Blue Monday.

Let's just say, with apologies to Rob Schwartz, that for about the past two years our work-life balance has been more than a little bit, ahem, askew.

In fact, if our work-life balance were a person, he'd be walking around like Charles Laughton's Quasimodo in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."

I suppose in the impecunious parlance of today (where it's considered fair that some people make $77 million while others are let go or are wage frozen, simply because some semantic-assassin has dubbed them 'job creators,') we are supposed to feel lucky, simply because we have staved off the worst of the worsening American economy.

I am not working at Starbucks, or wearing an orange jumpsuit and picking up litter along the Grand Central Parkway.

But the real fact is--the detail no one wants to notice or do anything about, is that people are suffering. Working day-in and-out, every night and weekend, leaving two weeks of vacation on the table, because if you take it you might be...is not peculiar behavior, it's systemic.

I'm afraid we're working ourselves to death.

The trouble is, I'm more afraid of the alternative: unemploying ourselves to death.

Uncle Slappy's weekly slap.

Do people read?

I guess if you get right down to it (or write down to it) ever since my first job when I worked for the great copywriter turned novelist Marshall Karp, I've always been regarded as a "writer's writer."

Maybe the best definition of that obtuse epigram is this: I've always held that thoughtful, warm, witty and clear messaging, that is, good copy, can solve most any marketing problem. And over my 33 years in the business, it's often fallen to me to make complicated things succinct and, at my best, a rallying cry.

I think that's why, appended to my ECD title (ECDs today are as commonplace as acorns in October) they've affixed the words "copy chief." Maybe those words are capitalized. I suppose they should be.

There's a school of thought, of course, that says almost with every exhalation that "no one reads anymore." They forget that over two-million people a day read "The Wall Street Journal," and over one-million people a day read the paper edition "The New York Times," while an additional one point six million subscribe online.

They forget that Jeff Bezos is a quadtrillionaire, and that in 2015, 2.7 billion books (in all forms) were sold. 

Still, we are told that people do not, or cannot read. Even my humble, rickety, seat-of-my-pants blog is getting nearly 20,000 readers a week. 

People who know me know I have a capacious memory for the history of advertising. I think one of the most profound statements about our business comes from David Ogilvy. I'll update it here to eliminate gender bias and cater to a la mode. "The consumer isn't a moron. He or she, or Xe, Xem and Xyr is your partner or spouse."

I think the "no one read-ites" are in-effect saying they believe people are idiots. They're too dumb to read, or too busy, or too tweety.

The fact is, no one reads what's dull, insipid, smarmily slick, dishonest, shilling, jargony crap. No one reads an in flight magazine, or a message from Sleepy's, the mattress superstore. 

But, as Gossage put it perfectly, "No one reads an ad. They read what's interesting. And sometimes that's an ad."

So the task we face, dear reader, is not to kowtow to the non-reader-ocracy, but to fight for compelling, well-crafted and informative copy. Copy that is useful to the reader like a letter from a loved one might be. Copy that leaves you with a feeling that you are respected.

No one can help but read that.

Thank you for reading.

The Descent of Brand. (Volvo edition.)

Some thoughts on a great boss.

Some years ago I got the best bit of creative direction guidance I have ever received.

I got that advice from Chris Wall, who died yesterday at the tragically young age of 61.

About 20 of us had created and produced a campaign for a major client that was the picture of efficiency and integration.

In fact, the worked sucked. It was the worst campaign we had ever produced for this particular client. However we were blinded by its internal success and by how much the client liked it.

Chris called a bunch of us responsible for the creative. He didn't yell or dress us down. He simply said one thing--the aforementioned best guidance I've ever received.

He said: "I'm not pissed that the work sucks. I'm pissed that our level of ambition has started to drop."

As a creative director, you can worry about details--is it the right color yellow? Is the copy "flowy" enough? etc.

Or you can do the real job.

Make sure your people are striving to be great.

That's what Chris made me think about.

For that, I am forever thankful.

Hector Quesadilla and the patata. A repost.

[From December, 2014.]

Hector was at home, resting in the giant bed that took up his giant bedroom from wall-to-wall. It was nearly twice the size of a normal bed, something Hector had custom-made for he and Teresa, his wife.

He told me that as a boy he had never had a bed of his own, sleeping, most often on a thin mat on the floor usually with two or three of his brothers. For him, a large bed was the ultimate in luxury and accomplishment and this was the largest bed I had ever seen.

In fact, in order to get over to him, to kiss him on the forehead and hug his once broad shoulders, I had to crawl two or three paces. The bed was a big as an open parachute.

"How is he," I asked Teresa, who was in from the kitchen and who had a cold cerveza for me.

"Es mejor," she answered solemnly. "Hector es muy terco." He is very stubborn.

I gripped the cold beer in one hand and Hector's mitt more tightly in the other.

"You remember the story of the patata?" He asked me.

"No one could ever forget. Where is Luis today? He is not here?"

"No, only you come. Luis a telegram he sent. As did Gordo and Marachal. Phone calls I have gotten from everyone. But only you come."

"You are a father to me."

"Tell me the story of the patata," he said, closing his eyes.

"Encarcion was playing catcher," I began, "it was late in the season and we were already losing in the game 11 to 1, or something like that. Mexico City had a man on first when you called time and waved Encarcion into the dugout."

"I did not go out. I had him come to me."

"You had peeled a small patata, a patata the size of a baseball and you slipped it into Encarcion's mitt. 'Pick him off,' you told him.

