"You're acting white."

Yesterday the Reverend Jesse Jackson accused Barack Obama of "acting white." Jackson's statement is one of the most racist I've heard in some time. Do all white people act alike? And what is acting white? Does it mean that if you're white you have a certain antipathy for other colors? Moreover, when will people be allowed to say, "You're acting Arab." "You're acting Jewish." "You're acting Eye-talian." And how far is that from simply cursing, "Whitey." "Arab." "Jew." "Dago." "Nigger."

Jackson, who once supported the virulent racist Louis Farrakhan and who once referred to New York City as "Hymie-town," has once again shown himself to be a racist. The fact that no one has even noticed Jackson's slur means that we have failed to pay attention to language and how the ill-intentioned can use it perniciously.

More on the demise of agencies.

If you were to look at an atlas from one hundred years ago when the Hapsburg Monarchy broke up, or even from fifty years ago when the British Empire collapsed, or even from 1989 when the Soviet Union broke up, national names and boundaries would look very different from how they appear today. Similar tectonic shifts are happening in the world of advertising for much the same reason: nations, oligarchies, realms like agencies lose their relevance and meaning. For nations that means people can't come together around a common goal or symbol. For agencies it means their offering no longer speaks to how consumers wish to be communicated with.

In the last couple of years, we've seen Lowe's billings almost literally decimated. Same with Fallon. And perhaps to a lesser degree the same is true with many of the large agencies at the top-most reaches of the big agency pantheon--the large old-line shops.

Many of these agencies have as their leaders people who have yet to embrace what people quaintly refer to as new media. Their fame, their ascent to the advertising stratosphere rested on a great commercial or print ad they did a couple of decades ago. Now, when they're in a crunch they go back to that very bag of tricks to solve their issues. In other words they try to stave off obsolescence via obsolescent behavior.

There's a logic leap coming, but I can't help but think of Henry Ford's famous quote, "If I asked people what they wanted they would have said a faster horse." Though Ford should hardly be regarded as a bastion of progressive management, I trust you'll get the point.

The Midas Touch. (Everything they touch turns into a muffler.)

Lowe, here in New York, has just lost the Saab account. Earlier this year they lost the GMC account. As Gertrude Stein might have said, as of this moment "there's not a lot of there there."

A reminder, Lowe has been an IPG catch-basin for a lot of agencies. I joined Lowe when it was called Marschalk. They then merged with Scali. Then they merged with Ammirati, which had previously merged with SSCB, which had previously merged with Bozell, which had previously merged with Kenyon & Eckhardt. In other words, what had once been probably close to $1.5 billion in billings is now virtually no more.

I used to kiss off the demise of agencies as part of the push for global efficiency. Because starting 20 years ago, it was the mid-sized shops that closed.

But now, it's clear as the ice in a dry martini, that the old order is crumbling. And the ash and residue ain't pretty.

Some thoughts on listening to Creative Directors, Account People, Clients and Research.

In "The Captive Mind", Czeslaw Milosz's memoir/essay/study about artists and intellectuals living under Communism in the early 1950s, he attributed the epigram below to an ancient Jew from Galacia. Makes sense doesn't it?

"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."

A meteoric rise.

We've all heard about the meteoric rise of so-and-so. A second baseman for the Twins. A rockstar. A politician. A business 2.0 leader or a colleague.

Well, I want to point something out that the great Hungarian-born historian John Lukacs noted in one of his books.
Meteors don't rise, they fall.

My point today, since I'm very busy, is quite simple. Language is fragile. Choose your words and visual words (images) carefully lest you mislead. If we don't watch what we do and say, we'll end up in a country where our leaders call gas-chambers "showers."

If you have an erection for more than 4 hours.

I'm on the cusp of doing some freelance work for a brand in a category I've never spent much time thinking about. For me, it goes this way when I get an assignment: I think about it fairly obsessively, I run through ideas in my head, I create scenarios, start writing commercials, etc.

Then it came to me. I have the answer, the magic bullet, the way to breakthrough, build a brand, get response no matter what the product or service you're working on. "If eating Cheerios (part of this complete breakfast) gives you an erection for more than four hours, see your doctor." "If your bluetooth enabled Dell laptop gives you an erection for more than four hours, see your doctor."

With the promise of a four-hour erection, advertising isn't that hard.

What is print?

