1000 Grand Concourse, The Bronx.

Uncle Slappy called this morning. He had heard on the news that New York was facing a "heat advisory" and he was making sure I wasn't doing something "meshugenah" and going out for a run.

"I'll be ok, Uncle Slappy. It's early yet. Besides the reservoir," that's where I do most of my running "is fairly well shaded. Besides, I probably won't do much more than a lap."

The old man had already moved on.

"Did I ever tell you about the building your Aunt Sylvie and I owned on the Grand Concourse. 1000 Grand Concourse to be exact. In the High Bridge section of the Bronx. Puerto Rican now, but Joosh when we owned it in the early '50s."

"No, Uncle Slappy. I didn't know you owned real estate.'

"The Grand Concourse was paradise in those days. And a member of my Congregation" (Uncle Slappy was the Rabbi at a small Upper East Side Shul, Beth Youiz Miwo Mannow) "left it to me in his will."

"You must have been very important in his life," I said.

"Well, like most things that sound too good to be true," Slappy corrected, "1000 Grand Concourse had its issues. The hot weather in New York--that's what made me think about it."

"How so, Uncle Slappy?" I asked somewhat plaintively.

"Well, for one, the ferstunkeh architect of the building was a nut job. Somehow he designed the thing so that all 56 units faced the back. You've felt heat before, Mr. Big Schott. But these were the days before air-conditioning. You never felt heat like you felt there."

"All the units faced the back? How is that even possible?"

"Never in a million years could I explain it. And secondly, the building was turned over to me occupied. Boney Tenant lived on the top floor."

"You mean Tony Bennet?" figuring the old man had slipped into a Spoonerism.

"No, a tenant no one knew his name in 6C a one-bedroom. He had to be 6'6" and maybe dripping with sweat 120 pounds. We never knew his name. He was always just Boney Tenant to us."

"Could he sing?" I asked trying to break the tension.

"Don't be such a wise-ass," the old man shot back.

And with that he hung up the Ameche.

I took it extra slow around the reservoir today and turned the A/C up a notch.

A picture from after the meeting.

Failures and hits.

Stop me if I told you this one before.

No?

Ok, so here goes.

In the halcyon days of the dot-com boom I was shooting three spots in what would eventually become a very popular campaign.

The campaign was the second the client had produced. The first was an abject failure. I was brought in to make things right.

We were shooting and all of us on the set had that giddy feeling that things were going right and we could have something pretty cool on our hands.

I was standing with my boss when the client came over.

"I think we have a hit," he said in his oleaginous way.

"Yes, we just may," said my boss.

"It's too bad we had that failure in the first round of spots."

I'll never forget what my boss said.

"If we didn't have that failure, we wouldn't be here now."

That shut the client the fuck up.

Which, by the way, is always a good thing to do.

Crap.

The central creative issue of our era isn't the lack of a big idea, originality or even impact and intrusiveness. The central creative issue we face is one of editing.

Most people and clients--especially online--produce and "publish" so much dreck that everything, even what's good suffers from guilt by association.

The news I listen to, arguably the most serious news in America (NPR), has more content on Charlie Sheen than it does on a bloody war in Syria. If you want to seriously depress yourself about the Empire of Illusion in which we reside, go to Yahoo's homepage. "Britney Spears Radiant in Red Dress" it screams followed by "The Simplest Way to Cook Corn."

Clients, of course, are incredibly guilty. As are the agencies that "serve" them. Websites are like content roach motels: The copy goes up but it never comes down.

When I worked on IBM I remember having heard that their website was 4.5 million pages long. I said to them that's 22,500 200-page books. That was ten years ago.

If you write it, it will post.

The genius of traditional media--print, broadcast, outdoor and radio--is that they were constructed with boundaries. You can fit only so many words in :30 seconds. The web is ever-expanding and hierarchy-less. It is like the Collyer Brother's apartment. Stuffed to the gills with crap.

Often online a friend will post a couple dozen photographs. Two are good. Even Woody Allen, whom I respect as an auteur, has just released "To Rome With Love." It would have been 100% better if it were 30% shorter.

Maybe I'm guilty as well.

This post is already too long.

Empires and colonies.

If you understand your world history, you know this: Great empires from the American, to the Roman, to the English, Dutch and French, amassed their fantastic wealth by extracting it (usually in the form of raw materials and labor) from their colonies.

In other words, they took a lot and gave back less.

It occurs to me that taking a lot and giving a little--the Colonial model--is precisely what the Empires of the Web (those amassing great wealth) are doing to us. They are the masters, we the subjects.

This thinking, of course, comes in the wake of Facebook--the most imperial of all web powers deciding to assign us all new--and virtually unchanegeable email addresses, all in an effort to compel its subjects (us) to spend more time on their site and looking at the ads they feed us with our own valuable data.

What's astounding about this "value exchange" between Facebook users and Facebook is that we--the users--don't have anyway of determining how much we are paying for Facebook services. When you fill up your gas tank you know how much the Oilopoly is removing from your wallet. When you buy "The New York Times" you know how much you're paying for their brand of the news.

Web entities have successfully given us the illusion that they are "free." Of course our data, our privacy, our lives are the gifts that keep on giving.

Free does not create billionaires. Never has, never will.

In the process, so-called free services have unfairly competed with analog entities that charged money. "Free" prevailed to the point where finding real news is virtually impossible. Free has forced good out of business. Easy destroyed hard.

Today is the day I leave Facebook. (If I can figure out how.)

I've been their colonial vassal long enough.

The price I'm paying is not worth the value I get.

--
BTW 1.
Years ago I wrote that Microsoft is following the course of pre-revival General Motors. They are following GM's practice of arrogant stupidity. The worm will turn.

I believe eventually Facebook and even Google will succumb to arrogant stupidity. They might still be popular--in the way Verizon is popular. But they will be despised.

