Acquired wisdom.

Being over 50 in an advertising agency today is like being a virgin in a whorehouse.
Sooner or later you're going to get fucked.

Angry.

I've been writing this blog for about 1,500 days and have written well-over 2,000 posts. Yeah, some of them have been lame-brained and some of them have been one-liners, but some of them, I think, have been measured, thoughtful and even astute.

I'm a writer in my soul, a copywriter by profession, so I do what I do. I write. I try to tap into my thoughts, observe the world and put it all down on digital paper.

To my mind, it's all very simple. Writers write.

Right now half a dozen of my Facebook friends are planners who seem to be attending TED. If writers write, designers design, photographers shoot, directors direct and comedians joke, I'm wondering what planners do to keep themselves sharp--plan?

What is it they produce? What do they make that advances the ball?

Starting out.

When I was in my early twenties I was having a hell of a time breaking into the advertising industry. Maybe the economy sucked. Maybe my book wasn't that great. Maybe I was just to shy too make calls and nudge people.

Whatever the case, somehow my book made its way to a pretty famous creative director called Shep Kurnit. He was the "K" of a well-regarded agency called Delehanty Kurnit & Geller or DKG. He had a good reputation in the industry and was kind enough to send out four letters for me to prominent creative directors. None of whom hired me, but eventually Shep's fondness for me did help me get a job working for a guy who used to work for Shep. It was my first agency job.

It's 30 years later now, and I'm still thankful to Shep. Shep died just before my father did in 2001, but I still think about him and how he helped me.

He never taught me this but he might as well have. When a bright, young, eager person finds you and asks for help, help them. Introduce them to people, criticize them constructively. It's the least you can do for the help you got along the way.

Chronic traumatic adkillopathy.

There's been a lot in the news for the past couple of years about football players, hockey players and boxers--you know, people who get hit in the head for a living--and an ailment called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE is a progressive degenerative disease found in individuals who have been subjected to multiple concussions.

Just last week a former NFL star, fearing the manifestations of that disease killed himself.

In advertising we suffer something similar. I'll call it chronic traumatic adkillopathy. Clients who, willy-nilly, kill ads and expect you to come back time and again with new ads. And quickly.

For the 30 years I've been in the business, my ability to come back with new ads has been my greatest strength. I've always believed that "the best revenge is a better ad."

But, to quote Preston Sturges, "A man works all his life in a glass factory, one day he feels like picking up a hammer."

Mario Vargas Llosa on Advertising.

I just came upon something in "The New York Times" by Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. It made me think, as so many things do, of advertising.

Here's Part the First:
"A successful society minimizes the unhappiness of its people, and encourages them to resist failure." I'd say, in part, that's what a successful agency does.

And Part the Second:
"I work, and I work hard precisely because I have an enormous difficulty in writing. Many times I sweat, I sweat ink, but with joy - suffering joy.
And I wouldn't trade with anyone, for anything, this task."

A metaphor, 2.

I just got an email solicitation from The Museum of the City of New York telling me about an upcoming exhibit called: "Women in the Great Depression."

Story of my life.

A metaphor.

About three evenings a week, I head home from work via 8th Avenue, one of the grittier avenues in the city where glitter has yet to completely replace "gritter." 8th Avenue, being just off Times' Square, used to be the epicenter of New York's porn industry and despite the puritanical ministrations of Guiliani and his thugs, it's still home to private viewing booths and places where you can buy edible panties in a variety of delectable flavors.

Thanks to an antique looking, Hopperesque (Edward, not Dennis) looking neon sign, there's a bar I notice on my way home called, "Smith's Bar Restaurant." The sign includes 20 characters in all and in my entire life I've never seen all 20 illuminated all at once. Often it's "t's ba rant," once it even read "Smith's B r a."

Somehow looking at this sign in all its variety makes me think of advertising. How nice it is, sometimes, to let viewers fill in the blanks and how incomplete information is sometimes more enticing than the whole kit and kaboodle. That's the positive side of the sign. The negative may be even more prevailing.

It reminds me of how sloppy and careless marketers (and agencies) are about their brands. How a piss-stained ATM does more to hurt a bank's image than a million dollar spot does to help it. How work that's badly conceived, badly written and badly produced often gets out because it's politically expedient.

By the way, I've never been to Smith's. But I might go this afternoon for lunch.

Dizzy Dean and Advertising.

I was talking to a fellow copywriter and somehow Dizzy Dean, the great pitcher for the 1930s St. Louis Cardinals "Gas House Gang" came up. That led me to look online and find some quotations by Dean. This one really struck me:

"The dumber a pitcher is, the better. When he gets smart and tries to experiment with a lot of different pitches, he's in trouble. All I ever had was a fastball, a curve and a change up and I did pretty good."

It occurred to me when I read that quote that Dean could be talking about advertising as well as pitching. We are good as an industry when we don't get too smart, too clever, too crafty. When we're simple, honest, direct. We are good when, simply put, we are entertaining, interesting, human and real.

When we get all crazy about things, when we talk about modalities and new models and game-changing paradigms, we are, in the words of Dean, "get[ting] smart." Or too smart.

That's no good.

Notes from a future client meeting.

Roadmap roadmap. Next steps, low-hanging fruit. Next steps, timesheets, roadmap, status report integrated new media roadmap. Touch-base check-in roadmap next steps. Interstitial integrated 300 by 250 roadmap. Powerpoint next steps roadmap concerns roadmap powerpoint. Media roadmap Facebook social unpaid media roadmap powerpoint.

Ontogeny recapitulates clientology.

The way I understand it--which admittedly could be off a bit--ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny means that the birth process of a single organism copies that of an entire species. In other words, the birth of a single person goes through stages similar to the birth of our species.

From an ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny point of view, I've been trying to make sense of what's been happening in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and, probably, a couple other medieval Sheikdoms that have been forced off the front page of "important" newspapers because of someone's Oscar dress.

What I've concluded is that big, monolithic, autocratic governments are like big, monolithic, autocratic brands. In other words, the Middle-Eastern countries mentioned above are a lot like a lot of client organizations.

Because I'm rushing this prior to a client meeting this morning, let me give just one example.

Both Middle-Eastern plutocracies or military states regard their customers (citizens) as wholly tangential to their rule. Rulers will do what they want regardless of what the ruled say. The simplest way of thinking about this in marketing terms is to (mis)quote Henry Ford. "A customer can have any color car as long as it's black."

Essentially, what's being said in the Middle-East is you can have any sort of government, as long as the plutocrats stay in office and can steal billions.