Jingles Jangled.

When I was a boy growing up in a treeless suburb just about twenty minutes from my father's agency's offices at 247 Park Avenue in Manhattan, my world fairly crackled with commercials for various local beers. Everyone's world did. 

No one in my parents' small home drank much beer. My mother used a bottle now and again to put "body" into her hair, prior to setting it with rollers. And she might have kept a few bottles in the fridge for a workman doing some sweaty summer job that my father wouldn't do and my brother and I were too young to manage. But beer was a blue-collar drink and my parents had six-martini-lunch aspirations.

Still, baseball was the sound track of the era (we lived less than a dozen miles from Yankee Stadium, the house that Ruth built--and years later--Steinbrenner desecrated.) In those days, and it seems almost crazy today, baseball was played during the daytime, under the sun, when it was meant to be played and the game was on on every radio.

In fact, like an Einsteinian exercise in time, light and motion, you could run down your block and not miss a moment of the game. The pitch might have been thrown in front of the Pearson's at 102, the call "ball" might have been heard thirty feet south in front of the Robinson's at 106, and the ball might finally have been hit at 112, in front of the Evans'. By the time Ellie Howard was dusting off his flannels and standing up from a slide into second, you might find yourself at 120, in front of the Fried's.

Accompanying the soundtrack of the game, of Red Barber and Mel Allen, were myriad beer commercials. 

Commercials when I was growing up didn't aspire to be "cinemagraphic." Or even high-falutin'. They aspired to sell stuff.

They understood the audience they were addressing. These weren't PhD-candidates from the Ivy League. They were Ralph and Ed. They were guys punching a clock. They were shower after work guys not shower in the morning guys.

What's more, copywriters and art directors creating commercials for this audience, weren't talking about "lensing." In fact for the first 30 years of my career, I never had to pretend to care about what DP we were using and his award winning cinematography from his obscure classic that no one saw and everyone admired.

So, worried instead about getting ear worms and their client's products lodged in bona-fide customers' head (not award's juries) they used ancient story-telling devices like jingles and repetition that have been working since your ancestors and mine made the move to bi-pedalism.

Right now, I'm reading Daniel Mendolsohn's new and widely- praised translation of Homer's Odyssey. Unlike advertising which lasts about a week, the Odyssey has lasted about 2800 years. It's still being read, enjoyed and learned from today. At least among those who take the time to read it.

What's more, the Iliad and the Odyssey are the structural basis for about every story you're likely to see on Netflix, in the movies or from the Marvel universe. Hero gets lost. Hero screws up. Hero can't get home. Hero gets home. 

Homer (not Homer Simpson, not Steve Simpson, Ogilvy's former CCO, my boss and friend) understood a thing or two about reaching audiences. Homer wasn't thinking originality. He was thinking "imprinting." Getting ideas and characterizations in his audiences' head. That often happens when you repeat things.

For instance, here are just a few mentions of "Dawn" (not the dish-soap) from Mendelsohn's faithful translation. The description of Dawn, of Odysseus, of Athena hardly varies. It was a repetitive memory device in a era, like ours, when most people can't or don't write things down.

All that leads me back to my youth. A long-time ago. When advertising agencies were more Homeric with their output. Schaefer Beer shared the airwaves with Rheingold Beer, Ballantine Beer and an occasional national brand. 

Everyone in New York knew the Schaefer jingle. My guess is that 97% of New Yorkers who are my age know it now. And probably 94% of New Yorkers who are my age and have early-onset Alzheimers know it still.

Because it was repeated.
Because it was simple.
Because it was liked.

Because they kept it fresh.

It's easy to disparage, no matter their efficacy, no matter how long humans have been using them, old ideas and old techniques. 

It's easy to disparage memory devices.

That kind of stuff is too old.
It's corny.
It's passé.

It ain't cool in Williamsburg.

Disparage things all you like.
Just don't cross Homer.

 

 

What's A Metaphor You?

Sorry about this, but a sports metaphor is coming.

I'm not much of a sports-fan. And I try to avoid using clichés but every once in a long while, like in the case of this long-suffering Knicks fan, 53 years, a sports metaphor is the only thing that can suffice.

