How to be a good client. And why.

About 20 years ago I was working on a campaign with a bunch of other people. Without going into too much detail, I had to write a website for a fake product and I had to make the website sound authentic but be a little off kilter.

The product was a Time Machine. A machine that could take you backwards in time and then back to the present.

It was one of those assignments—the type I get a lot of. They’re usually prefaced with a sheep-eyed look and someone saying to me at 12:15, “I’m sorry, George, we need this by 1:00.”

I went back to my table a little nervous. I had a lot to write and not a lot of time to write it. That’s when you have to trust your brains, your experience, your instincts and your self. You sit down at the ol’ Smith-Corona and you write.

Those who know me know I have something close to a photographic memory. I don’t remember everything—but I like to say that there’s a saying among pachyderms: “A George never forgets.” 

I can’t find a sample of what I wrote (though I believe it made a raft of annuals) but I remember I said to myself, “This is supposed to be credible but tongue in cheek, and I’m writing this for the Vice Chairman of the agency and the CCO—and for myself. I don’t really care if it’s a bit esoteric.”

My opening line was something like, “Perhaps it was the Bard who wrote ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, it’s only a day away.’”

Yes, I had combined Macbeth with the musical Annie. I believed it was inappropriate but funny. I wasn’t sure if I’d be yelled at or not. I wasn’t sure if anyone would get it. But I did it, thought about it and sent it through.

A few minutes later I got a call from the people I mentioned above. Essentially all they did was laugh.

Subsequently the copy was approved without a single word changed. I wasn’t there when it went to the client. I’m not sure if the client understood my faux pomposity. But I realized something via that copy.

Most often, as creative people, we create work in the service of our clients. Our job is to show them off—not to show off ourselves.

But more important, our job is to engage readers or viewers in our work and to make them feel understood and special. Sometimes that’s writing something not for everyone who reads your ad but for one or two or two dozen people who get it.

That’s not fetishizing work. That’s not being pretentious. That’s realizing, finally, that we don’t speak to millions, or thousands, or hundreds or tens of people at a time. We speak to one person at a time. And if our work really connects with someone on the level where they feel understood, where they feel like they’ve gotten a joke written in a sense just for them, you’ve scored a victory for advertising as a profession, your client and their brand, and yourself as a human.

Since the rise of the computer in our industry and the rise of big data and the rise of our ability to target people down to a rat-hole in their root cellar, we have lost our overarching sense of humanity. I know that's broad but take a look at five hours from my personal email's spam filter. In what universe is this targeted, helpful or even...human?

We think by saying, “Dear Dan, We know you have a mortgage, a wife, two kids and two college tuitions to pay. But did you ever think about the change in your life that a laser-guided micro-razor nose-hair trimmer could bring?” That might be “personal,” and “data-driven.” But it’s crap. Because it’s not using data to understand people, it’s using data to pretend you understand people.

My point in all this is fuzzy.

This post is called, “How to be a good client.”

A good client, a good boss, a good agency, a good marketer knows that even mass-media isn’t really mass. You can't be all things to all people. 

Communications should be honest, real and unusual. Not merely the blandest common denominator. Because people are not demographic swaths or target markets. People are people.

I always rebel when I hear something on the news where some reporter is interviewing someone from the “_________ community.” Here’s someone from the “Jewish community.” The “plumbing community.” The “golden retriever owners' community.” 

What does that even mean? Are there really such communities? I don’t think so. To my eyes, such collectives are merely groupings that are supposed to make us feel that someone’s done some examination into the commonalities of these groups.

Here’s the commonality that’s important.

We all like to be spoken to with honesty and warmth and understanding, as individuals.

If you allow honesty, warmth, individuality, quirk and a small soupcon of occasional irreverence into the work your agency presents to you, you’ll be a loved and successful client and the brands and products you represent will be loved and successful, too.

Conversely, if you try to be so broad that you please everyone, you will please no one.

Looking at rainbows.

Many years ago I was at work. I was in a big conference room inside a big company. There were a dozen people or so talking about something oh-so-important. Everyone was intense and on edge. You could have cut the atmosphere with a butter knife.

Or maybe a spork.

