Gary Goldsmith One. A Talk with a Leader.

A few weeks ago, I noticed this online from the great creative Gary Goldsmith. Gary was starting a new ad school--having for years helped run Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California as Chair of Creative Direction. 

My experience of Gary goes back almost fifty years. Nearly every young person in the ad industry in the 1980s who was looking to move up through the industry one shaky rung of the ladder at a time had heard of Gary. Gary had landed at DDB--when DDB was still DDB, when giants out-numbered ceiling tiles, and seemed to be single-handedly doing more great work than the rest of the industry combined. 

His work, btw, wasn't just good. It made you look at how you did work. It made you want to work harder, smarter, better. It made you proud to be on the outskirts of the same business Gary was in. You can see some of Gary's early work here, if you poke around a bit. 

There are so many ad schools in the world right now. In fact, to my cynical eyes there seem be more people education others on advertising than there are people educated in advertising. It's like there are a million driving instructors and no one knows how to use a turn signal. 

But I know Gary as someone of wisdom. He doesn't do things without thinking them through, and without a flexible process to make sure they work. Gary and I have spoken through the years about his work at Art Center--particularly his "Crashvertising" modus operandi, and I've always left the conversation a better person that I was when I started the conversation.

I quickly wrote Gary a note. 

Would he like to be featured on Ad Aged? Could I interview him.

He wrote back in seconds and seconds later, I sent him a list of potential topics we could talk about. The next Monday, we had an 82-minute Zoom, that could have gone on for 82-hours.

While I amn't by any stretch a professional interviewer, I tried to ask Gary tough questions. 

1. Like why an ad school when the future of the industry we both love seems so bleak?

2. With so many ad schools what makes Makers + Mentors different?

3. How did Gary start teaching? And how has he kept it up for almost a half-century?

4. What was the ad that got him to DDB--and what happened next?

As I said, I'm no journalist. This might not be the most orderly of interviews. But Gary and I had a good time talking--sharing, and learning from each other. 

Over the next couple of days, I'll publish our discussion. My advice though, is my advice in almost all things. Read. Read Gary's work. Read of Gary's influences. Read what Gary is trying to do and teach.

You can only lead if you read.

--

AD AGED: When I first was introduced to you, we were very much younger, not in person, just by reputation. I heard about this guy at DDB who did these amazing ads for a student book for crayons. And I just went to your site, your personal site, saw those ads. And I guess my question is, or questions are, one, would those ads work today? I know the answer, but I want it from you. And two, are you fearful? Let me ask this in a provocative way. Are you fearful of people saying, well, that  Gary Goldsmith man, he's living in the past. Why does he have 50-year-old ads on his portfolio site? But just in terms of background, and I obviously have a point of view on this, but I'd love to hear it from you.

Would he like to be featured on Ad Aged? Could I interview him.

He wrote back in seconds and seconds later, I sent him a list of potential topics we could talk about. The next Monday, we had an 82-minute Zoom, that could have gone on for 82-hours.

While I amn't by any stretch a professional interviewer, I tried to ask Gary tough questions. 

1. Like why an ad school when the future of the industry we both love seems so bleak?

2. With so many ad schools what makes Makers + Mentors different?

3. How did Gary start teaching? And how has he kept it up for almost a half-century?

4. What was the ad that got him to DDB--and what happened next?

As I said, I'm no journalist. This might not be the most orderly of interviews. But Gary and I had a good time talking--sharing, and learning from each other. 

Over the next couple of days, I'll publish our discussion. My advice though, is my advice in almost all things. Read. Read Gary's work. Read of Gary's influences. Read what Gary is trying to do and teach.

You can only lead if you read.