And there's a lot about them to hate.
--
BTW 2.
Facebook's market cap is about $70 billion. They have about 900 million "users." (They should really be called "usees.") That means Facebook sells $77 worth of data from each of us.

I am not content. A re-run.

I am sitting in an allllllllllllllllllllllllllll-day meeting on Content Strategy. This post, which I wrote four years ago popped into my mind.

Content is today's shibboleth. "It's all about content." "Content is king." "We're in the content business."

Oh, bullshit.

First of all, since this blog proposes to look at the world through a linguistic lens, where did the word content come from? I am 50 and before a few years ago, the word, in the way it is used today, did not exist. We relied on words like information, stories, movies, interviews, jokes, instead of the catchall phrase "content."

"Gone With the Wind" was not content. It was a movie, and frankly, my dear,a damn entertaining one. But by amalgamating everything under the heading of content, we eliminate judgment, quality, nuance. It's all just content. Calling everything made out of binary code "content" is as broad and inaccurate as using phrases like "axis of evil," to describe two-or-three-hundred million people. Calling everything content is as broadly discriminatory as saying "all Asians look alike." It's just not the way things are. Everything that contains information, everything that can be viewed while trapped in an edit suite or a conference room in Client-ville is not content.

Here's the one, the only, the simple rule to remember: If it's not relevant, it's not content. If it's bland, a talking head, irrelevant, uninteresting, it's not content. If it doesn't speak to someone with humanity and empathy, it's not content. It's NONtent.

Think about some of those Ogilvy-isms that were drummed into our heads, either from working at Ogilvy or from reading "Ogilvy on Advertising." "You can't bore someone into buying your product." "The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife." "Unless your advertising is built on a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night." In other words, it had damn well better be interesting, or it isn't content.

Now, let's fasten our seat-belts and take a look at some data. According to Richard Saul Wurman in "Information Anxiety," “Companies are only able to keep up with, and use less than 7% of the information they produce.” More data will be produced in the next year than has been generated during the entire existence of humankind. Every year the amount of data produced in the world grows by 800%. In 2005, humans produced 43 million exabytes of data--that more than eight times the amount of printed data ever produced.

Hold on, here's some more: Cal Berkeley studies estimated that by the end of 1999, the sum of human-produced information (including all audio, video recordings and text/books) was about 12 exabytes of data. The 2003 Berkeley report stated that in 2002 alone, "telephone calls worldwide on both landlines and mobile phones contained 17.3 exabytes of new information if stored in digital form", and "it would take 9.25 exabytes of storage to hold all U.S. [telephone] calls each year."International Data Corporation estimates that approximately 160 exabytes of digital information were created, captured, and replicated worldwide in 2006.

Did you cry "Uncle" yet?

The word exabyte is the basis for the term "exaflood", a neologism created by Bret Swanson of the Discovery Institute in a January 2007 Wall Street Journal editorial. Exaflood refers to the rapidly increasing torrent of data transmitted over the Internet. The amount of information people upload, download and share on the Internet is growing (due in large part to video, audio and photo applications), at an exponential rate while the capacity of the Internet, its bandwidth, is limited and susceptible to a “flood” of data equal to multiple exabytes. "One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video.

All this data is not content. It's just stuff. It's not king. It's inundation. It's NONtent.

So, if you'll give me the notion of NONtent--shit that isn't interesting, relevant, important, funny, entertaining, I'll concede to you the notion of content. And now I will go back to the days of the Mad-Men and attempt to resurrect the content phrase that pays.

That phrase is AIDA.
A--Attention
I--Interest
D--Desire
A--Action

So, I'll go so far as to say this it's not content without AIDA.

You don't go home nights and watch "content" on the content-boob-tube that doesn't involve AIDA. You don't listen to the radio or subscribe to magazines that aren't AIDA-oriented. You don't consume NONtent. Why would your audience or your target?

If you build it, they won't come.
If it's interesting, they will.

For Sam.

The easiest thing in the world to do is to complain about work.

We spend most of our time there.

Even if you're "high up" in the company, there's still the "man" to rail against.

And of course, you're over-worked and under-paid.

Then there are the layabouts, frauds, esthetes and kiss-asses who seem to get ahead unfairly.

Complain.

Complain.

Complain.

There's nothing wrong with complaining. I would be the last one to say that there is.

But there is something wrong with having complaints and then doing nothing about them.

And there is, I think, something wrong in not appreciating the blood, sweat, toil and tears of work.

Work helps give us meaning.

It presents us with choices.

It allows us to challenge ourselves.

It introduces us to friends.

In short, it helps us define ourselves.

You can be diligent or a dilettante.

You can work hard or you can get by.

Back to the beginning: You can work to make things better or you can slide by.

These aren't simple work place choices.

They are life choices.

Who do you want to be?

Who's in the mirror?

How do you want to live?

No understanding.

Having grown up in a Philip Rothian household (though without a great deal of access to calves' liver) I have never be brimming with confidence. I did not have one of those mothers who gloried in my every movement, who sang my praises to one and all including myself. Rather, she was shrewishly dedicated to doing everything she could to make herself powerful and myself weak. Unlike the practice of so many parents of today's generations, nothing went up on the refrigerator, no praise--for my brother, sister or me--was ever forthcoming.

There was a time, of course, when most of the people I worked with, those my age and a few years more, were similarly neurotic. There was a power to that neurosis. It inspired us to work hard, to prove ourselves to always strive for more.

That all, these days, seems to have disappeared.

Now among so many young creative people there is a inverse relationship between achievement and arrogance. There is a disconnect between effort and entitlement. There is a subject-object split between competence and confidence.

I think such ego-inflation explains the eminence of awards that are indirectly correlated to achievement. People seem to act as if they deserve praise simply for showing up.

