Time. Order. Responsibility.

I suppose one of the worst things about being me is my sense of time, order and responsibility. Let's start with time.

In the 40+ years I've been paid--between summer jobs making change in a game room on the boardwalk at Playland to my myriad jobs in advertising, I can count on one hand the number of times I've come in late.

I just can't do it.

Even this morning when I was dealing with some sundry interpersonal mishigoss and the swirl that so often accompanies my spouse, I was terribly nervous about being late. I have a lot to do and I was worried that I would get scowls as I hustled in at 9:06.

Well, 9:06 came and went, and now, 20 minutes later and no one I need is even in yet.

Order is of the same order, solipsistically speaking.

I tend to knock items off my to do list the way the Germans rolled over eastern Europe. I get stuff to do and I do it.

Dilly-dallying is not a part of my modus operandi.

Finally, there's responsibility.

I like to say that I'd run through hell in a gasoline suit to get my work done, to do what's right for the job or assignment.

You can psychoanalyze me if you'd like and criticize me.

I know I should lighten up and take things a little easier on myself.

That's all well and good.

But it's not the way I am.

There are a lot of people in the business--it seems like a full one-third of my Facebook friends--who are in Cannes right now. Mainly it seems like they're there to post pictures saying they're there.

These guys and gals are the advertising winners--a club of which I am no longer a member.

For whatever reason, they are perceived as cool and cutting edged.

There's nothing cool about getting in on time, doing your work, and going home having done a job well.

There's no festival celebrating that.

Hubris.

I just read something in "The New York Times," that Comcast, the universally-despised cable and internet provider is seeking to put its name in lights atop the tallest building in Rockefeller Center, the 770-foot-tall Rockefeller Building designed by Raymond Hood in 1934.

That building for decades had the initials RCA atop. Remember RCA? The Radio Corporation of America? Perhaps I always felt warmly about that sign because my father's first job had been as a copywriter at RCA and until he died he had an old RCA vacuum tube clock-radio in bakelite by the side of his bed.

About 25 years ago, the RCA sign came down and GE's logo went up. And New Yorkers, as they do, slowly accepted the initials of America's second-largest defense contractor and despoiler of the Hudson River (PCBs) lording it over our city like some super-villain in a Batman flick.

Now, Comcast.

I could be wrong about this but I would imagine if you wired most people to a polygraphic graphic reader they would register great disdain and antipathy every time they ever see a Comcast logo. There's a skyscraper hard on the FDR down by South Street with a too-large by half Verizon logo polluting our sight-lines. It makes my blood boil.

Some city landmarks commission or another has to approve the signage change if it's to happen. The prevailing winds say that they will. They approved GE's usurpation 25 years ago and they were ok when MET LIFE went up and Pan Am's logo came down on what New Yorker's of my generation still call the Pan Am building, at 200 Park Avenue.

I think there's an important brand lesson here, maybe the simplest and maybe the most easy to ignore.

Comcast spends probably over $1 billion on advertising every year, but no one likes them. They act like some rich kids you probably grew up with who would invite you to their lavish birthday parties and you'd go because maybe you were all being taken to a Knick's game. You'd go even though you couldn't really stomach the kid. Make yourself likeable before anything.

No one likes Comcast.

And soon their ugly-ass logo will sully our majestic city's skyline.

And we will be reminded around the clock how much we are at the mercy of ugly companies we hate.

Complicated thoughts.

Last night, I was working late. It was long about 10:30 when someone with the word "chief" in his title sat across a table from me.

He began eating his dinner and we had a long-postponed chat.

Like I said, it was late.

And I must admit when it comes to burning the midnight oil, I'd way rather get up at 4AM and jam from 5AM till noon to get my work done than stay until the wee hours. I'm fresher in the morning. I'm faster. And I have all day to reflect and polish what I've done--to dot the i's and cross the t's.

But, as usual, I digress.

What I noticed last night and I've noticed through the years is that creative people who succeed in our business usually are prone to busting their buttons in talking about the business and the work they do and the things they learn.

Too often, I think, too many businesses has become to professionalized and analyticalized. In our powerpointed, Excelled and politically white-washed world we have lost something very important.

We have lost love.

Ardor.

Passion.

Of diving headlong into the work we do.

We have lost spark.

If you're a client, or a creative director, I think the best you can do to get great work is not to critique little things that really are of no material difference to the performance or perception of a communication.

I think the best thing you can do to get great work is to release the passion that's initially in most creative people. It's a passion that usually gets wrung out as things get over-thought and over-picked at.

During the Renaissance there were probably hundreds of painters who had the taste and technical proficiency of, say, Rembrandt. But Rembrandt had a spark.

That's what needs to stay alive.

Camus on advertising.

I've been playing Sisyphus lately.

Pushing a giant boulder up an imposing crag.

Only to have it tumble back upon me.

So I have to start from scratch again.

Camus posited that this is the human, existential condition.

Not bad for a guy who never wrote copy.

It's not freelancing that makes me feel beleaguered.