--

AD AGED: When I first was introduced to you, we were very much younger, not in person, just by reputation. I heard about this guy at DDB who did these amazing ads for a student book for crayons. And I just went to your site, your personal site, saw those ads. And I guess my question is, or questions are, one, would those ads work today? I know the answer, but I want it from you. And two, are you fearful? Let me ask this in a provocative way. Are you fearful of people saying, well, that  Gary Goldsmith man, he's living in the past. Why does he have 50-year-old ads on his portfolio site? But just in terms of background, and I obviously have a point of view on this, but I'd love to hear it from you.

AD AGED: Crayola is the category.

Gary Goldsmith: Exactly. And on a separate note, the other reason those ads are important to me is that when I did those ads, that was actually the first time I really “got it" and felt like I had done something good.

Gary Goldsmith: Honestly, George, I never really thought about it that way. I think it depends on the context. I have those ads on my personal website because they’re part of the historical body of work that I want people to see, whether it be my students or others. The site is more of a retrospective than just a “this is what I'm doing now”. But do I think that they would still work now? Yes, because I think they come out of an insight that's still true.

You could criticize them to say that they’re generic for the category, but there is no category.

AD AGED: Crayola is the category.

Gary Goldsmith: Exactly. And on a separate note, the other reason those ads are important to me is that when I did those ads, that was actually the first time I really “got it" and felt like I had done something good.—

AD AGED: Interesting. Can you expand on what it is you got?

Gary Goldsmith: It was getting the idea of the words not repeating the picture, the picture not just illustrating the words, but the two working together in a way that made a combined meaning that you wouldn't have had otherwise. 

And I specifically remember going through this whole process of trying to figure out the best way to say it. With the first ad, I kept thinking, well, let's see, if a toy breaks, you have a broken toy. If a crayon breaks, you have two crayons. That was the first long-hand way I had of saying it. Which was, of course the idea…you break one, you have two of them now.

But then by going back and writing line after line after line, I came up with “Toys break, Crayons multiply. A much shorter, more succinct and memorable version of that same thought.

AD AGED:
And it's about imagination.

Gary Goldsmith: 
Yes. And that was the first time that I thought, ok, maybe I could be good at this.

AD AGED:
Oh, interesting. You know, but before.

Gary Goldsmith: 
Before that, I was struggling. I was looking at a lot of work in annuals like we all do when we first start. And a lot of the great work back then really spoke to me. I loved a lot of the work I was seeing, and I knew why I loved it.

But I couldn't do it.

I would start working on something, have high expectations, finish it and be disappointed. Even though I knew good from bad, I simply could not do work that I thought was very good. I kept trying and trying. More all-nighters than I can even count. Some stuff was okay, some stuff was pedantic, and then finally, I did that ad.

AD AGED:
And it's almost like it opened the doors.

Gary Goldsmith: 
It's a moment, yes. And yes, I tell that to my students all the time. I always reference the difficult time that I had at the beginning…I want them to understand that it's not easy and none of us do it naturally. Keep pushing and your moment will come.

AD AGED:
Lets end today with a little digression, which is what I do best. I'm reading this book now, which is fabulous.

It's called "The Ancient Wisdom of the Mesopotamians."  And it's like it's our Western and modern tendency to look at people different from us and say 'how could they have been so ignorant?' 

4000 years ago in Mesopotamia, no one would ask if you believe in God or not--Because God was, just was. Right. 

What the author is saying is we're being spoken to all the time. We just might not be able to see it. You might not be able to get the perception of the person who loves you and you don't see it. Or the craft you want to do, but it's kind of there. You just have to make the things align. 

It occurs to me, When you say this is the moment it clicked, is there a similar clicky moment on why you're starting Makers and Mentors now? Is there a similar conjunction, a similar kind of epiphany in a sense?

Gary Goldsmith: 
Yes.

There is, in the sense that, you know, I talk to a lot of students, not just my own students, but other students who know of me and send me their books…students who went to different schools than ours, state schools, private schools, art schools…and I talk to them and I learn about what they were doing in their programs as I try to help them. And one of the things that it reaffirmed for me was that in the program we built at Art Center at that time, we put together a carefully curated collection of great teachers. And I always continued to evolve the curriculum and bring in new and contemporary teachers. It was not a fixed faculty where every term was necessarily taught by the same people.

