Notice Anything?

One of the best things about being in advertising today is that the effort most companies and most "creatives" put into actually getting noticed is so minimal, you don't have to do much to do better than 99.99999% of everyone else.

So many people and companies post things that are bland and empty. Milton Glaser who knows a bit about getting noticed called this (lack-of)-phenomena collective recurrence. That is, when we're so used to seeing something over and over, we no longer notice it. Think in-flight announcements for fastening your seatbelt or an offer for a new credit card. Or all-cap corporate shrill-mails to do your timesheets. Has anyone, ever, listened?

When giant companies post ads like the ones below, it makes you wonder not what they were thinking, but if they were thinking. If there is anyone in their entire company that understands the hierarchy of information that for about the 200,000 years of homo sapiens' presence on earth has resulted in lucid communication.

(This is how communication works. Every communication from a dog's bark to the Gettysburg Address.)

The only hierarchy of information that makes sense.

When I started at Ogilvy back in the 1990s, there was a dying corner of the place filled with old-school practitioners who just wanted to fly under the radar and leave everyday within spitting- distance of 5:15. They used to mumble, "the secret here is not to do anything too good or too bad. If you do, you'll get noticed. And getting noticed will only get you in trouble." That's the attitude in so so many organizations from the post-office to pony express.

One night at a different agency, when I was young but already an SVP and Group Creative Head at Ally & Gargano, a client of mine got two-clicks too drunk at the client-agency Christmas party. K and I lived near each other and I was forced to get a cab and get K home. None of us wanted to picture him sleeping in the gutter or drowning in his own effluence.

K was a middle manager well-past middle-age. A decent guy, but like an old ballplayer who's lost one-step-too-many, just playing out the string. In the cab, sad and drunk, embarrassed and lonely, K confided to me.

I've spent a life sadness-proximate. A crying drunk fat client is about as bad as it gets. It's a living, breathing country-western song sung by Franz Kafka.

The failures of his career were revealed as we sped uptown in a 1988 Ford LTD. "George," K said to me, my eidetic memory engraving it in one cortex or another, "you want to know my philosophy? 'Fly low. Fly slow. And try not to crash.'"

Joseph Heller described Major Major this way in "Catch-22,"

In short, and to be as brusque as a Joe Louis round-house about it, most communication has mediocrity welcomed with open-arms. Most communication doesn't communicate because most communication doesn't get noticed.

This isn't a media issue or a platform issue. 

It's a "not-taking-the time-or-giving-the-attention-to-make-something-interesting-issue." 

Almost everything we see we don't see because we've seen it so often. 

What's worse is current marketing "best practices," remind me of that old Borscht Belt witticism.

"The food is terrible. And such small portions."

Only marketing today says:

"Our advertising is ineffective. Let's run more of it."

When I was still working in an agency other than my own, I put some of this theory to a practical test. If I got an invitation to a 2:00 meeting and I was expected to say whether or not I'd be going, I usually replied this way. "I'm over-booked and running late today. I won't be there till 2:01.30." 

That's the sort of thing that takes you from "bland" to "brand." People notice you. Half the battle in an agency.

I first figured this out the afternoon of my first baseball practice. I was just 14 and brand-new in my school. I was the youngest in my grade, and no one knew my name. I calculated something and as eager as I was to try out for and make the team, I decided to skip our first practice.

This was my logic. 

The coach would call the roll. 

He'd eventually call my name and no one would answer. He'd repeat my name. Finally he'd ask the other boys, "anybody see Tannenbaum?"

The next day I'd show up and introduce myself. At this point rather than being an anonymous aspirant, the coach knew my name. He forgave me going to see a dentist or whatever my excuse was. He might have been pissed, but I had done my job. I was on his radar. (Also I could hit.)

Below is from a spread from Paul Arden's great book, which I've been carrying around with me for a quarter of a century. Next to "Man's Search for Meaning," by Viktor Frankl, I've probably given copies of "It's Not How Good..." to more people than any other book.

