Five minutes with our CSNO.

AD AGED:

Good morning and thank you for your time today.

CSNO:

THERE’S NO REASON FOR SUCH GRATUITOUS SOLICITUDE. IT IS IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO CUT TO THE CHASE AND GET DIRECTLY TO YOUR POINT WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY, POSTPONEMENT OR EVEN, IN EXTREMIS, LASSITUDE.

AD AGED:

OK, then. Cutting to the chase, what does CSNO stand for and what do you do?

CSNO:

YOU SHOULD REALLY HAVE BEEN MORE PREPARED FOR THIS DISCUSSION AND HAVE DONE SOME RESEARCH INTO THE ROLE OF CSNO. IT IS BOTH YOUR OBLIGATION AND RESPONSIBILITY TO HAVE DONE SO.

I WILL SAY THIS EXACTLY ONE MORE TIME, THOUGH IT SHOULD BE SOMETHING YOU AND ALL EMPLOYEES MAKE THEMSELVES AWARE OF. I AM THE AGENCY’S CHIEF SHRILL NOTE OFFICER.

AD AGED:

I see. Thank you. And what is it that you do?

CSNO:

I USE ELECTRONIC CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS TO BELITTLE, BERATE AND BESMIRCH AS MANY EMPLOYEES IN A BLANKET FASHION AS I CAN. MY PURPOSE IS TO KEEP RANK-AND-FILE EMPLOYEES FEELING WORTHLESS AND DEMEANED—TO FEEL LUCKY THAT THEY ARE EMPLOYED.

AD AGED:

Wow. Give me an example.

CSNO:

HERE’S ONE: IT IS CONTRACTUALLY REQUIRED FOR YOU TO EAT THE INEDIBLE FOOD WE CHARGE YOU EXTRA FOR UNDER THE MISGUIDED ASSUMPTION THAT YOU’RE SO STUPID AND OVINE YOU’LL GLADLY PAY $1.50 FOR A WITHERED BANANA. YOU WILL EAT WHAT WE TELL YOU TO EAT, WHEN AND WHERE WE TELL YOU TO EAT IT.

AD AGED:

That is shrill. Thank you for that chilling example. And that keeps employees feeling beaten, weak and put-upon.

CSNO:

RIGHT, GENIUS. AND THAT’S EXACTLY THE POINT.

AD AGED:

How about another...

CSNO:

MY OLD STANDBY. THIS IS TO CSNY’S WHAT WHITE CHRISTMAS WAS TO BING CROSBY OR HEY, JUDE TO THE BEATLES.

YOU ARE NINE-SECONDS LATE ON YOUR TIMESHEETS FOR NEXT WEEK. IF YOU HAVE NOT COMPLETED THEM BY THE TIME YOU GET TO THE END OF THIS SENTENCE, YOUR FIRST-BORN SON WILL BE DOUSED IN PRUNE JUICE AND FORCED INTO A LIFE OF WITHERED $1.50 BANANAS.

AD AGED:

That is a thing of shrill beauty, and I thank you for your time today.

CSNO:

OK. NOW GET TO WORK, YOU LUNKHEADED COST-CENTER. THE AGENCY CAN NO LONGER ABIDE YOUR INCESSANT LOLLYGAGGING.

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Thank you, Thanksgiving.

For as long as I've been in the advertising business, I've never gone gentle into the holidays. There always, no matter how on top of your work you try to be, seems to be a crush of loose ends or add-ons or crises that must be attended to.

I suppose getting ready for the end of the year is a little bit like getting ready for a two-week vacation. You can try all you like to be buttoned-up, but rattling along the Van Wyck on your way to JFK, you're bound to remember that you've forgotten your shaving cream, an electricity converter, or  your Azerbaijanian phrase book.

This year, as we head into Thanksgiving, there seem to be about a million and nine things that need to be done--and they all need to be done now. So, of course, as the days grow shorter, our nights grow longer and our sleep vanishes altogether.

That said, it's very nearly Thanksgiving, and despite the above, I have a lot to be thankful for.

My wife, my kids, my own self--seem to be surviving our modern dystopia with a modicum of personal success. That is, despite the meanness of the age, the unfairness of the economy, the inequities of the tax system, we all still have our faculties intact.

And even at work, where it seems we daily get shrill memos demanding that we eat the corporate-mandated swill from our corporately-mandated catering, or we get a note telling us the printers aren't working, or the wireless, or half the elevators, I work with a group of women and men who are--every single one of them--the sort of people you'd not mind sharing a metaphorical foxhole with, should the bullets, metaphorical or not, start to fly. 

The same, I say with sincerity, is true for my clients. They're demanding. But kind, and appreciative. And as Robert Frost once wrote somewhere, 'that has made all the difference.'

So that's it from me, pre-Thanksgiving. I'm taking the rest of the week off from blogging for the most-American of holidays.

Similarly, I wish you and yours many things to be thankful for.

Old friends.

It happens just about every year or so now. After not having happened for literally forty years.

Three old men--old men who were once young boys together--meet for dinner and a glass or two.

Chris, Fred and I met way back in 1971. We were 9th graders. Vietnam was raging. Drugs were rampant. According to Time Magazine, in a single 18-month period during 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted 2,500 terrorist bombings on American soil, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy had been murdered just three years earlier. In three years, Nixon would resign.

The world, it seemed to many was coming apart.

