Homer, Virgil and us.

One of the things that strong brands do is they create for themselves a "creation myth," a story that captures their foundation, their beliefs, their over-coming of the odds, their strength.

Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" were creation myths that unified the people of ancient Hellas, just as Virgil's "Aeneid" glued together the Roman Empire, just as stories about the Revolutionary War and Washington crossing the Delaware helped define the American character.

These are (or were) important brands in their time.

Today, brands like Apple, Mercedes-Benz, IBM and a few others have creation myths--strong stories that define them.

At its most elemental and its best, advertising finds or creates creation myths. It finds a way to make a brand understandable, important, likeable and true.

I know such lofty thoughts can get in the way of writing another "This Fall, Rake in the Savings" ad, but sometimes it's nice to dream.

The homestretch.

Since I started at my current agency I've done nothing but work on one account. And on that account, I have done everything, and at a fundamental level. I've worked closely with my client's c-level executives and now, after about two years, have figured out--with them--the 'story of their brand.' Who they are. How they act. How they'll present themselves to the public.

A little over a year ago I got a brief from the client to create a TV spot. That brief went through myriad changes and I presented probably about 100 scripts over the last year.

That's all drawing to a close.

Yesterday, I mixed four spots and a long form film. Today and tomorrow I am 'conforming.' Tomorrow, we ship the spots to the networks. They are meant to start airing beginning September 18th.

It's been a long, mother-fucking road.

Too long by at least half.

But I'm nearing the finish.

I'm not ecstatic over the spots. They were a lot of work. They suffered from a lot of compromise. I made a number of mistakes along the way.

That said, the spots are like nothing I've ever worked on. Every word, every scene, every nuance was picked over, dissected and over-analyzed to the point of atomization.

None of this helped the quality of the creative. It seldom does.

However, a particularly difficult client is happy--pleased with the work. As is, moderately anyway, my agency.

In any event, I'll post the spots after they air.

You can see for yourself.

Is honesty suicide?

Thomas Friedman, the three-time Pulitzer-prize winning op-ed columnist for "The New York Times," has a line in his column this morning: "Honesty, we are told, is suicidal in politics."

That made me wonder if honesty is suicidal in agencies. And with clients.

Last night I had a meeting with the President and the CEO of the client I toil on. They signed off on five cuts, but had an issue with one of them. There was a jump in the cut from a medium shot to a close-up. The CEO felt it was jarring and disruptive.

I have a good relationship with these guys. I've worked on their business for about two years--day in and day out--and have done nothing but come through. Along the way, and I don't say this to sound bombastic, I have helped guid their business and helped them coalesce their vision for the company.

The CEO mentioned his issue with the cut and then said, "Do you think I'm wrong?"

"Yes," I answered. "I've never lied to you and I'm not lying now."

"Ok," the CEO conceded. "I'm ok, then."

Here's my point.

Being blunt and honest is one of the hardest things you can do in the business.

To get through the day without bullshitting yourself or your clients.

Honesty takes work. Because in the words of the great fictional character Sammy Glick, "Why tell the truth when you can lie."

But honesty works.

Especially if you've been honest enough to have earned trust.

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PS. If you haven't read Budd Schulberg's classic novel "What Makes Sammy Run," you owe yourself that favor. It follows the career of Sammy Glick whose personal philosophy is summed up by this line: "Going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on."

A subject-object split.

If an alien creature were to fly down from the heavens and if it were alien enough to read advertising blogs, that creature would conclude an oxymoron.

That is, the best people, the most creative people, the smartest, kindest people in advertising are not the people who actually make advertising, they're the people who comment on it.

You see, everyone who does work sucks and everyone who doesn't actually make anything could have done light years better.

This attitude is endemic.

I've been working in the industry 27 years come December and I guess you could say I've enjoyed a fair amount of success. But the fact of the matter is this, I know that in any agency worth its ampersand, there are scores of creatives who are better than I am.

They know film techniques I can hardly fathom.
They think of ideas that would never occur to me.
They know the latest this and the latest that.

The trouble with them is simple however.
They don't know how to do the grievously hard work of shepherding the work.
They don't know how to make things accessible to clients.
They don't know how to challenge clients and win them over.

While they are creating castles in the sky, beautiful and elegant but ephemeral or un-sellable, I am doing what I do.

Facing the world with a dose of pragmatism.

And selling work that clients spend money on and agencies make money on.

Franz Hals at the Metropolitan Museum. And death.

There's a small exhibit of the Dutch Master Franz Hals at the Metropolitan Museum. It runs through October 10th and if you're in the vicinity, you should take a gander.

Hals painted about 350 years ago and though his subjects are accoutered in ruffles and lace, his portraits are surprisingly real and contemporary and evocative. My wife saw Caravaggio in his paintings whereas I saw the brushwork of the Impressionists. And of course, we are both right.

Recently I read something about how painters feared the death of their medium when photography and motion pictures came into being. What's the point of a close representation of a subject when you can have an exact duplicate? Surely someone somewhere declared painting is irrelevant and dead. Another medium bites the dust.

Also in New York this weekend, at the Film Forum, is an all-day Buster Keaton festival with live piano accompaniment. Ah, surely, Keaton is dead. He is silent. He is black and white. Contemporary film makers don't discuss his editing technique. He is past and no more. Though I guarantee the theatres at the Film Forum will be stuffed to the gills with aficionados and there will be more than a few families with young kids in attendance.