I'd hear about somebody doing some really good work in LA, meet with them and ask them (or beg them if necessary) to teach. Even if it was only for a term or two. That was back when we had to be in person. During and after Covid, when we went remote, it threw the doors wide open. Jeff Goodby, Jaime Robinson and Greg Hahn each generously agreed to join me on zoom for two weeks of Crashvertising. Dave Dye was kind enough to join us on zoom from London and taught for a few semesters. It created the possibility of building a program like we’re building with Makers+Mentors now, unencumbered by bureaucracy and with talented, contemporary instructors teaching from anywhere in the world.

Or I brought Dave Dye to teach when we could go remote because of Zoom.

Continued...soon.

--

Easy.

 

I remember back to 1980.

I had just left college--and home.

I had not two dimes to rub together.

And was getting evicted from Columbia housing where I was paying $90/month sharing a two-bedroom with an apprentice diamond cutter from Philadelphia and 22,000 feral cockroaches. Columbia wanted me out. I was no longer a student.

I grabbed the fifty-page want ad section of the Sunday Times. Like a 1930s corn-fed movie, I circled the one or two things I found of spurious interest that I was remotely qualified to do.

One was a running-shoe salesman at Paragon sporting goods on Broadway and Union Square. One was a junior catalog copywriter for the Montgomery Ward catalog--whose "fashion" divisions were based at 393 7th Avenue, in the garment district.

I got offers for both jobs and took the writing one, regarding it as having more of a future. Later that day, I signed a lease on a small one-bedroom on 109th, between Broadway and Riverside. 

The Montgomery Ward job paid $11,700 per annum, but gave me time in the evening to work on my portfolio or to play basketball at a nearby private school or to pick up some work somewhere if I could find it.

My girlfriend at the time, my wife today, helped me find some freelance work with the husband of a woman she worked with. Somehow N owned pages in the glossy free-standing inserts that were stuffed into the newspapers of the day. 

N would go to clients with deals. For instance, show two proofs of purchase having bought this toothpaste or that, and you can get two free games of bowling at your local alley. If N sold that as a concept--to someone at Colgate, he then would charge them to create an ad announcing the offer. N would come to me to write the ad.

I remember thinking, toothpaste and bowling. That goes together as naturally as tiramisu, spam and bug-killer, but ok. And I got to writing the ad.

Quickly I scribbled "Get Bowled Over," and some sub-copy that explained the workings of the offer. For that I was to get paid $500, which was more than two-week's of my Montgomery Ward pay.

"This is easy money," I said, as I nervously showed it and a few other choices to N. 

It's been 50 years now.

I think I'm still waiting to be paid.

Wednesday night, I was out for dinner with the JCrew, a coterie of older ad people I'm associated with. We're all in the later stages of our careers but still working and sweating and shaking our heads about the work styles and/or the lassitude of the people we work with. Still wondering if it's worth it or when the fun that was supposed to be part of the business will actually show up.

Two or three of the constituents list night have their own legitimate agencies. They have account people, and CFOs, and project-managers. You know, the trappings of a grown-up business. And they have worries like rent, salaries, the leases on copiers and the tsurus that comes from people not showing up or the elevator being out or the bathroom toilet being clogged.

That said, they have accounts and reputations and PR machines that proffer the illusion that Mammon is waiting in the next room. They fly to conferences, book blocks at seaside Cannes hotels, and wear expensive sunglasses even when its dark. At some point, I can hear the sub-rosa utterances we all sotto voce at one time or another primarily to ourselves.

"This is easy money," we whisper, hoping the fates don't hear us and thereby punish us.

After 68 years of bowling people over with this banality or that banality, for this client or that, what I've learned is very simple and very blunt.

