Oy vey.

Draftfcb, an agency hardly noted for its stellar creative has just formed a new unit. It's called (and I'm not making this up) the Institute of Decision Making and it's devoted to finding out more about the instinctual ways that consumers behave along with the rational and emotional ones.

The goal of the unit says the comically named Michael Fassnacht is to "make strategy sexy."

Listen. Strategy shouldn't be sexy. It should be smart. Ads should be sexy.

And as for "decision making," it's not that hard. People like and are motivated by ads that are interesting and entertaining. Focus on that. Not ways to rationalize the motivation behind your crappy ads.

An anniversary.

One year ago today I was fired.
Today I celebrate.

Jobs are like relationships.
If they don't want you, you should leave.

Yes, I had my moments of fear.
Maybe even a soupcon of despair.
And yes, I had a bit of a drop of income.

But I learned a lot.
First of all, I gained a deeper understanding of who's a mentsch and who's a schmuck.
Second, I learned that if you work hard at finding work and at doing work, you usually find work.
Third, I learned that while I can castigate myself for having burned some bridges in my career, my integrity commands respect in the job market.
Fourth, I got to see the inside of a lot of pompous old-school agencies that have as much hope of returning to flight as a Louisiana pelican.
Fifth, I learned to have a bit more faith in myself, in what I can do and what I bring to an agency.
Sixth, I remembered this quotation from Hemingway's "The Last Good Country": "He had already learned there was only one day at a time and that it was always the day you were in. It would be today until it was tonight and tomorrow it would be today again."

So to all the mofos who fired me, two things.
1. Fuck you.
2. Thank you.

Toyota.

Often in this space I critique ads and other marketing exploits that miss their mark or are flat out dumb.

That's not really a tough job. So much of the work we're exposed to is well south of mediocre.

Right now, I want to comment on a rare body of work that actually seems to be working. I'm thinking of Toyota's campaign to refurbish their reputation in light of allegations of uncontrolled acceleration.

I wouldn't say Toyota's work is brilliant or scintillating. But it is clear, consistent and reassuring. It is also artfully and intelligently executed.

Not long ago I think a lot of people were saying, "How could anyone ever again feel safe buying a Toyota?"

Now I think people are buying Toyotas.

That's the point, right?

Advertising vs. Anarchy.

Of all the things that good advertising can do, perhaps first and foremost advertising can combat anarchy.

Anarchy, or brand entropy, is a brand's natural state. If you have 1,000 stores selling Starbuck's coffee, it would only be natural that everyone develop their own language, their own signage, their own sets of behaviors to sell that coffee. Much the same way small groups of people develop their own myths, methods and manners.

What brand advertising does is create order. It tells a company who they are, what they sell and how they should behave.

Today I read in "The New York Times" that Dell Computer (a brand name but not a brand) knowingly shipped almost 12 million of computers with faulty electrical components that were leaking chemicals and causing malfunctions.

I contend that if Dell had stood for anything other than "LOW" prices, someone along the line would have said, "No, we can't do this. It isn't right."

But Dell had no such brand order. Nothing to keep them honest outside of relentless price cutting and price competition. The "Dell Way" was simply to wring costs out of the supply chain.

But this is not to pick on Dell.

This is to serve as a warning. Companies that don't establish and commit to their values are not brands. They might have branding and a nifty logo like BP. But they are basically behavioral anarchists. They can do whatever they want and act however they wish. Expedience and anarchy rule.

I prefer the order of brands.

I don't want to hear about it.

Since I grew up in the crazy hippie days of the 1960s and 1970s, I often heard that it makes no sense to read or view something that isn't contemporary because if that something we are viewing or reading isn't about the immediate world, it can't be relevant.

We hear this all the time in advertising. And so the relevant ethos of the day, fart jokes, prevail in much of what we do.

On Saturday night I saw Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" in Central Park with the 70-year-old Al Pacino playing Shylock.

The audience was rapt when Pacino was on stage. When he whispered, he really whispered. And you could hear him, despite the police helicopters and laughing picnickers frolicking outside the theater.

The whole play was wonderful. The lusciousness of the language. The humor, the conflict. The debate it generated about Shylock. Was he the victimizer or the victim.

I don't want to hear things aren't relevant because they're old. Things aren't relevant if they suck.

25 words I never want to hear again.

1. Paradigm.
2. Agency model.
3. Robust.
4. e-mail thread.
5. Methodology.
6. Skill set.
7. Vision.
8. Operationalize.
9. Rounded corners.
10. Circle back.
11. Pre-meeting.
12. Brain-storming.
13. Exploratory.
14. Actualize.
15. Guesstimate.
16. Prioritization.
17. Workshop.
18. Visioning.
19. Pre-read.
20. Ideation.
21. Scoping.
22. Scope of work.
23. Statement of work.
24. Calendar (as a verb.)
25. Cheers!

Graphic representation of the day.

This is from Errol Morris by way of "The New York Times." http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/the-anosognosics-dilemma-somethings-wrong-but-youll-never-know-what-it-is-part-5/

The longest distance between two points.

If you've ever driven past a giant oil refinery or an electrical power generating plant, you've seen the way most companies and certainly most agencies work. What you'll see when you drive by these complexes are an array of ducts and pipes and smokestacks connecting this way and that and as tangled as a hippie's hair at Woodstock.

Of course these systems weren't originally built and designed that way. They were probably built with a certain degree of method and order. But over time as demands for capacity increased or new demands had to be met, wiring and ducting had to be re-routed. Before long whole new structures were glommed onto the old, then even newer structures were laid on top of the other systems and so on and so on.

In these plants nothing works as it should. The whole thing is a rickety mess. And the output of the plant is often at the mercy of the smallest, oldest and most insignificant parts.

Most businesses have come to be configured in similar ways. So we hear things like, "it's a matrixed organization." We find out it takes three years to begin to update a website because systems are built out of other systems. Straight line production is unheard of--all processes are complicated, bureaucratic and baroque.

Notes from Cannes.

I've been busy of late, running hither and yon and was delayed getting to this year's Cannes. I flew out around 4 yesterday afternoon on a specially recommissioned Concorde and arrived in my suite early this morning where I found some time to write this missive.

Though I do not usually succumb to the siren of nostalgia, I must say that I thought back to my first trip to Cannes some 22 years ago.

My partner and I were the creative team on Gorton's Fish Sticks. In Gorton's we knew we had inherited a legacy, a tradition of great work, and we had to do more than just another emotionally moving spot for reconstituted and breaded fish. We had to raise the bar.

The particular fish sticks we were to advertise were of the "Lite" variety. They had 15% less cholesterol than the our arch competitor Mrs. Paul's. "How 'bout we make Mrs. Paul the Whore of Babylon?" I ventured to my partner, Craig. We weren't just thinking another pretty commercial with a cut-away of a crispy fish filet, we were already thinking epic. "No," rejoined my partner. "Mrs. Paul is a Nazi dominatrix. With a leather cat o-nine tails she forces innocent victims to eat high cholesterol fish sticks."

"Wait," I said. "Wait."
"The Seventh Seal," said Craig.
Simultaneously, we said "The Gorton Fisherman plays chess with death."

The rest, of course, is advertising history. We got Ingy Bergman to shoot the spot and it blew the judges at Cannes away.

I missed the place. And glad I'm back.

I removed an earlier post.

Because I was indiscreet.
I'm not censoring.
Just not exposing my not inconsiderable keister.