The power of Facebook.

There has been much discussion--loud and ill-informed--about the power of "friending" a brand or a cause on Facebook.

I'll admit I don't understand Facebook as an advertising medium. I have nearly 500 "friends" but have yet to have a conversation about brands with any of them. I do not turn my facebook profile picture pink to show my support for breast cancer. I do not stripe my face for gay rights, I do not obliterate my profile picture for the satisfaction of my mother.

I find it weird when people write that they love today's weather and append onto that message something like "on another note, can china plz release liu, and while they're at it, also the nation of tibet?!!"

I do not understand that and never will. It seems to me so much posturing or poseurism. "I am not a stupid slug who cares only about Snookie. See how politically aware I am; I support Tibet."

Well today I ran across this fact by way of "The New Yorker" and Malcolm Gladwell. "Save Darfur" had 1.3 million people as friends or fans. From that base they collected less than $120,000." Nine cents a supporter. Not even a dime. OMG LOL!

I think that's about right.

George S. Kaufman.

Dick Cavett has an item in today's "New York Times" that relates an anecdote that is so withering and symmetrical that it bears repeating here.

The setting is a game show in the early days of TV. Eddie Fisher is a contestant, George S. Kaufman, "the gloomy dean of American comedy" was a panelist.
The show was called “This is Show Business” and in it a performer would come on, tell the panel a problem of his, perform and then return to sit before the panel. Each panelist would then comment on the person’s 'problem.'"

What follows is Kaufman's comment on Fisher's problem:

"Mr. Fisher, on Mt. Wilson there is a telescope. A powerful telescope that has made it possible to magnify the distant stars to approximately 12 times the magnification of any previous telescope. [pause]

"And, Mr. Fisher, atop Mt. Palomar, sits a more recently perfected telescope. This magnificent instrument can magnify the stars up to six times the magnification of the Mt. Wilson telescope.

"As improbable as it would doubtless be, if you could somehow contrive to place the Mt. Wilson telescope inside the Mt. Palomar telescope, Mr. Fisher . . . you still wouldn’t be able to see my interest in your problem."

They get it right.

Steve Jobs, you'd have to say, is the greatest marketer of the last thirty or so years and early this morning I just got another example of his prowess.

My Mac's hard drive died. So I went, more than a little agitated, to the Apple Store near me for help. I got more pissed when, at 6:30 in the morning they said I needed an appointment. Fuck heads, I said to myself, this is a mechanical problem--your problem-- that you're making me pay for. I was getting angrier.

Finally, about 30 minutes later, I got to see both a genius and Job's genius. When I turned my machine over for them to keep and repair, the Apple technician said to me, "I'll take care of your baby."

Wow.

He understands, he gets it, what my computer means to me. All my anger, agitation and animus disappeared with that one simpatico sentence.

The the ability to have your workforce speak the language of your brand not just mouth the words is an amazing feat.

The kind of feat that keeps customers coming back.

Under new manglement.

I am always amazed at the mangling of English. I'm not one of those punctilious people that believes languages don't adapt and evolve. I accept that. What I don't accept is abject, obfuscating dumbosity.

"Brazilian Spanish."

And then, this sentence from an email: "Thanks for your help as we solution and evolve."

When it's not going well.

While I am generally prolific and full of ideas, there are times when I feel tapped out and barren. I'm feeling a bit like that now. Not a great deal to say--writing this blog, which generally comes fairly easy to me, comes grudgingly lately. Ideas at work, writing scripts, having thoughts, seem to have abandoned me.

When I was young I was quite a decent long-distance runner. Not super-fast, but strong and steady, capable of running 7-minute miles pretty much all day. Along the way I decided to start running marathons.

Running a marathon--at least at my level of athleticism and no matter how much you train, is not a sure thing. You could get a cramp in your leg. The weather could be too warm. You could start out too fast and fade too soon.

Still, your job in running a marathon is to finish the marathon. When you get to those miles that feel like they're entirely up-hill, where your legs feel as heavy as telephone poles, you can't go home for the night and try again tomorrow. You keep running.