On Saturday night my wife and I went to see Woody Allen's new movie "To Rome with Love." The line was long. Long and elderly. Long and elderly and Jewish.

In fact, I'd say fully 60% of the line was filled with holocaust survivors, spreading down 3rd Avenue and around the corner down 59th. My wife and I arrived early and we're about seventh and eighth in line. Finally, the line began to move. And there at the front of a line is a hipster couple. Trying to meld into the line, cutting in front of all.

I yelled out, "how can you do that? How can you live with yourself?" With that they were sent away by the ticket taker.

How can people do it?

How do they live with themselves, with their lies?

There's so much I will never understand.

A Sunday in New York.

I noticed something very strange this morning as I went out for a run. I left the house around 9:45 and just before 10, I passed a kid and his dad and the kid was eating an ice cream bar--a popsicle, the colorful red, white and blue types you buy from the Sabrett's wagons that dot our cityscape.

A bit later on, maybe around 10:15, I saw a kid and his mom, with the kid eating a peanut-crusted hard ice-cream cone, again, the type you buy from a street vendor.

Finally, finished with my run around 11:15, I saw a grown man licking lasciviously at a cone heaped with chocolate soft-serve.

Seriously, not to sound like an old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn, or like Michael Bloomberg, but what's happened to our society when people are eating ice cream well before lunch? Why are they writing ridiculous phrases all over their bodies, wearing next to nothing. And why, amid a national obesity epidemic is Taco Bell running yet another campaign positioning itself as a "4th Meal." Really. Three meals is no longer enough.

Maybe it's a stretch. But something's gone wrong.

But maybe something is changing.

CAA and R/GA both won big at Cannes for doing work that promotes values--sustainable farming and dedication to fitness. The antipode to our current dedication to fatness.

This weekend National Public Radio had a short segment on the great television writer/producer and liberal leader Norman Lear. Lear created shows that discussed the issues of the day. Racism, sexism, ageism, war and politics. He did so in a popular and humorous fashion.

Today, there is no room for Lear or someone like him on television or even cable. Our shows have no heroes, no positive role models. And most seem to involve nothing more than a juvenile fascination with giggling and sex.

But maybe things will change. Maybe people will wake up to the horror of amusing themselves to death.

Probably not, however.

Some pedagogy.

I've written about this before but it's been a while and I feel it's time to write about it again.

Getting fired, axed, shit-canned, booted out, downsized, right-sized, aligned, adjusted, schmised is a part of our business.

The saddest part of this is, of course, that the people most in need of being fired, seldom are. In the words of Rudy Vallee who played John D. Hackensacker in Preston Sturges' great movie "The Palm Beach Story," "the men who are most in need of a beating are always enormous."

In any event, no one ever said the world, or our business is even remotely fair. If it were, we wouldn't all be working for holding company honchos who have never written an ad and wouldn't know good from shit if you bludgeoned them with it. That's ok, I guess, someone has to make $20 million and I'm convinced it will never be me and that's ok, I guess.

So, here's today's lesson.

What to do when that inevitable day comes when you're fired.

1. Send notes/phone all your real friends in the business. Changing your Facebook/Linked In status to say you're available doesn't count. This is a time to reflect upon karma. Or tit for tat. Or quid pro quo. If you've helped people along the way, people will help you. If you're a schmuck, you'll be treated like one.

2. You should always keep your book/portfolio/site up-to-date. Anyone can be fired at any time. So don't wait till the last minute to make yourself presentable.

3. Figure out a plan of attack. Where do you want to work? Is your book up to snuff to work there? Who do you know there? What is your "touch strategy" to communicate with them.

4. Understand that some days you'll have done all the job-hunting you can do by 10:30 in the morning. Don't spend the rest of your waking hours flagellating yourself. Go to the movies, go for a run, enjoy yourself. You'll be working soon enough.

5. Accept any freelance at any reasonable rate that comes from a good agency. You'll make connections, promote yourself, and move on from there.

6. Start a blog. (Unemployment is why I began Ad Aged.) Blogging is the best way I can think of to put your name, thoughts and work in front of prospective employees. I've met in my five years of blogging half a dozen "big deals." That ain't a bad track record.

7. Finally, when you live your life, don't live high on the hog. Don't buy $129 canvas sneakers and $79 wool hats and apartments realtors tell you you can afford. Save your money. There's a time when you might need it.

It had to be said.

One of the surprising things about marketing people is how many of them are especially lousy when it comes to marketing themselves.

It's getting to the point where it's beginning to piss me off.

I have 1232 Linked In linkees. About half of those twelve-hundred are fairly recent and they're people, I think, who have linked in to me primarily because I am an ECD at an agency that's considered "hot."

In other words, I probably couldn't pick them out of a line-up.

Nevertheless about three times a week I get an badly-written email from someone I don't know asking for my help in getting a job.

Look, I'm happy to help people if I can.

But you have to first help yourself.

Treat yourself like you'd treat a product you'd advertise.

Treat me like you'd treat a consumer.

Be interesting.

Be intrusive.

Be smart.

Above all, fucking be grammatical.

Brand stories.

Great brands tell great stories.

It's pretty simple.

IBM does it.

Nike does it.

American Express does it.

Even Coke and Pepsi do it.

What great brands don't do is create lists of copy points.

Or pound their chest.

Or blast the volume.

"Storytelling" is today's marketing shibboleth.

People like me, in fact, are categorized by the agencies they work for as "storytellers."

I've been in advertising virtually my whole life, having grown up with a father who was in the business. I've spent a good portion of my 54 years thinking about how I'd take a brand, product or service to the public.

I've never thought of myself as a storyteller.

But that's ok.

It's today's jargon, and I don't want to get all King Canute about it. I can't hold back the tide.

Today, my partner and I will show some nice work to our client.

The client that says they want to tell their brand story.

