucked up. And you're left out of the money.

Can't you muster a little anger? Can't you curse the gods? Or at least the officials?

In our plasticene world we have skipped all of Kubler-Ross' stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and taken an express train to acceptance.

This is the HR-approved reaction to all miscreance and slights large and small. It is what it is.

I'm having none of it.

Adjusting vs. starting over.

I once read somewhere that the great writer Umberto Eco wrote in his personal library surrounded by his collection of some 30,000 books.

That is an extraordinary number of volumes. It's buying a book a day every day for 82 years.

Eco liked to be amid his books. And he said when he had visitors he could divide the world neatly into two. There were those who immediately asked "have you read all those books?" (An impossible task.) And those who understood that knowledge can be gained by proximity and osmosis. Eco was better because he could absorb from those volumes.

I'm thinking about this to day as I am engaged in a death battle with my client.

"Just add a sentence or two from a couple of the campaigns we didn't buy. We really liked those thoughts," they say.

They are short, these sentences, but that's not the point.

The point is I've worked extremely hard to make my scripts extremely simple. It's not the number of words that matters, it's how those words are put together. Right now, they work. If I have to add stuff, they won't work.

Because adding at this point is pulling the loose thread in a sweater. Before long, the whole thing unravels.

Sometimes I believe a good piece of copy is like a mosaic or a puzzle. Everything has to fit. There can be no leftover pieces or missing ones.

If you want more stuff in there, it's time not to adjust but to start over.

You can't just add things.

That's not the way it works.

Some people will never get it.

Where's the outrage?

Charles Blow, the brilliant op-ed columnist for "The New York Times," had an online column yesterday about the perverting and pervasive influence of big money on our elections. He titled his column "Where's the outrage?"

As a child of the 60s, of sit-ins, and Kent State and burning draft cards, of protests and riots and marching in the streets, I wonder and worry about today.

Where is our outrage?

Social media has anesthetized us.

We think if we mis-type a few words on our Facebook feeds we have done something important. We think if we wear a ribbon or a petrochemical wrist band, we have made a statement. We think if we piss and sit in a private park, we have had an impact.

We are silent, though.
We sip our $17 martinis.
We write our protests in ink across our backs or on our shoulders.
As if they have an effect.

as ee said:

Women and men(both little and small)

cared for anyone not at all

they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same

sun moon stars rain

Meeting notes.

Media, paid and unpaid.

One of the many amazing things about life in today's modern advertising agency is how little you may have in common with many of your colleagues. In fact, if you want to get right down to the nub of it, you can divide agency denizens roughly in two.

1) There are those who have had marketing communications run in paid media.
2) There are those who have never had anything run in paid media.

Not doing work for paid media seems strange to me. But so much of what we purport to do today is "meta-media." We create products, apps, ecosystems and more. We polish presentations. We buff theory to a high-gloss.

When clients spend millions to run something that something is accompanied by a huge raft of expectations and responsibilities. Your work is subject to scrutiny, accountability and pressure that I think meta-media work doesn't face.

A :30 Super Bowl spot costs roughly $5,000/frame.

There's no room for amateurs.

I'm old-fashioned.

At least two times a week some pretty little thing buttonholes me to tell me about a new app or website that "will change everything." These sites are invariably well-designed and have interesting names.

Often they promise to bring you relief from things like standing on lines. Or they are a new way to connect into a "community" of the like-minded. Or they allow you into the lives of interesting people via their tweets, comments and photos.

My first question on viewing such properties is always, yes, always the same.

How do they make money?

The response of the pretty little things is always the same as well. First, they seemed stunned. They look at me as if I suggested putting the golden arches on the Mona Lisa. Then they look back at me blankly. Finally they mutter something about selling the data they collect.

In the wake of the precipitous drops in valuation of Zynga and Facebook, when, it appears to be people smarter than I in the ways of finance are beginning to question the real worth of such binary entities, I think my question reverberates.

