Two more bits on storytelling.

Billy Wilder, the great Austrian-American filmmaker won, I think, seven Academy Awards. He also had great movies in almost as many film genres, including film noir (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard), war (Five Graves to Cairo, Stalag 17), comedy (Some Like it Hot, The Apartment) and more. In short, he was quite a "storyteller."

Likewise, another of my favorites Preston Sturges was similarly acclaimed and prodigious. His string of eight movies in seven years from "The Great McGinty" to "Unfaithfully Yours" is an output that, I think will never be matched. He has four movies in the American Film Institute's Top 100 Comedies.

Anyhoo, as they say in the Midwest to my great disdain, here are Wilder's and Sturges' rules on storytelling.

BILLY WILDER

1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you’re going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then—that’s it. Don’t hang around.

PRESTON STURGES

1. A pretty girl is better than an ugly one.
2. A leg is better than an arm.
3. A bedroom is better than a living room.
4. An arrival is better than a departure.

5. A birth is better than a death.
6. A chase is better than a chat.
7. A dog is better than a landscape.
8. A kitten is better than a dog.
9. A baby is better than a kitten.
10. A kiss is better than a baby.
11. A pratfall is better than anything.

Storytelling.

A client came to me a few weeks ago. The executive leadership team of her company has, finally, realized that their company is bogged down by long, boring meetings and presentations. They have issued a four-page single-spaced email about storytelling, the need for and importance of.

They have asked my client to prepare a short presentation on the do's and don't's of storytelling.

In turn, she has turned to me for help.

Actually, she turned to me to "collaborate" with her. And then she disappeared.

Since I know I'll end up writing this presentation anyway, I figured I'd be better off doing it now rather than later. So I began late last night.

I think teaching storytelling to people who haven't a clue is like teaching people with no teeth how to have a great smile. You have to have a certain degree of empathy and humanity to tell a story. You have to care about what your audience thinks. You have to allow them to think. You have to also have a bit of the risk taker in you. Otherwise, you're not telling a story, you're reading instructions.

My client's told me she ordered from Amazon a few dozen books about storytelling because she is looking for a framework that her audience could understand. I started looking at the blurbs on some of these books and decided that anyone who writes a book on storytelling isn't a storyteller. Also, anyone who says they're a storyteller, or a digital storyteller, or an UX storyteller, or an application storyteller is a fraud and a charlatan.

Storytelling is just the latest phrase that pays. It's as prevalent in business today as the question, "what would Jobs do?"

In any event it occurred to me that an advertising framework, AIDA, is probably all you need remember.

Get your audience's ATTENTION.
Keep your audience's INTEREST.
Inflame their ardent DESIRE.
Impel your audience to ACTION.

I know AIDA is old-fashioned and from the Mad Man era, but I'm sticking with it.

There's one other thing. I've pasted above a page from two-time Pulitzer-winner John Updike's novel "Couples."

Storytelling, even if you're a master like John Updike, takes work.

Something most people just hate to do.

True story.

Shamokin, PA.

When I was in college I had a friend down the hall who came from Anthracite coal country in Central Pennsylvania. One Thanksgiving break we drove down to his hometown, Shamokin, PA to spend the holiday with his family.

Driving there had its beauty. The mountains, the brooks, the deeply wooded forests. There were scarcely any cars on the road, which was good, because the roads themselves, winding through the hills were barely two car's-width wide. Every once in a while, you'd round a bend and see an abandoned mine or a water-filled quarry, remnants of a more vibrant past. But nothing prepared me for Shamokin proper.

Shamokin's population had peaked before the Great Depression at just over 21,000. When I visited in the mid-70s, it was half that. Today, the population has been declining for nine decades and it's just over 7,000. Now that mining is gone, the poverty rate is about one in four.

The bulk of the houses in the village were situated on its main road. The road itself was built over the mine and the town didn't stray far from the seam. The road and the houses alongside it were all leaning to one-side or the other. The entire town was rickety. As the roof of the mine moved, so moved the aspect of the houses above.

At the end of the main road was a giant hill of slag--the detritus of the mines. It loomed over the town like my borderline mother loomed over my childhood.

My friend's parent's house was among the best in town. His father had advanced in the mining company to become an accountant. He and his children had escaped the pit. Still, the house was a far cry from suburban New York where I cut my teeth.

Today this area is a tourist destination of sorts, for All Terrain Vehicle enthusiasts and mountain bikers. The waste mountains the miners left behind are now recreation.

In 1884, "The New York Times" reported on a mine disaster in the town that killed four miners. Ten miners were killed in a 1893 explosion and cave-in. One died after being buried for seven hours in 1898. And three died in a 1964 disaster.

There are worse things in the world than to be in advertising. Where we work without fear of death.

Usually.

A Saturday laugh.

From an illustrator named Grant Snider on the back page of "The New York Times Book Review."

Why do we do it: A response to Bukes.

Bukes asked, in response to a somewhat dour previous post, why we continue to toil in the fleshpots of metaphorical Madison Avenue.

Well, Bukes, I am old and I think you are young. So maybe my answers won’t apply to you. Nevertheless, I will do what I can to provide “illumination.”

We work—for idiots, inside of idiot systems—because there’s a natural human want to overcome things. None of us, even those who were born with a lot, have all the cards handed to us. Work is what we do to get more of those cards.

It’s how we provide.

How we are provided for.

How we prove ourselves.

How we define ourselves.

How we create.

How we think.

How we battle.

Make friends.

How we find laughter.

How we find ourselves.

Work is a place to go.

Work is people to be with.

Work is problems to solve.

Work is a force that gives us meaning.

