1000 Grand Concourse, The Bronx.

Uncle Slappy called this morning. He had heard on the news that New York was facing a "heat advisory" and he was making sure I wasn't doing something "meshugenah" and going out for a run.

"I'll be ok, Uncle Slappy. It's early yet. Besides the reservoir," that's where I do most of my running "is fairly well shaded. Besides, I probably won't do much more than a lap."

The old man had already moved on.

"Did I ever tell you about the building your Aunt Sylvie and I owned on the Grand Concourse. 1000 Grand Concourse to be exact. In the High Bridge section of the Bronx. Puerto Rican now, but Joosh when we owned it in the early '50s."

"No, Uncle Slappy. I didn't know you owned real estate.'

"The Grand Concourse was paradise in those days. And a member of my Congregation" (Uncle Slappy was the Rabbi at a small Upper East Side Shul, Beth Youiz Miwo Mannow) "left it to me in his will."

"You must have been very important in his life," I said.

"Well, like most things that sound too good to be true," Slappy corrected, "1000 Grand Concourse had its issues. The hot weather in New York--that's what made me think about it."

"How so, Uncle Slappy?" I asked somewhat plaintively.

"Well, for one, the ferstunkeh architect of the building was a nut job. Somehow he designed the thing so that all 56 units faced the back. You've felt heat before, Mr. Big Schott. But these were the days before air-conditioning. You never felt heat like you felt there."

"All the units faced the back? How is that even possible?"

"Never in a million years could I explain it. And secondly, the building was turned over to me occupied. Boney Tenant lived on the top floor."

"You mean Tony Bennet?" figuring the old man had slipped into a Spoonerism.

"No, a tenant no one knew his name in 6C a one-bedroom. He had to be 6'6" and maybe dripping with sweat 120 pounds. We never knew his name. He was always just Boney Tenant to us."

"Could he sing?" I asked trying to break the tension.

"Don't be such a wise-ass," the old man shot back.

And with that he hung up the Ameche.

I took it extra slow around the reservoir today and turned the A/C up a notch.

A picture from after the meeting.

Failures and hits.

Stop me if I told you this one before.

No?

Ok, so here goes.

In the halcyon days of the dot-com boom I was shooting three spots in what would eventually become a very popular campaign.

The campaign was the second the client had produced. The first was an abject failure. I was brought in to make things right.

We were shooting and all of us on the set had that giddy feeling that things were going right and we could have something pretty cool on our hands.

I was standing with my boss when the client came over.

"I think we have a hit," he said in his oleaginous way.

"Yes, we just may," said my boss.

"It's too bad we had that failure in the first round of spots."

I'll never forget what my boss said.

"If we didn't have that failure, we wouldn't be here now."

That shut the client the fuck up.

Which, by the way, is always a good thing to do.

Crap.

The central creative issue of our era isn't the lack of a big idea, originality or even impact and intrusiveness. The central creative issue we face is one of editing.

Most people and clients--especially online--produce and "publish" so much dreck that everything, even what's good suffers from guilt by association.

The news I listen to, arguably the most serious news in America (NPR), has more content on Charlie Sheen than it does on a bloody war in Syria. If you want to seriously depress yourself about the Empire of Illusion in which we reside, go to Yahoo's homepage. "Britney Spears Radiant in Red Dress" it screams followed by "The Simplest Way to Cook Corn."

Clients, of course, are incredibly guilty. As are the agencies that "serve" them. Websites are like content roach motels: The copy goes up but it never comes down.

When I worked on IBM I remember having heard that their website was 4.5 million pages long. I said to them that's 22,500 200-page books. That was ten years ago.

If you write it, it will post.

The genius of traditional media--print, broadcast, outdoor and radio--is that they were constructed with boundaries. You can fit only so many words in :30 seconds. The web is ever-expanding and hierarchy-less. It is like the Collyer Brother's apartment. Stuffed to the gills with crap.

Often online a friend will post a couple dozen photographs. Two are good. Even Woody Allen, whom I respect as an auteur, has just released "To Rome With Love." It would have been 100% better if it were 30% shorter.

