Sunday, April 9, 2023

The Things a Dying Industry Can Learn From an Obituary.


It's not unusual to get a raised eyebrow or two when I cite an obituary I've read or when I bring one up in conversation. Some people think reading about the newly dead is morbid. But I learn from obituaries and from the famous lives they summarize. 

Sometimes I even learn about living.

And sometimes about advertising.

On Friday morning, I read aloud to my wife (we happened to be celebrating our 39th Anniversary that morning) the obituary of a famous restaurant reviewer and food critic for The New York Times, Mimi Sheraton.

If you came of age when I did, Sheraton was a part of your life. Her reviews not only helped you find a place to eat--or for us just starting out in our careers, a place to aspire to eat--they were written with a wit and perspicacity that I could only envy. In other words, Sheraton was both funny and smart. 

Who in our trade couldn't learn from that?

Unlike so much of our modern world where people become "senior" or creative directors in three years or less, and you create ads about a product, service or company based on a sheet of paper from someone who's never tried the product, service or company, Sheraton was the opposite of a dilettante



In 2013, she had calculated that she had eaten professionally in 21,170 restaurants in 49 countries. What's more, Sheraton brought a discipline to restaurant reviewing that reminded me of the glory-days of advertising.

You remember those days (or you don't) when we used to take factory tours, talk to customers, talk to engineers, and learn the product and the consumer and the competition inside-out. One reason so much advertising today looks and feels like so much advertising and every car ad looks like every car ad and every pharma ad looks like every pharma ad and every hotel ad looks like every hotel ad is that no one actually uses the products we're supposed to be selling. We resort to surface depictions because our thinking is surface thinking.

If America's best history writer, Robert Caro, is right and "time equals truth," we do work without taking the time to obtain anything better than a superficial knowledge of the brands we work for and then, while we're at it, we rush through the creative process to make sure we don't indulge in the most-deadly of today's advertising sins, that is, going over scope.

But Sheraton took her time and went after the truth. To quote the obituary, "The Times required three visits to a restaurant before publishing a review; she [Sheraton] dined six to eight times before passing judgment. For an article on deli sandwiches, she collected 104 corned beef and pastrami samples in one day to evaluate the meat and sandwich-building techniques."

Time equals truth.

A credo our industry should reacquaint itself with.

My favorite part of the obituary and to my mind, the most important bit of insight comes in its last paragraph.

[By the way, the obituary was written by one of the modern greats of the obituary writing business, Pulitzer-Prize-winner, Robert D. McFadden.]

In the last paragraph, McFadden quotes Sheraton who says some words that we in advertising would do well to listen to and think about. I wish we had such a pragmatic approach to assessing work. It would save us a lot of award entry fees if we paid Sheraton's advice a little heed.

"Food writers in general devote too much space to chefs’ philosophies. They’re not Picasso, after all — this is supper. So I don’t want to hear about a chef’s intentions. Call me when it’s good.”

I feel the same about advertising.

I don't want to hear about the travails of making the work. 
Or how high or low the budget was.
Or the sanctity of the auteur's concept.
Or how many awards it's won.
I certainly don't care to spend any time over four seconds watching a case-study video.

"Call me when it's good."



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