Job titles.

A friend from the City of Broad Shoulders sent me this.

A new word.

A Creative Director, whom I would like to schmeiss, has just returned to the office after thirteen days in LA for a two-day shoot.

Thanks to him or her I have coined a new word.

Shoocation.

It's yours. Royalty free with attribution.

A radical Friday.

Just about every morning at 1 AM I get an email notice from the Holding Company Server Police (HCSP) that says my mailbox is over its size limit (most things about me are over their size limit, but I digress.)

I hate these notices. I keep things in my mailbox because I think I might need them at some point. Yes, HCSP, I could archive. But I am not here to have a clean mailbox. I'm here to do good work.

So here's what I did.

I deleted everything.

Screw it.

Swimming in a sea of sameness.

I just did a soupcon of research on how a few search engines talk about themselves.
I guess in our haste to get work into the market we have forgotten to see what our competitors are running.

AltaVista
AltaVista provides the most comprehensive search experience on the Web!
www.altavista.com/ - 9k - Cached - Similar pages -

Dogpile Web Search
Dogpile.com makes searching the Web easy, because it has all the best search engines piled into one. Go Fetch!

Welcome to About.com
About.com: expert guidance from real people searching the Internet for the information, goods, and services that you need to know related to your passion.

Yahoo! Search - Web Search
The search engine that helps you find exactly what you're looking for. Find the most relevant information, video, images, and answers from all across the ...

AOL Search
The AOL Search engine delivers great search results, enhanced by Google, plus relevant multimedia results delivered on a single page-so you can search less ...

The Bingifesto.

I just saw JWT's manifesto for Microsoft's new search engine--oooops, discovery engine, and I am shaking my head. Not because the spot sucks, which it does, but because the spot is so utterly superfluous. http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=137044 Read about it and see it at the above link.

Here's what I mean.

If bing is a dramatic improvement to Google, news of its betterness will quickly spread. And they will spread in ways that are way more cost effective than a :60-second manifesto. If bing isn't significantly enough better than Google, the greatest spot in the world will do nothing to change consumer behavior. I'm not saying that advertising doesn't work and that the product is the only thing that matters. What I am contending is that Google users are entrenched. They love the brand and the product. They probably don't feel the same way about either Microsoft or yet another inflated promise about solving a problem they don't know they have. Does the bing manifesto give people a reason to try, a reason to switch? Naw. It's just a lot of zeitgeist blather. And I think we're all suffering, frankly, from zeitgeist overload.

Here's a decade-old spot for alta vista which used to be a search engine. (Maybe it still is.) I happen to like it. It's better than any spot I've ever seen google run. A lot of good it did for alta vista.

Ten Minutes.

Everywhere you go these days you run into people staring down into a rectangular piece of plastic and typing at it. Stare stare stare. Type type type. The minute you get off the train--whoooosh--the sound of a thousand hand-helds being drawn like pistols from the holsters of a thousand simultaneous gunslingers in the old West. In every elevator, on every street corner, stare stare stare. Type type type.

Years ago I worked on a retail bank account. For all the mishigoss of working on a retail bank account, there are some positives. You get fast. You get good. And you gain confidence.

Here's what I learned conceiving, shooting and writing approximately an ad a week for five years. Six words: Take a walk around the block.

It's great to be responsive and to respond right away. But guess what? It's even better to take ten minutes and actually think.

Tweak. Tweak. Tweak.

This needs to be tweaked. It's close but it needs tweaking. Could you tweak it a bit? I think we need to tweak the copy and tweak the look and feel.

Tweak and you shall find.
Me with a blow-torch hoping to burn your eyes out.

Thinking about hold music.

I was talking to a friend at an editorial house who had to put me on hold. Their hold music was pretty good. A bit bluesy. Like something you might listen to even if you weren't on hold.

Then I started thinking about what would happen if your hold message coordinator had Tourette's Syndrome.

"Hey, let me put you on hold for a minute."

Fuck you fuck you suck fuck fuck fuck shit head fuck face.

Now that's progress.

Are you comfortable with this?

Every day I get a couple dozen emails that enumerate the changes the client wants to make on an ad or a poster. Almost invariably the account people ask, "Are you comfortable with these changes."

When I was at Ally & Gargano this quotation was attributed to Carl Ally: "Advertising should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

Today all we want to do with our work is make sure everybody is comfortable with it. And I'm not comfortable with that.

Reasons for Leaving.

A friend of mine recently was called for an interview at one of the Madison Avenue behemoths. Given the economy and the industry he showed up for the interview. He met first with an HR person who handed him an application that sought to replicate all the information that was on his resume. This friend is in his 50s, so it seemed to him somewhat irrelevant to have to write down where he went to high school, but he did.

As he complied with the form, however, he began getting angrier and angrier. Then the final straw. Under employment history there was a 1"-square box that asked you to fill in "Reason for Leaving."

"For the life of me," he said, "I couldn't think of what to put in that box. How do you encapsulate office politics, petty battles, ego conflicts, lack of opportunity, wage freezes, broken promises, head games, lack of support in a box?" he asked. "Even if the agency you left was the Madison Avenue equivalent of Utopia, there had to be some scintilla of bad feelings as your 'Reason for Leaving.' I thought and thought and couldn't come up with an HR-acceptable response. Finally,desperate, in one box I wrote 'Swine Flu,' in another I wrote "gambling addiction." In yet another, simply "cancer," and in the last "death of loved one." These are all things HR thrives on. My guess is, they'll call me back."