Page One.

It's Friday, and I have a big meeting with a very big client today.  There's an agency between me and the client--and there's a lot of work being presented--a lot of thinking--but I am the only creative in the mix.

That means I had to do what I do best.

Toil.

No, really, toil.

Not just the "exalted" thinking. The kind people fantasize about when the enter what used to be the ad-business. But the grind-it-out things, that in the parlance of sports, "don't show up in the boxscore."

Writing scores of ads, manifestos, blog-posts, TV scripts and more. Filling a giant deck-worth of worth the money. 

Today, if you're on the ball, you don't just have to be better than other writers, you have to be better than AI, too. The AI threat is always looming. Like the steam-drill was always staring down John Henry.

It's unusual in the ad business these days, but my work--the creative bits--were done early. About 48-hours before the client meeting. The head of the agency sent me the deck just about two hours ago. I made a copy nibble here and there, but essentially my work was complete.

Then, I realized something.

Something I didn't like.

We had done exactly what was asked of us.
Exactly as we promised. 
It's all good, artful, sound, strategic and plentiful. 

But something is missing. 

That feeling nagged at me.

We had done everything that was asked of us.
And we did it well.

But that's not enough. 

It never is.

We are launching a new brand for a giant company. We've got all the doodads that do that.

But we didn't have the gasp.

We didn't have the jaw-drop.

We didn't have the awe.

The more-than-they-ever-expected.

The image that sears.

I'm an old-man now. 

I might even be past my expiration date.

I certainly feel that way sometimes, when my aches and pains and heartaches and "lack-of-mattering" overwhelm me like a wave a kid's sand-castle.

But I learned something this afternoon as I tried to beat-back what I saw as a gap in our meeting.

If you're doing work for a client--whether you're an auto-mechanic, a circus act, or an obstreperous copywriter, you should give yourself a brief.

You should hold yourself to a brief. And a standard.

How do I get my work on page one of the deck?

Page 1.

How do I carry the meeting within the first two minutes?

How do I start with a crescendo and build from there?

How can I open like Bellini opened "Norma"?

Then keep going--for two hours after the open.

That's our job.

Meet Chris Miller: the Copywriter With his Own Strapline.

Just a few weeks ago, Dave Trott, as in THE EMINENT DAVE TROTT, highlighted a LinkedIn promotional piece by Chris Miller, "the copywriter with his own strapline."

I'd noticed Chris some years ago--because of that brilliant little fillip of a strapline. He's funny, I said to myself. I'll keep my eye on him. And see what I can learn him or, more candidly, steal from him.

A Rake's Progress. 1, The Heir.

A Rake's Progress. 8, The Madhouse.

The promotional piece Trott liked reminded me of those great 18th Century etchings by William Hogarth. They had a wit, a sensibility and a quirkiness I just loved. 

I was mad at myself for not having gotten there first. Instead of dwelling on my jealousy, I reached out to Chris Miller, "the copywriter with his own strapline," and asked him to write a blogpost for this space. My note to Chris read: "Actually, you exemplify my main advertising thesis. Do something different. From your "strapline" epigram to your 18th century comix." 

Unlike so many people I reach out to, Chris followed through with the piece below.

If you don't know Chris, you should.

You can meet him below.

Why not write him a note and say "hi." 

Like I said above, "he's funny."

--

COPYWRITER, SELL THYSELF.

Like you, dear reader, I'm a George fan. A lover of his humerus-tickling George Co. ads and his mighty blog. Together they offer a glorious drip-feed of Tannenbaumian wit and Georgian

wisdom.

As it happens, I'm also partial to doing a wee bit of self-promo. Although, sadly, the dosage of wit and wisdom is woefully homeopathic by comparison.

George gave me a free hand to write anything. But I believe it was my personal stuff that caught his eye. So I'll talk about that.

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My strapline/tagline/endline

I once wondered why we copywriters don't do unto ourselves as we do unto our clients. Or, more specifically, why we don't tend to write our own straplines. Stuck for an answer, I promptly wrote one for myself.

One of the benefits of now being "the copywriter with his own strapline" is that the line differentiates me from other copywriters called Chris Miller. Because Chris Millers are ten a penny out there, believe me. Check the list of your Facebook friends. You'll find at least three there.

Christopher Charles Miller, Donald Trump's former Defence Secretary, goes several steps further by sharing all three of my names. And the same year of birth. He's also a wearer of

spectacles and, like me, has a frown that can curdle holy water from a distance of 300 metres.