It's just the way life is some times.

Every time you think some blip of copy gets approved,
it comes back with 47 more changes.

Not changes in material facts.
Not changes that make it better.
Just changes.
As indistinguishable from rational as one raindrop is from another.
But that's life.

It's hard to get over the hump.

There's a lot of crap weighing you down.

There's only one thing you can do about this.

Keep pushing.

"I get the willies..."

I've had quite a time over the last week or so, juggling more than a few demands on my time. To be honest, I've also had a bit of a crisis in confidence--the throes, I suppose, of being the new kid (despite my age) in a bunch of new places, doing a bunch of things, really, without clear direction.

It's amazing what this mixture of circumstances can reduce you to.

The feeling reminds me of a passage from Joseph Heller's great novel "Something Happened," which Heller published in 1974, 13 years after he published "Catch 22."

"I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely;..."

Right now, and I have the experience to know that the feeling will pass, every work situation feels like I'm a kid trying on a new pair of shoes that don't quite fit. The shoe salesman has me walk across the floor and I wobble as I do so. He wants the sale and says how well they fit, and that they'll soon be 'broken in.' My mother wants to get the fuck out of the store and back to her Metrecal and Demerol and Johnnie Walker.

"They hurt," I say.

"They look fine," my mother bludgeons.

"They pinch," I protest.

"We'll take them," she swats.

That's life, I suppose, as a newly-minted freelancer.

It hurts. But you'll take it. 

One bad day in the Mexican League

I quickly realized I was no Sandy Koufax.

About three months ago I was running along across a loose gravel surface, chasing Whiskey no doubt. The ground was wet, or the surface unstable and I lost my footing. As my old boss used to say, I went ass-over-tea kettle, and tumbled painfully to the ground.

My almost-brand-new quilted jacket was ripped and dirty. My hands were bloodied, my hip was sorely bruised and my right arm was painfully wrenched.

Now, as I said, it's three months later and while my jacket is patched and my hip is well, my arm is still hurting. In fact, even something simple like opening my dresser drawers is painful, as is holding onto the straps on either a subway car or a bus.

My assorted pains, painful as they are, I have to admit wash over me with a sense of warm, rosy nostalgia. They bring me back to my one short season in the Mexican Baseball League in 1975.

While I primarily manned the hot corner, el esquina caliente, for one lost game, late in the season, my strong right wing was called upon to close out the last two innings of a 22-4 blowout.

I had pitched a bit in high school, mostly filling in when our regular arms were sore or tired, and I'd often horse around while on the Saraperos and toss batting practice. But pitching seriously in a game that mattered--or was at least close to mattering--was something that eluded me.

I entered the game, down 13-2, with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation. Though this was merely mop-up duty, the team was using me to spare using a real arm in what was deemed a lost cause, I was scared I'd have the crap knocked out of me.

That said, I was hopeful, too. For whatever reason, I fantasized that my modest assortment of fastballs and a half-way wily slider would somehow have become elevated through the years to professional grade. Against all logic and common sense, I was hoping that due to some intervention of divine power that I had magically become the next Sandy Koufax, the ultimate baseball hero to every Jew who's ever laced up a pair of spikes.

I quickly realized I was no Sandy Koufax. I might not even have been Mandy Koufax, Sandy's little sister.

It's lonely on a pitcher's mound when you're 17, in a foreign land where you scarcely speak the lingo and you're surrounded by seven or eight thousand relatively hostile and drunk fans, if that's not being redundant.

I promptly plunked the first batter I faced in the ribs, my mediocre fastball running in on him. The second batter fairly tore the cover off my best slider. He was in at second standing up while base-runner number one scored on a play at the plate. Quickly I was down by another run.

The rest passes in a blur. I don't remember who I faced and what I threw. I do remember, perhaps the opposition got winded from running the bases, that somehow I got out of the inning without giving up more than an additional 20 or 30 runs.

Though I had been asked to garner the final six outs of the contest, after my inning's debacle, my manager, Hector Quesadilla, mercifully yanked me out of the game. My right arm after my one inning's work throbbed like a porn flick.

I think my line for the day was like this:
IP    BB    HBP    H      R       ER        K        ERA
1      0        2        8      8        6           1         54.00

What I learned back then is something I am living today as I try to make a life as a moderately well-paid freelancer.

Every once in a while you're called upon to step and take center stage. You're not always ready for the job, you can't always perform as you're asked. But nevertheless, you go out, rub some dirt on your pants and do as well as you can.

My arm hurts just thinking about it.

In praise of repetition.

After about twenty years of hearing that all traditional media is dead and seeing all new media flounder (despite new media's hype) I'm coming to the conclusion that in our headlong embrace of Integrated Marketing Communications starting about 20 years ago, we've over-looked something absolutely seminal.

That is repetition.

Repetition.

Repeating yourself.

Having the same message in 99 different channels is not the same thing as repeating your message 99 times in one channel.

Another, perhaps caustic, way of phrasing this belief is this: There are no short-cuts.