The Knicks after more than half a century of dismal, essentially ego-centric basketball, won last night the NBA finals. Before the Knicks beat the Cleveland Cavaliers to advance to the finals, the Cavaliers' coach, the esteemed Kenny Atkinson said, "I think analytically, I think we've won the -- I said three out of three [games in the series], we're two out of three in the expected wins," Atkinson told reporters. "I don't know if you guys follow that -- the expected score. We've won two out of three."

That in a nutshell is the genesis of today's post.

We won. Though we lost. Screw the score, the analytics say so.

For most of the last thirty years, as know-nothings from the accountancy-consultancy-human-resourcery-world devastated the advertising industry, we've looked at analytics and fake-metrics (like specious awards for work that never ran, was never paid for and had no material market success) as a measure of an agency's success or a network's.

We're agency of the year and have a 55% attrition rate and have lost 65% of our revenue. We're network of the year and have lost major client after major client and can't win new ones. We're "the trusted growth partner for the world's leading brands" but we've destroyed half of our own major brands and have been for ten years, while proclaiming ourselves the growth partner, shrinkng.

Updated. And now 100% bushwa free.

As an industry, we've thrown away just about every construction that made any agency ever strong.

You can look at all the numbers and money-ball data you want. Nothing really beats hitting a clutch double.

Instead, we've thrown away long-term partnerships--between art-directors and copywriters. Between creatives and creative directors. Between planners and creatives. Between account and creatives. Between creative and the clients they work with and for.

We've thrown all that out for an analytic-efficiency-just-in-time-staffing approach. And then we PR the shit out of the result and say things like, "I think analytically, I think we've won."

Since leaving WPP in a 'secure financial position' just 12 months ago,

WPP's 'secure' stock has fallen from 39.77 to 18.46.

Since ten years ago, WPP's market cap has plummeted. 

It was $31,000,000,000 a decade ago.

It's about $4,000,000,000 today.

That's like turning eight dollars into one.

Most agencies no longer even have creatives on staff. Much less long-time partners who rely on each other and make each other better. Most agencies no longer have people on brands who even use their clients' products, much less know the customer, know the engineers, know the clients. Instead, agencies "scope" people for an hour here and an hour there--that's efficient, their well-parboiled numbers say. So that's how they sail their ship.

Most agencies hire hot hands. Not thoughtful, adjustable, team-oriented people.

They hire the people who have won awards in last year's shows-- work as above, that never ran, was never paid for, wasn't created under real conditions and had no material market success.

The Knicks ran for more than half-a-century just as holding companies and agencies operate today.

Selflessness and team seldom entered the discussion.

On the Knicks, from their vaunted pick of Patrick Ewing in 1985, personnel and personal egoism ruled. Ewing, while still a rookie, refused to play out of position, alongside all-star Bill Cartwright, for the good of the team. Ewing, despite a "hall-of-fame" career and a raft of gaudy numbers, never won a championship. 

The Knicks had Sprewell, a magnificent scorer who played little defense and seldom passed the ball or passed up a shot. The same can be said of "hall-of-famer" Carmelo Anthony, a player who never saw a ball he wouldn't hog, or shot he wouldn't take. 

As Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) said to "the gunsel" (Elijah Cook, Jr.) in John Huston's great version of "The Maltese Falcon," "the cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter."

That's been, it seems to me, the guiding mis-light of the last half-century of advertising and the world.

"The cheaper the agency/network, the gaudier their self-promotion."

"The smaller the ideas, the bigger the trophy case."

"The more spurious the results, the more well-produced the case-study."

If you watch any of the mandatory press interviews with any of the Knicks' players after Saturday night clincher against the San Antonio Spurs, you won't hear the word "I." Instead you hear about help. A belief in the team. A respect for the organization. A trust in each other.

These attributes cannot be gained when you are mercenary and run a mercenary organization--a sports team or a business or a nation. 

The construction of winningness takes time, risk, money, thoughtfulness and a plan more well-formed than the prospect of a short-term triumph.

These are all metaphors.

For human-relationships.
For sports.
For business.
And yes, for amerika.

Nothing good comes merely from money.

It comes from human connection.
It comes from leadership.
It comes from buy-in of a plan.
It comes from respect--for self and for others.
It comes from honesty--doing your job.
It comes from truth. Doing what you say.
And sacrifice of self.