Let's see if it all becomes about copy points.

Some thoughts on lies.

There are certain things that in the words of Henry Wiggen, really rub my goat the wrong way. Foremost among those things are lies. Especially lies in advertising.

When I was about four or five, the back cover of just about every kids' magazine was adorned with a lavish four-color illustration of a pitched battle between the American revolutionists and the snooty British "red coats."

The scene was every bit as vivid as the opening 20 minutes of Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," or Kubrick's great "Paths of Glory." You were "in" the battle. You could smell the gun powder, feel the drama, hear the whiz of musket balls.

The ad told me that for just $1.99, or something like that, I would get 200 lifelike British and colonial soldiers. Then, I could create my own battles.

Somehow I prevailed upon my mother to order these soldiers for me. I eagerly checked the mail every day, waiting breathlessly for them to arrive.

Finally they did.

200 flimsy pieces of red and blue plastic pressed men. They looked nothing like the ad.

I was crushed. And maybe that small incident explains why I hate liars so much. If you can't deliver what you promise, some ring of hell is reserved for you.

Right now I am sitting in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, online thanks to Boingo.

I almost always want to kill when I'm in an airport. And today my homicidal tendencies are even more pronounced. They confiscated my aftershave.

But what really got me was logging onto Boingo, where they put an ad and then a button that says "Skip this Welcome Screen."

It occurs to me that perhaps the reason web advertising is so utterly and completely "click-free" is that so much of the web was built on lies like "welcome screens." Or ads that promised ways to lose 30 pounds in 30 minutes. Or that you won seventeen billion Nigerian dollars.

I don't know how a medium can establish trust when it's overrun by liars.

But if I were at Cannes, that's what I'd be talking about.

Advertising, a love story.

When I was young, I had aspirations of being an English professor at some small ivied college where the autumns are cool and the co-eds are hot. I saw academia through rose-colored lenses. It would be an escape from the crush of competition, an escape from the madness of Madison Avenue I grew up with, and a cloister away from the banality of the real world.

That didn't work out.

I ran out of money for grad school.

I got a job in advertising.

Here's the thing for me about advertising.

I absolutely love it.

For all the stupidity and cravenness and crap of today, there are people I enjoy spending my days with.

I love the work of doing work.

I love that I am versatile enough to work in all media channels.

I even love my clients for their ails, and woes and problems.

There are times, of course, I get down-trodden.

I fall into that natural Semitic trait of carrying, Job-like, the woes of the world on my shoulders.

And there are times when the business gets to me.

And, I'll admit, at the end of the day, I leave advertising and recharge myself in a good book.

Just because you hate it somedays doesn't mean you hate it.

The truth is, there's really nothing else I'd rather do.

An early morning. Not in Cannes.

As I do often when I'm feeling a great deal of pressure, I got in early this morning.

No one was in the office.

Even the rats, which run through the floor at night looking for half-eaten tuna salad sandwiches, had scurried off to the garage just below me where the Sabrett's guys store their rickety carts. There they feast. I imagine them like Roman Grandees gorging while the city falls.

This morning I was kept company by a common housefly. Musca domestica.

It would land on my screen as if to see what I was writing. I swatted at it unsuccessfully with my bear-sized mitts and then, as it flew off, I grabbed it out of mid-air and let it drop dead to the dirty carpet that shows no dirt.

Finally, I was all alone, the only other sound the rumble of an air-conditioning system that was designed with the care of a soviet era nuclear power plant.

When I need to concentrate, I put on my reading glasses--I need them more often now--they act as blinders, forcing my focus on the page.

I read what I had written last night before I left.

Six scripts.

I knocked out a phrase and added a shorter one.

I untyped and retyped.

And there, as people began slowly to fill the $29 desks around me, I became happy with what I had done.

I've had a hard time of late. My serotonin seems to have gone missing. And even two fairly good runs this weekend have still left me with a shortage of endorphins.

But I read again what I wrote.

It's good.

I'm ok.

Morality, character and all that shit.

While reading Maureen Dowd's op-ed in yestderday's "Times," http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/opinion/sunday/dowd-moral-dystopia.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss I came upon a sentence or two that helps explain much of what is wrong with our business and our world.

Dowd was writing of the overall decline in our moral standards, our societal loss of values and character. Here's the paragraph that struck me. It's a quotation from James Davison Hunter, a professor of religion, culture and social theory at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Death of Character.

“We’ve moved from a culture of character to a culture of personality. The etymology of the word character is that it’s deeply etched, not changeable in all sorts of circumstances. We don’t want to think of ourselves as transgressive or bad, but we tend to personalize our understanding of the good.”

Too often, I think, we in the ad industry create personalities for brands rather than helping brands uncover their character (that is if they have any.) We also fall for agencies and agency leaders who are personalities, rather than people of character.

Character, as Hunter writes, endures. It does not blow with the wind. It is resolute. It makes tough decisions.

Not long ago, Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, NJ and future president ran into a burning house to save a neighbor. His security team had told him not to.

Booker sums life up pretty well: “We have to fight the dangerous streams in culture, the consumerism and narcissism and me-ism that erode the borders of our moral culture.We can’t put shallow celebrity before core decency. We have to have a deeper faith in the human spirit. As they say, he who has the heart to help has the right to complain.”

Uncle Slappy on "erev" Father's Day.

It's Father's Day weekend. Always a tough day for me, like most days these days.

I grew up in a fatherless home. And even when my father was home he was essentially absent. Fortunately, I have Uncle Slappy in my world. Slappy is both willing and able to fill the role as my lost father's surrogate.

I called Uncle Slappy this morning, not able to wait till tomorrow, Father's Day, to call him. I will call him tomorrow as well, but when you have Uncle Slappy in your life, you really can't speak to him too often. What's more, he's pushing 85, and though he's hale and hearty and his mind is as fast as an Intel Dual Core, you just never know how much longer he'll be around. The last thing I want is for him to die and for me to feel regret that I hadn't had enough time with him.

Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie never had kids. I don't know if that was there choice or if they had some other issue. In any event, my brother, sister and I were in a sense adopted by them. Over the years, my brother has drifted away and my sister died young and tragically. In the meantime, I have grown closer and closer to the old man. Though I some times complain when he's up from Boca (my three bedrooms seem awfully claustrophobic when he is around) he is a big part of my life, lending me wisdom and stability and experience when I need it.

He started this morning's call with a joke.

Two old Jewish men, alta kockers, are sitting in the sun on those benches in the middle of Broadway on the Upper West Side.

Abe says to Benny, "How's your new marriage?"

Benny says, "Oy. My marriage is terrible. My wife is only twenty years old. She's absolutely gorgeous. Giant breasts. And all she wants to do is have sex with me, day in and day out."

Abe asks, "That sounds great! What's horrible about that?"

And Benny replies, "I forgot where I live."

That's the other thing about Uncle Slappy.

He almost always hands me a laugh.

Man vs. Machine.

I think open plan workspaces are one of the stupidest "consultant-derived" arrangements of people yet conceived in the history of man. I'd bet my last dollar that for all the studies that say they enhance community and collaboration, there are a dozen that say they drive down morale and productivity. Also, I'd bet the real motivation behind packing people onto a floor like cord wood in a suburban back yard has nothing to do with anything other than cramming more workers into the same amount of space.

Some time, probably after I hang up my mac, there will be a backlash against open plan, and HR specialists, architects and the like will wail, "How could we have been so stupid?"

In any event, in my open plan space, I'm lucky enough to sit shoulder to shoulder with another Creative Director/writer who happens to be a talented and nice guy. We usually find 20 minutes to chat in the morning--about life--and another 20 or so to chat before we wrap up for the day.

Yesterday, my pal, I'll call him "Max," came in a bit late. He settled in and I asked something banal.

"Where's your computer?"

He took a pencil and a pad and said, "I'm going old school (or is it 'skool') today. No computer. Just me and a pad."

"Wow," I exclaimed. "A day without being besieged by email and IM. A day without the ever-present distraction of Facebook. That's fucking great. I don't think I could do it."

At that point, I left the floor for a few hours.

When I came back near the end of the day, there was Max, pounding away at his mac.

"What happened," I asked him.

"Fuck that shit," he said, "I have to work."

Amnesia.

They say when a woman delivers a baby the pain of childbirth is so great that over time the body or the brain actually forgets how bad the pain was. If the pain stayed resonant, they say, no woman would ever choose to have more than one child.

I was just chatting with a friend from another agency, also a creative director.

It was typical creative director talk.

We spoke of how lousy our clients are.

At that point my friend said something wise:"You need amnesia to do this job."

In other words, if you remember how difficult things are, you'll duck and cover rather than trying again.

I think in a lot of ways, that's the secret.

Put aside the pain, then show up anyway and try, try again.

A bit more explanation.

I've been feeling a little out of sorts of late.

I'm not sure if it's something physical or something to do with my serotonin levels. But I've been misplacing things, feeling generally drab and when speaking I've had a harder time than usual finding the right word. I've even been feeling a bit dizzy.

Naturally when you get up in years, your first worry when these things happen is that you are coming down with early-onset Alzheimer's.

Along the way, you also begin to notice a few other ailments. You're a bit more winded running up the steps from the train (heart condition), that it takes a few moments longer than it used to to pee (prostrate cancer), and you're too tired at night to watch the NBA finals (inoperable tumor).

In short, you reckon, you're doomed.

Even this blog, which I assiduously write nearly every morning has fallen victim to my woes. The ideas I'm usually brimming with just aren't coming. And the ideas I get paid to have, well those seem lethargic as well.

Of course, I still have my mortgage to pay, my kids to support, my meetings to make and my work to create.

That shit never has an off day.

So STFU, George.

And get back to work.

Black Dog Wednesday.

Some days it's like working in Chernobyl. Without the benefits of dying early.

Personal branding and yoga shorts.

This weekend as I walked along Broadway on the Upper West Side, I came upon the cleavage-adorned windows of Victoria's Secret. (When I was a kid, if you wanted to see similar amounts of skin you have had to man up and actually buy a copy of "Playboy.")

There were posterized breasts everywhere, ready to pop like over-filled water balloons. And shapely keisters the likes of which I've seldom seen outside of Cameron Diaz. The keister posters were advertising something called "yoga shorts" and the headline blared that the shorts were "cute."

Cute is a word, I believe that afflicts us.

Aren't my nails cute?
Look at those cute shoes?
I love that cute haircut.
My boyfriend is so cute.
These shorts (back to the Victoria's Secret window) are cute.

What's happened is that as a society we have all learned about personal branding. We have bought the dope that if we wear "cute" things, we too will be cute.

We have forgotten about steak and sell, instead, a persistent sizzle.
As a culture we have forgotten pretty is as pretty does.

We, therefore, adorn ourselves with logos.

Everything from our eye-glasses to our flip-flops are branded.

We think by associating ourselves with popular, rich, successful and sexy brands we will be popular, rich, successful and sexy.

Get real.

Those cute shorts won't do shit to an ass that has the topography of the Andes.

Losing Facebook.

A backlash is brewing against Facebook. A backlash built not just around its plummeting stock price but about more important and real issues.

In today's "New York Times," the op-ed columnist Bill Keller begins his column this way:

"What's the difference, I asked a tech-writer friend, between the billionaire media mogul Mark Zuckerberg and the billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch?

"When Rupert invades your privacy, my friend e-mailed back, it’s against the law. When Mark does, it’s the future."

More damning to my mind is the op-ed three time Pulitzer-winner, Thomas Friedman, wrote in Sunday's "Times."

