A sad song.

Like most things online, too long.
But it isn't bad.

A nice bit of writing.

I watched Truffaut's "The Last Metro" last night, a complicated story that takes place in Paris during the Nazi occupation. There was one scene in the movie that really stuck with me and it had nothing to do with Catherine Deneuve being in a state of deshabille.

In this scene Deneuve is reading aloud a theater review by Daxiat (Jean-Pierre Richard), a Jew-baiting collaborationist stooge who is an influential theater critic. Deneuve reads the review and concludes: "He signed it but it reads like an anonymous letter."

Every once in a while, you hear a bit of writing that makes you proud to be a member of the human race.

Downtime.

Because I have no downtime, I finally got around to reading Nicholas Davidoff's profile, "A Civil Heretic" of a hero of mine, Freeman Dyson, the philosopher, mathematician and physicist which appeared in The New York Times on March 29th. If you have the inclination to read 8,500 words, you can get the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?scp=1&sq=freeman%20dyson&st=cse

Dyson is 85 now and has been a noted, notorious, subversive thinker and doer for 65 years, so his accomplishments are legion and more than I will annotate here. But this sentence in Davidoff's article struck me especially: "Their father [Dyson], meanwhile, was always preaching the virtues of boredom: “Being bored is the only time you are creative” was his thinking."

Hmmm.

That reminded me of something the great Jean Renoir said decades ago. I wrote about it 18 months ago in Ad Aged. http://adaged.blogspot.com/2008/01/foundation-of-all-great-civilization.html "The foundation of all great civilization is loitering."

My point, as always I hope, is simple. If you are working on a detergent account, sometimes the best way to come up with a great creative solution is to listen to Mahler. To do something non-linear. To take a walk. To throw a ball. To tell a joke. To talk to a cab driver.

One of the fundamental stupidities of our advertising age is the Frederick Winslow Taylorism of creativity. That creativity, like building a toaster or digging a ditch, can be broken down into piece-parts and can, therefore, be billed accordingly.

Ideas don't happen this way.
Stop forcing serendipity into a spreadsheet.
They call the little boxes in spreadsheets "cells" for a reason.
Don't lock your brain, or your creative department in a prison.

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.