Success isn't derived from $70,000,000 payouts, bs about share prices and bald-men holding hollow anthropomorphic trophies surrounded by store-bought smiles and well-varnished self-aggrandizement.

Success is not found on rented yachts, bottomless rosé, back-slapping and AI-generated press-releases.

Just ask the Knicks.

Radical.

I'm 68 years old.

After 68 years of toeing-the-line,

doing what was expected of me,

working for others,

working for my family,

working to pay my taxes 

and trying to make sure that I'm not destitute
in my dotage,

I'll admit something.

I'm ready to do something radical.

I have a large, wonderful apartment in New York City.
I've lived there since 1998.
It's paid off.

I have a small, seaside cottage in Connecticut.
I can spit into the Long Island Sound from my bedroom.
And it's all-but paid for.

But I'm ready to do something radical.

Not move to a larger house, 
or a smaller house,

or to California, 

where my younger daughter lives,

or closer to Boston,
where my elder daughter, 
my grandsons and my son-in-law lives.

Not to the middle of the country,
closer to my Chicago brother,
and equidistant from my kids.

I'm ready to do something radical.

Not take a day-off from blogging.

Not retire.
Not have the hot-fudge sundae of my dreams.

No.

I keep telling my wife.
I'm ready to do something radical.

When the Times runs pieces like this,

I'm no longer looking for a nice split level,

this time with a mudroom.

Like I said, radical.
At least radical for me.

Of course, it doesn't take long for my thoughts to turn to advertising. What would it mean for a brand to do something radical. 

Radical doesn't mean off-brand, by-the-way.
Maybe radical means more on-brand than you could possibly ever imagine yourself allowing yourself.

Radical might mean,

in this era of universal namby-pamby,
speaking out.
Calling bull-shit.
Not pulling punches.

Radical might mean--in this era of politesse--

actually saying what you feel.

As the Knicks were returning from San Antonio, Texas, up two-games to none against the highly-favored Spurs, I wondered, what would happen if the Knicks did something radical.

I wondered what would happen if instead of holding Game Three in Madison Square Garden, the self-proclaimed "world's most-famous arena," what if the Knicks played a game at Rucker Park in Harlem--the center of gravity for New York street basketball.

Or even the famous W. 4th Street courts?

Or what if they went back to basics. Found an out of the way high school gym in the Bronx, or somewhere in Queens, or somewhere far from the madding crowd and had the game there?

There might be outrage among monied fans who couldn't get to 155th and Eighth Avenue. Or some band-box of a gym in Corona, Queens.

But really about 98% of the NBA's money comes from TV, so the amount of revenue lost would be nominal. Maybe the broadcast--done on a shoe-string without all the built-in big-arena gee-whizery would suffer. But what it might lack in polish it would more than make up with charm and humility.

Then there's this, which I just read in The Economist.

What if Dolan,
the Knicks,
the NBA did something radical.

"LIVE FROM RUCKER PARK,
the cornerstone of basketball history,

where the crossover, the slam-dunk and streetball

were invented and honed,
a court graced by 

LIVE FROM RUCKER PARK,
GAME THREE OF THE NBA FINALS."

Or what if the game were played on a court like the one Richard Avedon shot Kareem Abdul Jabbar on (back when he was Lew Alcindor) near the old Power High on W. 65th Street?

Doing so would have been radical.

A tribute to the dreams of kids who breathed the game.
Not the big money people who bought it.

Doing so might have made James Dolan, one of the most-hated team-owners in the world, perhaps a bit human. Maybe even, for a moment, likable.

Also, for all those dreaming kids, 
many of them now old men,

what if the Knicks re-designed their uniforms for one day.

And went with something like this.

A slight uniform revise,
in the universal language of New York

that no one would ever forget.

Radical.

An A-peeling Job.

It makes sense, even if you're happy doing whatever you're doing for a living, to occasionally open a job listing and see what's what. 

It makes sense to see if the grass really is greener on the other side of the barbed wire (I live in a rough neighborhood). 

It makes sense to see if the new pizza place everyone is talking about is really better than the place you've been going since your were in college. (That's V&T's on 1024 Amsterdam between 110th and 111th. And no, the new place isn't nearly as good and is four times the cost.) It even makes sense to try the new Yogel--the yogurt-flavored bagel that will surely be, at some point during our benighted days, the next next thing.