Friedman's column is about the failure of the Arab Spring. You remember the Arab Spring, don'tcha. It was, to the Williamsburg cognoscenti, proof of the great power of Twitter and Facebook. It was a revolution spread by tweets, likes and posts. 

Friedman writes: "To be sure, Facebook, Twitter and blogging are truly revolutionary tools of communication and expression that have brought so many new and compelling voices to light. At their best, they’re changing the nature of political communication and news. But, at their worst, they can become addictive substitutes for real action. How often have you heard lately: “Oh, I tweeted about that.” Or “I posted that on my Facebook page.” Really? In most cases, that’s about as impactful as firing a mortar into the Milky Way galaxy. Unless you get out of Facebook and into someone’s face, you really have not acted. And, as Syria’s vicious regime is also reminding us: “bang-bang” beats “tweet-tweet” every day of the week."

Friedman's view is something few marketers have understood--though it was one of those adages people of my generation certainly grew up with. Talk (as in tweets, posts, likes) is cheap.

When you actually have to do something, that's where the rubber meets the road.

P.S.  My guess is Facebook all but disappears by 2017.

 

The Ice Cream Man Cometh.

There are two ways to grow old, I'm told.

You can either be old and fat.

Or you can be old and thin.

I am trying desperately, battling my genetics to be old and thin. Accordingly I have adopted what I'm calling "The Passover Diet." I have virtually removed bread, pasta, rice and grains of their ilk from my diet. Along the way, I've dropped 30 or so pounds, but have more to go, so I am sticking with the regimen.

Last night, however, after having run and walked for almost two hours earlier in the day, I felt I could reward myself with an ice cream cone from a Mr. Softee truck. Now that there are no more Carvels in Manhattan, their goodness being priced off our slim sliver of asphalt, Mr. Softee has to do. It's not bad ice cream, and since it's bought from the side of a truck, you walk and eat--not a bad way to rebel against the scourge of adipose-laden calories.

Having had a pretty shitty week in the office--nothing entirely unusual in that--and feeling particularly vulnerable at work, I did today what I often do. I thought about a different career.

There's not a lot I can do, I have a distinct absence of marketable skills, but I do have the money to buy a Mr. Softee franchise and truck.

I began doing research on the life of a Mr. Softee franchisee. Do you get to choose your route? What are the hours like? What happens in the Winter? Most important, how much money do you stand to make?

Tomorrow I'll get up my usual time and go to work. I'll do the work I do, work considerately with people, deal with clients and try to keep my sanity.

But, look! There's Mr. Softee, just over the horizon.

New York poetry.

There are times New York is just so amazing that it's hard for me not to pinch myself that I get to live here. Sure, it's crowded. Apartments are small. And today is the day of the drunken tattoo-athon, the Puerto Rican day parade. But the city is so surpassing in so many ways that I very nearly gush with excitement.

Last night my wife and I got free tickets to the Public Theater's "Shakespeare in the Park." It's the 50th year the Public's been putting on free plays and they seem to be bent on out-doing themselves for their anniversary. Last night's performance of "As You Like It," featured the stunning and excellent Lily Rabe as Rosalind and a cadre of fools and melancholics, the likes of which you rarely see outside of agency conference rooms.

It was a beautiful night in New York. The skies had threatened rain, but in the end, the rain stayed away. The air was warm and humid, but not too warm and humid and there was, on occasion, a gentle cooling breeze. As for flies and bugs, they were absent, presumably flying out to the Hamptons to feast on the mega-wealthy for the weekend.

The high point of the evening was Jacques' (Stephen Spinella's) delivery of the play's greatest monologue, which left me wondering what stage I, a 54-year-old copywriter, am left to play:

"All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like a snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

 

The great Historian, Robert Conquest, compressed this monologue all into a limerick. It is also great and wonderful:

 

"Seven ages: first puking and mewling,

Then very pissed off with your schooling,

Then fucks and then fights,

Then judging chaps’ rights,

Then sitting in slippers, then drooling."

That's all for this Sunday.

Except for a bit more Conquest--this time a summation of 40 years of Soviet history.

"There once was a Bolshie called Lenin

Who did one or two million men in.

That’s a lot to have done in

But where he did one in

That old Bolshie Stalin did ten in!"

 

Groucho and groceries.

Fairway ("Like No Other Market") is the big supermarket/everything emporium in my neighborhood. It's an event, a scene and home to everything you could possibly want for your kitchen, all fresh off the farm, out of the sea or from the slaughterhouse. In the year or so it's been open in my neighborhood, it's annihilated virtually all other supermarkets and fruit stands. It's so big and so fresh, nothing else can compete.

My wife and I stop there almost every weekend after our run, doing our week's shopping. The only problem with Fairway and shopping this way is that you have to get your things delivered. Fairway sits about a half-mile from our apartment and lugging home eight bags of groceries is painful.

Delivery is free is you spend over $150, it's $4.95 if you don't. Today we fell about $25 short so we paid the delivery fee.

The young Nigerian man just showed up with our groceries. All I had was a $10. I asked him if he had a $5. We exchanged his $5 for $10.

It all reminded me of a bit by Groucho, I thing from "Night at the Opera":

"Do they allow tipping on the boat?
- Yes, sir.
Have you got two fives?
- Oh, yes, sir.
Then you won't need the ten cents I was going to give you."

A lunch-time observation.

I had lunch today with a friend--a young producer for whom, I suppose, I play the part of agency dad. She's bright, funny, energetic, ambitious and good at her job. She also has a diffident edge to her. She's not, in the parlance of sports announcers--a "homer," meaning she doesn't buy into a lot of the bs that comes with having a job. She doesn't swallow the company line.

She said something profound at lunch: "I'm not into place that shows it's caring by scaring."