All at once during this barrage of importance, during all these pie-charts and marketing speak, amid all the competing egos and confident assertiveness, my mind wandered.

It wasn’t my fault, really. Minds were built to wander. It’s an essential evolutionary survival skill. Your mind might need to focus on the lion up ahead, but some part of your ontology better be tuned in to the rest of your surroundings, lest you get ambushed by something else from somewhere else.

In this meeting as the words spewed forth like the Krakatoa East of Prolix, I noticed something out of the corner of my left eye. There, rising over the concrete, soot and cacophony of a Manhattan landscape, was a technicolor rainbow, a Lucky Charms rainbow, a Dorothy rainbow.

Without even thinking, which is how I do my best thinking, I blurted, “Look, a rainbow.”

Maybe because I grew up in and around the city, I haven’t seen that many rainbows in my life. I still, at my hoary old age get excited when I see one. For me it’s like being enrolled in an all-boys school and one day seeing a girl for the first time.

“Look, a rainbow.”

Twenty eyes or more looked at me like I raised the Nazi flag at the Weinstein Bar Mitzvah. I insulted their self-importance by remarking upon a rare natural phenomenon. Was I asserting that something magnificent and in a sense holy was more important than PowerPoint? How dare I be a refusenik in the face of commerce.

I remember their looks and their annoyance two decades later.

Just yesterday I had half a dozen phone-calls with long-time friends from the industry. I realize that’s not a valid sample size, and I shouldn’t make too much of anecdotal experiences.

But what I’ve seen since being fired on January 14, 2020 (and what I was seeing even before that) and what I’ve seen since “lock-down,” and what I’ve seen since the bottom has dropped out of our once “essential” industry, is simple, important and sad.

As an industry, as a culture, as humans, as New Yorkers, as Mom and Dads and partners and wives and husbands and friends and lovers, we don’t know something very basic.

We don’t know what to do about rainbows.

We don’t know what’s really important in our lives. We don’t know what’s really crucial to being a good thinker and a good creative. We don’t know how, or how to respect, spontaneity, irreverence, serendipity, even the Serengeti. 

We don’t know how to cry when we’re happy and laugh when we’re serious. Or love friends or help people or lend a hand or tell a joke or a story or hold-open a door or say ‘let’s take a walk outside.’

Maybe we’ve forgotten—now that we are furloughed and furlined and fer-gotten—what we should know for-all-time.

That we are not employee ID numbers, 80% owned, talent to be acquired, job codes, allocated or even dislocated.

We are humans.

Living-breathing-hurting-caring-nice-mean-angry-screaming-friendly-funny-iconoclastic-collaborative-moody-helpful-giving-selfish rainbow-noticing protoplasmic life-forces.

Work is important. Our jobs are important. What we do is important.

But even more so, so are people who stop and notice rainbows and those magical moments when they appear.

Worry worry worry.

About 27 or 28 years ago I learned something that I’ve carried with me all these years. In these dark days it seems like we are playing a game of global whack-a-mole. 

First a dirty, lying, science-and-fact-denying and aggressively anti-intellectual strain completely takes over one of our nation’s political parties. Then pops up a lying, philandering sociopath know-nothing who knows only how to play a symphony of racist, homophobic, xenophobic and misogynistic discord on a dog whistle.

Then a virulent global pandemic strikes. Then the worst economic conditions since Herbert Hoover. Then then then. And then somewhere, 20% of the inhabitable earth is under water in the next 50 years, that is, if we don’t first immolate because of greenhouse gases. 

Here’s an opinion piece I remember from “The New York Times” from January, 1988. It’s 32-years-old, but you could update it in about six minutes and run it again tomorrow. It’s called, “Worry Chic.”

Don't relax. 

There's always something to worry about. Herpes, crack and nuclear holocaust have not gone away but have become passe worries. 

A trendy era obeys fashion even in its fretting. Here are some worries that have already infected 1988.

There may be urethane in the wine. 

There may be parasites in the sushi. 

Radon, an insidious, invisible, radioactive gas, could be seeping into your basement. 

There is too much ozone in the air you breathe, which damages the lungs. 

There is too little ozone in the stratosphere, which lets in ultraviolet rays that burn the skin. 

