Digging In.

I've been looking at, admiring, coveting, studying Dave Trott’s ad work since the mid 1980s. That’s when I saw his (and John Webster’s) Courage Best work and his Toshiba work (which, at the time i didn’t get.) I never met Dave in real life, though I came close once, at some art directors club function in the west 30s, but chickened out.

However, Dave and I correspond a lot. We trade articles and emails and general commentary on life--in the industry, and more often outside of the industry.

Dave posted this about a week ago.

If you're over 55, you remember a time in the industry when creative people had to do more than make ads pretty and culturally relevant. They had to live the product/brand/service. They had to do a factory tour. They had to speak to people who made the product and used the product. They had to investigate and interrogate the product. Only then, could they write about the product in a way that was unique to their client and not just a generic ad.

Here's a commercial example that illustrates that modus operandi. Though not my favorite of Wells Rich Greene's work on Braniff, this commercial, shot by Howard Zieff, is an almost perfect example of what I mean. Understanding of a product, or the customer pains around the product, was not gained second-hand via a discussion with a planner, or through reading a powerpoint deck. Understanding was gained through living and breathing the brand. And through something called "empathy." Empathy today is as obsolete as loving thy neighbor. It's a game for saps.

Today, such non-quantifiable aspects of advertising have been time-sheeted out of existence. All ads (no matter what form they take) all communications, for that matter, look, sound and feel alike because the people behind them have been allotted about 90-minutes to create them. The details of life, the facts of a brand cannot be uncovered in that time. Instead, we default to pablum and "buy one get one free." We don't do work that comforts the afflicted or afflicts the comfortable because the corporate chieftains who strip-mined our industry, deemed that such work would not make them their billions fast enough.

• As an industry, we no longer understand people or even try to.
• We get out information about humans from columns and rows.
• Or in antiseptic conference rooms.
• Then we're told nobody wants to see anyone who's not smiling.
• 97.9% of all commercials end with a grin-fck, a high-five or a dance move.

For the past six years since I've been running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I've been my own planner. Eva Augustyn, Ogilvy's former head of planning on IBM, wrote this about me, unsolicited, about ten years ago. I've converted that into permission to myself interview clients and customers about what they do for a living. What they do differently. About why it's different and important. About why they're proud.

Right now I'm in the middle of about 20 interviews with clients about their technology products. I know an AI's worth more about AI than I did before I started these chats. And think I can begin to work out--to salutary business effect--the first of my two marketing Ds. 

I'm a very shy guy. I don't like talking to strangers. I don't even like talking to friends. And many times I wish I could outsource these interviews to someone else and read their eight-page executive summary.

But this is the only way I know to do advertising.

To get to the soul of a brand.

To differentiate at the corpuscle level. Not the decorative or stylistic level.

If I look a little grey-er and seem to have a little less pep in my step than usual.

This is why.

But the work is better.