In other words, she can live without the bombast, the bluster, the mean-spirited bs that comes with so many jobs.

The Freedom Tower from my clients' conference room.

Madeleine Albright and the barber.

I am reading right now former Madeleine Albright's new book "Prague Winter." The book is an account of the former Secretary of State's life growing up as a Czechoslovakian exile in World War II and of the horrors and hardship her nation endured first under the Nazis and then under the Soviets.

On Tuesday I read an anecdote about a relative of Albright's, a doctor, who was transported to Auschwitz. His compatriot, a carpenter, urged him to say he was also a carpenter. The doctor refused to lie about his occupation, or didn't see the need to. He didn't survive the Nazi "Selektion." The carpenter did.

Last night I went to the barber--a Russian Jewish emigrant who is studying to be a pharmacist. Surprisingly he started talking about the Holocaust. He said, "I would have survived because I have a trade. I do something, I make something with my hands."

It occurred to me that much of what is wrong with our business comes from the center of gravity of our business being transfered from our hands to our heads.

We don't spend the bulk of our time making. We spend our hours thinking.

There's nothing wrong with thinking; just as there's nothing wrong with being a doctor.

But it's what we make, produce and air that's most important.

The refreshingly expensive advertising agency.

Dear Potential Clients,

For the last 30 years or so we've tried one model of advertising agency--that is, the fee-based agency, where you pay for services rendered.

What has that model gotten you?

You don't have people working on your business who are dedicated to it and you.

You don't have people who know your business as well as--or better--than you do.

You don't have people willing "to run through hell in a gasoline suit" to do great work.

Instead your business is staffed largely by disinterested temporary workers, largely afflicted with bad morale.

Low-paid, disinterested temporary workers while holding company bosses (who add nothing to your business) routinely pocket tens of millions dollars in salary and bonuses.

Along the way, of course, your advertising has grown similarly bland, undifferentiated and anonymous. Like the people who staff your accounts, it doesn't stand out.

So, we are pleased to announce the world's most expensive advertising agency. You're happy to pay top-dollar for dinner, vacations, small leather goods and jewelry, why not advertising.

We will service you like the Four Seasons Hotel does.

We will know your business like your tax person knows your finances.

And accordingly we will create and produce the most memorable and actionable advertising in the world.

It will be expensive. It will be worth it.

If you're interested, respond here.

We will get back to you, as you'd expect, substantively and quickly.

Stylistic extremism.

Last night I went to see the latest installment in the "Men in Black" franchise, "Men in Black III." My client, has signed Tommy Lee Jones, a co-star in the movie, as on-screen talent and I felt it important to see his latest opus. I saw it in IMAX 3-D, to boot, my first encounter with such amazing technologies.

"Men in Black" is not the sort of movie I ordinarily go to. In fact, I think the last 'shoot 'em up' movie I saw in a theater was a James Bond vehicle, "Quantum of Solace." To my eyes that flick lacked everything that makes a story: character, plot, setting, humanity. In fact, it depressed me. It seemed, as so much does, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Over the past few weeks in American basketball titanic struggles have taken place pitting two old-guard teams, the San Antonio Spurs and the Boston Celtics against two upstarts, the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Miami Heat.

This morning reading about these clashes I came across this by Harvey Araton in the "Times." "The great Oscar Robertson has often complained that the 21st-century player knows only how to play in the air, an overstatement borne of some truth. Of course, stylistic extremism — airborne or grounded — is no advisable path to glory."

For the uninitiated, Oscar Robinson was the Michael Jordan and LeBron James of the 1960s. Routinely leading the league in scoring, assists and dazzle. In fact in one season, 1964-1965--he averaged for the season a "triple dozen." 

Having seen "Men in Black" and the trailers to a handful of putative "Men in Black" look-alikes, including "Prometheus" by Ridley Scott and "Spiderman (Roman Numeral)" the phrase stylistic extremism strikes a chord.

The sensate-ness of these films is overwhelming. The theater boasted its sound-system had an output of 12,000 watts. Forget about American drone strikes killing suspect Al-Quaeda operatives. We could probably blast them out of their compounds with soundtracks.

The blasts, the booms, the chases, the effects, the stunts, the protheses are all magnificent. There's never been anything like them. Just as in the Celtics-Heat basketball series there's never been any team like the stylistically extreme Heat. Watching them play, watching LeBron bull through mighty defense like a tornado through a toothpick factory, you ask yourself "how can he lose?"

Yet, the Heat are down three games to two. And the Celtics, stylishly restrained may not play "in the air" as the Heat do. But they are a better team on the ground.

I did not hate the "Men in Black" movie. I confess, even today with all my intellectual pretense, I enjoy a good barn-burning page turner. And that's what "Men in Black" is. It's a comic book. It's cotton candy. It disappears the moment after consumption.

Here's my point, if there is one in this ramble.

As a workaholic father of two I get precious little time to consume entertainment, precious little time when I am not serving the needs of my client, my employer, my family or my friends. I want the slim seconds of time I do have to count for something.

I want meaning in my entertainment. Truth, insight, laughter, beauty. 

Stylistic extremism just isn't filling.

Listen.

Regardless of how little television you watch, or claim to watch, even a few moments of casual viewing will assail you with at least a handful of commercials for pharmaceuticals, most of them promising relief (with side effects, of course) for problems you never knew existed.

For problems that do exist, modern medicine seems to have no answer.

There should be, for instance, a drug called "Balls."

Yesterday afternoon I was on a conference call with a client. Ostensibly to discuss something of interest to them, i.e. a brief.

It was obvious to all of us on the phone on the agency side that the client wasn't listening to a word any of us were saying. I could picture the client, reading email, texting, sending notes back and forth. Doing everything, that is, except paying attention to what a million dollars or more of agency salary were saying.

No one had the balls to say anything.