Maybe I'm guilty as well.

This post is already too long.

Empires and colonies.

If you understand your world history, you know this: Great empires from the American, to the Roman, to the English, Dutch and French, amassed their fantastic wealth by extracting it (usually in the form of raw materials and labor) from their colonies.

In other words, they took a lot and gave back less.

It occurs to me that taking a lot and giving a little--the Colonial model--is precisely what the Empires of the Web (those amassing great wealth) are doing to us. They are the masters, we the subjects.

This thinking, of course, comes in the wake of Facebook--the most imperial of all web powers deciding to assign us all new--and virtually unchanegeable email addresses, all in an effort to compel its subjects (us) to spend more time on their site and looking at the ads they feed us with our own valuable data.

What's astounding about this "value exchange" between Facebook users and Facebook is that we--the users--don't have anyway of determining how much we are paying for Facebook services. When you fill up your gas tank you know how much the Oilopoly is removing from your wallet. When you buy "The New York Times" you know how much you're paying for their brand of the news.

Web entities have successfully given us the illusion that they are "free." Of course our data, our privacy, our lives are the gifts that keep on giving.

Free does not create billionaires. Never has, never will.

In the process, so-called free services have unfairly competed with analog entities that charged money. "Free" prevailed to the point where finding real news is virtually impossible. Free has forced good out of business. Easy destroyed hard.

Today is the day I leave Facebook. (If I can figure out how.)

I've been their colonial vassal long enough.

The price I'm paying is not worth the value I get.

--
BTW 1.
Years ago I wrote that Microsoft is following the course of pre-revival General Motors. They are following GM's practice of arrogant stupidity. The worm will turn.

I believe eventually Facebook and even Google will succumb to arrogant stupidity. They might still be popular--in the way Verizon is popular. But they will be despised.

And there's a lot about them to hate.
--
BTW 2.
Facebook's market cap is about $70 billion. They have about 900 million "users." (They should really be called "usees.") That means Facebook sells $77 worth of data from each of us.

I am not content. A re-run.

I am sitting in an allllllllllllllllllllllllllll-day meeting on Content Strategy. This post, which I wrote four years ago popped into my mind.

Content is today's shibboleth. "It's all about content." "Content is king." "We're in the content business."

Oh, bullshit.

First of all, since this blog proposes to look at the world through a linguistic lens, where did the word content come from? I am 50 and before a few years ago, the word, in the way it is used today, did not exist. We relied on words like information, stories, movies, interviews, jokes, instead of the catchall phrase "content."

"Gone With the Wind" was not content. It was a movie, and frankly, my dear,a damn entertaining one. But by amalgamating everything under the heading of content, we eliminate judgment, quality, nuance. It's all just content. Calling everything made out of binary code "content" is as broad and inaccurate as using phrases like "axis of evil," to describe two-or-three-hundred million people. Calling everything content is as broadly discriminatory as saying "all Asians look alike." It's just not the way things are. Everything that contains information, everything that can be viewed while trapped in an edit suite or a conference room in Client-ville is not content.

Here's the one, the only, the simple rule to remember: If it's not relevant, it's not content. If it's bland, a talking head, irrelevant, uninteresting, it's not content. If it doesn't speak to someone with humanity and empathy, it's not content. It's NONtent.

Think about some of those Ogilvy-isms that were drummed into our heads, either from working at Ogilvy or from reading "Ogilvy on Advertising." "You can't bore someone into buying your product." "The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife." "Unless your advertising is built on a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night." In other words, it had damn well better be interesting, or it isn't content.

Now, let's fasten our seat-belts and take a look at some data. According to Richard Saul Wurman in "Information Anxiety," “Companies are only able to keep up with, and use less than 7% of the information they produce.” More data will be produced in the next year than has been generated during the entire existence of humankind. Every year the amount of data produced in the world grows by 800%. In 2005, humans produced 43 million exabytes of data--that more than eight times the amount of printed data ever produced.

