Doing.

As you may or may not know, I'm on Grand Jury duty now, hearing cases involving the Special Narcotics Task Force. I am charged to serve afternoons, from 2-5 until December 30th.

Grand Juries are meant to hear a lot of cases and act on them quickly. We are not brought together to assess guilt or innocence, we are convened to assess whether or not there is reasonable evidence that a crime or crimes have been committed. If we vote yes, the defendants are indicted and will stand trial at a later date.

I call it judicial speed dating. Cops and other law enforcement people come in, present their testimony or expert point of view and they leave. So far to a man (yes, it's been all men) the witnesses are brusque, plain spoken and emphatic.

During my mornings, before I head down to the court house, I encounter just about the opposite. I find myself in meeting after meeting where we often talk about road-maps and game plans and things I can't understand. There is no precision of language and, I suspect, little that is articulated that exists without some agenda.

In fact there is little talk about what we do and how we'll do it and a lot of talk about what we may consider doing sometime in the future or might want to research doing or even talk about researching doing.

This is probably wrong and perhaps someone will correct me.

Somewhere along the way advertising has moved from a craft to a profession. Craft industries make things, they do things. Professions talk.

Wither Twitter?

Adweek reports this morning that a mere 8% of the US population uses one of our latest "this will change everything"-technologies, Twitter. http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i9a98d83b8ff950ac27aeab8bc177069e

The same study that reported this 8% statistic had reported in September that 24% of Americans used Twitter or services like Twitter.

My point here is simple and is really not about Twitter at all.

It's about the tyranny of those who but too much stake in the latest transformational technology, who buy statistics, and who believe that new technologies can change the fundamental neural capacities of humans in a year, whereas even the most vociferous evolutionist would say that fundamental human changes take something like 10,000 years.

If Twitter were really to change our brains, how we take in and send out information, we should be looking forward to a generation of humans born with enlarged thumbs.

Change does not happen that fast.

Random career thoughts.

I've been asked by an advertising school--or a school that helps "engineer pop culture" (if that's not an oxymoron) to teach a class either on putting together an advertising portfolio or on how to network efficiently. I'm not sure if I'll have the time to teach either of the course, but this morning I started thinking about this blog and how I network.

I started this blog at the behest and encouragement of my friend, partner and soul-mate Tore Claesson (http://toreclaesson.blogspot.com/)I was out of work at the time, having left a big job and a big salary because the senior level people who hired me turned out to be a bunch of--dare I say it in print?--consultants? (Excuse me while I wash my hands.)

The blog was just a way for me to put my thoughts down every day. Intuitively Tore knew that I would spiritually die if I didn't write. So he bid me to write. Since Tore told me to blog, I've written nearly 2,000 entries. Some of them have sucked. Some of them are trivial. Some are more, I think, intelligent and heartfelt.

I am not a self-promoter by nature. I don't mix well. I am, in fact, a fairly virulent misanthrope. But after a while my blog led me to others'--Bob Hoffman's (http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/) and Dave Trott's (http://www.cstadvertising.com/blog/)In time, I got to know these fellas. In person or via email and I count them as people whose work I admire and maybe even as friends.

A headhunter of mine, another e connection, taught me how to use Linked In and Facebook to positive networking effect. That those two media vehicles are how recruiters and agency people search for candidates, so make yourself pretty and easy to find.

The thing about work, about finding work, about furthering yourself, is that it's work. It's work that is on-going--it never stops. Because it's your career and it's your future and it's your life.

Watching television.

Turner Classic Movies, TCM, is running a seven-part series called "Moguls and Movies," a history of the movie industry. Last night, they ran a episode on the encroachment by television in the 1950s on the movie industry's near monopoly as mass entertainment entity. "Movies are dead" was the near universal cry.

Today, 60 years or so later, people have been chiming similar death knells for television. "People no longer watch," the online luddites have claimed. "Everything is zapped and DVR'd" others trumpet.

Today "The New York Times" reported that TV, according to Steve King, chief executive at the ZenithOptimedia media division of the Publicis Groupe "is, by his estimates, still gaining share of the overall advertising market, he added, to 40.7 percent in 2010, from 37 percent in 2005." This is not the last breath, in other words, of a dying media.

My points in all this are simple.

1. Get your facts before you make a proclamation.
2. Things don't die that easily.
3. Never trust anyone who issues grand proclamations.
4. People like TV--they even like commercials when they're well-wrought.
5. Tweets, Facebook "likes" and 300x250 pixel banners don't build brands.
6. I've still yet to have a conversation about a brand.