Later on in our allotted hour I had a script to read to them.

I refused.

If they aren't there to listen, I'm not there to present.

I suspect I'll get some comments on this post warning me that my clients might be reading this.

I don't care if they do.

At least they're listening.

Tide Inn.

When I was a kid I went to a private high school that drew its students from all across Westchester County and the more benign  precincts of the Bronx. As a consequence it wasn't at all abnormal to live 15 or 20 miles away from friends.

This "disaggregation" as we would call it today, led to some logistical problems. Where could we find middle ground where we could get drunk off our keisters and not have too long a drive home?

I should add that until fairly recent times, the drinking age in New York was a more reasonable 18. You could, after all, be sent to die in a Vietnamese jungle at that age, it stands to reason you should also be able to enjoy a Schaefer, Ballantine's Ale or Rheingold at the same age.

Having been born in December, I was almost always the youngest of my "age cohorts." In many cases I was a year younger than my friends. Fortunately, I had an older brother who gave me his defunct draft card (in those days IDs didn't have photos) and this aged me up 21 months, putting me on par with my friends.

One of the places we drank was a cavernous bar in downtown New Rochelle, a place called "George's." Not only was it virtually equidistant from nearly everyone, it allowed my friends to escape their parents' house by saying "I'll be at George's." Their parents unaware that the bar was seedy at best.

Not far from where I lived was a crappy little shack of a bar called "Tide Inn." Before the post-War suburban explosion widened roadways and paved over marshland, I suppose it was near the murky waters of the Long Island Sound. Hence the name.

When I was a kid, however, that had all changed. A Toyota City had opened in the late 60s and by the mid-70s when I left Westchester for good, it had engulfed, as the Japanese car industry was engulfing the American, nearly a quarter of a mile on each side of the Boston Post Road. Tide Inn, a rickety place with walls that seemed to be made of old driftwood planks was directly across from Toyota City. It was doomed.

I took the lyrics to Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi," and rewrote them for our circumstances.

Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em

I rewrote that, thusly:

Oh they tore down Tide Inn
And put up a Toyota City.
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone.
They tore down Tide Inn
And put up a Toyota City.
They took all the bars
Put 'em in a bar museum,
They charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em.

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone.
They tore down Tide Inn
And put up a Toyota City.

The Times of New York.

Living in New York, as I have my whole life, has many drawbacks. The city is dirty, noisy and crowded. A small apartment here costs the same as a couple of dozen acres in, say, Dallas. There are the taxes, the threat of crime, the Puerto Rican Day parade--an annual Boricuan Bacchanal that leads even the most heavily armed to barricade themselves behind steel doors and police locks. 

Nevertheless, it is the greatest city in the world, I xenophobically believe. Home to more galleries, more museums, more cultural diversity than probably anywhere else.

It's also home to "The New York Times," a paper of such surpassing excellence that I can't imagine life without it.

Yesterday up in Boston there was an epic basketball game--a Hemingway-esq game pitting the ancient Celtics of Boston against the vaunted and upstart Heat of Miami. Last night was game three in a best-of-seven series, and the Celtics trailed the Heat two games to none.

I believe myself a writer. I love words. Below are some I enjoyed.

Here's how Howard Beck of the "Times" began his recap of last night's game on the Sports page.

"The foul was hard and sudden, and it left Kevin Garnett flat on his back, his lanky frame spread across a broad expanse of green-toned hardwood. He flipped over, put his knuckles to the floor and pressed hard for eight push-ups, the din at the TD Garden growing louder with each one."

You can watch a clip of the scene above.

I've read everything McCabe ever wrote. Books by Abbott, Hegarty, Ogilvy and every great Volkswagen ad.

I still learn every time I read the Times.

Thanks.

I saw a tweet from a friend of mine reminding the world to thank the people who have helped them along the way. Thanking, I think, is something we do all too often. In fact, in our hyper-narcissistic era, I think most people forget that everything--no matter how accomplished and original--has precedent. That no one got where they are without the help of some significant others.

Years ago when I was knee-high to a cockroach, I had sold a long copy campaign where the copy ran on the order of 500 words. These were my first real ads and now I had to write more than some writers write in a decade.

With real trepidation I wrote my copy and read it to my boss, Harold Karp. We spent about two hours together going over it line by line.

I figured he spent that much time with me because he hated what I had written. It turned out that he loved it and was helping me get better.

Thanks.

Gagging on snackability.

Of late, almost running hand-in-hand with the banal phrase "story-telling" is the adjective "snackable." We are meant to make content like a bag of mixed nuts or a mini-frankfurter. Easy to consume. Quick. And with no "barriers to entry." Pop a dozen snackables in your mouth. You'll be full, fat and happy.

In other words, make everything a munchable sound-bite. A "factoid," whatever the fuck a factoid is.

I have nothing against paring something to its most concise form. That's good and proper. It's fair and respectful to the viewer. But if anything is happening in the world, there are too many writers writing as Shakespeare's Polonius spoke. In a series of sententious maxims that almost always cannot stand up to anything that passes as scrutiny. They write with no depth. As Gertrude Stein once wrote (I think about Oakland), "there's no there there."

What too many clients are asking for, and too many writers are writing, is "the fortune-cookie-ization" of copy.

When I read I want to learn something of value.

I'm willing to do the work to get that value.

The best-selling author, ubiquitous blogger, and relentless self-promoter Seth Godin writes this on his blog this morning: "Is more always better? Sometimes, only better is better."

The writing equivalent of throwing up in your mouth. Keep your banalities to yourself.

I ran into Seth at the opera once. At John Adams' "Nixon in China." We chatted during the first intermission and he expressed his disappointed in the work. "It's my first opera," he said. "It doesn't have the sonic power I thought it would." Ten minutes later, the third act started and Godin was gone.

I guess the opera wasn't snackable.