And now a word from Jeff Goodby.

This just in from Cannes and 'the pony-tailed one.'

"We've created a system that rewards work that is increasingly unknown to anyone outside the business. We have become connoisseurs of esoterica. And in the process, we're becoming more about us, and less about changing the world.

We are becoming irrelevant award-chasers."

Halavai, Jeff.

Read his whole philippic here:

http://adage.com/cannes09/article?article_id=137525

How to pitch woo in an Agency today.

I just sent this note to someone:

T.N.T.I.R.D.T.A.A.C.C.W.Y.*


*there’s nothing that I’d rather do than attend a conference call with you.

The Phrase that Frays.

Some years ago, if you "lost it," people might say "you went postal." Today now that people killing people with guns is so commonplace, we don't much use the phrase "going postal" anymore.

A friend, however, has just forwarded me a substitute. She got it in an email in which the venue for a get-together was being changed. The writer wrote the email in ALL CAPS.
And then ended the email with this sentence. "Sorry to go all caps on you."

I suspect in the not so distant future we'll hear things like this on the nightly news: "He opened up with an AK-47 and killed 41 dental technicians. He just went ALL CAPS on everyone."

Mr. Rabinowitz and Advertising.

Mr. Rabinowitz, Chairman of Rabinowitz, Inc., worth hundreds of millions of dollars meets a young chippie all of 22-years old. He can think of nothing but this beautiful young thing. Finally, he asks her out to dinner and she says yes.

The chippie orders the most expensive of everything.
Shrimp cocktail.
A fabulous salad.
A 12-lb. lobster smothered in Chateau-Briand smothered in veal chops.
A champagne from the early '70s.
Crepes Suzette for dessert.

Finally, Rabinowitz can't stand it any more.
"Tell me, young lady," he says, "your mother cooks for you like this?"
She looks at him and says, "No. But my mother isn't trying to fuck me."



OK, but there's an advertising point here, as there usually is. As an industry we are Rabinowitz. And clients are the winsome little things we are too often trying to fuck.

So, we go into new business and deliver thinking for free (not only free, but more often than not our new business thinking is cursory at best, though of course we'd never say to a client, 'we've had six weeks to think about your business here are some preliminary thoughts.' nope, we gallop ahead and assert we have insights.) We shoot, we score, we edit. All for free. Why would we do any of that if we hadn't figured out that there's a nice juicy fuck at the end of the process.

It's been raining for about three straight weeks here in New York. Here is Mickey Spillane's description from a similar weather pattern. This is from his novel "One Lonely Night." The opening of chapter 3.

"The rain. The damned never-ending rain. It turned Manhattan into a city of reflections, a city you saw twice no matter where you looked. It was a slow easy rain that took awhile to collect on your hat brim before it cascaded down in front of your face. The streets had an oily shine that brought the rain-walkers out, people who went native whenever the sky cried and tore off their hats to let the tears drip through their hair."

A father's day poem.

The Ball Poem
by John Berryman


What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over—there it is in the water!
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went. I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions. People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up
And gradually light returns to the street
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

Gang bangs (by way of Bergman and Michelangeo.)

The blog-equivalent of an open letter.

Dear GM,

I just read in Advertising Age (http://adage.com/article?article_id=137453)that during your bankruptcy you will be spending between $40 to $50 million/month on advertising.

Now, ordinarily I wouldn't care but this is my money your spending. So let me let you in on a little secret. Your advertising will fail to work. No matter how good it is. People aren't interested in your brand and since they can't pick it up and try it, no matter how much better your cars are, you're really just pissing into the wind. You see, nothing matters if you can't get people to come into your dealers and try your product and service. Your commercials and your products aren't making that happen. And haven't for about 40 years.

So if you can't bring people to the products, GM, have the perspicacity to then bring your products to the people.

Rip out the seats in movie theaters and put in seats from your new cars. Bind a piece of leather upholstery into a magazine to let people touch what you make. Give influencers (and I don't mean Tiger and Oprah) free samples.

In other words, DO SOMETHING.

I don't know who said it. Maybe it was my crazy Uncle Seymour. But it works here.

"If all you ever do is all you've ever done
then all you'll ever get is all you ever got."

Which, GM, is scorn.
And bankruptcy.

Rome is burning, pass me my fiddle.

At 8:20AM I walked down Prince Street this morning on my way into the office and I bumped into an art-director who works for me on line outside the Apple store. He was about to be let in. He had been on the line for about an hour at that point. And the line he was at the head of was around the corner, I'd estimate 300-people long.

I'm told Starbucks was there for Appleites, with free coffee and cold water. Great for the Apple brand, great for the Starbucks brand, great for the customer.

This, of course, got me thinking about advertising, brands and more.

There's really one thing you need to know about marketing. It's that brands, or products or people are about experiences, not speeds and feeds or wheels and deals. And Experiences are, I believe, made up of three component parts.
1. There's the service aspect of experience. How well does the brand keep its promises. How do they fix things that break? How do they help me when I need help?
2. There's the functional aspect. How well does the product or service perform? Do I like how the thing works? Does it keep its promises?
3. There's the self aspect of experience. What does using the product or service say about me? Does it make me a richer person emotionally, or physically. More interesting? Cooler? Do I self identify with the product.

Think about those components with regard to Apple, American Express, Nike. Obama. Then think about them in relation to General Motors, Verizon, your agency.

Advertising--and the current Ad Age-generated flap about the importance of award shows like Cannes--too often attempts to make every brand cool, ignoring the inherent intrinsics of a brand. Ergo spots like the Miracle Whip one that I wrote about on Wednesday evening.

Apple, American Express, Nike. Obama are great brands that do great advertising. Their advertising doesn't make them great, rather it reflects their greatness. A lot of not great brands do award-winning advertising that while creatively-recognized is, in reality, bad for the brand because it is false.

These are the things marketers and their agencies should talk about. Not the banality of awards.

Our industry in one simple metaphor.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/jet-landing-in-newark-with-dead-pilot/?hp