The Party's Over.

I have been waist-deep lately in a slough of despond. (Slough of despond, not a bad name for an agency if you think about it.) This morning while listening to the news out of Detroit on NPR I couldn't help but think of the song "The Party's Over" by Jule Styne with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

You really should go to iTunes and download the great Judy Holliday's rendition. Mournful and perfect. But if you can't spare the 99 cents, here's a You Tube video of Shirley Bassey singing it.

Lead in our pipes.

It's been famously surmised, if not actually proven, that the demise of the Roman Empire was due in part to lead in the pipes of its famous water system. Lead poisoning, of course, leads to all types of mental and physical infirmities. So lead in the water supply is bad for business all around.

Spending time on Facebook, and Facebook's huge explosion of members, makes me wonder if Facebook is the binary equivalent of lead in our internet pipes. I don't give a shit what five albums touched you. Or what Peanuts character you are most like. Or that you got a new toaster this weekend.

I do not need a margarita thrown at me. I don't need a tattoo on my home page. And I don't need to see 78 photographs of your kitten.

Failure.

There are a lot of types of failure in our business. But today I am talking about just one. The good kind of failure, the failure that comes from aiming high, from ambition, from trying to do something special.

Years ago I worked for a great agency that trained its clients to expect failure now and again as the necessary by-product of trying things. Now however, if your spot doesn't dot all the i's and cross all its t's, in other words, if it doesn't accomplish all the myriad and unreasonable expectations laid out in front of it, it is deemed a failure and you will probably be fired.

I am dealing with this now.

Next time, that is if I'm not fired this time, I likely won't be so ambitious. The work will be humdrum, and therefore, considered successful.

This is life during the Re-De.

The tyranny of experts.

Nicholas Kristof had an op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times that is worth spending a few minutes with. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/opinion/26Kristof.html?_r=1
The piece was called "Learning How to Think" and it begins like this: "Ever wonder how financial experts could lead the world over the economic cliff? One explanation is that so-called experts turn out to be, in many situations, a stunningly poor source of expertise."

Kristof, of course, is talking about the GEM (Global Economic Meltdown) whereas I find relevance to the advertising industry. What's happened, I am speaking in broad strokes here, is that rather than applying common-sense and gut to our issues, we have turned to experts (or focus groups) to tell us what to do.

Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley studied over two decades some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. It turns out the experts' predictions were only a tiny bit better than random. As Kristof writes, "the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board."

No wonder our whole industry is depressed.

A reminder.

A reminder to all those who feel they can treat people like crap because there are no jobs out there. So, fuck 'em, is the attitude. They'll take whatever shove with shiv them with.

This is from Albert Schweitzer:

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”

Scoundrels.

Reading people is an important skill. Not pre-judging, but reading. If you're in advertising I have a simple thesis. Don't trust anyone. Especially anyone that uses words like "model," "monetization," "process," and a few others. They are scoundrels, plain and simple.

Or as I wrote almost back in September 19, 2007:

In "The Captive Mind", Czeslaw Milosz's memoir/essay/study about artists and intellectuals living under Communism in the early 1950s, he attributed the epigram below to an ancient Jew from Galacia. Makes sense doesn't it?

"When someone is honestly 55% right, that's very good and there's no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it's wonderful, it's great luck, and let him thank God. But what's to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he's 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal."

Remembering Betty Hubble.

This is a dumb story that pertains to my last post which was about the eradication or individualism in the world today. There's no larger point to it, really, just a recollection of a lovely woman and a different time.

When I was at Ally & Gargano almost two decades ago the petty cash woman was named Betty Hubble. She was a character that seemed to have stepped right out of a Joe Sedelmaier commercial. A bona-fide, central casting eccentric who bumbled through the halls with a smile, a kind word, a hug and a charm you don't often see. If you spent $7.80 for a taxi cab to an edit, Betty would run down and bring you your money and hand you a laugh while she was at it.

Betty had a "face" and was even cast in a couple Sedelmeier commercials and a few print ads. Then there was the story about how Betty got hired at Ally. I heard it from Betty herself, so as apocryphal as it sounds, I'm taking it for the truth. Betty was going for an interview in the building Ally was in and got off on the wrong floor--onto Ally's floor. Someone, presumably Carl Ally himself fell in love with her and hired her. That was the story.

With stories like that she became something of a legend. Part of the core of an agency.

I left Ally & Gargano in April, 1995, and the place closed a few months later. I wish I could say I knew what happened to Betty. I wish I could say I heard she won the lottery and is living on a 92-foot boat, but I really don't know.

Maybe I'll find her on Twitter and follow her.

In praise of madness.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."

-Jack Kerouac

The MBA-ization of the world has led to more than just the collapse of its economic system, it's led to the collapse of madness and the simultaneous adoration of order and process in a world that desperately needs epiphanies.

