Advantage.

Many years ago when I was barely into my first year of my twelve years on the IBM account, when I was just beginning to understand what IBM did and what they offered, I was working closely with the most senior art director on the account.

S, I'll call her, was very intimidating.

She was fully in the club with the people at the very top of the IBM/Ogilvy creative heap, and I was a newcomer, pushed off into the deep-end with very little guidance other than "sink or swim."

If you're a ball-player and you move up a notch, to a level of competition sterner than you ever faced before, you have to find a way not to think too much. You have to find a way to redouble your efforts and trust in what got you in that position in the first place. If it's your hitting ability, as it usually is, you have to use your eye, your brain and your swing and try to, as much as possible, set how intimidated you feel aside. You have to wait for your pitch and swing.

When I transitioned from baseball to running, I learned much the same lesson. My bone structure is not like that of really good runners, but I was a really good runner--decent anyway. Even though at my thinnest I was never smaller than 6'2" and 185-pounds. Classic distance runner build for men is two-pounds per inch of height. So, at 6'2", I should have weighed 148 pounds.

When I was racing I couldn't keep up with those sylphs. Even to try to made no sense. But when one of them would run by me I'd just decide to go along with them as if we were tied together with elastic bands. I'd hold on as long as I could--usually to the finish line by doing what I do, that is running, and not thinking.

The same held true for me when I was working with S. I was in way over my head but tried to do what I do and keep pace. I relied on my swing, my stubbornness and my years of practice that had gotten me to this point.

Early when I was working with S, I wrote a line of copy--not a headline, a line of body copy. One of hundreds of lines I had written. It read "Technology is a business advantage."

S immediately called me from her office in Paris. "That's fucking great." I didn't even realize it when I wrote it. S forced me to think about it and eventually I saw the saliency of what I had writ. The reason you buy something in the first place--that something does something for you that makes it worth it.

Two decades later when I got shit-canned by Ogilvy though no one there could write like I do and they decided they didn't need writers, I was already 62.

The ad industry isn't clamoring for cranky 62-year-old copywriters with arrogant appraisals of their own value. I therefore said to myself, "If I am ever going to work again, I have to find a way to position myself. I have to make myself "lust-after-able."

I didn't have far to go. 

I went to that phone call with S from back in the year 2000. And I wrote on my LinkedIn, my Twitter and my website, "Good writing is a business advantage.™"

In terms of great lines and the "fearful symmetry" great lines often possess (apologies to William Blake) my line didn't measure up to my favorite tagline of all-time, Ammirati's line for UPS: "We run the tightest ship in the shipping business." It was not as good as Federal Express' line penned by Patrick Kelly at Ally & Gargano, "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight." And it was nowhere nearly as good as Chiat\Day's line for Apple in all its distinct and ungrammatical splendor, "Think different."

But "Good writing is a business advantage™" is better than 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999-percent of taglines written by other copywriters ever since the world began, simply because roughly  99.999009999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999-percent of all copywriters (and creative people in general, and agencies, too, and certainly holding companies) don't bother to position themselves in a memorable or distinctive way.

Last week I went out to dinner with a bunch of advertising creatives of my vintage. Chinese.

I still couldn't shake something I had written about two weeks ago. That BBDO's office in New York employs just 300 people. I asked the people I was with how many people they thought BBDO employed.

Predictions ranged from 1000 to 2,500.

But it's 300. At least according to "Advertising Age," the erstwhile trade journal.

My guess is that in getting to 300 employees from a high of 2,000, about 200 creatives have been fired along the way. If you're reading this and you're a freelancer, that means you have more competition than you ever imagined. And virtually everyone of those competitors will cut his or her price to get the job, which will force you to do the same.

That sucks. To be at the mercy of others for your own sanctity. Whatever sanctity means.

I don't know what happened to our industry. 

Why we no longer think in terms of what makes a Nissan different from a Mazda or a Whopper different from a Big Mac or Jamaica different from the Bahamas.

Alex Murrell not long ago wrote a great essay called "The Age of Average."  About the sameification of everything. I shared it with two dozen friends and four dozen clients.

Everyone tsks and shakes their heads. 

No one says, "I'm doing that to myself."

Not marketers. Not creatives. Not agencies. Not holding companies. 

No one's made the effort to do what third-graders do when their choosing sides for a kick-ball game. 

Make themselves stand out so they get picked.

In other words, standing out is a business advantage.™