"And so when Ruiz stood tall on la goma, on the rubber, the Red Diablo on first took his lead. A big lead--testing Ruiz's motion to the plate and Encarcion's arm.

"Encarcion saw the lead, got up out of his crouch and whipped the patata down to Hernandes at first--the Diablo was caught, hook line and sinker. Out three.

"Though we were losing 11-1, we ran off the field as if we had triumphed. If I remember correctly, you proceeded to eat the evidence."

"Yes," the old man smiled, "it was a perfect play. And a good patata."

He closed his eyes with that and Teresa touched me on the shoulder.

"He must rest now," she admonished. "Later you come."

I kissed Hector once again and Teresa, too, grabbed my duffle and walked to my hotel.

Marketing explained in two charts.

Your weekly slap.

A crosstown walk.

Sometimes when I walk through the city, I feel instead that I am taking a walk through a graveyard. I think of myself as Pip Chirrip in David Lean’s version of Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” in the opening scene when he’s running through the fog on the moors, past lonely gallows and crouching behind weeds and tombstones.

I walk and I see things not as they are, but as they were. That’s not living in the past—that’s recognizing, only, that something was here before the present, as Broadway was an Indian trail before it was a Dutch road, than an English one, then an American polyglot. Maybe after the chimes at midnight, after the last ding-dong of doom, it will go back to pre-history and once again be the home of wolves and bears and the wild half-naked living on nuts and berries.

The voices, and people, and things of the past come back to me. They don’t harm me, these ghosts, or even scare me. But they present themselves to me—as if to beg me not to forget the New York that used to be before it became the New York of today.

They ask me to remember the little bags of peanuts on sale from machines nestled inside the girders on the subway platform at 51^st Street. They ask me to remember the big old barns of bookstores like Coliseum Books outside of where the great old ugly Coliseum sat on West 59^th Street at Columbus Circle—you could smell the urine of the bums from four blocks away, mixed with the smell of Central Park South’s horse-drawn carriages and the odors of a million boiled hotdogs and a thousand burning pretzels from ten-thousand vendors, that crowded the old Coliseum waiting for the ptomaine-resistant to grabbafrank. Or, even more long-gone, the old Salters bookstore across from Columbia between 115^th to 116^th where you practically needed a PhD. just browse the joint and only a denizen of the place—the staff worked there for decades—could point you to a Arendt or Chomsky.

The ghosts remind me of when I was a young aspiring copywriter, running through midtown with my portfolio, running up third avenue from Scali at 50^th Street, to Benton and Bowles at 54^th, to Needham Harper and Steers at 55^th, back down to Ally at 49^th, and Grey at 47^th, and then over to other places that have gone belly up, like the world I grew up in has died and dessicated in today’s too strong sun.

I walk crosstown past Lex, where Dancer Fitzgerald and Sample were, past Madison, with Della Femina, Lord Geller, Compton, DDB, Y&R. Past snooty Fifth Avenue, which housed Ogilvy & Mather in red  brick on the corner, aloof and imperious. Then 6^th Avenue with Calet Hirsch and Spector—before they went downtown—and BBDO and Marschalk—before they were renamed and merged into oblivion—

and dozens more I don’t remember.

They were part of my world, these agencies. And cheap places where you could sit at the bar in the dank dark of a lunch hour and get a glass of sweet beer for 50-cents and read the New York Post for the afternoon sports scores—this was before Murdoch bought it and it turned fascist.

This was my New York and it’s all gone now. It’s all oligarched and chain-stored and big-monied out of existence.

And it’s only me and my ghosts who know any different.

A memory torn down.

When you live in New York as long as I have, the passage of time is often marked by a passing of a place.

I just took a walk with Whiskey around my neighborhood—a neighborhood I’ve lived in since 1982 when it seemed like it was one of the few safe places left in a New York that was slip-sliding-away into chaos.

I walked past a building that has just been torn down on East End Avenue. It was home to a friend of mine, way back in the early 80s. We had met in a course at School of Visual Arts and we spent many hours in his apartment working on our advertising portfolios.

Man, that was 35 years ago. Half a lifetime if you believe the Psalm’s threescore and ten.

I lost touch with this friend some time after that. I think he moved down south for a job, or out west, or wigged out when his girl-friend dropped him, or something.

But seeing his apartment house torn down (surely it will give way to $7 million apartments) made me sad, mostly because a lot of times I feel like I am the last man standing.

Of all the people I started with so many days ago back when I was skinny, I think I am the last one still working in a regular job. I say this not to brag. More to lick my wounds—the wounds of a million meetings, a billion ads, and, maybe a trillion disappointments.

I just finished a book, a diary of a sort by a veteran of the Pacific war, E.B. Sledge. Sledge was a 19-year-old marine who survived the fighting in 1944 and 1945 on Peleliu and Okinawa. Of the 1,500 men who started with him in basic training, he was one of only two who came back home when the bloody war ended without physical wounds.

Sledge wrote “With the Old Breed” as an old man and as a private memoir. His family persuaded him to publish it, and it eventually became the HBO miniseries “The Pacific” which was produced by Tom Hanks.

The sense I get from Sledge is how I feel sometimes. I have a sense of loneliness come over me—because no one is my age anymore and though I admire, respect and enjoy the people I work with and for, I feel, very often, a bit distant from them.

I also have what I guess you could call survivor’s guilt. Why am I the one still working—where did I go right, or wrong.

This is all pretty somber, even for a Monday.

But sometimes a torn-down building will do that to you.