Creative industries need madness to be creative. Otherwise they are just industries. Ideas, when they happen, sometimes come late in the game. Re-writes. Re-shoots. Re-concepts. Re-thinking. You cannot project management your way to breakthrough work. You can not org-chart it. Or build a model that creates it.

Exercising my vocabulary.

A babel-like gaggle of pissant poltroons gasconading with more wind in their sails than work in their portfolios. Meagre-minded midgets masquerading as humans. Pontificating dwarfs. Serpent-tongued frauds. Deceitful jezebels. Dissemblers, despoilers, despicable small-dicked double-dealers.
Asinine asses of arrogance.
Bombastic bloviating blowhards.
Carping caviling cowards.
Duplicitous distillate of dilettantism.
Excretia of ego.
Fellatio of foaming falsehoods.
Grandstanding glad handers of glib.
Hagiographers of the half-assed.
Imbeciles, idiots and in-grates.
Janissaries of Judas.
Kleptomaniacs of krap.
Liars.
Monomaniacal monoliths of mealy-mouth meagre-minded mush.
Nasty needle-dicked nits.
Odious otiose orotund obfuscators.
Pissant picayune pin-headed pricks.
Querulous quick-hits of quakery.
Rotten and righteous.
Slimy scum-sniveling sycophants.
Testicle-twisted two-bit twittery.
Undulating, under-cutting, uxorious, un-doing and ugly.
Vestigial, venial and vile.
Warts.
Execrable excrescence of effluvia.
Yon Cassius.
Zip-headed zeros.

The Hyped-Depression.

There's no doubt that the economy is in shambles and millions of people have lost their jobs over the last few months (seemingly half in our industry.) But we need a little perspective.

When FDR back in 1937 said, "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished" he wasn't exaggerating. Today life sucks. But we are not eating ketchup sandwiches or living in Obama-villes. Yet.

One of my favorite websites, moreintelligentlife.com has recently run an article about the iconic status the word iconic has achieved. Everything from sliced cheese to frisbees is called iconic. Just as every economic indicator from here to eternity is exaggerated to the point where we have to shove it aside for the four horsemen of the apocalypse to gallop through.

As for the word iconic, here is moreintelligentlife's iconic list:
Iconic albino, iconic assassin, iconic baby lotion, iconic brand, iconic bridge, iconic bucket, iconic building, iconic button fly, iconic camper van, iconic car, iconic cassoulet, iconic CCTV camera, iconic celebration, iconic chainsaw, iconic chair, iconic chef, iconic chimpanzee, iconic children’s entertainer, iconic clock, iconic cocktail, iconic comb, iconic combover, iconic comedy, iconic cooling tower, iconic Coventry City football shirt, iconic cricket bat, iconic crisps, iconic diaper, iconic doll, iconic dreadlocks, iconic drinker, iconic earthmover, iconic episode of “Emmerdale”, iconic escalator, iconic enema, iconic field armour, iconic film star, iconic fishing reel, iconic flat cap, iconic garden, iconic goggles, iconic gorilla, iconic grocery, iconic guitarist, iconic hairstyle, iconic halo, iconic hand cream, iconic handshake, iconic hanging laundry, iconic hazard, iconic helmet, iconic high heels, iconic hitman, iconic house, iconic ice cream, iconic icon, iconic injury, iconic injury-time winner, iconic itinerary, iconic jihad target, iconic jigsaw, iconic jingle, iconic jockey, iconic joke, iconic kitchen utensil, iconic knife, iconic knowledge, iconic lawnmower, iconic leprechaun, iconic light fitting, iconic lion, iconic lip balm, iconic mascara, iconic milkshake, iconic mittens, iconic moment, iconic moustache, iconic mouthwash, iconic movie, iconic murder, iconic noose, iconic ointment, iconic orangutan, iconic palace, iconic panda, iconic penis, iconic perfume, iconic philosophy, iconic photograph, iconic pig, iconic pimp, iconic piston, iconic playwright, iconic plumber, iconic pub, iconic pylon, iconic radiator, iconic relationship, iconic restaurant, iconic retail mall, iconic robot, iconic rodent, iconic saddle, iconic sandwich, iconic sausage, iconic shampoo, iconic shoe, iconic shoehorn, iconic shop, iconic silhouette, iconic snack food, iconic soft drink, iconic sound system, iconic steeplejack, iconic stethoscope, iconic submachinegun, iconic sunglasses, iconic surgeon, iconic taxi, iconic terrorist, iconic toaster, iconic toby jug, iconic toilet paper, iconic toilet seat, iconic tracksuit, iconic tractor, iconic treehouse, iconic trenchcoat, iconic typeface, iconic vending machine, iconic vindaloo, iconic wedding dress, iconic welder, iconic wheelchair, iconic wig, iconic wine, iconic yak, iconic yogurt, iconic zip hoodie.