Is there anything else I can help you with?

I've had it with The New York Times. Not the paper itself, which I love and depend on (though, like most other news outlets, the Times has increased its coverage of the puerile and banal and decreased its coverage of petty things like wars, famines, pestilence, global warming, hate crimes, slavery, poverty, locusts and the Mets)but the home delivery service my wife and I subscribe to.

We, we were told when we subscribed, would get our paper before 6AM. Which means we'd have a chance to read it in the morning before we leave for work. Of late, and by of late I mean for the last ten years, the paper's been coming well after 7.

So I called the Times.

First they tell me, a recording tells me, that I'll be on hold between 8 and 13 minutes. That's just what I like, a margin of error of over 50%. Imagine interviewing for a job and being told you'll get paid between $80K and $130K. Not even close.

Finally I get a "customer care representative." I explain my problem. I tell her that my apartment house is served by two delivery services. One seems to deliver the paper in the 6AM range. Mine, is unacceptable. I don't want to cancel my subscription, I just want to change delivery services.

"Oh," says the central Kentuckian on the phone, "I can send a memo to the distributor, but it's not what we do here. We're a phone center."

"Your recording said you're a customer care service. I'm not getting any care."

"We're a phone center."

"Well, connect me to a supervisor."

I hold for about five minutes.

Finally Little Abner comes back on. "The are no supervisors available. Can I have one call you?"

"Yes, I say. After 9:30. I'm in meetings until then." I said, knowing I'll never get a call back.

And then the clincher.

"Is there anything else I can help you with?" She drawls.

"You didn't help me."

"Ok, but is there anything else I can help you with?"

"You didn't help me." And I hang up the phone.

Me and Jackie O.

There's a spate of attention of late about Jackie Kennedy Onassis because 8.5 hours of taped interviews between she and Arthur Schlesinger have just been released, 47 years after they were recorded.

Believe it or not, I ran into Jackie one Sunday afternoon in the D'Agostino supermarket on 75th and Lexington, just a few blocks west from my apartment and a few blocks east from hers.

This was about twenty years ago, I was a young father and, of course, buying something we desperately needed to keep my kids from tearing down our apartment. I got to the checkout with my sundries and all at once, behind me pushing a sparsely populated shopping cart was Jackie herself hiding behind a caricature of large sunglasses.

As a chatty person and someone who believes one's personality can be divined according to what's in their shopping cart, I began a conversation with Jackie. If I remember correctly she had some Carr's water crackers, some Martinelli's sparkling apple cider and some Del Monte "fresh cut" creamed corn.

"I'm buying apple juice, too," I offered, "for the kids."

"Oh, how old?" she asked.

"6 and 2. You know, I haven't had creamed corn in years. I used to love it when I was a kid."

The checkout girl was getting impatient.

"Well, Del Monte makes the best" said the former first lady.

At that, we parted.

From F to B. (A ramble.)

If you read advertising blogs, as I have said in this space before, you traipse through a universe where nearly everyone is a hack and any work that any agency has ever done sucks a bone the size of the Washington Monument.

The small-minded, mean-spirited venom you find on the likes of Agency Spy, or even George Parker's wonderful blog Ad Scam is almost enough to make you give up blogging altogether. (Not that blogging has any importance. I blog because I love to write. And now that I've worked my way down in advertising to the point where I'm not a Big Cheese anymore, no one is around to listen to me spout. In a blog people can ignore my thoughts anonymously. Which is much safer for all concerned.)

In any event, I was thinking this morning about something I've always said to associates, bosses, big bosses and giant bosses. "If you want to move an account from a "B" to an "A," I'm not your man. But if you want to move one from a "D" or an "F" to a "B," there's no one in the industry better than I am."

The fact is, very little of the work in the industry today can be regarded as "A" work. And very little, as far as I can discern, of that "A" work actually ran.

Much more of the work we produce is unimportant, mediocre, mild and mundane. It is insultingly dumb. Uninspired. It is work designed to fill 30 seconds, not move a client's business ahead.

Of course, our mania as an industry is to divine excruciating "A" work that no one sees or notices. In the parlance of thousands of account dweebs sprinkled across this not-so-green planet of ours, we create work that "boils the ocean." Conceited, small and incessantly masturbatory.

The bigger job--the rising tide meant to life all boats--of taking dreck to respectable is a quality we, as an industry, ignore.