The world may get too warm, because sunlight is being trapped, as in a greenhouse, by the growing veil of gases spewed out by burning coal. 

The world will get too cold if the next ice age arrives before the greenhouse effect does. 

The dollar may make a strong recovery, ruinously reversing improvements in the balance of trade. 

You may suffer a heart attack if you exercise too little. 

You may suffer a heart attack if you exercise too much. 

Even if the wine has no urethane, it probably contains sulfites. Or the beer may. 

And in any case, both are laden with a more pernicious chemical -alcohol. 

Does all this mean that modern life is burdening Americans with more and more worries? 

No-- just different ones. Worries grow stale and need to be changed. 

It's the disposition to worry that endures.

Anyway, back to 27 or 28 years ago. My older daughter, Sarah, now with a PhD. in Clinical Psychology was in summer day camp. She came home fretting. “Dad, I’m really scared. Tomorrow, I have my swimming test to make “A” water. I have to swim seven laps without stopping and I’m afraid I can’t do it.” 

Wow. You might know angst in your life, but feeling the pain of a child who’s scared tops them all. 

Somehow, I summoned up a soupcon of wisdom. 

“Sarah, you’re a very good swimmer. We’ve done a lot of swimming. You’re very strong. And here’s the thing. You don’t have to swim seven laps.” 

“No, Daddy, I do.” 

“Sarah, you have to swim one lap. And when you touch the wall you say to yourself, ‘now I have to swim one more lap.’ When you touch the wall again, you say to yourself again, ‘now I have to swim one more lap.’ Don’t think about the seven laps. Think about swimming one lap at a time.” 

There’s not a single person in the world who knows what’s coming next. As they say in Yiddish, “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht.” Man Plans and God Laughs. None of us knows anything. 

None of us knows if clients will ever spend money again. If the agencies that seemed like global institutions in December will be belly-up by June. No one knows if there will be global unrest, mayhem in the streets, Molotov cocktails and class-warfare. 

None of us knows if the new Russian deepwater submarines will cut our undersea cables and sever 99% of worldwide communications.

No one knows if Trump will lose whatever remaining marble he has and the DeVos and Friess and Koch and Mercer families will finally assume complete control. No one knows if there will be food in the stores, blood in the streets, filth in our water supplies and toxins in our contrails. 

No one knows. 

What I do know is what my daughter taught so many many years ago.

We’ll do what we can. 

We take one lap at a time.
And we pass whatever test the world throws at us.

Baseball. Renoir. Russell. And Renewal.

Not too long ago I wrote a post where I said something very unscientific. That’s my prerogative—it’s my blog and I earn no money. I’m allowed to be a little slapdash. Not just my typos—I’m only human, after all—but my raft of unsupported opinions.

A base-ball game in Hoboken, New Jersey as seen by Messers Currier and Ives,

In any event I wrote a post in which I made a guess. I said that I think most advertising people prefer baseball to other sports because baseball, like advertising, is a sport where if you win 60% of your games, you’re a champion. Or get 27 hits out of 100 at bats, and you’re way ahead of the game.

Like advertising, baseball is a game based on failure. No one, even the smartest person is right much more than 50% of the time. The trick isn’t being right, it’s learning from the mistakes you make and doing better next time.

Most of the good people in the industry, no matter what discipline they’re in, do not drip with confidence. They understand, in the words of Bill Bernbach that advertising is “fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”

Art is mistakes that work out. Advertising might be too. To get attention, you have to say things in ways no one ever has before. That’s risky.

A Renoir self-portrait.

No artist is confident in her work. No one is sure what they do is good, different, for the ages. Even Pierre-August Renoir is quoted as having said about painting at the age of 78, “I think I’m beginning to learn something about it.” (Renoir raised self-deprecation to an art-form, he also said, “It is after you have lost your teeth that you can afford to buy steaks.”)

Over the last few years, in the world and in advertising, a sneaky bombast has emerged that masks itself as confidence. To my eyes it seems that half the people that roam the halls of agencies today are so puffed out with self-importance that you can’t squeeze more then 40 or 70 of them in a single conference room.

The prevailing way of thinking is, I have to show a suave confidence or clients won’t believe me and people in the agency won’t respect me.