No matter how easy it seems,
no matter how accustomed you are to doing the work,
how well you know the client
or how well-versed you are in the product or service,
there is never,
never,
not once,
not ever,
never ever,
there is no such thing
and never will be
as easy money.

The sum total of all I've learned so far is this:

Easy money isn't.

Where There's Smoke There's Salmon.

I don't have many friends, and never really did. 

Even when I was at my most popular, I drew my spiritual covers close under my chin and didn't share my blanket with many. My coterie of friends is usually one or two close ones--maybe three--and a small periphery beyond that inner orbit.

It takes years for me to put out the welcome mat. 
It takes milliseconds for me to whisk it away.

Since I stopped working in a proper office and started spending about 95.67-percent of my time in my basement office well beneath the surface of the earth, my network has contracted. Not only did my best friend of fifty years die (such friendships don't come with understudies) so too did my work father/mentor die just last summer. Adding to that, I work more and more independently now--mostly sans art director and sans "support" people like I had when I worked for others. I employ one person--who's a friend, but we're three-thousand miles apart, and both wired for efficiency, not a chatty-kathy geniality.

In short, it's not unusual for me to go an entire week and have maybe two human conversations. Those are usually with clients, so I suppose--to be mean about it--I could put the word human in italics, as if it were written by Salinger, replete with sarcasm.

All that being said, I am seldom lonely. My interests remain varied and keep me occupied, and my connection with Sparkle, my nearly-perfect two-and-a-half year-old golden retriever keeps flourishing. While she is different from Whiskey--slightly less present, she is a wise companion as we take long seaside walks looking for trouble along this coastline or that. On top of Sparkle, I have developed an interstitial way of reading and writing where one things leads to another. I keep finding new things to learn about and keep developing and deepening my world view. There are a lot of people with scores of friends who have no world view. I'd rather be alone with one then surrounded and devoid.

Just about 90 minutes ago, I arrived in New York's newly developed Moynihan train-station by Amtrak, the chronically under-funded amerikan't train system. The new train-station is built inside an old post office and is really just a mall with diesel exhaust and intermittent whiffs of urine-soaked-homelessness. amerry-cannot has a decimal place problem. Everything that kills or enriches the plutocrat class has plenty of numbers to the left of the decimal. Everything that helps the lümpen has few numbers to the left. 

It looks like this: Murderrapemayhemreverserobinhoodtheivery.00
Good.00

The northeast corridor includes 17 percent of the country’s inhabitants--about 58 million people--and 20 percent of its trade on just 1.4 percent of its land.  The I-95 Corridor Coalition calculates that 60 percent of the thruway’s urban sections are already congested and predicts that car traffic will increase by 85 percent by 2035. And nearly half of the nation’s domestic flight delays originate in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. In 2019 (pre-covid) six hundred fifty thousand passengers ratted through Penn Station each day, more people than flew out of Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark airports combined.

New York, especially after a few months of stultifying connecticutness, can be a dispiriting place. Everyone is head down rushing like mad, no one is watching where they're going and fully-a-third of all those people look like they haven't showered since amerikkka's previous illegal war, about four weeks ago.

But New York is New York. There is a quality here that makes sense, a conviviality, a warmth and a humanity that in the rest of ameridon't seems to have been cost-consultanted out of consideration. We live in a nothing for nothing nation. And now that everything you buy, everyplace you go to for help, everything you eat is owned by one or another giant private-equity held money squeeze, decent treatment, politeness and smiles are off the MBA-world's agenda.

But as I said, New York is New York.

I got on the "whites only Q train" outside of Macy's. (I say "whites only" because the train goes no further north than 96th Street. Not daring to enter black and brown Manhattan.) In moments I was disgorged at 72nd and Second amid the Vik Muniz subway art and the effervescent and always under-construction Upper East Side gentility I love so much.

I headed like a migrating animal to Sable's, an Asian-run Jewish appetizing storefront that's been a fixture in the neighborhood for over 40 years, since Kenny broke off from Zabar's on the Upper West Side and opened up his own small smoked-salmon Shangri-la.

