A post about my father.

My father was a let down to me on many levels. He was never really there when I needed him when I was growing up. My brother used to call him "the opera singer," because everything out of his mouth was "me me me." Oh yes, I am an obstreperous cuss and always have been. Maybe it was me. But that's besides the point, I suppose.

However, in the almost eight years since my father died I've noticed bits of him coming back now and again, bits of wisdom really. The little things parents give you along the way that maybe you don't notice until your kids are grown and about to go off to college or enter the workforce.

Over my father's desk for as long as I knew him was a small stanza from Ralph Waldo Emerson. He had typed it on his old manual typewriter, the e's filled in, the letters un-evenly hued like typing used to be. I quote it often. Think about it oftener. And pass it along here to you for what it's worth.

"On Anxiety"

"Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From the evil which never arrived."

An update.

I found this update online. Don't know who's responsible, but I admire their effort.

Walking through San Diego Airport.

I come to a sign that says "Sky Bridge."
And I wonder.
What other kind of bridge is there?

Stanley Kubrick on Management.

The movie that marked Kubrick's emergence into the big time was "Paths of Glory," a 1957 film that starred Kirk Douglas, the ever-under-rated Ralph Meeker and Adolphe Menjou. "Paths of Glory," though nominally about WWI has taught me more about how not to manage and what not to like (or to despise) about management than anything else I have ever seen, read or experienced.

Here's the crux of the matter. Douglas, a lawyer while a civilian, is now a Captain in the French army. His command is pinned-down in a filthy trench facing a German barrage every time they make a move. The cinematography in the trench is seminal Kubrick. Handheld. There. You can smell the sweat, stink and fear. You can see the gristle, dirt and death.

Cut to Adolphe Menjou, an aristocratic General housed in a former palace miles from the front. He needs to make himself look good. He wants another bauble on his epaulette. So Menjou orders, by radio of course, Douglas' to have his men charge out of their trenches to a certain death. Ah, Glory!

Douglas' men comply and get slaughtered but some refuse. Menjou needs to assert command and has Douglas pick three soldiers at random for execution.

This is so often what happens in agencies. The fellas at the top have no sense of what life in a trench is like. And when firings come people are chosen while they are safe in their palaces.

I am thinking of Enfatico--one of about 79 "agencies of the future" who announced layoffs yesterday.

To the best of my knowledge, Enfatico has yet to produce a single ad for its only client, Dell. I'm sure that failure should not be borne by the people being schmised by the agency. I'm sure there are Enfatties at the "C-level" shaking their heads, tsk-ing, destroying and expensing car-service to their country places.

Paths of Glory.

A bit of poetry.

This is by William Carlos Williams a poet from the last century who knew how to find and take delight and joy in little things. These days we could all learn from his example.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

-- William Carlos Williams

--
Now, I have re-written it. By a deposed banker in 2009.


This Is Just To Say, II

I have taken
home the
128 thousand dollar
carpet in my office

which was
paid for
with taxpayer money.

Forgive me
but my shit,
doesn't
stink.

-- 100s of Bankers in the US.

"The United States Does Not Torture." --Barack Obama

Well then how do you explain the finance meetings I had to sit through today.

My leitmotif.

My leitmotif of the last few weeks, certainly my last couple of posts, has been about waste.

The waste that comes with the by committee approach to the creation, approval and production of marketing communications.

I am still working on spots I shot on October 14th. The client has some "tweaks." In fact they've had six months of "tweaks."

This can't be good. For either cost-control or communication.

When I was 25 and a neophyte in the business I would labor over a brief until I could write a sentence in eight words or less on what the client wanted to say. When I got to eight words in plain, simple English I would then find a way to make those words interesting.

No one worries about this crap today.
Today we worry about making meetings.
As I like to say, "It's not a communication, it's a negotiation."
No wonder we're in the mess we're in.
And I mean that in both macro and micro contexts.

We all bought into this.

And we are all being damned for it.

The "this" I'm talking about is the phrase "approval process." It caught me unawares, I'll admit. But all of a sudden, so it seems, an approval, which should take place at a fixed point in time, is a process that can extend over weeks or, who knows, maybe months or, who knows, maybe years.

But wait, it gets worse. Engineered within the phrase "approval process" is a democratization of feedback and comments. The process includes dozens of people whose feedback needs to be considered. Approval is no longer singular. It is plural. We don't seek approval on a piece of creative, through the approval process, we seek the plural--approvals.

Getting through the approval process becomes a goal unto itself. The approval process itself is one of time-lined compromise. If we do "X," we will get through this level. Doing "Y" will get us past this level. The approval process is something you get through, or better, something you have to navigate, though there isn't a boat or a navigable body of water in sight.

It seems to me that this issue is not only endemic to our profession but infects our world. Which could begin to explain how we got to where we are.

I was wondering about how some marketing departments go about decisioning.

Historians some decades from now will argue about what to call the era we are now tumbling through. We've had "The Gilded Age," "The Gay 90s," "The Roaring Twenties" and so forth. I'm for calling this "The Era of Bad Judgment." Or "The Group-Think Depression." Or "The Hubris Generation."

I just came upon this in The New York Times. Grant me a little spleen and then I will talk a bit about advertising. "Though seven major financial firms lost more than $100 billion since 2007, they have paid their top executives $464 million in performance pay since 1995."

OK, let's switch gears to the marketing geniuses behind the re-branding of Tropicana. I won't go into a peroration about the oft' derided Peter Arnell whose agency created the new campaign for Tropicana and designed its new packaging. Arnell does a dang good job deriding himself. Told Tropicana was going back to its old packaging, Arnell said "“Tropicana is doing exactly what they should be doing...I’m incredibly surprised by the reaction," [but] "I’m glad Tropicana is getting this kind of attention." Read the whole album of asininity here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/business/media/23adcol.html?ref=business

What amazes and amuses me about the stupidity of Arnell's work is the "decisioning" that must have taken place during the approval process. Let's take a moment and consider the tagline for the brand. "It's a natural." I can hardly for the life of me think of a more obvious or banal tag for a "natural" brand.

A Google search of the phrase in quotations yields 392,000 hits. The line is used by the Biological Weed Control Committee of the Weed Science Society of America (the first hit), by a Glendale, CA provider of natural gas for cars (hit two) and, hit three, Rev. John Carmichael of the Church of Scientology on the efficacy of drug-free child-birth.

That alone, you'd think, would kill a stupid, meaningless, over-used, un-original tagline. But decisioning kept it alive.

This is not a political commentary.

Just a link from my childhood to today. Excuse the self-indulgence.