I’ve never been that way.

I think admitting doubt is the greatest strength a human can have. And asserting that you “know,” or you’ve found the one true way, is to my mind, intellectual terrorism. No one likes a zealot—especially those people who know what the word zealot means.

Bernbach was said to have carried a card around in his wallet reading, “Maybe he’s right.” And Czeslaw Milosz attributed the epigram below to an ancient Jew from Galacia.

“When someone is honestly 55% right, that's very good and there's no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it's wonderful, it's great luck, and let him thank God. But what's to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he's 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.”

Yet today, however, from the leaders of our country, to religious leaders, to business leaders, to advertising people, phony confidence seems to win friends and influence people.

However, as the Weird Sisters chanted in Macbeth, “Fair is foul and foul is fair.”

In other words, our world is topsy-turvy and our trip on this formerly blue marble is just a cockeyed-caravan with a wheel about to fly off an axle.

Some years ago, the brilliant and legendary Dave Trott sent me a note about Bertrand Russell’s “Liberal Decalogue.” I’ve been carrying with me for ten years.

Bertrand Russell by Roger Fry

I could be wrong about this, but if the industry and the world wants to start remaking itself if we ever get through our latest Pandemic—and before the greater crisis of Climate Change starts killing and displacing billions of people, this might be a good place to start.

It’s a good way to think about who we are, what we know, how we treat others and how to behave.

A LIBERAL DECALOGUE

by Bertrand Russell

---

"A Liberal Decalogue" is quoted from The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 3: 1944-1969, p. 71--72.

Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Time, truth and drivel.

Most of what I’ve learned about writing I’ve learned from reading good writing. Good writing from both within our business and out in the world.

Probably my favorite writer writing today is two-time Pulitzer winner and winner of the National Book Award, Robert Caro. About a year ago Caro came out with a book about his famously prodigious writing process. It was called “Working” and you can buy it here.  It will take you about six hours to read and you will be richer for it.

At the time Caro's book came out, he also went on a speaking tour of New York. I saw him at the New York Public Library, a Times Talk and at The New Yorker Festival. In Working and at each of those three talks Caro told the same story about a creative writing class he took while he was an undergraduate at Princeton University, graduating in 1957.

When asked why he still wrote drafts longhand in pencil on yellow legal pads, Caro explained, “It's because of something that was said to me at Princeton by a professor, a very courtly gentleman, Southern gentleman, who was my creative writing teacher.

“Every two weeks we'd hand in a short story. I was in his course for two years. For two years he gave me high marks, but I always did these short stories at the last minute. ... I would always start at the last minute and just type, because I could write very fast.

“At our last session, he hands back my short story ... and he compliments me, and as I'm getting up to go he says, ‘But you know, Mr. Caro, you will never achieve what you want to achieve unless you stop thinking with your fingers.’

For Caro that conversation became more than a rebuke. It led to Caro’s simple, but important, belief: “Time equals truth.”

It takes time to get to something real. It takes time to think with your heart, your soul, your brain, your life, your empathy, your experience. Not just your fingers.

Of all the evils visited upon our industry, the removal of time has been the most grievous. I don’t mean staying in an airless conference room till 2AM for months at a time. The time I mean is deeper.

It’s time to visit a client’s factory. It’s time to get to know the client’s employees—not just the C-level. It’s time to ride with five sales-people or ten. It’s spending time unattended in the corporate cafeteria. It’s time to talk to engineers and customers and retirees.

That’s essentially how you find a spouse or a life-long friend. You really get to know them. You meet their families. You break bread.

There are no shortcuts to learning a person, a culture, a language or an ethos. There’s no magic app that makes it happen. Or some powerpoint ‘deep dive.’ Or six hours of focus groups edited down to one eight-minute video or half-a-dozen man-on-the-street cameos.

That’s no way to get to know a client.

And if you don’t get to know a client and their business, you wind up—in the two-hours you have between the initial brief and the first tissue session—you wind up with cliches, jargon and more and more pixels of advertising pablum. You know, crap. Insipid. Interchangeable. And meaningless.

Time equals truth.

But to agencies and clients time equals out-of-scope.

So, time is not allowed.

Because the truth, while effective, is expensive.