My point is that we are quick to pronounce old forms (and old people) dead. We are quick to assume they are superseded by newer and better.

But old doesn't die if it works on an elemental level. If it communicates, breaks through and imparts insight, humor or information in an emotionally moving way.

The photo above is of a painting by Rembrandt that was in the Hals exhibit. It's called "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer." On the gold belt around Aristotle's waist hangs a pendant with a portrait of Alexander the Great on it. This is a painting, in short, about the imparting of wisdom, and respect, through the ages and across generations.

It's something we could all learn from.

Using your ears.

Last night my wife and I took a walk through East Harlem to have a pizza at one of the few remaining Italian restaurants that have survived the neighborhood's transition from an Italian slum to a black and Hispanic slum. We headed up to Patsy's between 117th and 118th on 1st Avenue where, in our estimation, their coal-fired brick oven yields some of New York's best pizza.

We walked home as well through the crowded streets on a hot Saturday night. Around 114th I heard this bit of kibbitzing--a 30-something guy ragging a 30-something woman.

"Just because your head is shaped like a bullet don't mean you're a big shot."

Perfect.

And evidence once again that the language of real people is real language.

Which is why it makes sense to walk and listen, or take the train and eavesdrop, or talk to cabdrivers when you decide to cab it.

New York, if you listen well enough, has an electric, living language.

The language you don't get from briefs.

The "Swirlathon."

A friend wrote me an email last night.

"It happens almost every night. I check my email before I go to bed and my in-box is empty. When I wake up six or seven hours later there are 30 or 40 emails in it.

"I wouldn't mind if something of consequence was being thrashed out in these emails. If something important was being discussed and gotten to the bottom of. But, sadly, the surfeit of emails reflects just the opposite.

"Usually something of little consequence has bothered the client. Maybe it's the registered mark on the logo in the end frame of a TV spot looks pixelated. That starts the swirl. The client, of course, sends an email cc-ing about nine people at the agency.

"Naturally each one feels compelled to react. Some of those nine, say three, feel that an accusatory finger is being pointed in their direction. So they send an email deflecting responsibility. Another portion of the nine, big cheeses, usually wind up sending emails saying 'how did this happen,' as if this problem were on the same order of magnitude as global warming or nuclear proliferation. Then there is an eruption of emails from people out of the original nine who are clueless. They open the door in their emails to additional problems. They'll ask something extraneous like 'how does this issue effect residual payments?' This, of course, will precipitate another series of emails.

"Now what's important to note here is that NOTHING has gotten done. No one's fixed anything, reported on anything, unraveled any great mystery. No one's even gotten back to the client with how this issue will be addressed. Everyone has just 'covered their own non inconsiderable obliquities' and shunted the problem along some circuitous path.

"What they've created is something I call "The Swirlathon." A cacophony that's an admixture of blame, obfuscation, ignorance, denial and chatter. The fuel that makes agencies run.

"I don't know about you, G, but it's wearing me down."

A memory.

When I was a kid, the television world I watched every evening was a wildly different place than the world we now live in. Domestic problems were small. Crimes were solved neatly in every episode. Beautiful people or cowboys (who were beautiful to me) smoked long cigarettes. And women really did worry about waxy yellow build-up.

I was just nine years old when the above commercial came out and it was something of a symbol on how the world was changing. It was notorious, it was sexy, it was startling. It also featured just about the most beautiful woman me and my friends had ever seen.

These were, as I said, different times. My friends and I wouldn't have known what to do with this woman--sex wasn't as ubiquitous and available as it is today, but we were able to admire her from afar.

When I hit 7th grade, I was 12 or so, my Latin teacher was absolutely gaga over this woman. After class when we would hang with him--he was funny, and probably just about ten years older than we were, he would talk about the Noxema woman and Brigette Bardot.

Every one of his Latin classes would start with him counting backwards from ten in Latin, and when he got to "nihil" (nothing) we had to be in our seats. This wouldn't be memorable except the word in Latin for six was "sex" and our teacher would linger on the word to the merriment of all of us.

No advertising point today.

Just a memory.

Advertising lessons from The New York Times, 2.

With the exception of ten months I spent working at Hal Riney in San Francisco and two years I spent at Digitas in Boston (and in each case I commuted home on weekends) I've been a New Yorker my entire life. It wouldn't surprise me if my parents lined my litterbox with "The New York Times," when I was an infant. That's how big a part the Times plays in my life.

Maybe I'm being xenophobic, but I don't reckon there's another daily newspaper anywhere that brings as much, on a regular basis, to its readers as the Times. And to my eyes at least, the Times as gotten better in the digital era. There are brilliant videos, slideshows, and art to consider almost every day.

Today in a preview of this Sunday's Magazine, there's an article called "Iron Workers in the Sky" with brilliant "Louis-Hine-esque" photos by Pulitzer-Prize-winner Damon Winter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/us/sept-11-reckoning/04Mag-ironworkers.html?hp

No advertising point. Except to say beautiful, stirring creativity is all around you if you know where to look.

Typical brilliance from Tore.

My erstwhile partner, art director, creative director, photographer and blogger. http://toreclaesson.blogspot.com/