Hold on, here's some more: Cal Berkeley studies estimated that by the end of 1999, the sum of human-produced information (including all audio, video recordings and text/books) was about 12 exabytes of data. The 2003 Berkeley report stated that in 2002 alone, "telephone calls worldwide on both landlines and mobile phones contained 17.3 exabytes of new information if stored in digital form", and "it would take 9.25 exabytes of storage to hold all U.S. [telephone] calls each year."International Data Corporation estimates that approximately 160 exabytes of digital information were created, captured, and replicated worldwide in 2006.

Did you cry "Uncle" yet?

The word exabyte is the basis for the term "exaflood", a neologism created by Bret Swanson of the Discovery Institute in a January 2007 Wall Street Journal editorial. Exaflood refers to the rapidly increasing torrent of data transmitted over the Internet. The amount of information people upload, download and share on the Internet is growing (due in large part to video, audio and photo applications), at an exponential rate while the capacity of the Internet, its bandwidth, is limited and susceptible to a “flood” of data equal to multiple exabytes. "One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video.

All this data is not content. It's just stuff. It's not king. It's inundation. It's NONtent.

So, if you'll give me the notion of NONtent--shit that isn't interesting, relevant, important, funny, entertaining, I'll concede to you the notion of content. And now I will go back to the days of the Mad-Men and attempt to resurrect the content phrase that pays.

That phrase is AIDA.
A--Attention
I--Interest
D--Desire
A--Action

So, I'll go so far as to say this it's not content without AIDA.

You don't go home nights and watch "content" on the content-boob-tube that doesn't involve AIDA. You don't listen to the radio or subscribe to magazines that aren't AIDA-oriented. You don't consume NONtent. Why would your audience or your target?

If you build it, they won't come.
If it's interesting, they will.

For Sam.

The easiest thing in the world to do is to complain about work.

We spend most of our time there.

Even if you're "high up" in the company, there's still the "man" to rail against.

And of course, you're over-worked and under-paid.

Then there are the layabouts, frauds, esthetes and kiss-asses who seem to get ahead unfairly.

Complain.

Complain.

Complain.

There's nothing wrong with complaining. I would be the last one to say that there is.

But there is something wrong with having complaints and then doing nothing about them.

And there is, I think, something wrong in not appreciating the blood, sweat, toil and tears of work.

Work helps give us meaning.

It presents us with choices.

It allows us to challenge ourselves.

It introduces us to friends.

In short, it helps us define ourselves.

You can be diligent or a dilettante.

You can work hard or you can get by.

Back to the beginning: You can work to make things better or you can slide by.

These aren't simple work place choices.

They are life choices.

Who do you want to be?

Who's in the mirror?

How do you want to live?

No understanding.

Having grown up in a Philip Rothian household (though without a great deal of access to calves' liver) I have never be brimming with confidence. I did not have one of those mothers who gloried in my every movement, who sang my praises to one and all including myself. Rather, she was shrewishly dedicated to doing everything she could to make herself powerful and myself weak. Unlike the practice of so many parents of today's generations, nothing went up on the refrigerator, no praise--for my brother, sister or me--was ever forthcoming.

There was a time, of course, when most of the people I worked with, those my age and a few years more, were similarly neurotic. There was a power to that neurosis. It inspired us to work hard, to prove ourselves to always strive for more.

That all, these days, seems to have disappeared.

Now among so many young creative people there is a inverse relationship between achievement and arrogance. There is a disconnect between effort and entitlement. There is a subject-object split between competence and confidence.

I think such ego-inflation explains the eminence of awards that are indirectly correlated to achievement. People seem to act as if they deserve praise simply for showing up.

On Saturday night my wife and I went to see Woody Allen's new movie "To Rome with Love." The line was long. Long and elderly. Long and elderly and Jewish.

In fact, I'd say fully 60% of the line was filled with holocaust survivors, spreading down 3rd Avenue and around the corner down 59th. My wife and I arrived early and we're about seventh and eighth in line. Finally, the line began to move. And there at the front of a line is a hipster couple. Trying to meld into the line, cutting in front of all.

