Improving the Game.

This baseball season the billionaires who own major league baseball have decided to take some steps to try to combat the game's decline in viewership and popularity. They've implemented a series of rule changes to invigorate the game--hoping to bring it back to its glory days when it reigned as America's past-time.

In short, they've identified problems with the game as it's played professionally and they're trying to address those problems. The key issue they landed on is that the game takes too long to play. (I think the season starts too early and goes on too long and we'd be better off with a 144-game season not a 162-game season, but no one asked me. Besides, money.)

When I was a kid, a nine-inning game lasted about two hours. In 1965 when the great Sandy Koufax pitched his perfect game, it took him one-hour and forty-three-minutes. Last season, the average game was almost twice the length of Koufax's masterpiece.

Like baseball, the advertising industry is also suffering from waning interest. 

Advertising is no longer a "hot" industry, attracting the best and the brightest. It's no longer fast, funny and responsive. Despite the thousands of awards and shortlists everyone humbly announces that they've won, despite all the 'cultural moments' the industry claims it creates, to most people the business produces little more than unfunny spots with unfunny faux-celebrities shouting $49.99/month for our bundle or o-o-o-o Zembic, or some lady pointing at balloons and Toyotas in a showroom and chirping witlessly, 'Toyota.'

I wondered, can advertising, like baseball, implement a set of rule changes to bring our industry back?

Here are a few suggestions.

1. The Pitch Clock. As in baseball, advertising practitioners should get a set amount of time to make their pitch. I'd say, 12-seconds. 

Under this rule, if you can't deliver a brief, show a spot, fire a person, or tell why you did something in 12-seconds, penalties result.

2. Three Strikes. Baseball has decided to limit the number of attempts a pitcher can make to pick-off a baserunner. 

Advertising should do the same. If someone presenting uses the words: agile, robust, diversity, Cannes, culture, dancing, nimble, Wes Anderson, anamorphic lenses, adtech, Kevin Hart, verbs as nouns, more than three times, again, penalties and punishment will result.

3. It's All About the Base. This season, in an attempt to improve offensive output, Major League Baseball has enlarged the size of its bases from 15-inches square to 18-inches square--that's about a 30-percent increase in size. 

In advertising during my lifetime, we have done the opposite. We have gone from "double-truck with gutter," to full-page, to half-page, to mobile ad. Or, from sixty seconds to six.

As in baseball, if advertising enlarges its base--if we transition back from mobile ads to print-dimensions, in other words, if we once again try to "go big," we might very well improve our industry.

4. Ditch the Shift. Baseball has banned shifting players out of position to stymie predictable batters who can't hit to the opposite field. It became typical to have three or four infielders positioned all on one side of second base. This overloading of staff cut down on the excitement of the game. 

Doing the same in advertising, limiting meetings to people who actually do the work--not a host of "defensive stoppers" aimed at halting progress will help our industry as well. The current makeup of most meetings is around 20 people. 14 people texting, four project managers, and two creatives. Imagine how our game would improve if we limited our meetings to just the creatives and let everyone else do their thing without interfering in the business at hand.

I'm not much of a baseball fan anymore, I haven't watched a game at all since Rocco Colavito hung up his spikes, so there might be a few rule changes my legion of readers could add. But these are a start.

And as my mother might say, "it couldn't get any worse."

Processing.

 

A long long time ago, before most of the people reading this piece were even born, I read a long article in the New Yorker about the decline in the quality of City College of New York.

The article was written close to the time that New York went bankrupt, and even closer to the 1977 black-out looting and burnings. Also, close to the time that the city, in an attempt to restore some semblance of fiscal solvency decided to start charging tuition for students to attend the City University--which had historically been free.

City College opened in the mid-1800s as the world's first free college. And quickly attained the epigram as the "poor man's Harvard." 

Aspiring people from all over the city and all over the world--too poor or too non-WASPy to attend the Ivies--flocked to CCNY. The result was a spate of Nobel Prizes, great art, literature, thinking and more--all up there on 145th Street, close by the Hudson.

The article I read however, was writ well-after CCNY's glory days had faded, and by an assistant professor visiting from the land we then called West Germany. He bemoaned the quality of the students he was to teach. Worse, he claimed a more fundamental deficit among CCNY's students. 

The visiting professor broke down the breakdown in an interesting--and profound--way. He said functioning brains need to play basically three roles and that some of CCNY's students were unable to perform these three essential functions.

1. They need to be able to understand information.
2. They need to be able to classify, sort and store that information.
3. They need to be able to recall that information, so they can use it.

As I wander I wonder. 

And from the way salespeople serve me when I ask a question, to what I see in my daily engagements with the advertising industry today, I see the same essential lacunae virtually everywhere.

There's no understanding. There's no memory. There's no recall.

I'll admit, this rant could be little more than an old man howling at the moon. It's possible thinking and service are as alive and well as ever. It's possible--perhaps probable--that the way my generation was taught to learn, think and process is not the way today's generations were taught to do the same. It's possible--perhaps probable--that my seismic break from today's today-ness is more age-based than reality-based.

In other words, as my daughters would admonish me: get over yourself.

However, it does seem that no communications today--whether by human or via media--contain any sort of information that could be filed under the heading "I didn't know that." What's the point of communication--why should you pay attention at all--if you're not hearing anything new?' What's more, to my mind, different is a component of new.

Even when I see spots that are fairly interesting, I often say, well any gum makes your mouth fresh, every car has self-parking and Apple carplay, and music from every phone or crunch from corn chip sends us into paroxysms of joy--followed by lordosis-imbued dance steps.)

The problem of blanderization of communications runs deep. I believe that the direct marketing people who dominated the early digital industry are now dominating what's left of the ad industry. 

Direct and digital were always about using lists and targeting to break through. Because these disciplines were meant to be more scientific, they tended to obviate the importance of creativity--because creativity is not understood by those with science backgrounds. Therefore minimize its importance.

That's led us to our current industrial-sized industry miasma. Not only do people not do good creative, they don't even understand the basics of and the basis for good creative. Just like we don't understand the basics of learning or communicating.

Even commercials and the like picked up in the trade-press--where ostensibly the industry is showing off to itself--are to my eyes weak and half-assed. At best, they get attention but don't differentiate. Or differentiate but, who cares. At worst, they just. blather on with bullet points, exclamation points and pointlessness.

I have a pretty simple remedy if you're a client or agency that needs help turning things around.

I go into every assignment with the notion that the client pays for every word with their budget and customers pay for every word with their time.

If you don't give people something worth loving, you're going to piss them off and be ineffective.

There's not much more to life than knowing that.

Past Performance.

 

I don't live in the past--the world is too much with me--but there are parts of the past I enjoy visiting. I was up in Boston for most of the first week of April to celebrate Passover. My daughter Sarah and her husband, Ryan, own a home in the North End and live there with Jude, my nine-month-old grandson. My younger daughter, Hannah, flew in from the kelp forests of San Diego, and my wife and I drove up with Millie, my mother-in-law.

There was work last week, of course. And about 91 hours of preparation for the Passover Seder, a feast most people hope is over in about twelve minutes. That seems like the normal Jewish ratio, by the way, of grueling work to enjoyment--5460 minutes (91 hours) of toil to 12 minutes of eating. In so many ways, genetics is destiny. You might as well concrete all your orifices with matzo and accept the fact that life sucks.

Of course, we also visited Sarah's home in the North End, made a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts where we saw a fabulous Hokusai exhibit and the new Museum at MIT, where I saw hundreds of things I can't begin to understand.

Boston, where I lived for small portions of two-years while I presided over a middling shop with C-minus creative aspirations was never my home, though I lived there as I said. I always thought the place earned its "angry-town" moniker--and that's coming from me--birthed in what was forever known in Cross Country Hospital, Yonkers, NY as "angry-womb."

In any event, I wandered through the City on the Hill, tripping over the drugged and drunk and side-stepping puddles of green vomit leftover from St. Patrick's day or the Celtics last win, it doesn't much matter which. Despite all that, I saw bits of life that brought smiles to my leathery face.

This, for instance, on School Street. I always enjoy PDLs (Public Displays of Lycanthropy) and seeing Romulus and Remus sucking on Mother Wolf always brightens my day.

I also got to spend an hour in the hushed marble of Boston's glorious Athenaeum, a mid-19th Century Building meant to last forever. Not like buildings today--meant to last until a Starbucks moves in, an Apple store or an Outback Steak House.

The Athenaeum (you'll never go wrong visiting an institution with a diphthong in its name) is a quiet place to be surrounded by a world gone by, with ancient sculptures, paintings and books upon books decorating the marble flooring up to the 16-foot ceilings.

There, I took the world's worst photo of a backlit Athena--a hero of mine (I see myself as a modern-day Odysseus)--complete with her silent owl. Through the window is the large burial ground, dating from the 17th Century where John Hancock is buried, and Ben Franklin's brother and various adjuncts to what we once called America's founding fathers. The names of many of those important men today sound more like chain stores selling press-board furniture than they sound historical, but we must learn to take the horrible with the terrible.

While at the Athenaeum, I also saw some nice early 20th Century Boston "Ashcan-style" paintings, a beautiful edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (maybe my favorite English-language book) with Zeus and Myron's Discobulus discus thrower presiding over the whole affair, the latter compleat with DeSanitized floral prudification intact.

Finally, I concluded my two-non-en-famille hours in Bean Town with a visit to one of America's great used bookstores. Though they had thousands of great books, signed copies and even hardcover childrens' books with local color like "Make Way for Ducklings," I bought nothing but three paperbacks for $5 each of ancient baseball books--one of which dated to 1966 and had an unshaven Sandy Koufax on the cover, in commemoration of his 1965 Cy Young award.

I concluded at Bromfeld pens--which is now Appleboom Pens, and treated myself to a Pelikan Apatite blue fountain pen with Edlestein's 2022 "Ink of the Year."

Yes, I still take pleasure writing with a good pen with real ink and messing up my hands and my clothing with that ink. Whether you're a real writer or a dilettante like I am, ink on your hands and on your shirt is a mark of pride. Like an old Prussian with a dueling scar from monocle to moustachio. 

Certain things just are and will always be. At least to me.

Past Time.

I don't live in the past--the world is too much with me--but there are parts of the past I enjoy visiting. I was up in Boston for most of the first week of April to celebrate Passover. My daughter Sarah and her husband, Ryan, own a home in the North End and live there with Jude, my nine-month-old grandson. My younger daughter, Hannah, flew in from the kelp forests of San Diego, and my wife and I drove up with Millie, my mother-in-law.

There was work last week, of course. And about 91 hours of preparation for the Passover Seder, a feast most people hope is over in about twelve minutes. That seems like the normal Jewish ratio, by the way, of grueling work to enjoyment--5460 minutes (91 hours) of toil to 12 minutes of eating. In so many ways, genetics is destiny. You might as well concrete all your orifices with matzo and accept the fact that life sucks.

Of course, we also visited Sarah's home in the North End, made a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts where we saw a fabulous Hokusai exhibit and the new Museum at MIT, where I saw hundreds of things I can't begin to understand.

Boston, where I lived for small portions of two-years while I presided over a middling shop with C-minus creative aspirations was never my home, though I lived there as I said. I always thought the place earned its "angry-town" moniker--and that's coming from me--birthed in what was forever known in Cross Country Hospital, Yonkers, NY as "angry-womb."

In any event, I wandered through the City on the Hill, tripping over the drugged and drunk and side-stepping puddles of green vomit leftover from St. Patrick's day or the Celtics last win, it doesn't much matter which. Despite all that, I saw bits of life that brought smiles to my leathery face.

This, for instance, on School Street. I always enjoy PDLs (Public Displays of Lycanthropy) and seeing Romulus and Remus sucking on Mother Wolf always brightens my day.

I also got to spend an hour in the hushed marble of Boston's glorious Athenaeum, a mid-19th Century Building meant to last forever. Not like buildings today--meant to last until a Starbucks moves in, an Apple store or an Outback Steak House.

The Athenaeum (you'll never go wrong visiting an institution with a diphthong in its name) is a quiet place to be surrounded by a world gone by, with ancient sculptures, paintings and books upon books decorating the marble flooring up to the 16-foot ceilings.

There, I took the world's worst photo of a backlit Athena--a hero of mine (I see myself as a modern-day Odysseus)--complete with her silent owl. Through the window is the large burial ground, dating from the 17th Century where John Hancock is buried, and Ben Franklin's brother and various adjuncts to what we once called America's founding fathers. The names of many of those important men today sound more like chain stores selling press-board furniture than they sound historical, but we must learn to take the horrible with the terrible.

While at the Athenaeum, I also saw some nice early 20th Century Boston "Ashcan-style" paintings, a beautiful edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (maybe my favorite English-language book) with Zeus and Myron's Discobulus discus thrower presiding over the whole affair, the latter compleat with DeSanitized floral prudification intact.

Finally, I concluded my two-non-en-famille hours in Bean Town with a visit to one of America's great used bookstores. Though they had thousands of great books, signed copies and even hardcover childrens' books with local color like "Make Way for Ducklings," I bought nothing but three paperbacks for $5 each of ancient baseball books--one of which dated to 1966 and had an unshaven Sandy Koufax on the cover, in commemoration of his 1965 Cy Young award.

I concluded at Bromfeld pens--which is now Appleboom Pens, and treated myself to a Pelikan Apatite blue fountain pen with Edlestein's 2022 "Ink of the Year."

Yes, I still take pleasure writing with a good pen with real ink and messing up my hands and my clothing with that ink. Whether you're a real writer or a dilettante like I am, ink on your hands and on your shirt is a mark of pride. Like an old Prussian with a dueling scar from monocle to moustachio. 

Certain things just are and will always be. At least to me.

Learn, Baby, Learn.

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal not long ago about a new museum that's opened at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--just about 200 feet from this sculpture. Its inscription may be a bit arrogant, but if measured by overall patents or things that have changed things, it's probably accurate.

As someone who's spent his entire life in or around the advertising industry--as the last person in a family who's been involved in the industry since 1946, much of what I see, read, learn and feel, I relate back to advertising.

It might seem a leap to find advertising advice from a technology museum, but I don't really think so. At its most basic, advertising like science is finding new ways to look at things. Scientists might be looking at stars billions of miles away while we're looking at tomato soup, but seeing is seeing and real seeing is never easy.

Rainer Weiss' quotation above seems apt to me somehow. A good ad, a good communication, a good scientific discover sees something differently.

The other thing I learned while at MIT is summed up with the second quotation. This, too, is certainly true for advertising--at least when things are working well on a team or within an agency and everyone is carrying their weight and keeping their voices down and their egos in check.

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company just shipped a spot for a large and prestigious investment advisory. We had a team of people working on the commercial that included the production company, animators, the clients, executive management at the clients and the team I had assembled of art, production and audio. Everyone pushed everyone else. Everyone made everyone else better. Everyone served everyone else.

I don't know what scientific discovery is like. I only know how to make ads.

But I do understand the thinking of Martha Gray above. Not everybody does the same job, not everybody is sweating equally every day, but the whole kit and kaboodle couldn't have happened unless everybody showed up when they were needed.

No matter what field you're in, if you can get up to Cambridge, MA, it wouldn't hurt to spend an hour or two in MIT's newest museum.

It's amazing what you can learn when you decide to learn about learning.