Go West, Old Man.

I'm a versatile writer. But I realized I couldn't in a million years write this.   
h/t Rob Schwartz,

Almost forty years ago when I was a young man and a young man in advertising, I witnessed something that shook me. Something that changed my world view.

500 or so years ago, people who encountered Copernicus after being raised believing in Ptolemy might have felt similarly. Or the early European explorers, like Vasco de Gama who made it down the west coast of Africa and found their way to India and back. What? No one knew there was there there. 

The world they knew was no longer the only world their was. Something new, different, maybe better was out there.

At the time, this is the mid 1980s, and the big liquor and wine companies started introducing something new: wine coolers. They swept the nation--and the ad industry. Suddenly, everyone was drinking wine coolers. And major ad agencies competed via the campaigns they did.

It used to be that way in a lot of categories. Major agencies had clients in major categories. Auto, finance, credit cards, tech. Etc. It was a good way to see which agency was real and which was hot air.

I used to watch these war games like people watch sports. Though I've never had a wine cooler, I started following wine cooler advertising. Along the way, I gained an advertising lesson. An advertising lesson I'm still lucky enough to keep learning from.

The first wine cooler commercials I recall seeing were for Seagram's wine coolers. Their commercials, I believe, were from Ogilvy. They featured a young and rising Bruce Willis and they were considered pretty good. They were very much like spots I was used to seeing. Pretty people having fun. With a little bit of sex-appeal and a little bit of wit.

Then came Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers from Ernest and Julio Gallo, the vintners. Hal Riney wrote the commercials and Joe Pytka directed them. They were everywhere. Funny. And utterly different. Using out of touch oldsters to sell something hip. They were entirely different in a crowded category. And they stood out. They won every award worth their plastic.

The last commercials I noticed were from California Coolers by way of Brown-Forman distillers with Chiat\Day LA as their agency. 

I saw these commercials as more than commercials. I saw them as something bigger. I saw them as evidence that something had shifted in advertising. That the center of gravity of cool had shifted to LA. All of a sudden to my eyes, New York-style of advertising seem old and creaky.

You often see this sort of phenomenon when someone or something new appears from out of nowhere. I imagine it's how a lot of painters felt when the impressionists came to the fore. Maybe how Perry Como felt when he first heard the Beatles. Maybe how the British felt when the colonies rebelled. Something inexorable was happening. Something therefore downright scary.

Here's an example from the world of sports. Sportswriters decried the leaping ability and athleticism of African-American players who were changing how the game was being played.

That's how I felt when I saw Chiat's California Cooler work.

In Adam Morgan's great book on challenger brands, "Eating the Big Fish," he outlines some precepts for challenger brands. One of them is "puncture the dominant complacency." Meaning, destroy accepted wisdom that grown stale. 

Let me say this, there's a bit of Kubler-Ross stages of grieving that you might go through when you have your dominant complacency punctured. 

I think much of america is going through at least the first couple of Kubler-Rossian stages since the days of Brown vs. Board of Education and the various other "equality-based-upheavals" of the 1950s and 1960s. I think much of the reason for the self-immolation and concurrent award-show-masturbation-athon of today's ad industry is that it's easier to praise yourself than adjust yourself and learn new things. 

The ad industry responds to change like the Catholic Church responded to Galileo. Ex-communication, denial, and more denial. Copernicus published “De Revolutionibus” in 1543. The ban on Copernicus's views wasn't lifted until 1822, and the ban on his book remained in force until 1835. 300 years is a long time to hold a grudge. Even for my mother.

For the past few weeks I've been neck deep in a large assignment for my third biggest client. I was asked to bring in a couple of art-directors to work with me. Usually I go to people I've worked with for years if not decades. Not only are they good, not only do I trust them, not only do they tolerate me, they're also what I know how to do. 

I don't know why but in deciding who I could get to work with me on this assignment, I remembered California Coolers and the effect that work had on me. It was work I could never do. 

I could write Bruce Willis spots. Even Bartles and Jaymes spots. California Cooler would be like asking John Donne to write like e.e. cummings. No. 

That's what I wanted.

We presented yesterday to the client.

Whew.

I realized that some of the work made me uncomfortable. It included things I "hadn't written before." And thinking that was well out of my comfort zone. 

"That doesn't sound very George."

Even putting the stuff in the deck was a challenge for me. 

But I did it.

As Bobby Frost wrote, "And that has made all the difference."