I yelled out, "how can you do that? How can you live with yourself?" With that they were sent away by the ticket taker.

How can people do it?

How do they live with themselves, with their lies?

There's so much I will never understand.

A Sunday in New York.

I noticed something very strange this morning as I went out for a run. I left the house around 9:45 and just before 10, I passed a kid and his dad and the kid was eating an ice cream bar--a popsicle, the colorful red, white and blue types you buy from the Sabrett's wagons that dot our cityscape.

A bit later on, maybe around 10:15, I saw a kid and his mom, with the kid eating a peanut-crusted hard ice-cream cone, again, the type you buy from a street vendor.

Finally, finished with my run around 11:15, I saw a grown man licking lasciviously at a cone heaped with chocolate soft-serve.

Seriously, not to sound like an old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn, or like Michael Bloomberg, but what's happened to our society when people are eating ice cream well before lunch? Why are they writing ridiculous phrases all over their bodies, wearing next to nothing. And why, amid a national obesity epidemic is Taco Bell running yet another campaign positioning itself as a "4th Meal." Really. Three meals is no longer enough.

Maybe it's a stretch. But something's gone wrong.

But maybe something is changing.

CAA and R/GA both won big at Cannes for doing work that promotes values--sustainable farming and dedication to fitness. The antipode to our current dedication to fatness.

This weekend National Public Radio had a short segment on the great television writer/producer and liberal leader Norman Lear. Lear created shows that discussed the issues of the day. Racism, sexism, ageism, war and politics. He did so in a popular and humorous fashion.

Today, there is no room for Lear or someone like him on television or even cable. Our shows have no heroes, no positive role models. And most seem to involve nothing more than a juvenile fascination with giggling and sex.

But maybe things will change. Maybe people will wake up to the horror of amusing themselves to death.

Probably not, however.

Some pedagogy.

I've written about this before but it's been a while and I feel it's time to write about it again.

Getting fired, axed, shit-canned, booted out, downsized, right-sized, aligned, adjusted, schmised is a part of our business.

The saddest part of this is, of course, that the people most in need of being fired, seldom are. In the words of Rudy Vallee who played John D. Hackensacker in Preston Sturges' great movie "The Palm Beach Story," "the men who are most in need of a beating are always enormous."

In any event, no one ever said the world, or our business is even remotely fair. If it were, we wouldn't all be working for holding company honchos who have never written an ad and wouldn't know good from shit if you bludgeoned them with it. That's ok, I guess, someone has to make $20 million and I'm convinced it will never be me and that's ok, I guess.

So, here's today's lesson.

What to do when that inevitable day comes when you're fired.

1. Send notes/phone all your real friends in the business. Changing your Facebook/Linked In status to say you're available doesn't count. This is a time to reflect upon karma. Or tit for tat. Or quid pro quo. If you've helped people along the way, people will help you. If you're a schmuck, you'll be treated like one.

2. You should always keep your book/portfolio/site up-to-date. Anyone can be fired at any time. So don't wait till the last minute to make yourself presentable.

3. Figure out a plan of attack. Where do you want to work? Is your book up to snuff to work there? Who do you know there? What is your "touch strategy" to communicate with them.

4. Understand that some days you'll have done all the job-hunting you can do by 10:30 in the morning. Don't spend the rest of your waking hours flagellating yourself. Go to the movies, go for a run, enjoy yourself. You'll be working soon enough.

5. Accept any freelance at any reasonable rate that comes from a good agency. You'll make connections, promote yourself, and move on from there.

6. Start a blog. (Unemployment is why I began Ad Aged.) Blogging is the best way I can think of to put your name, thoughts and work in front of prospective employees. I've met in my five years of blogging half a dozen "big deals." That ain't a bad track record.

7. Finally, when you live your life, don't live high on the hog. Don't buy $129 canvas sneakers and $79 wool hats and apartments realtors tell you you can afford. Save your money. There's a time when you might need it.