Back in 1979, you could buy a small pie for $3.50.
Man, I wish I had a Rheingold right now.

All that being said, not too many minutes ago, not having a post for Thursday and not having any ideas for a post, I did what so many do when they need an idea in a jiffy, I procrastinated. 

In other words, I went on LinkedIn (which could be called ThinkNot) where I saw this ad:

Oh, says I.

That job listing looks vaguely interesting.

Publicis has somehow gained the reputation as the "well-run" advertising holding company. At a time when agencies are losing money faster than municipal transit systems, Publicis' numbers look glossy.

Still, somehow I remembered a story from 74 years ago about Marilyn Monroe. Back then, Edith Gwynn, a gossip columnist for the Los Angeles Mirror, criticized the gown Monroe war to the "Photoplay Awards." Gwynn wrote: Monroe's gown was “Ill-fitting and too tight in all the WRONG places. It’s black lace over bright red and has a wide, red silk ruffle…Everyone isn’t born with taste. But surely when ‘a star is born’ her studio should see to it that the public doesn’t see her looking cheap and vulgar."

20th Century Fox, Monroe's studio wrote that Monroe would look good in a potato sack. They promptly had Monroe photographed in one. 

By way of metaphor, I wondered if Publicis was the Marilyn in our "potato sack" of an industry. 

And so, I checked out the Publicis job. 

The Publicis job-listing had all the attractiveness, speaking of potatoes, of a tumor on a tuber. And it was written with the uniqueness of a condolence card in Soviet Russia--just after the 1937 purges.

I'm a fairly experienced, well-read and well-educated person. Still, I don't know what half those bullet-points are asking for.

Nevertheless, as someone with the stamina of Tenzing Norgay, I kept reading. 

Norgay led Edmund Hillary to the summit of Everest.

I wondered how many ducats such a job would earn me? 

That's when I came to this portion of the job description.

BTW, and more to the point, as I've said before in this space, so much of what AI generates is bad. Not just slop bad. Stupid bad. 

So much of AI is insulting to readers, viewers, listeners. So much is so widely and thoroughly wrong that you can only conclude that the company using the AI (in this case Publicis) cares hardly a whit for the people they send messages to.

We all make mistakes, of course. Once, a few dozen years ago, a small typo creeped into Ad Aged. But that's human and not unfair. Errors of the sort I've highlighted above are not borne from human frailty--they come from the worst place errors can come from. In this case, corporate Hubris. 

Hubris because there's been a trillion-dollars worth of marketing-spend force-feeding us the idea that AI produces perfection. That AI can do anything you and I can do. Worse, AI can do anything Spielberg can do, or Amy Sedaris or Van Gogh. Trillions are being spent telling us our government, public health, safety and multi-trillion dollar wars can be run by AI. In most cases, it misses--wide--the most salient information, or ignores the most pressing needs of people.

No matter what business you're in, before you go whole-hog and embrace A.I. make sure you also embrace simple, old-fashioned proof-reading and even more-so, respect for your audience.

The reputation you save may be your own.

(In fairness to Publicis, they've corrected their listing. Someone there must be eating potatoes--brain food.)

Take the Paper Away.

Of all the frustrations of running your own ad agency, or working for one, or even more broadly, selling your imagination and creativity for a living (and a loving) the most heinous of all are the many slips 'twixt cup and lip.

Put into plain English, it's selling the client something good, startling and attention-getting (and therefore with a greater propensity to be effective) and then seeing it chipped away assiduously, like if you crossed Michelangelo with a cocaine-fueled beaver.

The short way of saying that can be summed up in one made-up word: Blanderization: The process of putting good work in a blender with convention, best-practices, milquetoast and a general 'everyone will like it' inoffensiveness that induces a kind of malaise--an insular un-caring-ness--upon the (non) viewer.

Some of this Blanderization is endemic, I suppose, to the very construction of advertising today. And even GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is not immune. 

Clients buy your ideas and creativity. After a short and finite amount of time, you are cut out of the picture--and oftentimes you work is turned over to hordes of "marketers" with even more hordes of opinions. Even worse, too often, your work is turned over to in-house teams. 

