Meetings and Beatings.

Let's start today's post in a very special way; a way I know you'll like. Let's start it with just a little modern agency math.

Let's take a typical employee of a typical agency. Let's say they are a full-time employee--an FTE. The math says they'll probably work around 45 five-day-weeks a year. I'm rounding down, but give me that. 

45 weeks times five days equals 225 days. 

Now, say that typical employee has to go to two meetings a day, every one of those 225 days. That's 450 meetings a year. 

You might go to more meetings than that, I did. But there's little chance you go to fewer meetings than that.

450 meetings a year. Now, let's say you work thirty years before your typical agency kicks you out for being too old and making too much money. The math says, you went to 13,500 meetings. If those meetings average an hour each, that's 337 and a half 40 hour weeks of nothing but meetings, or roughly eight and a half years of your thirty year career sitting in a meeting.

You can do the same math with emails. If you get 100/day times five days/week times 45 weeks/year times 30 years, that adds up to 675,000 emails. If each of those emails takes you a minute to read, that's 11,250 hours of email, or 1,400 eight-hour days. If you work 45 weeks/year, that's 6.25 years doing nothing but reading emails. Cheers!

All that is to make a point.

The quantity of things that fill our days is not the point today. The quality of those things is the point.

If I went to 15,000 meetings in my life, I remember, I think, exactly one. One person, a planner I love called Teresa Alpert cared enough to make a meeting do more than impart information. She worked to make it memorable and different and motivating and honest.

I stole this triangle from Sir John Hegarty. It's a way he evaluates ads. It might be how we should start thinking about how we spend eight years or more of our working life.

The meeting Teresa called was, to be technical, a talk on how to reach small-and-medium-sized business people. That might be as exciting as counting the fungal spores in a pair of rental bowling shoes. 

Speaking of shoes, Teresa called her meeting T.O.Y.S. Take Off Your Shoes. 

And we did. And we sat on the floor. And we talked about the pressures small-and-medium business people felt. And the slights. And the ignominy. And the angst. And, yes, the boredom.

Teresa's T.O.Y.S. meeting was not about some alchemical ruse to reach people. We never discussed the efficacy of putting a "click now" button in gold and making it glow. Or writing copy that ham-fistedly attempted to kowtow to the audience. We never said ass-wipey things like, 'this is for people like you.' 

First we had to understand who we were talking to. 

The precipitant behind this post was a book review in The New York Times of a new book by Sly Stone. I was absolutely smitten by the title--the absolute genius of the title. A unique, idiosyncratic articulation of the most-human of all problems. Not being able to be yourself. 

I'd imagine that 99% of people in those lifetime of 13,500 meetings or 675,000 emails never once felt seen or heard or cared for. When I saw the book cover above, it jumped out at me. It said, and I steal these words from Arthur Miller, "Attention must be paid."

When my daughters were little, my wife and I went through that most-New York-of-all tortures. We went through the horrors of applying to private nursery schools. 

Fortunately, my daughters are very bright. They were accepted at a lot of schools and they had a lot of choices. Now my wife and I had to decide on a school. How?

Quickly we got appointments at three nursery schools and went in to meet various heads of school. We had nice meetings with every head, but one of the heads got out from behind her desk and took us into a classroom. There, with a teacher or two, we sat on the floor and talked about teaching and talking and being human. It wasn't a meeting. It wasn't a recital. The virtues of the school were not transmitted by PowerPoint.

Reaching people, regardless of your creed or education or your religion or what agency philosophy you follow, is mostly about getting down on the floor and meeting people where they live. It's mostly about not talking down or talking over someone but feeling what they're feeling. And using that feeling in a constructive way. That's a lot of what advertising is supposed to be about but seldom is as we practice it.

In the words of Sly Stone, “There’s no point in blaming the mirror if your face looks strange."

It's about lettinya be mice elf agin.