I'd been having a craving for a lox on a salt bagel sandwich of old-school dimensions for about a month. I had thought about stopping by Barney Greengrass on West 86th Street, the last place I had had such a treat (about four years ago) but they were closed for Passover, so Sable's it was.

No sooner did I enter the small shop when a burly Asian man behind the counter handed me a small-niblick of bagel with about four-ounces of hand-cut smoked salmon on it. I hadn't even ordered anything yet. But Sable's calculus has always been, "treat customers well and they'll keep coming back." 

I did the math in my head. They returned a $6 sample of lox on my $100 expenditure. Not a bad ROI for anyone but an MBA.

Today, in New York or not, treating people with pre-emptive dignity and kindness is a vestige of a naive era. Why bother? Everything is owned by a monopoly and there's no place else people can go, so fuk'em.

If you don't like Verizon, try AT&T, they're worse. If you don't like Delta, try United, they're worse. If you don't like the dimmycrats, try the repugnicants, they're worse. If you don't like omnicant, try pubickiss, they're worse.

You see this from almost everyone you do business with. Then after paying mandatory service charges for peremptory service, and $6 for four slices of bread, you get this, in lieu of genuine caring.

The world was better off when you got samples of lox and weren't merely a survey sample.

But now it's lunchtime.

Lox.

Six stars.

Resumé.

From a very early age, as much as I wanted to write for a living, I knew I wasn't the mattress on the floor of a six-story walk-up on Avenue C kind of guy. It was a gnarly New York I grew up in. We weren't many years away from bankruptcy, endemic arson, 2000-murders a year and the spectre of ever-present crime. Most of the shop-keepers along Broadway up in the Columbia neighborhood I lived in kept a club of some sort under the counter and such implements weren't just for show. 

New York at the time seemed like the Wild West and many sane people like myself sought to find a certain middle-class equilibrium to get away from the four deadbolts on the front door and grates on every window sort of existence.

Accordingly, while I knew kids from college who were night-time troubadours, or ersatz beat poets snapping out riffs in crooked-floored tenements with torn photos of Allen Ginsberg Howling on every third wall, I realized quickly, the Bohemian life was not for me. While I'd love to lay in bed till noon and work on my art, I knew that those plusses usually came with mean-spirited rats, roaches that swarmed like the Viet Cong during Tet and worse of all, vermin so prevalent as to be all but unidentifiable to anyone who had even an inkling of entomological training. 

In short, I worked and worked and worked until I could beat a path to a 7th-floor apartment in a white brick building on 73rd and Second. I escaped from grunge about as fast as I could pay the rent somewhere ungrunged. It was, in the words of Hemingway who was writing about something else entirely, "a clean, well-lighted place." There was laundry in the basement, doormen at the door and a sense of Scarsdale decorum without the boredom so rife in suburbia.

While I wrote stories and parts of novels and filled shoe-boxes with type-written tripe-writing, I always had a day job and the burning ambition to move up in my career and my life, which took precedence, and still does over novels and lives unfinished.

That said, it's not unusual for me to read things by the great Mason Curry, who as shown above writes often about the ways and means writers and artists persevere and become writers and artists, not merely copywriters and art directors. You can buy Curry's latest book here, as I did just moments ago. Curry's book relates stories and reflections on how  famous artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers throughout history have managed to successfully (or not) support a creative life. That is, how to do what I could not, balance their creative ambitions with the very real need to pay rent and put food on the table. 

BTW, there are those who walk among us who don't understand those who walk among us who buy more books than they can possibly ever read. And acquire more movies, as I do, on DVDs--because I like having hard copies for when elon musk and his fellow plutocrats crash the internet for their own nefariousosity, leaving us in the forthcoming digital dark ages where we've forgotten how to read ink on paper. 