(I'd be inclined to see an attack on the Capitol as something that had to be stopped at all costs, though. So the similarities aren't endless.)

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"I heartily recommend me."    --me

During the Covid lockdown, a fusion of boredom and financial necessity prompted me to create my own little ads for social media. 

I probably should've involved an art director, but I thought the ads' roughness had some sort of charm? Is that the mot juste? Notre Georges would know.

Anti-email mail

Paper was all the rage in my youth. OK, I'm going back a bit, so it might actually have been papyrus. But let's not quibble.

I believed, with the following ink-and-paper mailshots, that fighting for attention in someone's inbox might be a battle I could sidestep altogether by landing on their desk instead. And,

hopefully, to continue sitting there long after an email would've been closed or deleted.

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Hallmark, eat your heart out

Despite being Mr Misnomer 'a non-Christian Christopher' I get as dewy-eyed as the next bauble-hanger at Yuletide. Sentimental sleigh-bell-loving sap that I am, here are a few things I sent out at the most wonderful time of different years.

As you can see, I wrote 1) cards and 2) a label for a wine bottle.

The design work was done by 1) my pal Malcolm Thompson and 2) Rob Taylor, CD at Like A River.

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The would-be Wordsworth wordsmith

I've had a few flurries of activity on LinkedIn that, I hoped, would raise my profile. Naive soul that I am, I mistakenly assumed a few years ago that some advertising-themed limericks were

the way to worm my way into the nation's hearts. (I mean, c'mon, who doesn't love a heartworm?)

I branded them "Limillericks". (Geddit?) But under no circumstances should you attempt to say that word aloud unless you're in the presence of a medical professional capable of

disentangling your tongue from your uvula. I remember one getting a like from George. (The first of those shown here.) That, it's fair to say, made my day.

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Old school

Cut to a few weeks (and centuries) ago. I started posting my comic strip Ye Olde Creative Shoppe on LinkedIn. As before, I was clinging to the ridiculous notion that someone would

see these and conclude that I was precisely the kind of copywriter they were looking for.

It seems to have acquired a (very) small following. So I may persist with it for a while. Or at least until villagers clutching burning torches and pitchforks arrive at my door, demanding I

do something less annoying with my time.

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Going live with a self-promotional project, despite the stakes being spectacularly low, makes me sympathise with nervous clients more than I'd care to admit.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of wide-eyed terror, writing for George's blog isn't for the faint-hearted. Yet here I am.

No, it hasn't been easy typing while biting my nails. But as I've got to the end, I've improved significantly. My ability to dentally self-manicure at 60 wpm is a skill I'll be adding to my CV.

Thank you so much, George. And toodle-pip, you lovely people, you.

Chris

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Thinking Small.

Hans Fallada, a writer born Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen, in Germany in 1893, somehow survived life (if you can call it that) in Berlin during World War II.

His most famous novel, "Every Man Dies Alone," was not published in English until a few years ago. I believe I read it in one-sitting or two. "Every Man" tells a small story based on real events of Otto and Elise Hampel, elderly residents of Berlin during the war who decide they must resist the German state and nazism.

The Hampel's are named the Quangels  in "Every." They are old and creaky. They cannot blow up buildings, shoot state functionaries, or kill the police. They do not possess any power or strength at all. They are old, poor and living on the fringes of society. How can they battle the hegemony of almost-all-powerful state control and oppression-repression? How can weak fight strong?

Postcards.

--

In Adam Hochschild's book, "Bury the Chains," he recounts the story of the abolition movement that started in late-18th Century England. 

In England at this time thousands if not millions of people were addicted to a new drug. The drug was everywhere and almost everyone used it (they were addicted, after all) almost every day.

That drug was sugar. 

And it was grown in the most savage factories our planet has ever seen. The vast sugar plantations in the British-owned West Indies. Sugar plantations owned by British Lords that were worked by slaves. These slaves had a life-expectancy, due to the harshness of plantation conditions and the inhumanity of those who owned those plantations, of about seven years. They stole healthy young people from Africa and worked and whipped them to death in mere months.

In 18th Century England, these plantation owners were the Buffets, the Bezos, the Musks, the Gates, the Ellisons of their day. 

How do you fight their power? 

When etchings (the news footage of the day) started coming back to England from Barbados, from Jamaica, and from other sugar islands. "The Guardian" in an article on current tourism in Barbados wrote:

In the past...sugar in Barbados has been responsible for great human misery. The island was settled by the British in 1627 and rapidly turned into a landscape of sweeping sugar-cane plantations, planted, cultivated and harvested by forced labour. By the 1660s it had become the jewel of English colonies; one commentator referred to it 'as the richest spote of grounde in the world' because of the fortunes that could be amassed. 