To be more precise runners have a certain posture when they are running well. When you run lousy, you lose that posture. So when I hit one of those bad patches I minded my posture. I stood up straight. Kept my arms low and looked straight ahead.

That's what I'm doing now. Minding my posture. Putting one foot in front of the other. And moving forward.

A well-rounded (and sexist) couplet.

I will admit my morale is bolstered
When I work with women who are well-upholstered.

Delayed gratification.

Almost 12 months ago I started freelancing at the agency that now employs me full-time. I was brought in to do a couple of what seemed to be fairly simple tasks. One was to write a capabilities brochure--that assignment wrapped in late January. The other was to write a brand book. That piece was just delivered yesterday.

It's not atypical for an advertising assignment that should take a few months to take a dozen or more. There are more tiers in client organizations than there were in the Tower of Babel. Everybody gets a shot of input and then another and another.

There are literally scores of rounds of revisions. Scores after "final" approval.

I have no more to say other than this is work today. You have to be like a diesel engine not a jet engine. The chuggers win.

After 11 months I got my copy of the client's brand book yesterday. Yes, it was excruciating. Yes, there was too much rigamarole. Yes, there were too many stupid and capricious changes.

But you know what? You see this shit through and don't give up on the big stuff.

My brand book arrived yesterday.

It's among the best work I've ever produced.

Modern Times. Hipster Style.

A hipster's confidence in how something should be done is inversely proportional to his inexperience.

On the water.

When he was despondent, Joseph Mitchell (who wrote for The New Yorker for something like forty years) always went down to the New York waterfront. There he found a different life from the one he lived and different people, with simple values and assessments of right and wrong.

An ex-boss of mine once described a writer who was standing in my way as "all wind and no sail." It's hard to get away with that sort of deportment on the waterfront. There's no reporting bs to HR. You'll, instead, get the shit kicked out of you. It would be a better world if people who are duplicitous fuck-faces would get the crap beat out of them, but alas, we are civilized and can't do that. So instead we stew, get ulcers and spend sleepless nights.

In any event, today I went with the New Yorker Festival out on a tugboat tour of the New York harbor. We were out on a 1800 horsepower tug built in 1958--a tug about the same age as I am.

The tug was strong, like me, and determined. Its diesel engine ran through the brown waters, past the tip of Manhattan and the helicopters of the rich. Past the Staten Island ferry and the Statue of Liberty and into the hard working estuaries where ordinary people don't go. The backside of oil refineries and container ports presided over by massive cranes. In little creeks where pilings decayed and snowy egrets hunted.

All the while the large diesel chugged and chugged. It plowed through the murk as if it knew its way on its own.

After four hours past Kill van Kull and Fresh Kills, past Governor's Island and Red Hook, we moored once again at a pier in Lower Manhattan.

The 52 year old had made it back.

The lies of technology.

One of the most powerful indictments of the online world is the transmutation it has foisted upon our language. I say this with one example in mind, but I'm sure there are many others. Like "select sex" on Facebook. Or "Personalize Your Weather" on the New York Times.

Here's the situation: I am in the George Bush International Airport in Houston, Texas. (As an aside, I have nothing against either George or Bush, but when you put them together, my skin crawls.)

Be that as it may, I am online thanks to a Boingo connection. Of course, I first am greeted by a "welcome screen."

Welcome, my ass. Plain and simple what every website in god's green earth calls a welcome screen is, in fact, an ad.

However, the engineers and technologists who designed this medium--people who, generally speaking care little about art or copy, have been told to call this screen something other than what it is. They are not word people, these technologists. So welcome screen it is. Everywhere you go.

Linguistic lying isn't up there with flesh eating viruses, genocide in Sudan, cataclysmic climate suicide, or a trillion other woes that afflict our world. But calling things other than what they are is at the root of much evil and woe. Furthermore, I'm in a pissy mood this morning, so there y' go.