In other words, if you want to make an impression, you have to buy an impression. For every viral hit, there are billions of videos that have no audience.

If you want to make an impression, do something impressive. And air it.

I don't think there's any media magic that can overcome that logic.

Fighting fire.

I was up at 5:30 this morning, earlier than I usually wake up. I have a client meeting out in the wilds of New Jersey that starts at nine, and, therefore, a 7:12 train.

I guess you could say I've been busy of late. Working bits of three or four full-time jobs.

A lot of what I've been doing is, I think, not what I like doing best, but what I may do best. That is I extinguish fires and calm nerves. Someone can't get something done, or there's 20 minutes to do it, or it's complicated and there's no brief and someone needs to figure it out.

After literally a lifetime in the business, I am handy with a fire extinguisher. I'm not afraid of the smoke or the heat. I put the nozzle in the center of the conflagration and I handle matters.

I'd be lying if I didn't say I was jealous of the cool kids who seem to get the big jobs and their pictures in the trades. I'd like to, every once in a while anyway, strike a pompous pose and have a holier than thou attitude. I'd like to say, every once in a while anyway, 'you got us into this mess, you get us out of it.'

I'd like to say a lot of things, about the advertising equivalent of the legal profession's ambulance chasers--award chasers.

But I'm a freelancer now and it makes sense to try to button, not flap, my lips.

There will be a time when something stinks to high heaven. Or there's a nut that can't be cracked. Or a client who is cracked.

I'll get the call then.

Uncle Slappy at the 'Genius Bar.'

The home phone rang just as I was leaving my apartment this morning. Of course, it was Uncle Slappy, the last person on earth to call my land line, and to call me at 7:20 AM.

“Anyone who calls himself a genius, definitely isn’t,” Uncle Slappy began.

I stumbled for a moment, but quickly recovered. “You went to the Genius Bar I assume.”

“You assume correctly, Mr. Smarty Pants. The ferstunkener Genius Bar. The MacBook Air you gave me, it’s on the fritz.”

Last year for Uncle Slappy’s birthday, I presented him with a brand-spanking new computer. I loaded it up with Skype, created gmail accounts for he and Aunt Sylvie and even book-marked all of Uncle Slappy’s favorite periodicals, from “The New York Times,” to “Holocaust Digest,” a monthly review of death.

“Did you get it fixed? It’s covered under warranty.”

“It’s working now like a top. But this morning I couldn’t turn it on.”

“But it’s ok now and they didn’t charge you?”

“When I came in the first thing they asked me is if my memory is saved. My memories are right here, I told them. Right in my head.

"Then it was, did you back up your memory?"

In my opinion that’s a dangerous question to ask a wag like Uncle Slappy. I wouldn’t go near that one with a 10-foot Latvian.

“Back up my memory, I said. Oy, half of my memories I’d be better forgetting.

“So Mr. Tattooed Genius tried again. ‘Have you backed up your hard-drive?’ he asked.

“At my age, I told, my hard-drive ain’t so hard.”

“Uncle Slappy, did you get it fixed? Did they erase your data?

“Data,” he quipped “I hardly know her.”

I gave him an Oy that encompassed 6,000 years of Jewish suffering and over 50 of mine.

“It’s fine now, boychick. All is right with the world”

“That’s good, Uncle Slappy. I’m glad.”

“Maybe tonight during the basketball, we could do the Skype a little.”

“I miss your face, Uncle Slappy.”

“Don’t be maudlin,” he answered as he hung up the blower.

Thanks, Uncle Slappy, I said to myself. I may be many things, but maudlin won’t be one of them.

Confetti. And branding.

Often when I get an assignment, the first thing I notice is that those working on the assignment or on the brand forget that they know more about the brand than 99.999% of ordinary people. So in concepting work, or presenting work, they often make leaps that make things all the more confusing to the viewer.

I'm beginning to think we as an industry have forgotten the original intention of what a brand should be.

A brand is supposed to bring clarity and order into the universe or the supermarket aisle. If you think about the derivation of the use of the work, I'd suppose it comes from the marks farmers would put on the cattle to identify which were theirs.

So, you take 500 bovine owned by 50 different cowboys. A brand allowed you to say, "that's mine."

A brand served to focus the viewer around a certain entity with a certain set of values.

I think focus is becoming undone due to the proliferation of media channels and integrated marketing communication's attempt to optimize each of those channels. All of a sudden, when your ad is festooned on a baseball stadium ticket booth, or on the turnstile at the subway, the consumer is confused.

More often than not it seems we are being beamed blandishments completely out of relevant context. What's more, because each of these venues contains a slightly different brand message what we get is a mess of messaging, not clarity.

The goal, I think, of a brand should be to focus the consumer as to the promise it makes. It shouldn't be making promises out of context and it shouldn't alter the promise merely to optimize a channel it shouldn't be in in the first place.

I think in our multi-channel world, brands have become like confetti.

We need focus.

Not dispersion.