Scary on 9th Avenue.

The best you can hope for.

When you're into round 17 of a cut, the best you can strive for is this: "They're not making it any better but they're not making it any worse."

I didn't skip a beat.

With Hurricane Irene coming, I had prepared my MacBook for the worst.

A book.

I don't know where I got the recommendation, but recently I heard about "The Copy Book--How some of the best advertising writers in the world write their advertising." It's a D and AD book published by Taschen and you, like me, can get it through Amazon for about $40. http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/design/all/06766/facts.dad_the_copy_book.htm


The book is a compendium of some of the best work by some of the industry's best writers: My old boss, Steve Hayden; my blogging friend, Dave Trott; and people I've always admired: David Abbott, Ed McCabe, Bob Levenson, Tom Thomas and a couple dozen more.

The book, which is unusual for awards books today, is full of ads of substance. With beautifully written copy that presents a compelling argument or tells a story. It's a book that recognizes the power of words. Full of ads that cater not to the lowest common denominator but that recognize that there are thoughtful, intelligent people in the world who can actually read--and will--if you offer them something worthwhile.

There are, sadly, people in our business who stop investing in their careers once they're in their jobs. They form a tight solipsistic circle and learn only from people around them--never allowing an outside or extraneous thought inside their closed system. You should never stop learning. And with this book, for just $40 or so, you can learn from some of the best.

Lighten up.

I've always broken agency people down into three groups.
1. Finders. These are the people who, by dint of their creativity and salesmanship, "find" new assignments and revenue from clients.
2. Minders. These are the people who keep an account running smoothly. They guide, gently, and hold hands.
3. Grinders. These are the people who do the hard work of an account. The assignments or gnarly tasks that no one wants.

It takes all three sorts to make an account and an agency run. And ideally, all people should have a portion of each in their cosmology.
They should be able to find opportunities, execute against those projects and keep their heads down and grind things out when needed.

Lately, however, I've come to the realization that most client organizations--it pains me to say this--are made up only of grinders. They view work with such excruciating over-thought rigor that they squeeze the life out of it. They suck the emotion and life out of things by grinding away at them. They turn everything into a long, slow slog through hip-deep muck.

I'm pissed at a particular client right now.

They're making me grind away at something that was 99% there when we presented it to them the first time two weeks ago.

Lighten up, ok.

Wasted assignments.

At least a couple times in my career I was given assignments that scraped the slimy bottom of the assignment barrel.

I'm not talking about the crappy assignments you get when you're a junior. Those assignments are part of paying your dues. I'm talking about assignments you get because no one else can do them or because everyone else has already rejected them.

About a decade ago I was given the task of preparing a bunch of videos and a few printed pieces for a client who was retiring. It was, I thought, a lose-lose proposition. If I did a good job, so what. A good party video. If I did a crap job, my ass was in a sling.

This is where personal integrity and a long view comes in.

You get these assignments, you do the best fucking job you can.

Here's why.

1. It's your job to come through.
2. The people you come through for, if they're not complete fuckfaces, will eventually come through with something better. They have memories. If they don't, then it's time to leave.

There's no such thing as an assignment that's wasted.

You always have a chance to impress someone.

Simplicity.

There must be some corollary of Murphy's Law or Peter's Principle or Ringelmann's Effect that states complication will always force out simple. Or never do anything simple when paralysis and complication are around as alternatives.

Today, specifically, I am thinking of life inside agencies.

It's unquestionable that agencies are going through a period of extraordinary tumult. There are all sorts of new ways to reach consumers. And each day seems to bring us a new new way.

So what we have within agencies, between agencies and at clients is a pissing match. There are those who loudly proclaim digital media achieves no reach and is therefore inconsequential. There are others who assert that TV is dead and so much can be won through a simple facebook like.

The truth, of course, is usually somewhere in between. There is no 'one size fits all.' No absolute right answer. It varies from account to account.

What too infrequently occurs is a precise definition of a clients' main issues. So we fight and wrangle and bicker and complicated to no good effect.

This is a really simple business.