And most clients don’t want to pay for the truth that comes from time and most agencies don’t want to challenge them.

So as an industry, we produce shit.

I could show a dozen examples here. Including examples from things I've done. But all that would only get me in trouble. So, next time you're "consuming media," you decide. 

Truth. Or shit.

Lack of time equals shit.

A Break-up Note to an Industry.

I’m pissed.

Not pissed like an Englishman. But a New Yorker.

In the course of about three hours yesterday three things happened in the ad industry. To my mind, each one represented another nail in the coffin of an industry that’s been strip-mined to devastation by vulture capitalists who run the holding companies—five of which have oligopoly control over our entire business.

First, Greg Hahn was fired from BBDO. I don’t know Greg. We’re LinkedIn but that’s it. I do know at least some of his work and for a quarter of a century it’s been among the most-creative and most-effective our industry has created. 
(Adweek's selected six of Mr. Hahn's notable campaigns here. Sorry, there's a paywall.)

I don’t know anything about Hahn’s firing. I just know he was fired. That’s the advertising equivalent of taking Willie Mays in his prime out of the game.

There’s been firerific fury since the start of 2020, including the creative pogrom at my once-vaunted Alma Mater, where four ECDs (myself among them) and one CCO were shitcanned on the same day. I’ve seen it nearly everywhere.

Maybe I’ve been napping, but of the suits, the holding company chieftains, the 31 or 44 Chief Risk Officers, and Chief “WTF do they do all-day Officers,” I’ve yet to a single one of them removed from their livelihood.

Not one.

If an army was as badly managed as the Holding Companies and their Agencies appear to be, I think very few people would recommend firing the soldiers. Maybe a General would get "furloughed." 

But, as Billy Pilgrim said, “And so it goes.” 

Or, "The Buck Stops There."

Second, I came across this from Mr. Bernbach.

Have you heard of him?

Do you know what he did?

Do you believe in advertising itself and its power to have an effect in the marketplace?

I’m not talking about the 23-year-old assistant AEs. I’m talking about the heads and subheads and even the codicils at the Holding Companies who make seven or eight or nine figure salaries and don’t know the Gospel of Creativity that built our industry.

No. They know everyone's doing this Insta-thang.

In fact, if any of you Holding Company doyens are at your country estates and you’re reading this now—it's Friday after all—I invite you to call me. 646 823 7165. 

I’d like to know if any of you know anything other than how to squeeze water from a stone and how to cost-cut your way to unviable profitability.

Finally, I was sent this super cut of COVID spots.

I realized something very depressing at that point.

When I started in this business almost 36 years ago, most agencies, even big ones had only two, maybe three conference rooms on a floor.

Now there are 15 or 20. Maybe more.

It hit me.

We no longer create work so that it may have an impact in the market on the health and viability of our clients’ brands and products.

We create work that’s designed to get out of conference rooms.

There are so many people—7/8ths of whom have never participated in the creation of an ad—who conference-room-ize work. And so the work that ultimately emerges from those airless and soul-sucking sanctums suffers from statutory sameness and checklist listlessness.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a multi-million-dollar broadcast campaign or a social ad about the size of a postage stamp, the conference room is filled with people and each person has to be heard and each voice must be considered. Each element of each idea is tweaked into twitblivion until we wind up with

shit.

It might be beautiful shit. It might be considered shit. It might be strategic shit. It might be on-brand shit. It might be nuanced shit.

It might check all the boxes. It might be laden with the phrase that pays and unique selling propositions and reasons to believe and recount like Cyrano all the mellifluous words like “we care,” “we’re in this together,” and so on. But it’s shit.

Lifeless soulless humorless. Dead from the neck up and the shoulder down.

The soulless celluloid equivalent of Jared Kushner in a coma.

I’m out now.

Working on my own.

Direct for clients.

Sure, it has its ups and downs. And like everyone else, I worry about the economy and money and how viable life is when it depends on me and the dexterity in my two typing fingers.

Since I was fired on January 14^th, I’ve developed a catch phrase. It saves time.

“I didn’t leave my agency. My agency left me.”

I'd say the same for the industry I spent my life in. 

And I'm not going back.