To most people running agencies, to most CMOs, to the heads of most media companies, the media world has always been composed of a trinity. That is, there is print, radio and television. Until recently each of those media has always had a specific role. Generally speaking, television was always the awareness media. Consideration and response was always given over to print. In fact, if you look at, say, the One Show Annual from 20 years ago, the big print winners were ads with copy--maybe even a couple hundred words of copy, like the ads that really built the BMW brand.

Then came the internet. To people who weren't watching, all of a sudden there was a new place to get information. A new consideration and response medium. So what happened was this: Print became posterized. Look at the Cannes winners over the last few years. There's hardly a word to be seen. So print quickly became a visual media. The only problem for print was that both TV and the internet have this thing Kevin Roberts of Saatchi calls Sisomo--sight, sound and motion. And--look at porn as one example--people would rather see moving pictures of moaning wimmen than still photos of the same.

What's more, print, except for newspaper ads, became slow. It took a long time to produce. In the ASAP-era, it lost its newsworthiness. Even in newspaper ads which should capitalize on the media's "dailiness," because of bureaucratic client organizations and slow-moving agencies, approvals are a long time coming and so relevance suffers.

So, what is the role of print when you can get cooler pictures and more words elsewhere? Print is tactile, you can hold it. Print can put a complete thought in one place--it won't disappear a frame or a pixel later. Likewise, print has the unique capability of presenting iconic words or images. The Absolut Vodka could not have worked anywhere but print. Finally, print, because of its bookish lineage, has an air of authority the internet and television don't.

These are my thoughts on something I've been worrying about. I would love yours.

It's all explained by Bertolt Brecht.

Now it seems that we will be in Iraq for at least a few more years, regardless of who wins the Presidential election in 2008. And who knows how long we will be in Iran when we decide to go there later this year (that's a prediction.) In any event, Bertolt Brecht looms large in my cerebral cortex.

Brecht who escaped Germany some 75 years ago, wrote a play called Mother Courage while in exile. It was nominally about the Thirty Years War but was really about war's larger evil. There's one line in Mother Courage that is all there is to know, and all ye need to know:

"Peace is a waste of equipment."

You can't spend trillions year after year on weapons and not use them. A practice field is to a football team what Iraq is to our military. It's a place to work on new plays.

The :30 isn't dead but it may be wrong.

I have fairly quick processing powers and an acute ability to take in a lot of information quickly. Lately however, maybe because I'm always doing a couple of other things when I'm watching TV, I feel that I get nothing out of a mere :30.

Is it possible that the internet has actually expanded our attention span? That because it provides so much information, we now want more in a single serving when we're media browsing. Every time I see a car commercial, I'm left saying to myself "so what." Same with the new IBM campaign, "Start Doing," or the current Microsoft campaign, "People Ready." Especially true with the Amex Tina Fey spot. Or the HP Gwen Stefani spot. Funny and engaging, but who cares?

I believe in the long-term viability of TV. (I just found these numbers in Forbes: 79% of all consumers discuss their favorite TV shows with friends, family and colleagues, compared with just 38% that discuss favorite Web sites.)

TV isn't wrong. But maybe :30 is the wrong time-unit. Maybe it's not the media, it's the length of the message. I know there are cost implications involved in this line of thinking. But, gee whiz, if I were spending hundreds of millions on TV, damn, I'd try something different. What's more, my guess would be that the networks would be willing to play ball with the advertisers if they thought it would cause a resurgence in the effectiveness of their medium.

Re-elect George Bush.

Let's get this whole carbon-based lifeforms thing over with in a hurry. Why prolong the human race until we are wiped out by rising sea levels, reduced to Malthusian depravity (no health-care, no housing standards, no safe food, no livable minimum wage) or destroyed by a nuclear cataclysm. Give Bush or one of his acolytes four more years and that will be that.

Did you know:

• Halliburton is doing profitable business in Iran. (Isn't Iran in the "Axis of Evil"? I guess doing business with Iran is not that different than Walker's great-grandfather doing business with the Nazis.)
• The ultra-right-wing Hunt family is earning money in Iraq, illegally selling Kurdish oil.
• George Walker Bush seeks to increase pollution levels in "clean areas of the country." I guess just to even things out.
• Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, former head of the EPA (there's a rocky marriage for ya) and the one who assured us the air at Ground Zero was safe, is related by marriage to George Walker Bush--let's keep asbestos exposure in the family.
  

Of course all this is only the tip of the iceberg. And all this is covered up by an Orwellian coating of lies, deceit and obfuscation.

Why prolong things? Let's vote Bush again, and get it over with.

See you in hell.