By definition in-house teams can't "fight" like agencies. As I once said not too many long years ago, an in-house creative department offers the objectivity of going to your mother-in-law for marital advice.

I've dealt with two clients lately who paid me top-dollar for my ineffable insouciance and then on the way to producing my ideas sullied them to the point of yuck. 

Before they did me dirty, I told each of them the same story.

It's an old story inveterate readers of this space might recognize. It's about the head-mistress of my kids' pre-school, a brilliant educator I'll call Mrs. Mandlebaum. A parent stood up one evening at a parents-group meeting and said, "my kids art sucked before she got here. And it sucked after she left. But it was great while she was here. What's your secret?" With Buddha-like serenity, Mandlebaum answered, "It's simple. We know when to take the paper away."

Back when I was a tween, Billy Hamilton and I were the best "artists" in our class. Billy went to art school and became skilled. I reached my apotheosis at twelve. I drew as well then as I can draw now. 

I remember spending a rainy afternoon drawing alongside Billy. He took me to task with these words I've remembered more than half-a-century: "You've improved it to death."

I draw exactly this well.

Not too long ago, I read a book review on a new book on the towering intellect, Harold Bloom, called "The Man Who Read Everything." It must be up my alley, because a friend sent it to me, as well.

This was the bit that got to me.

Many in the ad industry are ravenous digesters, too. While I'll be the first to admit, those of us in advertising are not Harold Blooms, we have some Bloom-isms in us. We think about people, brands, film, music, words in ways that most people don't. And that extraordinary-ness often finds its way into the best of our work. 

Even something as prosaic and terse as "Got Milk," launched a thousand advertising ships. It's Bloom-like in its genius.

However, the power of our own modest Bloom-isms, gets whittled away or smoothed over by those who haven't got it. Those practitioners of 'best practices,' who spend their days and nights pondering how many focus-groups can dance on the head of a pin.

That's how this:

Turns into this:

I don't know a single person who's not 98.79-percent bot who uses the word "holistic." Or anyone who has the foggiest notion off what financial parenting is, unless they're in the counterfeiting business.

I do know that when after five days a Linked in post gets just five  responses, it's woeful. And agencies get fired for not doing it. No matter how much they fought having to do it.

5.

More than they deserve.

Differenting.

In the nearly seven years since I opened GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I've been in fewer meetings than I'd have been in at an agency in a week. 

OK. I'm exaggerating. But you get the point.

Because I try not to have meetings, I have actual time to think, work, read, learn, observe and get out of the prevailing Madison Avenue Echo Chamber.  What's more, I can break away from the mind-controllingness of the algorithm that feeds you the same concatenation of crap that it feeds everyone else.

No wonder everything looks alike, feels alike, tastes alike, ends with the same joke, has the same VO, the same music, etc. We're all being fed the same stimulus. And time-pressed as we are, and as bogged down by time-sheets and meetings as we are, many of us seldom get to cast our gaze anywhere but where someone else has already cast theirs.

About two weeks ago, reading something or other, I tripped over a mention of this book. "The Dictionary of Visual Language" by Philip Thompson and Peter Davenport. It looked interesting and odd. And it looked like something everyone else isn't reading. I quickly found it on abebooks.com (an aggregator of used books) found it decently priced and ordered it.

Not having been taken out since October, 2005, the book had been removed from University of Brighton libraries and offered for sale. It arrived on my seaside stoop just two hours ago.

It makes sense, if you trade in ideas as I do, to find sources of ideas. It makes even more sense to find sources that other people aren't aware of or don't use. Ostensibly, that's why agencies used to hire people from different backgrounds, used to have libraries and used to allow people the downtime to fill up their brains with something other than 209-page powerpoint decks containing little but marketing blabber.

There were about one-thousand air-mail-stamp-sized reproductions in the book. I took crappy iPhone photos of some things I liked for no other reason that I like sharing things I like. That's part, I think, of being a human and living in the world.

The nature of the book--it's emphasis on 'visual language' had me looking at simple graphic "stories," that made me laugh, gasp or wow. 

Here are about a dozen things I liked.

A big assignment just wrapped and another one isn't slated to begin until next week. Rather than drive myself crazy worrying about getting more business, I bought this book, took these snapshots and wrote this post.