There's a lot to learn from this spread. 

Particularly the third word in the headline:

Noticed.

Back when this photo was taken,
the lens had to stay open for quite a while to capture the complete image.

One boy ran from one side of the assemblage to the other.
He timed it so he appears twice.

It might be a dick move. I can hear my mother cursing him.
But, he won.

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By the way, the ever-surpassing Dave Dye had an idea a few years ago. What if he went to a local cheese store in his London neighborhood, and started "tinkering" with the chalkboard so many stores put outside their doors. Could the right words, typography, design and pictures drive more traffic?

You can read about Dave's experiment here and here. Here are. a few of Dave's sketches. 

To my mind, Dave's idea should be something most marketers try. It would be great if an agency tried it as part of a new business pitch. 

Make a lot of nice things.

See what works.
Repeat.
Reap.

Take Note.

About twenty years ago, I read Walter Isaacson's book on Albert Einstein. Einstein was one of those people I had heard about my whole life, yet I knew nothing about him. I'm not talking about "knowing" his physics, but something about his development and emergence as a thinker and a scientist appealed to me. I read in Isaacson's book about Einstein's 1912 manuscript titled "On the Special Theory of Relativity."

Some time after that I was down at the Strand bookstore on 12th and Broadway (18-miles of books) and I found a copy as marked-down as a neutrino some moments after the Big Bang.

That was incentive-enough to buy it. Though down at the Strand, I seldom spend more than lunch money on a single volume, this time I went a little nuts.

My ability to comprehend Einstein is about as keen as my ability to understand an Archie comic written in Cuneiform. I can recognize works of genius, but to be honest I can make neither head nor tail of what's happening.

Nonetheless, I spent time with Einstein's book, and I discovered something.

I think there's value to be gained simply by seeing how people puzzle through problems. 

When I was a kid in grade-school and high-school math, teachers always exhorted us to "show our work." To my eyes there's something to be gained from seeing how other people reason even if you don't understand what they're reasoning toward or what it all means.

Something Zen about the journey goes here.

I think you can learn about solving just from being near people and the puzzles they have solved. You can usually spot a certain doggedness and willingness to cross things out. You can usually appreciate the sweat and ardor applied to the problem they were set on solving.

Since I stumbled upon Einstein's 1912 work, I've made a practice of buying other such facsimiles. It's not a mania. But when I see one, I check the sofa for loose change and find a way to usually buy it.

In my lap as I type this sits a moleskine-sized replica of Isaac Newton's college notebook. Again, I don't know what the hell it's doing there or why I ordered it from an esoteric publisher in the UK.

There are two more items like these sitting less-than-an-axe-length away from where I'm typing this.

Johnny von Neumann's plans that led to the first modern computer, the forerunner to the one you're likely reading this post upon.

Parenthetical on Johnny: 

And last, Alan Turing's "Mathematical Theory of ENIGMA Machine." Turing helped break the unbreakable nazi code which might have won the Allies World War II, or at least shortened its duration. This reproduction, like the von Neumann volume and the Newton book is from an English publisher called Kronecker Wallis. 

Kronecker Wallis is a wonderful and strange company. Invariably I order something twice because in my eagerness I press buttons too soon and too often. They always send me a personal note checking on me, making sure I'm not quite as dumb as I look. 

If after reading this, you order something from them, tell 'em George sent you. They'll probably give you a discount, and me, too.

BTW,

If you're interested at all in genius, you might like this book, which I enjoyed on Enrico Fermi. Having married a Jew, Fermi fled from Fascist Italy, landed at Columbia and began, really, the Manhattan Project. After Pearl Harbor, Fermi was classified as an 'enemy alien.' As such, he was not allowed to take the ferry home to New Jersey from Columbia. 

You'd think once you'd won a Nobel Prize you'd be pretty secure about your standing in the intellectual firmament. But I have a feeling physicists are just as insecure as you and I. I remembered, then found this passage. A coda to this post.

Whaaaaaa?