It seems to me that since, roughly, the first dot-com boom in 1999, we have been living through the ones and zeroes equivalent of the California Gold Rush. We meet in the 21st Century hipster saloons and trade paper marked with maps to properties that will make us rich beyond our wildest dreams.

We spend fortunes on these deeds. We commit to them. We build communities around them. And then we dig up pyrite--Fool's Gold.

If you talk to most small business people--people who have bricks and mortar to worry about, they'll tell you, almost immediately, that they're breaking even, or making money. No dry cleaner will ever tell you that he cleans and presses for free but will make his money selling his customers' data.

This, simply is a ludicrous notion.

But then again, I'm old-fashioned.

Scheduling.

There are many reasons people from my generation feel advertising is worse today than it used to be. One reason, I think, is overlooked by many.

We no longer have schedules. Or traffic people to enforce them.

But first, let me tell you a story. Some months ago a "project manager" (whatever that is) asked me how many hours I thought a particular assignment would take me. I answered honestly, though he thought I was being funny.

"It will take me ten hours if they want it good. 75 hours if they want it to suck."

In days of yore, when you got an assignment, you got a schedule of when work was due to the client. It delineated client reviews and usually gave them three rounds.

Today, clients are allowed literally dozens of rounds of revisions.

In about eight minutes I'm meant to go to a meeting to discuss why my account is (in the words of a project manager) "burning hot." Meaning why are we spending so many people-hours doing the work we're given.

To me, it seems like I am the wrong person to ask. I'm extremely diligent and extremely fast.

Ask the client.

Ask the people who think of schedules and assignments as journeys, which the destination moving ever-further away.

Filling in the .

A couple million years ago (or a few thousand if you're a creationist Republican presidential candidate) humans began getting rewards for filling in the blanks, for adding two plus two, for drawing deductions. People who could do so survived, the others were eaten. Over time, the ability to "see" things before they were apparent became hardwired into our heads.

Here's what I mean.

Say it's two-million BC and you're out for a walk alone. Thirty feet ahead of you is a boulder. You notice that the bush around the boulder is tamped down and torn up. Something must be lurking behind that boulder. You turn on your calloused heels and avoid the lion lurking behind the rock.

You are rewarded (with life) for your ability to perceive.

Now, look at Kanizsa's Triangle, above. You see, of course, two triangles where there are none. This is another example of your brain doing work--of seeing things that aren't there. Of filling in the blanks.

Over the course of human history, humans have been "rewarded" for their ability to add up things that are barely perceptible. My lion example above is just one example.

We know ads work better when they give your brain the pleasure and reward of filling in the blanks. Yet, as Bob Hoffman pointed out in a comment on this blog the other day, so many clients want their advertising to "read" like a court case.

Next, take this drawing by Klimt. It looks like nothing we have ever seen in real life. There are not creatures made of squiggles and outlines. Thankfully, our brains make it work for us.

It's both sad and frustrating that the MBAs who approve our work and so often talk down to us because we wear blue jeans, know nothing of elementary neuroscience.

Our ads become prisoners of completionists. When they should, to be effective, allow the viewer's brain to do what it is wired to do.
--
By the way, if I ever get the nerve, funding or business to re-start my agency, GeorgeCo., I will begin every creative presentation with a brief discussion of Kanizsa's Triangle. It might even become my logo. After all, it looks also like a Jewish star.

Writing.

I joined Ogilvy & Mather on July 19th, 1999. I remember this in part because just three days later I was in my office--early--and I heard bagpipes coming down the hallway. A moment later, there was an honor guard of Scotsmen. David Ogilvy had died and the agency was paying tribute.

In any event, when I arrived at Ogilvy I immediately was handed what Steve Hayden would call "a steaming pile of shit." Someone had sold a B2B campaign on IBM--three long-copy (probably 500 words each) ads on vertical topics. Then, whoever sold the campaign disappeared and there was no one to write the copy.