I read in Nassim Nicolas Taleb's classic, "The Black Swan," that Umberto Eco had built an anti-library: a collection of books that one hasn't yet read because, as Eco asserts, "unread books are much more valuable than read ones." It's been said that Eco's library contained over 30,000 books. That's like buying a book a day for 82 years. Or to mutate the famous quip by John Kennedy, from back when amerikkka was a country, at a White House dinner honoring Nobel-Prize recipients (real ones), "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Curry writes of an artist I don't know called Agnes Martin, who (above) wrote a list of every job she ever had. 

Here's an excerpt from Curry you might like, if your faculties have remained intact enough and you can still read:

James Dickey was “office writing radio commercials for Coca-Cola bottlers while at the same time working in secret on his poetry (“ Every time I had a minute to spare, which was not often, I would stick a poem in the typewriter where I had been typing Coca-Cola ads,” he said); the composer Philip Glass, who, in the 1960s and ’70s, in between short tours with his music ensemble, ran a moving company with his cousin and worked as a plumber and a New York taxi driver (“ I expected to have a day job for the rest of my life,” he said); the abolitionist and writer Harriet Jacobs, who was born a slave in North Carolina in 1813 and who, after having her freedom purchased for her by her employer, worked as the family housemaid caring for five children seven days a week, writing her book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl at night while the children slept (“ I have not yet written a single page by daylight,” she confided in a letter); the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who, in 2018, told The Paris Review that his favorite job was as a “night watchman for three hundred cows,” though he also worked as a miner for a time (“ That was almost comical—the real miners had to cover for me,” he said); the artist Agnes Martin, who worked as a waitress, a dishwasher, a janitor, a cashier, a receptionist, a playground director, and a tennis coach, as well as jobs for a mining company, in country schools, in a factory, in a hamburger stand, in a butcher shop, in a nursery, in a cafeteria, and as a baker’s helper ('Also raised rabbits and ducks,' she noted in a handwritten list of all the jobs she ever had); the poet Lorine Niedecker, who worked as a library assistant, a writer and research editor for a Wisconsin guidebook, a scriptwriter for a Madison radio station, a stenographer and proofreader for the journal Hoard’s Dairyman, and, from 1957 to 1963, a cleaner at the Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital in southern Wisconsin—her final day job before her retirement at age sixty—during which time she adopted a unique haikulike form that became a signature of her late style; the painter Henry Taylor, whose earliest artwork included drawings of patients at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital in Southern California, where he worked the night shift as a “psychiatric technician” for eleven years, from 1984 to 1996; the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, who produced more than two dozen books during the thirty-three years he worked as a civil servant at the General Post Office, writing for three hours every morning before he dressed for breakfast; the author Kurt Vonnegut, who at various points worked in public relations for General Electric, tried to invent a board game, lasted one day as a writer for Sports Illustrated, and managed a Saab dealership on Cape Cod (his son later called him “the world’s worst car salesman”); the Swiss writer Robert Walser, who worked as a journalist, a bank clerk, an inventor’s assistant, and, for six months, a butler for a count who lived in a castle in Upper Silesia* (Walser’s time at a Berlin school for domestic servants inspired his 1909 novel Jakob von Gunten, now considered his finest work and a masterpiece of early-twentieth-century fiction); and the playwright Tennessee Williams, who as an aspiring young writer worked at the International Shoe Company factory in St. Louis and hated it so much that he set himself the goal of writing one short story per week, working late into the night at his parents’ house. After work, Williams “would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house,” his mother recalled. 'Some mornings when I walked in to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too tired to remove his clothes.'"

In my youth, I worked reserving squash courts and refunding money in a college student center, as the assistant dean of student [ahem] affairs at Barnard College, as a nightwatchman at McIntosh Hall at Barnard, as a reader of bad novels for a fourth-rate New York publishing house, as a catalog copywriter writing shoe copy for the Montgomery Ward catalog, as a game-room attendant at a penny arcade at a seaside amusement park outside of the Bronx, as a camp counselor in New Hampshire, as a dishwasher at an Italian place, as a aluminum-siding stevedore, as a night-cashier at a downtown Chicago liquor store, as a store-checker for a Chicago sausage company, as a paperboy in suburban New York, and probably two or three I don't well-remember or whom still owe me money. 