I haven't joined, not even once, the ongoing diatribes about AI-writing. I've never once commented on the nature of the Oxford comma, the use of m-dashes, or the use of millennial-banished words like "moist."

I think all that blather is, well, so much blather. 

What I care about when it comes to writing is good.

Sensible. Add-up-able. Readable. Thoughtful. Euphonious. And honest. 

My belief is simple.

Writing we like acts like people we like.

It makes us smile.
It cares about us.
It tells us the truth.
It has some surprise, some wit, some reward.

Mostly respect.

It doesn't high-falutin' us.

Or talk down to us.
Or talk in a way as to make us feel out-of-place, dumb or inadequate.

Also, it forces us to think.
By being interesting enough to make us pay attention.
And it lets us put things together in our heads.

As Ernst Lubitsch said to Billy Wilder as recounted to Cameron Crowe,
"Let the audience add up two plus two. They'll love you forever."

One of my favorite movies is Alexander Mackendrick's colossal flop "The Sweet Smell of Success," with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, written by Clifford Odets, Ernest Lehman and Mackendrick. You can download the script here, for free. Or head over to YouTube and watch the movie for practically free. Read any snippet or watch any clip, and you'll find good, human, seminal writing. Just drop an axe on any page at random. 

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When I'm online--when I'm trying to buy something, or shop for something, or I'm simply curious about something--a different kind of writing assaults my baby blues. Honest to goodness, I don't know what planet it comes from, who or what could possibly have written it and why or how it got approved (how big was the committee) what it's supposed to do and what it's supposed to be selling me.

I suppose this is the kind of obtuse writing that bad creatives and bad clients generate because they think it sounds effete and elevated. They think it sounds like bad poetry. It must be good because only a select few (not idiots like me) can fathom the beauty of its inscrutability and its charms. If common people can get it, it can't possibly be any good. So they obtusify.

Oh.

Most of the writing below leaves me slack-jawed. I find almost every phrase has an insult in it.

Taking my "daily drive to new heights"? My 0-60 in 4-seconds car has been in bumper-to-bumper traffic about 94% of the time I've owned it. Icons that celebrate forever? That sounds like you're selling ashes from a loved-one's cremation. Maybe most disgustingly cloying of all is "drivers like you." Like you know who I am. You wouldn't know a hiccup from a hand-grenade.

This is writing like most writing today.

It no longer speaks person-to-person. 
Rather it speaks buzzword-to-buzzword.

I saw this on LinkedIn a week or so ago. 
From one of the 97 people who have the president title at the 1/10th its size of ten years ago, Ogilvy.

I've been writing for a living for well-over half-a-century.

I have no idea what any of this means or why.

Or worse, what I should do about it.

Frankly, I don't truly know what "strategy & solutions at WPP" means either. I doubt anyone does.

This is typical of the garbage writing we see.
If good writing is good thinking, 
bad writing is bad thinking,
is bad sales,
is bad marketing,
is bad business.

But bad is good enough.

AKA, here comes the bribe.

And a crankcase of kugel.

Every drive? Have you seen Thelma and Louise?

One minute from now is merely dandy.

Climb every mountain.

Yep, paying $85,000 for a car is a breeze.

So, I can't sit in them today?

The signature Black Panel. Where do I sign.

Refined. Redefined. Lost your mind.

 I inspired the world. But I can't get an answer from my wife.

Marine allure. Does Gomer Pyle know?

Wild duets? Make it a three-some and I'll be right over.

Magnetic felines. I prefer radioactive goldfish.

I've been putting off celebrating forever like, forever.

 

That's a fancy way of saying
"we drop 40% of all calls and you can't understand your bill."

Oh.

Take on every challenge. I guess my third-grader will cure cancer.

I thought connections started here.

I'd rather have a shrimp cocktail.

Wait. Top-enterprise technology. Or Top enterprise-technology?

Road map. Make it a GPS and you've got a deal.

You win! Today's buzzword bingo game is over.