The agencies that will survive going forward are the ones that keep that in mind.

New York, after the storm.

If you're able to, every once in a while you should walk to work.

I went to sleep last night thinking the New York City transit system would still be smarting from Hurricane Irene. So I decided that rather than deal with over-crowded city buses (the world's slowest form of transportation) I'd walk the just under four miles to my desk.

It turns out the trains were running this morning, but I was up early, had no pressing deadlines and the weather was nearly perfect, about 65-degrees and clear as a bell, so I decided to stick to my plan.

I don't know where I read it, but long ago I happened upon this quotation: "If you walk on concrete for too long you start to think like a predator." There's nothing but concrete for me to walk on, but I still felt rejuvenated by my walk.

New Yorkers, those who weren't on vacation on this the week before Labor Day, or weren't hiding under their covers from the storm that bypassed the city, were bleary-eyed this morning. As if we were blinded by the sun we had been some days without. So both auto and pedestrian traffic was light. Even midtown, even Times' Square was without the wall-to-wall tourists which so clog our sidewalks.

In the week just past, New York had survived both an earthquake and the remnants of a ferocious hurricane. Both signs, according to some, that god was telling us to repent or somehow reform our wicked ways, our pursuit of Mammon.

Some people see my city as a dark and foreboding place. I see it as hard-boiled hurly burly, fast-paced, frenetic and fun. Where you hear string quartets playing in Central Park or a black man saxophoning "Hava Nagila," in front of the Met. I see New York as a little slice of amity in a world filled with hate.

And a place where, if you're lucky, you can walk to work.

We have lost our memory.

Living through Hurricane Irene, not the actual storm but the banality and ubiquity of the 24-hour coverage, leads me to the conclusion that as a culture we have been stricken with societal Alzheimer's Disease. We have no memory of anything that's happened before. Everything that happens is happening for the first time.

Such memory-myopia leads, of course, to hyperbole and bombast. New York--which just endured a mild summer storm--has shut down its mass transit system for the first time in the city's history. 370,000 people have been evacuated. And the city's famous retailers--Bloomingdale's, Tiffany's, etc. have shut down.

As if we never had a major rainstorm before. Or 35-mile-per-hour winds.

The same societal Alzheimer's effects the advertising industry, of course. Minor advents, like Twitter, like iPhone apps, like Facebook, are hyperbolicized into the newest news and the biggest discoveries. Facts, data, common-sense are all ignored. The "old" ways are declared dead in the wake of these "enormous" changes.

The truth of the matter is this: we live in a dynamic world in which things change all the time. The introduction of something new does not mean that everything else is dead.

What's more, that something new, probably isn't even new. It's probably merely a permutation of something that happened some years earlier in some different form.

Relax the hyperbole.

Read history.

Get in touch with your dormant memory.

The world might be better for it.

Joe Hill.

There's an interesting article in today's "New York Times" about the Swedish-born American labor leader/songwriter Joe Hill. You can read the article, hear some songs and see a slide show here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/27/us/27hill.html?scp=1&sq=joe%20hill&st=cse

Hill was the face of the International Workers of the World, the IWW, the Wobblies, the nascent anti-capitalist labor movement most feared by big-capital due to their radical tendencies. Hill wrote the songs of the labor movement, songs that rallied the workers and were later performed by Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and, of course, Bob Dylan.

In 1915, Hill was executed by a firing squad in Utah for allegedly robbing and killing a grocer and his son. New evidence has recently come to light that Hill was in flagrante delicto during the robbery/murder but was convicted and shot to death because of his involvement with the Wobblies. The state and big money wanted him gone.

When I was a kid my father played us Paul Robeson's rendition of "The Ballad of Joe Hill." This accomplished a few things.
1) He introduced us to the great Paul Robeson.
2) We learned about the violent struggle between capital and labor.
3) We were taught about the power of a compelling message and a great delivery.

There's no real advertising point today; I'm just wading through some 40-year-old memories.

And wishing, a bit, that we still had some radicals around to battle the pernicious forces of capital.