Right now I'm engaged in writing over 100 ads for a large financial services company. These are the small-type ads that I don't believe anyone really reads much-less gains useful consumer information from. But they've become somehow, this marketing flotsam and jetsam, the sine non qua of modern marketing. They have little effect but to keep people working for other people so that still other people feel important.

I've been in this situation before, and when I am done with the entirety of the work I have to do for this company and its various adjuncts, I'll have created a marketing platform which will "contain" probably 2000 ads and 50 or so longer pieces. My calculus says they'll pay me on the order of a quarter of a million dollars for all that.

Which isn't enough, of course. Though at one time it was beyond my very comprehension of Mammon. And I've always liked Mammon.

Whatever form it takes, Mammon beats a piss-stained mattress on the lower east side and roaches with a bug up their ass against you.

Simpler.

Many years ago--through 1993--I worked, indirectly at least, for Hall of Fame art director Mike Tesch. I say indirectly, because Ally, where Mike was ECD (when that was the highest creative title) was a well-run agency. If you were a Senior Vice President, Creative Group Head, you ran your business with your account guy. You hired the people you needed. Got rid of the people you didn't and approved or killed ads as you deemed appropriate.

There wasn't a lot of meddling, so long as the work was good. That gave people a necessary sense of autonomy and kept back-biting and turfwars to a minimum.

So, while Tesch was looming in the background, I had little to do with him. Ed Butler and Mike Withers approved my work, and that was fine. Once, it must have been a summer Friday, Ed and Mike were out for the day. An account person came running down to my office fairly breathless. 

"The client just called. They need an ad this afternoon to run in the Times for Monday morning."

"But Mike and Ed are out," I stammered.

"You do it," the account guy said, making scarce for the 2:18 to Scarsdale. "Get Tesch to approve it."

I quickly wrote an ad--a headline with copy and I doped out a rough comp and trembled my way to Tesch's almost pitch black corner office.  I explained the crisis in about three words--and leggo the work I had done when he brusquely grabbed for the paper I was sweating over.

"OK," he said. And he went to work.

In about two minutes he had found me and handed me a comp. I was to sell it to the client. About an hour later the client approved it and Tesch sent it out for type and got the studio work going so the ad could plate over-the-weekend for the Monday Times.

I remember reading something about Tesch around the time in some awards magazine. It might have been on the occasion of Tesch's entry into some advertising Hall of Fame or another. The sentence read something like, "Mike believed there was no marketing problem that can't be solved by a great commercial."

Certainly, if you look at the best of Tesch's work you can see why he was a true believer.

Today, of course, no one believes statements with the sort of simplicity and directness of Tesch's belief above. 

Below is a bit from an article from The Athletic, the New York Times' really crappy sports pages.

I don't one-hundred percent know what all of the above means. I know a good pitcher and a good catcher will move the ball in and out, up and down, fast and slow. Every at bat, real or metaphorical, is a cat and mouse game with the batter. And the best way to win that game within a game is to mix things up so the batter is almost always guessing.

From a batter's pov, we hear a lot today about bat speed, angle of approach, knowledge of the strike zone and so much science. When I was a boy, we heard about two things from our coaches. 

1. Hit the ball hard.

2. Hit 'em where they ain't.

I think we can find a trillion things to say about agency marketing ecosystems and what works and what doesn't work and why. You need spend no more than nine micro-seconds on LinkedIn to get enough marketing theory to choke a hippopotamus.