Unless one of those aforementioned Holding Company guys calls me. And makes me an offer I can’t refuse.

That number again is, 646 823 7165.

Hey, good lookin'.

When I was a little kid, probably eight or nine years old, so this was 1966 or 1967, my old man took charge of me one Saturday morning. He piled me and my entire Cub Scout troop into his 1961 Studebaker Lark station-wagon and steered the giant rattling machine onto the New England Thruway.

We were heading up to New London, CT, not far from where my wife and I are currently trying to ride out the Covid-19 storm. 

New London is still the site of a major US naval base. It’s where the world’s first nuclear-powered sub, the Nautilus was launched in 1954, and back in the 1960s, a submarine that was active in World War II was moored there. A sailor in a gleaming toothpaste-white uniform would guide us kids through the sub.

World War II was only 20 years over at that point and seemed, even to us little kids, fairly recent history. Actually, it was closer to us back then than 9/11 is to us today.

I remember seeing the small Japanese “Rising Sun” flags indicating a kill of Japanese shipping on the conning tower of the sub. Somehow, to a little boy with a big imagination, it made the war very visceral and real.

These were simpler, less security-conscious times. We climbed down the steel ladder of the conning tower and into the ship. I’d imagine today, you’d have to be wanded, metal-detectored and you’d probably be led down a ramp that was wheelchair accessible. But not then. We all descended on board.

I remember seeing the periscope and the steel bunks, the sonar and radar controls, the mess-room and the torpedo room. But what I remember most—even back then I noticed it—was the sheer functionality of the submarine.

There was no aesthetic whatsoever. No frills. No niceties. Nothing that deviated from the engineering purpose of the craft: to sink as many enemy ships as possible while bringing the ship and the crew home, presumably in one piece.

I remember looking at simple things like a toggle switch. It was authoritative. Today, we’d call it intuitive. When it was on, it was on. When it was off, it was off.

This is the confession of an old, get-off-my-lawner, but on half the things I buy today, the MacBook Pro I’m typing this on, my fancy-schmancy iPhone 11 which has a camera better than any Andre Kertesz used, or Alfred Eisenstadt or Dorothea Lange, there is no on-off switch at all. 

In fact, I’ve been renting a house since early March and have gone nearly four weeks without watching any TV at all. I finally figured out how to turn the set on last night, but haven’t yet deciphered the all-too-baroque mechanism for changing the channels.

My point, though, is an advertising one.

The functionals—the Bernbachians, Ally & Garganos, the Scali and McCabe’s, the Ammiratis and Puris’, the Dyes and Trotts and Abbotts, and Chiats, are in large measure vanished from the scene now.

The decorators are here.

And they have triumphed.

(In a sense, Trump is the antithesis of functionality, the apogee of decoration. A charlatan and six-time bankrupt who claims business and economic acumen. A tax fraud fixing the tax code. A serial molester and pay-for-sex porn-star banger who’s restoring America's Christian core and making America great again.)

I worked many years for a client who was eager to play a large role in a trillion dollar market they were late in entering. After a decade and probably $1.5 billion of media spend, they had gained less than 2% marketshare. They never told the audience in any evidentiary way why their product worked better, was more secure and gave any reason why you should switch.

Their ads looked nice, though.

Going back to the submarine I visited 55 years ago, though. Here’s my point. And maybe this is too blunt, brusque and brutal for today’s sensibilities. Advertising can be thought of as a battle.

Sorry, I don't like war and the pitched-battle sensibility of war-rooms and swat teams and deployed resources. But more often than not, we face competition, a well-armed enemy. Like my sub did.

You have to either out-gun them, out-maneuver them, out-engineer them, or out-work them.

Once you’ve done all that, in advertising, war, love and life, you can worry about form over function. Then you can put on some spiritual aftershave.

Once you've outsmarted your competitors and out-worked them--then knock yourself out--go out-design them. 

Until then, make work that imparts useful information in an executionally brilliant way. Intelligent. Honest. Human.

It wasn't a better-looking American submarine that help sink enemy shipping and vanquish the Allies Axis foes. The sub I was on was ugly, really. Hardly Raymond Loewy sleek.

And that really didn't matter.

As Ed McCabe pragmatically said: