When advertising tried harder.

Pride.

Yeah, yeah, I know it goeth before a Fall. But when I got off the subway at 42nd Street the other day and saw this beautiful relief housing a simple sign, it made me think of another sort of pride. Pride in your work and your craft. So much of what is produced online today is absolute crap. Yes, a lot of the people doing the work have great illustration skills, but that does not make them great illustrators. I took the photo above, but I am no photographer and wish it were better.

The point is, production values matter. They communicate how much a company cares about its work and its products.

PS. You can see this sign when you exit or enter the 4,5,6 trains from what used to be the old Bowery Savings Bank building. It is now a Cipriani's restaurant. O tempore, o mores!

Calcified. Ossified. Dumb.

David Pogue, technology writer for the NY Times
has just returned cellular industry conference.
You don't have to be a Svengali to guess he
bemoans the lack of innovation among
American carriers.

Here's a bit from his post that I really enjoyed:

"P.S. ... As longtime Pogue's Posts readers know, my biggest
cellular pet peeve is the endless recording you hear when you
reach someone's voicemail: "To page this person, press 2 now.
You may leave a message at the tone. When you finish
recording, you may hang up. Or press 5 for more options"- and
so on.

At the conference, I asked one cellular executive if that
message is deliberately recorded slowly and with as many
words as possible, to eat up your airtime and make more ARPU
for the cell carrier. I was half kidding - but he wasn't
fooling around in his reply: "Yes."

Whip it out.

The next time a client asks you to do something crass, ugly or hyperbolic, whip out this slide show appended to a BusinessWeek article I just happened upon. Here's the link to the article:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_28/b4042050.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_top+story

And a link to the slide-show.
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/06/0628_reputation/index_01.htm

The article is called What Price Reputation? In a nutshell it claims Advertising can boost a company's reputation (especially if the company concerned backs things up with deeds) and thus its stock price. For instance, if Wal-Mart had the reputation of Target, it's stock value would rise an estimated 4.9%, boosting its value by nearly $10 billion. That's a lot of simoleans. At Ogilvy some years back, the Agency was quick to trumpet the $50 Billion increase in IBM's market cap as the result of the brand's resurrected reputation. This makes sense to me. A sandwich shop you like can charge fifty cents more for that corned-beef on rye and get away with it. (See Starbucks.)

Companies that force you do crappy work because "that will drive sales," are once again, sacrificing real value for specious short-term gains. Don't let a client screw itself in the temporal pursuit of marketing mammon.

Whip it out and fight.

Advertising is maggots feeding on the rotting corpse of Capitalism.

I don't really believe that quotation but as a headline it is a stopper. Thanks to Karl Marx, a reader from Trier, Germany for providing it. More later if I have something to say.

And keep those cards and letters coming folks.

I don't know if this is real or not.

But it appears real. It is an email forwarded to me by a friend with a long cc-list of real names and an e-signature with a real name and title. Real or not, it has that whole verisimilitude thing going and is therefore, worth reading.

Dear Co-Workers and Managers,

As many of you probably know, today is my last day. But before I leave, I
wanted to take this opportunity to let you know what a great and distinct
pleasure it has been to type "Today is my last day."

For nearly as long as I've worked here, I've hoped that I might one day
leave this company. And now that this dream has become a reality, please
know that I could not have reached this goal without your unending lack of
support. Words cannot express my gratitude for the words of gratitude you
did not express.

I would especially like to thank all of my managers both past and present
but with the exception of the wonderful Saroj Hariprashad: in an age where
miscommunication is all too common, you consistently impressed and inspired
me with the sheer magnitude of your misinformation, ignorance and
intolerance for true talent. It takes a strong man to admit his mistake - it
takes a stronger man to attribute his mistake to me.

Over the past seven years, you have taught me more than I could ever ask for
and, in most cases, ever did ask for. I have been fortunate enough to work
with some absolutely interchangeable supervisors on a wide variety of
seemingly identical projects - an invaluable lesson in overcoming daily
tedium in overcoming daily tedium in overcoming daily tedium.

Your demands were high and your patience short, but I take great solace
knowing that my work was, as stated on my annual review, "meets
expectation." That is the type of praise that sends a man home happy after a
10 hour day, smiling his way through half a bottle of meets expectation
scotch with a meets expectation cigar. Thanks Trish!

And to most of my peers: even though we barely acknowledged each other
within these office walls, I hope that in the future, should we pass on the
street, you will regard me the same way as I regard you: sans eye contact.

But to those few souls with whom I've actually interacted, here are my
personalized notes of farewell:

To Philip Cress, I will not miss hearing you cry over absolutely nothing
while laying blame on me and my coworkers. Your racial comments about Joe
Cobbinah were truly offensive and I hope that one day you might gain the
strength to apologize to him.

To Brenda Ashby whom is long gone, I hope you find a manager that treats you
as poorly as you have treated us. I worked harder for you then any manager
in my career and I regret every ounce of it. Watching you take credit for my
work was truly demoralizing.

To Sylvia Keenan, you should learn how to keep your mouth shut sweet heart.
Bad mouthing the innocent is a negative thing, especially when your talking
about someone who knows your disgusting secrets.  ; )

To Bob Malvin (Mr. Cronyism Jr), well, I wish you had more of a back bone.
You threw me to the wolves with that witch Brenda and I learned all too much
from it. I still can't believe that after following your instructions, I
ended up getting written up, wow. Thanks for the experience buddy, lesson
learned.

Don Merritt (Mr. Cronyism Sr), I'm happy that you were let go in the same
manner that you have handed down to my dedicated coworkers. Hearing you on
the phone last year brag about how great bonuses were going to be for you
fellas in upper management because all of the lay offs made me nearly vomit.
I never expected to see management benefit financially from the suffering of
scores of people but then again, with this company's rooted history in the
slave trade it only makes sense.

To all of the executives of this company, Jamie Dimon and such. Despite
working through countless managers that practiced unethical behavior,
racism, sexism, jealousy and cronyism, I have benefited tremendously by
working here and I truly thank you for that. There was once a time where
hard work was rewarded and acknowledged, it's a pity that all of our
positive output now falls on deaf ears and passes blind eyes. My advice for
you is to place yourself closer to the pulse of this company and enjoy the
effort and dedication of us "faceless little people" more. There are many
great people that are being over worked and mistreated but yet are still
loyal not to those who abuse them but to the greater mission of providing
excellent customer support. Find them and embrace them as they will help
battle the cancerous plague that is ravishing the moral of this company.

So, in parting, if I could pass on any word of advice to the lower salary
recipient ("because it's good for the company") in India or Tampa who will
soon be filling my position, it would be to cherish this experience because
a job opportunity like this comes along only once in a lifetime.

Meaning: if I had to work here again in this lifetime, I would sooner kill
myself.

To those who I have held a great relationship with, I will miss being your
co-worker and will cherish our history together. Please don't bother
responding as at this very moment I am most likely in my car doing 85 with
the windows down listening to Biggie.

One!

A clarification.

There's a reason I am so punctilious about language and lying. Lying leads to dying.

Here in America, a lid has been kept on the outrage over the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. One way that lid has been kept on is that our captive press reports only American deaths--running about 3,500 as I type. Most people, I think, say, '3,500. That's not so many.' And they swill another brewski and ogle another Britney story. However, if we honestly reported (ie told the truth) about our invasions, the death count would total nearly 700,000 (oddly, I consider Iraqis and Afghanis people, too, and therefore worthy of a death count.) Reporting that nearly three-quarters of a million Iraqis have died since we invaded their sovereign country on a pretext, or 1/30th of their country--equivalent to seven million American deaths, begins to put the power of language and lies into context. (You can read more about carnage and language here:) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html

Do your part. Speak the truth when you create work. And demand it of others.

Politics as usual.

President Bush's commutation of Irv Lewis Libby, Jr.'s sentence should remind all of us communicators out in blogmerica of the power (and the necessity) of words--precise and exacting words. When you write something for a client please stick to pure English not political Orwellian New Speak. Man, his sentence wasn't commuted--he got a 'get out of jail free' card.
I believe that most children and some adults can see through or read through linguistic advertising lies and caveats. So avoid them like the plague.

Now, if you're one of the thousands of avid readers of Ad Aged, you know I am keenly interested in the abuse of language for nefarious purposes, including duping the public to buy your product. If you are too, pick up Viktor Klemperer's Lingua Tertii Imperii. That's Latin for The Language of the Third Reich. In his diary, Klemperer (a distant relative of Colonel Klink) bears witness to the degeneration of language under a dictatorship. As a Jew who survived first the Nazi fascists and then the Soviet fascists, his chilling account knows whereof it speaks. You can find it on Amazon or a good bookstore, if there are any left.

De-foresting phone trees.

Just now, I came across this article in Advertising Age. It's about a company called Bringo that will machete through phone trees for you. Check it out at www.nophonetrees.com

That's an idea I wish I had had.

If advertisers acted like politicians.

This morning the news world was abuzz with the news that Barack Obama raised over $30 million in the quarter just ended. And that John McCain is letting people go and cutting salaries because he's "behind in the money race."

You see similar tallies when the press talks about new movies too. Such and such did only a disappointing $4 million at the box office. Or some other movie set a box office record.

This is a lamentable trend. What it Chevy promoted itself by saying "America's most heavily advertised car brand?" There's no reason why there for me. Chevy isn't credible because they're profligate any more than Barack Obama is viable because he's charismatic.

I have nothing against Barack Obama. My issue is I'm a fairly well-read guy and I know nothing about his policies, his vision, his soul. I just know he raised $30+ million. I suppose this is life in our Trump-ocracy.