How do you fight this power? 

Wealthy women in England knew they had no way to "frontal attack." But a small group of them did something small and profound.

They stopped scooping sugar into their tea.

They were society women. The kind who set trends and who are emulated. First by other society people and then by many others. They were the taste-makers.

The small move of abjuring sugar started the British anti-slavery movement.

Just as stamping pennies in England like this, pressed the "patriarchy" to give women what should have been theirs all along: the right to vote.

Pennies circulate. Or at least they did. What better way to spread a simple message?

As amerikaka plummets into a white christian nationalist state, a state where those who wield power pay no taxes, a state that doesn't respect the sovereignty of other states, I wonder what we can do. 

What you and I can do.

Of course, vote.
Of course, speak out.
Of course.
Of course.
Of course.

But what small acts can we do that will have big impact? What small, daily behaviors can we begin that will have big impact?

We can't not pay tax like Thoreau did to protest Polk's Mexican war. Tax is taken from us automatically.

How do you fight their power? 

What small thing can we do for outsized impact?

That's our human brief.

Where Do Ideas Come From?

I think a lot of people in the advertising business, especially so-called creative people, aren't taken seriously in our business and by clients, because they think a lot about creativity but not enough about business.

To be clear, creativity in advertising must be in service of a business objective. We are charged with selling stuff, or improving a brand's reputation, or imparting some brand-relevant information. Commercials, despite the power and weight of what's award-winning these days, are not "art films." Or if they are, then at least they must be "art films in service of a business objective."

Many people in our business, in a way that I truly fail to understand, don't read The Wall Street Journal. The Journal, for all its cheery neo-fascism, gives readers the information to know more than their clients know about whatever field their clients are in. Oh, and more than planners, account people, and fellow creatives too. If that's not an "unfair advantage," when you're working on a information-based brand, I don't know what is. 

(BTW, I don't believe in making brands part of culture. During the upcoming Super Bowel, we will see about 75 spots that attempt to do so. They don't seem to realize that celebrity juxtaposition and cultural appropriation cannot really be owned by one brand. By doing advertising that's extraneous to the composition or components of your brands, you're really, in essence, making work for the category rather than your client.)

In any event, I started reading The Wall Street Journal around 45 years ago. They ran ads at the time for the Journal that featured famous advertising creatives. You can see about 50 or so here on Dave Dye's treasure of a blog, "Stuff From the Loft."
Here are just a few of the people profiled in these ads. Below that a picture of people profiled I was lucky enough to work for, with or near. (I know they're all white men I've featured. That's the way it was. And we didn't know any better. We do now.)

All these ads featured a bit of copy on why the ad notable featured read the Journal. I said to myself nearly half-a-century ago, if they read the Journal, if they admire the product, I should do the same. Here are a few of those reasons why:

I'm gushing about the Journal, however, because of this article and book review on how we get ideas. The gist of it can be summed up in these sentences, especially the single sentence I've underscored: "George Newman, a cognitive scientist and professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management...draws on scientific studies, historical examples and behavioral research to argue that what we call inspiration is better understood as a set of habits and mental practices available to anyone willing to cultivate them. Creativity, in his telling, is more method than miracle."

Newman analyzes how ideas happen--the circumstances and the conditions that are "idea-phrenogenic." That is, the circumstances and the conditions conducive to having ideas and working to make them better.

In the spirit of ideas coming more from method than miracle, Newman is a fan not of isolation--but of sharing thoughts with friends and colleagues. He's a fan of submitting ideas to the scrutiny of others because their feedback often sharpens what solitary effort cannot." 

Newman also notes that new ideas are rarely "entirely new." In fact, most often innovations and "breakthroughs" grow out of previous ideas. He cites a study by systems researcher Brian Uzzi. He analyzed 18 million scientific papers and found breakthroughs happen in only 5% to 10% of them. Most "new" ideas are "a strategic mix of old with a touch of new."

He likens creativity to an archaeological dig. It's the final, most tedious stretch--the sifting and refining--that makes something of what's been dug up. The point of tedium (re-working) when most people give up is when most ideas come to life.