Jury duty.

I'm on jury duty for the next month unless I get released. There's a decent chance my prodigious output will slacken. I will do my best but I make no promises other than that I will do my best.

Grinning is winning.

I've written about this before but I flew into LA yesterday and was assaulted by billboards of happy people and smiling faces and I need to write about it again.

The billboards featured people smiling about the product they were offering. Traffic was slow so I really had time to notice them. I even tried to smile the way the people in the billboards were smiling. And I couldn't. I couldn't get my mouth to cooperate and my teeth to gleam. I certainly couldn't talk while smiling like that.

There are a lot of social-justice issues facing America today. Resurgent racism, sexism, ageism and more isms.

I think the worst is grin-ism. We are all supposed to be so damn happy all the time. That makes me sad.

You could learn a lot from my younger daughter.

My younger daughter is a freshman at an idyllic consortium of colleges about an hour east of LA. There, she has awakened to the wonders of pure intellectual pursuit. Specifically, she has fallen in love with John Milton (1608–1674) and his epic "Paradise Lost."

Her class decided to host a "Milton Marathon," in which they would read Paradise Lost aloud in its entirety. The subject line of my daughter's email to her entire college was "Are you into Epic shit?!" Her explanation for that assault was simple. "Kids get so many emails, you have to find a way to stand out."

So last night, by the light of the moon and an iPhone flashlight app, she and her friends read of Satan, battles between the fallen and the unfallen, heaven, hell, despair and cruel depravity.

It was heaven.

What if?

I'm 37,000 feet up in the air and I was having a digital conversation with a Linked In acquaintance who became a Facebook friend and who now seems on the verge of becoming a real friend.

What we were talking about was the failure of the Web as an advertising medium. The "10 Best" online campaigns recently selected by The One Club didn't have one piece of work that actually built a brand. Not one.

The brands in question were built on print and TV. Period.

What occurred to me while my new-found friend and I were chatting was this: the web has been called a designer's media. Design and interaction design drives it. Writers for the web often seem as important as tailors in a nudist colony.

What if we've been doing it all wrong?

What if we tried doing work that understands that words can have impact? Meaning. Power. Importance.

Statements can make a statement.

Messages can be the message.

Substance can be substantial.

Function can follow function.

Many of us are complicit in propagating well-designed sameness (if it looks like everything else, is it well-designed?) and that, simply and plainly, hasn't worked.

Maybe it's time to try something different.

A dispatch.

A writer friend writes:

"George, thanks for your note. Glad to hear things are well with the girls. Let me tell you what's going on with me:

"Yesterday I was locked in a room with clients. There were 20 of them and one of me. They said I was there to help them figure their positioning. I said, 'you're a Fortune 200 company. That's your position.' They laughed--nervously--and said, really, we have to figure out our positioning.

"They read off the positioning statements they had for their brand and their three sub brands. I said, 'you've basically used the same 100 words everyone else uses and mixed them up slightly differently.' 'That's why we need your help,' they said.

"The hours went by. I proffered freshly thought out language. Unexpected words that still described who they are. They regressed to the mean and rejected everything I had to say. I couldn't take much more so I offered to go off and write three versions for their review.

"It was the only way I could get out of there.

"The only good news was I was able to catch an earlier flight home."

Reality vs. approximate reality.

Last night, as I so often do, I stumbled upon a quotation in a book I'm reading that made me think.

John Breit was a physicist who went to work for Merrill-Lynch as a Risk Manager before that firm's unregulated financial shenanigans and hubris brought it to collapse. "By the standards of a physicist, Wall Street was quantitatively illiterate. Executives learned "Standard Deviation" and "normal distribution," but they didn't really understand the math, so they got lulled into thinking it was magic. Traders came to believe that the formulas were not an approximation of reality but reality itself."

Maybe those sentences hit me hard because in advertising we do much the same thing.
We listen to 16 people being paid for their opinions in Cincinnati and we think they are reality. We see that the cool kids in Williamsburg are reality. We treat award shows and ad critics like they are reality.

Along the way to approximate reality we've forgotten life.

Anyway, here's Big Daddy's soliloquy in Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."


"Heroes in the real world...
...live hours a day,
not just two hours in a game.

Mendacity! You won't...

You won't live with mendacity,
but you're an expert at it.

The truth is pain and sweat...

...paying bills and making love to a woman
that you don't love anymore.

The truth is dreams that don't come true...

...and nobody prints your name
in the paper till you die."