The Thief of Baghdad.

I realize the title I posted above, in this politically-correct day and age, is anything but politically correct. It has, however, entered our consciousness. And, to me at least, entered my store of stories about the industry.

I first heard "The Thief of Baghdad" applied to a writer many years ago. Naturally, it referred to his propensity to steal other people's work. As well as his ethnicity.

My friend, Sally Hogshead once said to me, "You have two things in this business. Your portfolio and your reputation."

As far as I'm concerned, if you're a creative and you steal other people's ideas, you are more than dead to me. You are burning eternally in the darkest corner of the rottenest meeting room.

In the pitch I'm engaged in, my partner and I quickly arrived at a place everyone loved. But of course, this being the era oppressive-non-hierarchal-everyone-has-an-opinion-and-the-right-to-say-something-democracy, the other creatives on the pitch were not dismissed or not reappointed to help me and my partner. Rather they were given time to take our work and smoosh just enough to "theirs."

I got news for you tattooed ladies and bearded men.

It ain't yours.

You stole from me.

I might not be able to do anything about it.

But I will never forget.

Never.

Uncle Slappy goes to the theatre.

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Uncle Slappy called last night, as he does so often. The fact of the matter is, Uncle Slappy is more of a father to me than my own father ever was. And though he is as hale and hardy as you can be at the age of 86, both of us know that neither he nor I are getting any younger. Every conversations and every visit we have, therefore, is something we hold dear, something not to be taken for granted.

“Aunt Sylvie,” he said “and I went to the theatre last night.”

“That’s odd,” I answered. “The last time you went to the theatre, you saw the Boca Raton Player’s interpretation of “My Fair Lady,” with the 71-year-old Minnie Abramovitz as Eliza and the 92-year-old Milt Goldfarb as Professor Henry Higgins.”

“Interpretation was putting it mildly,” Uncle Slappy corrected. “If I remember, and at my age, who knows if I do, the Players retitled the play “My Fair Shiksa,” and Higgins was teaching Eliza how to make kreplach.”

“That sounds about right,” I answered. “What did you see last evening?” I was immediately sorry I asked.

“Well, Aunt Sylvie bought a prescription to the Boca Players. So now we'll go every few weeks. Last night we went to “The Book of Norman.”

“You mean Mormon.”

“No,” he said, “Norman. The story of Norman Rabinowitz, a struggling schlemiel as he tries to sell his Bildungsroman in New York publishing circles.”

“Oy,” I said, issuing my standard response.

“Oy is right,” the old man echoed. “There wasn’t a single song you left the theatre humming.”

“That’s too bad. I know how you like a good musical number.”

“Rogers and Hammerstein it wasn’t. But next week, maybe, next week might be better.”

He let a long pause intervene to build tension leading up to his punch line.

“We are seeing “Cats,” he said. “As in K-A-T-Z.”

And with that, he hung up the Ameche.

Revisions.

Years ago when I worked on IBM at Ogilvy, I was having quite a nice run. (I've written about this before, so skip this post if you've heard it already.) During this run, it wasn't unusual for me to have two or three full-page 4-color ads in "The New York Times" and "The Wall Street Journal" on a single day.

So-called colleagues, of course, resented my success. They thought my success at producing ads came from the strong relationships I had developed both within the agency and at the clients. They thought, somehow, that I could write just about anything and it would magically appear unmolested as a headline in the Times.

The truth, naturally, was different. I keep very thorough files, and each ad I produced was the product of dozens and dozens of headlines and twenty or so re-writes of the copy. What looked easy from the outside looking in was the result of hours and hours of labor.

Because the ad industry today lives in an Empire of Illusion where the best we produce never actually ran for real clients, many people mistakenly believe that they have the right to be frustrated if actual clients change their work. They think everything should be as easy as a phony ad.

Life however is not phony.

And the trick to surviving in our business isn't fake ads. It's doing the thirty rounds of real ads and not letting them be ruined along the way. In fact, it's about making them better along the way.

I'll close this with two thoughts.

The first is from Bill Bernbach, who purportedly carried a card around in his wallet. It read: "Maybe he's right."

The second is from my mentor, Steve Hayden, who said: "The best revenge is a better ad."

Jonathan Swift on Advertising.

For the last few hours, and for whatever reason, I've had a quotation from Sir John Hegarty rattling around in my head. Maybe it's because the biggest television event of the year is looming, maybe because I've been ensconced with a bunch of "mobile and social strategists," or maybe, likely, I'm just in another of my prodigiously bad moods.

In any event, here's Sir John's quotation:

"...One of the other problems I have today is people have retreated to the edges of advertising. You know, they’re happy to do some small little campaign somewhere or they’re doing something on the net that hardly anybody sees and they’re getting awards for it and everybody’s cheering. But they’re not changing the way people feel or think."