Just about every third person on LinkedIn has a mini-MBA from Mark Ritson, or some certification in agentic asphyxiation from the Seth Godin Institute of Chrome-Dome-itis.  In those places you learn how to derive 192 page decks that prove your eyeballs didn't bleed when you were forced to sit through a reading of the 192 page deck and the accompanying :30-second spot with seventeen different testable offer tags.

I suppose all this professional wankery is good for the economy. It employs thousands of people to do the work of about a dozen and then tell us why they work could be better if every decision that was validated by research yesterday is invalidated by new research from today.

I don't watch a helluva a lot of TV.

But when I do, I never see anything that stops me, that intrigues me, that interests me, that makes me a promise I'll remember until the next day.

Somehow we've made it so complicated it's all spinning down the drain and no one has the balls to say so. And say maybe complication has rendered it so.

I miss Mike.

Return on Investment.

I came. I saw. I was vindictive.

I got something of a vindicating call the other day. While I realize vindication doesn't pay the bills, every once-in-a-while it's worth the price of foregone revenue.

I think it was Bernbach who said, "it's not a principle until it costs you money." Thankfully, this principle cost me, but not so much so that I had to take a second out on Sparkle.

This was a client who came via an old work colleague, and came by the way of a pro-bono favor. I'm not a big one on favors--but when the person asking is someone you've known for a quarter of a century, and the client is doing something good for the world, you can stretch a point. Not too often. But once in a while and with a sort-of white-glove discretion.

The pro-bono ask was fairly simple, as they rarely are. It was just a manifesto. Having read and remembered something from a Greek philosopher called Heraclitus not too many days before, a quotation of his seem shockingly apt for the subject.

I quickly ran it by my friend, who quickly ran it by the client. In about 42 seconds I had somehow landed on that slim sliver of loft that collided somehow with dreams and aspirations--all without being so high-falutin' you want to gag on your own pomposity. 

I've worked at digital agencies. My soul has grown deep with pomposity.

In any event, in about two shakes of a mackerel's tail I was on the Ameche with my pro-bono client and my friend--reading the whole exegesis. About three-quarters of the way through, the client blurted, "you have to work for me."

In about two weeks we had a fairly hefty scope of work signed. She would pay me a little over $8500/month for the six months of the scope.

The first few months went great and I got a check with a minimum of back-and-forth emailing. But then the checks stopped. With work having been done by me on a "drop-everything" modus operandi.

Expecting me to drop-everything is not cool. Not paying is uncool-er.

H, my business director tried everything from honey to vinegar and back again. Eventually we were cc'd on an email by mistake and we heard about cash-flow issues--which are not my problem. Finally, we got a check for $2,000 out of the $8,500 owed. 

Again, tres uncool.

Frankly, I closed the books on the business.

One of the things I've learned in running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is that you can't relax on who you are, your belief in yourself, and your worth. I've worked hard to position myself as expensive and I'm not about to back-track on that well-earned posture.

Yesterday, I got an email from the now ex-client. Needing work like the work I had done for her before for another client she was pitching.

You realize along the way--you force yourself to--that your work is special and unique. That is, no one else can do it how I do it. That's why I get to charge what I get to charge.

The mathematics contained in those sentences were never understood by the holding companies. They saw the very work they did and the people doing it as cheap, interchangeable and not at all unique. 

No matter what business you're in--your job is first and foremost to be different. To do something no one else does. 

If you're an indifferent hitter and an indifferent fielder, you find a way to become an iron-man--you find a way to fill in when guys are hurt. Or you find a way to squeeze a runner over, or start a little 'bingo' if the opposing twirler is throwing aspirin. You find a way to get under the other team's skin, to disrupt a pattern, to make some noise. In advertising and in sports, many of these skills are of ephemeral importance--they're hardly seen except by the cognoscenti and there ain't too many cognoscenti left anywhere at this point. Most of them have been cost consultanted into oblivion.

The hardest thing is finding that thing. 
The second hardest thing is finding a way to actually believe it on those days when you feel like shit. 
The third hardest thing is charging for it and not relenting. 

That's vindication, too.