Albrecht Durer on Advertising.

If you ever decide to search for the apotheosis of Western art, looking at the work of Albrecht Durer isn't a bad place to start. His work has a precision, soul and depth that's hard to fault. Or maybe I just like zoo animals.

In any event, during the course of my recent literary, historical and biographical peregrinations I happened upon this quotation by 19th Century millionaire art historian and patron Charles Ephrussi on Durer.

"Picking up a drawing enables us to catch the thought of the artist in all its freshness, at the very moment of manifestation, with perhaps even more truth and sincerity than in the works that require arduous hours of labour, with the defiant patience of genius."

It's the last five words of the above that caught me..."the defiant patience of genius."

This is not to say that I believe any work in advertising is genius on the level of a Durer. No, that ain't the point.

What first struck me in the quotation was the word 'defiant.' Being a creative takes defiance. It demands an upset of the status quo, a search for the startling, the different, the unexpected, bold, unorthodox.

The word 'patience' is next. Genius/creativity takes patience. It takes an abnegation of those timesheet terrorists who rush you along. Patience doesn't mean slow. It means a dedication to the task that is stronger than those ephemera that press on you. It means unraveling a problem on your walk to the train, in the shower. It means the patience to derive something defiant against all odds.

An atmosphere that encourages or at least allows defiant patience is a hallmark of successful agencies. Successful creatives, too.

Shame on us.

I was out of the country when the TV Game Show "Jeopardy!" featured the IBM super-computer "Watson" as a contestant. However, last night and for the next few nights, ABC Television will re-run the segments. Jeopardy! like most everything else has been severely dumbed-down (Three-letter word for feline; "what is a cat, Alex?") but I'll admit, on those rare evenings I am home by 7PM, I often tune in, as I tuned in last night. http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/?cn=agus_watson-20100712&cm=k&csr=google&cr=jeopardy_watson&ct=USJWK002&S_TACT=USJWK002&ck=jeopardy_watson&cmp=00000&mkwid=sRONsUpeR_15714878373_432n0d3749

The show, the foibles and excellence of the computer, the genius and humility of IBM scientists were all on display. And it was amazing. Of course, I knew the outcome. I knew Watson mopped the floor with its two human contestants. But that's not the point.

The point was the IBM Watson/Jeopardy! shows were probably the best "ads" for a company I had ever seen. And yet, as far as I can tell, the "advertising" effort wasn't cited by a single awards show--or even the recipient of ad-industry buzz.

The IBM Watson/Jeopardy effort wasn't gratuitous and tacked on like so much product placement. It wasn't blatant bombast like so much sports and entertainment sponsorship. It wasn't self-serving and small like one of this year's Cannes Grand Prix winners, "pay with a tweet."

It was a full and astounding product demonstration fully integrated into the surrounding show and a brilliant evocation of IBM's "Smarter Planet" campaign.

The fact that the effort wasn't covered by the trade press, isn't the topic of agency conversation and isn't even noticed by awards shows shows how far the industry has strayed from recognizing and praising work that is genuinely good, business building and important.

We will continue to debate what crappy advertising icon gets on the Walk of Fame. We will extol the virtues of trivial work that's never run. And we ignore what's really happening.

Some conclusions.

I just watched a too-long video on an advertising blog that was so bad it defies description. It put me in a bad mood, or, more accurately, a worse mood. It did, however, lead me to publish these conclusions:

1) Agencies shouldn't show anything that purports to show off their creative ability unless it's been approved by clients. Clients' taste might suck. But watch enough videos like the one I just saw and you'll start thinking as I do, that at least clients have a shred of dignity.

2) Advertising trade journals and blogs should only show work that is about the business we're in. They should not show "intern" videos and an agency's "recycling" film. These will invite more of the same and they are sickening.

3) Never underestimate the importance of an editor who isn't on staff. Staff editors have to do what their "superiors" tell them to do. They can't afford to speak their minds. So we are left with a monstrosity like the one I just viewed.

4) There's much you can say in favor of 30-second spots. Even if they suck, they are quickly over. This abomination I just watched seemed to last as long as the George W. Bush administration.

Never forget.