I can't help but think that as creators of marketing communications we are acting, these days, like Lilliputians assailing Gulliver.

We annoy consumers with millions of miniscule messages that have no material effect.

We shoot hundreds, literally hundreds of messages at the consumer, none of which have the size, accuracy or power to make an impact.

Here's a confession.

My wife and I used to have a large basket in the front foyer. We filled it with our mail.  After about two months, we probably had collected about 30 pounds of mail. Most of it stayed unopened.

The same, of course is true of our in-boxes. Last I saw my wife's Yahoo account, I think she had over 7,000 emails unread.

I have never seen a single frame of syndicated content, or responded to a tweet from a brand, and have seldom responded to a banner ad.

I think we've lost the plot.

We've retreated to the edges.

We're firing tiny arrows.

We're annoying, and we're having no impact.

To strain the metaphor, our audience is swatting us away.

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None of this is to say TV is wholly effective--especially given DVRs, lack of attention span and so forth. 

But it seems to me that you must be noticed to be considered.

And if I had a brief blink of time to influence a consumer, I do it with the blow from a sledge, not a pinch from a tweezer.

My boy Luke can write 50 Manifestos in an hour.

A pain.

A deep, grumbling, jaw-clenching pain.

A pain like the wrath of god--the wrath of all the gods.

A pain that doesn't waver, doesn't diminish.

A pain that starts in your gut.

That shortens your breath.

That slows your walk.

That doubles you over.

And doesn't leave.

A pain.

A pain not understood by family, or friends, or anyone else.

Like Ahab and the White Whale, you are alone with your pain.

It will conquer you.

Or.

You will conquer it.

You will rise.

Straighten yourself.

And fill your lungs with air and hope.

You will deal with the pain.

You will vanquish it.

You are stronger than the pain.

Because you have made it to the toilet.

And flushed your pain.

Away.

After the all-nighter.

I'm working on a pitch right now, which is fine.

I like working on pitches, and I like working with my partner and I like kicking the asses of whomever I'm competing against. That's my nature; I have always been competitive. Either my work carries the day, or I've failed. There's no second place.

I'll admit, since I joined my agency 50 months ago, they have pretty much put me out of pasture. I don't get called on a lot of assignments, and mostly they just leave me and the business I run alone.

The fact is, since I'm twice the age of most of the other people in the joint and because I work hard to eschew the jargon and the trend-spotting bullshit of most of my peers, I think they just don't know what to make of me. Bad companies, I've often said, have boxes that they fit people in. Good companies let people expand into open space. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

But back to the pitch.

My partner and I quickly came up with an idea that was almost universally liked. In the 24 hours since it was praised, we've done two things. Yesterday until around midnight, we tried to make our initial idea better and broader. How could we make it unassailable? Then from midnight into the high single-digit hours, we came up with alternate campaigns.

That's right, we worked around the clock. Or nearly so.

At some point, I guess about 15 years ago, a few agencies started writing manifestos for pitches and big assignments. These were grandiloquent articulations of the brand. Its purpose, its soul, its promises, its driving force.

I worked on a lot of these and became very good at writing them.

They were effective, these manifestos, because they were a unique way of expressing your agency's point of view.

Now manifestos, usually short 100 word pieces litter the sticky carpet tiles of hundreds of conference rooms across the country. We write manifestos for everything. Usually to rationalize a tagline.

I bet not one person in a hundred can cite a tagline that isn't 20 years old. When I think of one, the only that come to mind come from the inundation period of advertising. So "the quicker picker-upper," pops up, "fly the friendly skies," "we try harder," "two two two mints in one," and so forth.

Nonetheless, this is how things are done today.

Don't ask why, it just is.

Bigger minds than mine have decided so.

How to have a baby.

Since, at 56, I am an wise old owl in the agency business, and since, I suppose, I have somehow managed to raise two kids and still keep my career going, people occasionally ask me how I did it. How I found time to care for my marriage, my children and my portfolio. I thought I'd lay out some thoughts that may or may not be useful.

1. Start your day earlier than most people. I've found that the end of the day (when asses schedule 90 minute meetings starting at 6) is harder to control than the beginning of the day. So wake up early, get to your kid's school early. Carve out some time to have them sit in the crook of your arm and read to them. I probably did this 90% of all mornings when my kids were young. And no matter what happened at work, at the end of the day, I had that time.
2. Have a regular weekend activity, just you and your kid. Take them out for ice-skating lessons, or to swim class, or tennis lessons. Swimming is best because you get to hold them. Make this virtually inviolable. Whatever else happens in your week, you had these special moments over the course of years.
3. Find a work partner who understands. If you need to get home at a reasonable hour and your partner needs to work all night, well, that's no good. Find someone who understands, someone who is strong if you're weak, someone who trusts you and who you can trust.
4. Find a boss who understands. If you're boss is an intolerable martinet and expects you to work till midnight every night (people who work till midnight every night aren't doing so for any other reason than they hate going home) find a new boss.
5. Find a spouse who understands. There's going to be some juggling, and some deal-making. Better doing that with an ally than an adversary.
6. Get to work 20 minutes before everyone else. Or more. I get in, and always have, first. I come in with my agenda for the day mapped out, with most of my to-do's partly done and with most of my copy written in my head. By the time people get in, say around 10, my work is pretty much done, and everyone else is back on their heels. Doing this also earns you the reputation of being crazy-driven, fast and a go-getter. Usually all it takes to earn that reputation is an extra 20 minutes or so in the morning.
7. Involve your kid in your work. I don't mean tell them about every detail, but let them see how much you enjoy what you do. Kids, like parents don't want to deny fun to others.
8. Missing a recital is not the end of the world. As long as you don't miss them serially, and as long as your kid knows how much you wish you were there, you'll be fine.
9. Missing a meeting is not the end of the world. Most meetings, if we organized our agenda, thoughts and next steps, should take no more than three minutes. You can miss a meeting and if you play your cards right, miss nothing at all.
10. Make the most of every moment. At home and at work. When you're at home, be at home, be with your kid. Not your email. And when you're at work, work like a madman. Get things done, be prolific, be funny and fast. That's how you handle both. By doing a good job with each.

Never underestimate the hubris of a brand.

Verizon, fucking Verizon, has taken over the Empire State Building for a social-media-driven light show. Verizon, fucking Verizon, asks a question each day about the game, and depending on consumer responses, the lights on top of New York's iconic skyscraper change color.

I think I've made it clear.

I hate Verizon.

I hate their artless Nazi-runic double logo.

I hate every bit of marketing they've ever done.

I hate their name emblazoned nearly everywhere.

I hate their extortionate pricing and their abysmal service.

The fact is, I hate everything about them.

But this is a new low.

Even though it's not Verizon's fault someone somewhere has decided to "merchandise" the spire of New York's most-famous building, Verizon is exploiting it in the crassest and ugliest way.

Look, I'll make this simple.

The top of the Empire State Building should always be white. The tower should always look like an old silver-gelatin print.

What's more, the Empire State Building belongs to New Yorkers. Don't fucking sully it with your arrogant commercialism.

I hate you, Verizon. More than fucking ever.

Fatigue.

There was a report this morning on "National Public Radio" that I think is worth reading about or listening to, depending on how you prefer to consume media.

You can read it here or listen to it (3:48), here.

Basically, it's a story, like the story of our industry, of too much noise. In the case of hospitals, like Boston Medical Center's 7 North, nurses and other staff were hearing 90,000 alarms a week. What was happening, of course, thanks to that onslaught of noise was that alarms were being ignored.

Deborah Whalen a clinical nurse manager at the hospital said: "Alarm fatigue is when there are so many noises on the unit that it actually desensitizes the staff. If you have multiple, multiple alarms going off with varying frequencies, you just don't hear them."

Nationally, this not hearing of of alarms has led to more than 200 deaths in 2011.

It seems to me that we in advertising are precipitating our own form of alarm fatigues. I'll call it message fatigue. Where back in pre-internet days an advertiser would produce maybe ten customer-facing communications a year, today we produce scores, or hundreds, or thousands or more.

Just last week, I reviewed and approved 72 social media posts for a client. This is probably 5% of what they send out annually.

Message fatigue doesn't kill people like alarm fatigue can.

But it does deafen customers.

The every-second-onslaught of drivel has turned them off.

The signal to noise ratio is all off.

I think we'd all be better served by fewer, bigger messages.
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PS.   When I was a kid, I had a summer job as a game-room-attendant at an amusement park called Playland in Rye, NY. The game-room itself was probably 30-feet deep by 50-feet wide and had probably 40 pinball machines in it. As you can imagine, it was a cacophony.

My first few days as an attendant, I couldn't sleep at night. I kept hearing bells and buzzers and dings and dongs in my head. But after a week or so, I got used to the din. And went back to sleeping like a baby.

Word.

There's a new book out that warranted a front-page article in today's "New York Times." It's 1,250 pages long, has no plot and no characters and is set in 5.5-point type.

The book is called "And Every Single One Was Someone." It simply prints the word "Jew" six-million times.

You can read the "Times" article here and order the book from Amazon here.

The author, Phil Chernofsky, had this to say about his book. "When you look at this at a distance, you can't tell whether it's upside down or right side up, you can't tell what's here: it looks like a pattern. That's how the Nazis viewed their victims: These are not individuals, there are not people, these are just a mass we have to exterminate."

Much has been written over the past few decades about the death of the book and the death of the written word.

This book seems very powerful to me.

And very much alive.