But, like I said, we were 9th graders. And amid this societal chaos we found each other.

We found laughter.

Dedication.

Understanding.

Reliability.

Unique ways of looking at the world.

Now it's 47 years later, and, perhaps as usual, things again seem to be falling apart. In the last two decades, the US has spent an estimated $6 trillion on wars that have killed half-a-million people. Whole swaths of our nation have been ravaged by drugs. Ignorance, racism and hatred seem ascendant. And we are led by a president that makes Spiro Agnew look like Albert Schweitzer.

Amid all that, Chris, Fred and I got together one night last week. We once again laughed, hugged, revealed, moaned, shared. We told stories. We told jokes. We went into detail about the woes of everything from the lack of fatty corned-beef in the world to kids whose pants droop to reveal their boxers.

We cut each other off, we stepped on our punchlines, we laughed and laughed some more.

We didn't solve all the world's problems. But we got through many of them.

And ended the night, as not enough nights are ended.

With the feeling that as awful as the world can be, it can be, as well, a beautiful place.

Advertising 201.

There's a new Christmas spot out from the British department store, John Lewis.

It's everything a spot should be.

Everything advertising should be.

Everything we should be.

And if we were, the industry wouldn't be in the throes it is currently in. In other words, it wouldn't be relegated to the fringes of the business world.

Bull-shitting about data. About conversations. Bull-shitting about re-targeting. Bull-shitting about the efficacy of treating people in ways they hate being treated. (The de rigueur of advertising today.)

The John Lewis spot doesn't go there. Instead it reasserts the only true advertising truth. That the only thing, the only thing that works, is creativity. Doing something that people like watching. That motivates them, makes them smile, makes them talk.

Take a look at the spot here:

What can we learn from it?

1. If you want to breakthrough and have an impact, be breakthrough and impactful.

2. That costs money.

3. It probably means a big production.

4. With genuine feeling and emotion.

5. Not stupid-ass ribbons tied to a new TV set.

6. It takes time.

7. Thought.

8. Effort.

9. And, fuck collaboration, sticking to a simple story and a simple vision.

10. Maybe we don't need plasticine smiles.

11. Statements like 'save big during our holiday savabration.'

12. And more bullshit.

13. And, oh yeah, wall to wall copy.

I don't believe it's ads people hate, or advertising, or even interruption.

It's crap they hate.

Because they're people. 

Not targets.

People.

Spend an hour with David Abbott.

One of the things that happens as you get older, besides noticing spots of discoloration on the back of your hands, or struggling with a crossword clue you would have handled in a mere synapse just weeks ago, is that you have a lot of conversations with friends about what you’d have done differently if you were, once again, young.

Would you have chosen—if you were 25 today—to go into advertising. Or would you have found a career less, let’s say impecunious. Like investment banking, brain surgery, or sausage stuffing?

I don’t know what I’d be doing if I were young and looking for a career today. But I do know I would learn everything I could from leaders in the field. In my day, and today, in advertising, it’s probably mandatory to read “Ogilvy on Advertising.” Or any of a thousand awards annuals.

Recently a coterie of my English friends, John O’Driscoll and Dave Dye among them, called my attention to a wonderful website—a retrospective of a titan of English advertising—David Abbott. 

Like film majors should know Orson Welles, or dramatists Shakespeare, ad people--whether they're creative, account or planning, should know David Abbott.

Mr. Abbott was responsible for some of the great campaigns of the last two centuries. The Economist. Volvo. Volkswagen. Sainsbury's.

Take a look at some of the samples I've posted here.

You want more right?

Well, there's a lot of it here: David Abbott said. A lot of stuff to learn from, a lot of stuff to emulate, a lot of stuff to admire. All organized in an intelligent and comprehensive manner. Oh, and beautiful to look at, too.

You might also want to read this, below. A closing statement from Abbott. As Ed McCabe once wrote, cheaper than psychiatry.

13 More Yiddish Curses for the Modern Ad Agency.

Some years ago I wrote a post called 13 Yiddish Curses for the Modern Ad Agency. In my view, and for no particular reason, I thought it made sense to update those curses for today's eminently curse-able ad industry. 

Yiddish may well be a dead language. But when it comes to imprecations, Yiddish is alive and well. 

And now, 13 new Yiddish curses:

1. May you be forced to eat at the agency cafeteria every day except for one, and on that day may you eat at Chipotle’s.

2. May the paperwork you have to do to submit expenses run as deep as Gary Vaynerchuk’s ego.

3. May you work for someone who uses the word humble without humility.

4. Before you’re allowed to leave for the day, may you be forced to count the lies in a thousand press releases.

5. If you leave a job to spend more time with your family, may you actually have to spend more time with your family.

6. May your powerpoints and your midsection get thicker with every meeting.

7. May you lose your timesheet just before you save it every time you try to save it.

8. May the interns who are always playing ping-pong get promoted to CCO and then fire you for not playing enough ping-pong.

9. May your briefs get longer as your media space gets smaller.

10. May your French holding company be taken over by an even-cheaper and more corrupt Russian holding company.

11. May your client get a $2 billion tax-break for relocating to your city and then may they fire you for being too expensive.

12. May you go to tissue sessions all day and may your nose run all night.

13. May your holding company announce a hiring freeze except for cafeteria workers and may those workers transmit a foodborne illness.

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