With non-stop 24/7 coverage, the 10th Anniversary has come but has not yet gone. We are still wallowing in the absolute horror of what happened in New York, Washington, DC and Shanksville, PA. It seems like people everywhere are all saying one thing: We will never forget. In fact, I find this proclamation self-centered, solipsistic, simplistic and short-sighted.

Only 100 years ago, World War I monuments proliferated throughout towns, cities and villages across Europe, America, Australia, New Zealand, India, Canada and other nations. The world had just suffered through around five years of sustained slaughter and surely we would never forget.

However, just twenty years later, we were at it again. This time with nuclear weapons.

The blood was barely dry from WW II, when we were slaughtering ourselves and others in Korea and Vietnam.

Slaughter, whether of "innocents" or soldiers, is ceaseless.

One nation's "never forget" is another nation's divine retribution.

I'm sorry this is so cynical, so anti-American. And the people who "did this to us," may be the incarnation of pure evil but they did not wake one morning and suddenly decide to try to destroy America. America was not passive in the Muslim world.

We have supported torture, put terrorists on our payroll and put despots in charge. We have taken trillions in oil wealth for our own purposes. We have flouted our wealth and imposed our values.

There is very little in the world that is black or white. We, Americans, were victims of horror but not unwitting, innocent victims. Though the 3,000 who died were innocent, America is not without sin.

I'm not excusing, rationalizing or minimizing the horror of what happened 10 years ago yesterday. But I do believe that more intelligent national introspection would have been more productive glib sloganeering.

It's easy to say 'Never forget."

It's not so easy to act in ways that don't propagate and extend hatred.

The best line I ever wrote.

Larchmont is a beautiful suburban community about 34 minutes by Metro North from New York's Grand Central Terminal. As its name indicates, on the lawns and open spaces are beautiful, old larch trees. There are lovely, large homes and rolling hills that meet the shimmering, if slightly polluted, waters of the Long Island Sound.

Somehow, for some reason (perhaps it was the private school tuition we had to pay for our two daughters) my wife got it in her head, her intransigent head, that we should find a house and move to Larchmont.

The very thought sickened me.

Nevertheless, I found myself in a realtor's BMW sedan and looking at homes within walking distance of the Larchmont train station. We stopped in front of one beautiful home built in the 1920s. "This is a four-bedroom," the realtor said, "with a finished basement and a detached garage."

And that's when my line came:

Larchmont. Where the garages are detached and so are the husbands.

Somehow, that line alone broke my wife.

We remained in the city.

The Testudo formation.

Today my producer and I shipped four television spots and have sent a longform web video to the proper site. The culmination of literally 15 months worth of work.

During those 15 months, I've written, along with some help from a handful of fellow creative colleagues, a lot of scripts.

Above is a picture of them all.

The Roman legions, many centuries ago, developed something called the Testudo formation. In it, legionnaires would interlock their shields and, in so doing, make themselves virtually impervious to enemy slings and arrows.



I suppose this was the forerunner to the modern-day tank or "armored personnel carrier."

Over the past 15 months, I've thought a lot about the Testudo formation. Many times, when you're dealing with client bullshit and agency bullshit, it feels like you are on the receiving end of a lot of missiles. You, or your work, are under siege.

During those times you have to hunker down and look for cover. And even if there's no one to form a Testudo with you, keep moving forward.

One thing.

Paul Krugman, the New York Times op-ed columnist, Princeton economics professor and Nobel Prize winner has a wonderful sentence in his column today that can be expanded to be about our business.

Krugman described Mitt Romney's jobs plan as "59 bullet points with nothing there."

So much of what we receive as briefs, so much of what we produce as decks, so much of what we create, air or digitize is similarly cluttered. Tales of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

Our job in advertising is a job of bringing clarity.
To make a case compelling.
To motivate.

Most advertising and most of the meetings around advertising are a rat's breakfast.

A decade ago I shot some unscripted spots with Tony Kaye. He and I, for two weeks, became best buddies. Before he would shoot someone he would get in my face, literally putting his nose within two inches of mine. He would stare me dead in the eyes and demand "what's the one thing you want to get?"

Kaye wouldn't even let me answer in a sentence. If I tried, he would repeat with more insistence and, even, fury "one thing."

I had to get it down to one word.

Not 59 bullets in search of a point.

---
BTW, the spots I shot with Tony Kaye, in the end, weren't great. That happens some times. But I learned a lot doing them.