Maybe most interesting to me is how Newman talks about how we can use AI. He sees value at the "digging" stage. Sometimes sheer "volume matters more than initial quality." But Newman believes (and this is where the cost-cutters using AI--including the holding companies--will fail) humans are essential to the process. "They bring the judgment to recognize a fertile idea, the unique experiences to make it their own and the ability to execute it in ways machines cannot replicate."

The point in all this is simple.

Ideas come from many places.

Friends. Sparks from previous ideas. Discussions. Feedback. And mostly working, re-working, re-re-working and so on.

No matter how you analyze the genesis of the alchemy of new thoughts--there is a miraculousness to the miracle of saying something in a way no one else has ever said it before.

I once wrote a line for an IBM software ad that made Chris Wall love me, or at least tolerate me, unconditionally. I wrote "This makes the Crab Nebula look like small potatoes."

No one knows where the ability to find those miracles comes from. Somehow I think I get a lot of them from reading. Especially things no one else reads. Like The Wall Street Journal.

Dogs. And Doggedness.

Rufus II, Winston and Cuban cigar.

As someone who's spent a lifetime wrestling with the "Black Dog" of depression, I've come to admire, not despise, the malady. Through a lifetime of therapy, I've attained an understanding of how the ailment works on my brain--and my moods. Along with that understanding, I've learned how to not conquer the problem, but turn it to my advantage.

Brown had the 4th-lowest season-ERA ever, in 1906. 
Just a year before I turned 50.

Brown's Hall-of-Fame Bronze.
His performance-enhancing tonic was having his fingers cut off.

There was a Hall of Fame pitcher from over a century ago, he pitched from 1903 to 1916 primarily for the Northside Chicagoans, aka the Cubs. Brown lost a finger-and-half to a farm-machinery accident, and a subsequent fall and bad resetting left his twirling paw--his right--more than a bit mangled.

Brown learned how to turn his ailment into an advantage. His missing digits forced him to change his grip, giving his pitches a groundball-inducing topspin. His a-kilter middle finger gave his pitches a wacky unpredictability--and sent his pitches a-flutter to the confusion of opposing batsmen. His 2.06 lifetime ERA is a testament to Brown's skill and how hard it was to hit his horsehide offerings. Accordingly, Brown became one of the great attendance attractions from the earliest days of the sport.

Some years ago, when I was a younger copywriter, I would labor at coming up with the three or six headlines or TV scripts that would fulfill the requisites of most assignments. Often, having come up with those few "deliverables" I felt stymied and unable to come up with more.

I began, in my own mind, likening my stuckness with what I had labelled the "meniscus of misery," that is the downward spiral of my bouts of depression. Where gloom would lead to deeper and deeper gloom and eventually to a spell of near-paralysis.

There was a time when my brain would spin down to point F. What I've learned through the years and with the help of therapy, introspection, training and wise-friends, is how to stop my depression and turn it around when it hits point A. I never even get to B, C and no longer do I find myself F'd.

This week, I got a big assignment from a Fortune 150 brand. They're paying me the money I've asked for. In return, they're getting about ten-people's work in a week. That means I've probably did a half-year of holding company output for them in just five working days.

Here's where I can again call on my drawing above. There was a time, I'd have gotten tapped out of headlines and ideas at point A. If you train your brain, you can prolific-ize your output. You can find a new approach to bring more ideas so your hustle past points B and C finally arriving (just ahead of your deadline) at point F. F as in Fantastically Fecund.

So much of being in the idea business or even the human business is about unlocking your brain. Stimulating it to either break a deleterious pattern or behavior or to think in ways you haven't thought before. 

It's about interrupting the barriers that interfere with progress. It's finding new jokes, new angles, new words, new approaches when it feels like you're tapped out or maxed out.

I think that's what Mordecai Brown must have done. I bet when he mangled his hand he went through days or even weeks and months saying "I'm done." Somehow he learned to turn that into "I'm blessed." Or "I have something no one else has." In the elevated parlance of our era, he turned his frown upside-down.

When I was a boy I remember sitting next to my father in his 1949 Studebaker Commander that he had bought second-hand for $350. I remember driving all over our grungy Yonkers neighborhood looking for, against all odds, a parking space in a busy shopping district. Maybe it was just before Christmas and spaces were scarcer than ethics.

I don't remember all that much about my father. We were never all-that-friendly with each other, but I do remember him saying like an old Jew repeating the Sh'ma, "We're going to find a space or make one."

Back when I was four, I couldn't understand what he meant by "making a space." It seemed to violate the physical law that matter cannot be created or destroyed. How could he make a space?

Sixty-five years later, I've discovered what he meant.