It was complicated stuff this copy. And long. And the ads were due overnight.

I figured out how to write them in a modular manner. Having, as they say, different ins and outs, but the same body. Thus, I was able to complete what to everyone else seemed an impossible task in about four hours.

What I had written was my first output at Ogilvy and I sent the copy to the account team with more than a little trepidation. A few minutes later I was cc'd on a note from the account guy that went to most of senior management on the IBM account.

In the note he praised my copy. Saying it was long copy in the tradition of David Ogilvy's long copy. It was lucid. Interesting. And forceful. In other words, I had hit a homerun.

I bring this reminiscence up for good reason. Not to praise my writing skill, but, instead to lament that the love of copy, the love of good writing and well-reasoned persuasion seems to have withered. As has the effectiveness of advertising in general.

Ogilvy used to be revered for its Ogilvy-style copy. Scali for its McCabeness. Ally for the words of Messner and Berger and Durfee. Ammirati for its Puris-ness and Tom Thomasosity.

There were defined styles and writers we looked up to and learned from.

Where is that today?

In 2010 there were over 325,000 titles published in the United States and 206,000 titles published in England. In the US, hundreds, maybe thousands of magazines are published. Go to any newsstand--they all appear bursting at the seams.

But a big lie persists.

No one reads, we're told.

Words don't matter seems a shibboleth.

It seems we've actually convinced ourselves that we're dumb, that we don't care, that we can't stand reasoning.

Maybe the reason so many marketing communications fail is that we stopped caring about what matters most: the elegant simplicity of a well-crafted message.

We are more concerned with decoration, frippery and nonsense.

Of course, I have an axe to grind here.

I am a writer of the old school.

I learn everything I can about a client, their offering, their place in the market and the consumer. Then I write one-to-one to that consumer. And help him or her see things my way.

That's what I do.

If you know anyone looking for a writer, let me know.

Some New York memories.

My parents grew up poor, in the poorest immigrant neighborhood in West Philadelphia in the poorest period of America's history, the Great Depression. They also became, if not communists (in the theoretical sense, not the Stalinist/Leninist misinterpretation) then at least extremely left.

My mother even claimed to have worked for Henry Wallace, a former FDR secretary of Agriculture and a Progressive Party nominee for President in 1948, running against the more "status quo" Truman and the more "big business/plutocrat" Thomas E. Dewey. Like most people my mother supported politically, he won 2.4% of the popular vote and no electoral votes at all.

Growing up as they did, the name Rockefeller almost always drew silent movie hisses. John D., the scion of the family was rapacious. It's that simple. He accumulated his vast wealth through nefarious means, on the backs and from the sweat of the little guy. He was, in the words of Teddy Roosevelt, a malefactor of great wealth.

I grew up in sunny, suburban New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was a candy-coated time for America (at least if you were white). But the house I was raised in was a hive of hissing. Rockefeller's grandson, Nelson A. Rockefeller was governor of New York through virtually my entire childhood--from 1959-1973, when he left the office because he was appointed Vice President in the wake of Nixon's and Agnew's resignations. (From 1974-1976 the President and Vice President of the United States were appointed, not elected. So much for our vaunted "democratic" process.)

Nelson Rockefeller, who never reached the goal he was groomed to assume--the presidency--died of a heart attack in 1979, apparently in flagrante delicto with an "aide" Megan Marshack. She was 26 at the time, and the joke running around was that Rockefeller died of bad blood pressure--70 over 26.

In today's political parlance, Nelson A. Rockefeller, a Republican, would be excoriated as a flaming liberal. But in the "little box" I grew up in, he was only slightly better received than Mussolini. He was tarred by his grandfather's petrochemical brush, and because he was to our eyes retrograde at best.

I'm not sure why I'm writing a history lesson this morning. Rockefeller popped into my head as I walked to work and triggered some New York memories. There's no advertising point in this post.