Work has never been about pure and unvarnished happiness and fulfillment. In fact, true happiness comes not from accomplishment but in the struggle for accomplishment.

The fight.

Which means the losses.

Are as important as the wins.

Rare as they are.

Work isn’t something you should look at every day.

It’s something you should look at from a year’s distance.

Or a week’s.

Or five year’s.

Or in my case, 25 year’s.

What have you learned?

Who have you loved?

Who have you helped?
Who’s helped you?

What have you made?

What have you done?

These aren’t simple answers.

And the best laid plans of mice and copywriters are often skewered by the

petty,

the stupid,

the ego-driven,

the economy.

But that’s the point.

Who you become, who you are, is based on how you handle the downs.

How you take the hits.

How you keep on keeping on.

Work is worth it every day,

even those days when it’s not worth it.

Because work, if you’re working at it,

is what makes you a better person.

An email from Cassandra.

While I was wallowing in the nostalgia an email (below) came in from a dear friend of mine. Cassandra, by the way, was a Trojan seer-ess who could tell the future but no one would believe her.

George,

today the only thing that really matters is technology.

And stuff that has little to do with the actual work.

The ideas, the creative work, the stuff that connects, communication is the stuff that we're supposed to give away for free. Discussing it in meetings is what agencies get paid for. Not the quality of the work.

That's why everyone can and do have an opinion about the creative work. 

An opinion about concepts and ideas, the words, the lay-out, the typography, the size of the logo, what not. 

But nobody has an opinion about the plumbing. Because that's the mysterious dark forest today. 

So it's perfectly fine to work forever and charge thereafter for that sort of basics. Stuff that means nothing if there's no message. In general clients seem to accept paying plenty for a lot of fluff but nothing for the actual work. 

Paying for hordes of people sitting around talking BS (at best) seems to be fine. Useless decks are discussed in eternity. And then, when after endless discussions and useless pseudo scientific testing shit has gone on, costing a lot of money, the work is finally to be proceed.

Then every cost that might positively affect the product is discussed and questioned. It's hell to be on the creative side in today's advertising world. The only people who actually produce anything of value are the ones valued least. We never ever get to produce what we really think is right. We have to bend and follow a whole bunch of self important hacks and idiots. That is, if we have a job at all of course.

The era of Ed McCabe, Lois, etc. is gone. There are NO leading creative voices in todays ad world. The stars of our time are relegated to be stars among other creatives only, relegated to the fame of the awards, not business success.

Also. Computer technology has made the creative people terribly efficient. We can produce entire campaigns in a few hours. Almost ready to run. The amount of comps and sketches and halfcooked cap we produce today are hundredfold compared to 30 years ago when we sat shown for days to THINK before we started to look for pictures.

So there are fewer and fewer of us in proportion to the talkers and pretenders that populate our meeting rooms.

The real reason for all those meetings is that most of the people in the room do nothing productive in between the meetings. The meetings are their job. And we're prisoners in it.

Old times.

Last night I did something I rarely do. According to my psycho therapist (two words) I don't do it often enough. That is, I went out with old friends and bent my elbow.

These were old advertising friends, people I worked with from 1990 to 1995 when I was plying the well-lit, well-designed, hall-of-fame hallways of the now defunct Ally & Gargano.

There were four of us there including me and I was, as is usual for me, odd man out. They were key creatives and account on the Dunkin' Donuts business, an account I touched only tangentially, because I was the creative lead on The Bank of New York business.

Nonetheless, I did a fair amount of work on Dunkin' and because I am quick-witted and know virtually every joke that's ever been uttered my brand of humor (such as it is) matched the tonality of Dunkin' Donuts in those days and I was welcomed into the fold.

In many ways, these years around 20 years ago were the most productive of my career. I rose in those five years from copywriter to Senior Vice President, Group Creative Head. And because I got in early and stayed late I got an enormous amount of good work produced and became invaluable to the agency.

I left the place 17 years ago on Sunday and they closed about four months later.

One of the people at dinner had been the Group Creative Director on Dunkin'. He is still marginally in the industry. The schticky sort of work he was best at has fallen out of favor and his style has come be regarded as too old to cut the mustard. He is now making a living freelancing at health care agencies.

Shelley, who was an account sup has left the business altogether. She's near 70 and near retirement, working as the office manager for a psychiatrist in Long Beach.

And Susan, a hard-as-nails Management Sup, now works in audio branding for Elias Music. She reminds me of one of those old supply sergeants in black and white war movies. She can find anything, arrange anything, get anything done.

As Paul Simon wrote many years ago, "And we talked about some old times/And we drank ourselves some beers/ Still crazy after all these years."
  
This is not a kind industry in so many ways. It hasn't treated my friends with much grace. And Ally & Gargano, a place that had been so good and so strong, in many ways lost out to greed and macro forces that made it hard for mid-sized shops to survive.

That said, there are people in our industry who make life and the world a little better. 
  

Interaction design.

I must say I have no love for the "discipline" of interaction design. In my myopic view interaction design is like plumbing. You only notice it when it's broken. Even when it's exemplary, I can hardly imagine gushing over it. I've yet to say during my 54 years "Wow, that was one amazing toilet flush."

One thing I know about information architecture I learned over 40 years ago. I think I might be the last inhabitant on this planet who knows it. But I still believe it, though I seldom any longer see it applied.

My father made me take speed reading courses when I was younger. It's something I've found so valuable--and I knew even as a pre-teen how valuable it would be--that I never for a moment regretted taking speed reading or having taken it.

I was good at speed reading, quickly reaching bursts of 3,000 words per minute and a sustained rate of 1,200 wpm. That's roughly six book-sized pages in a minute. With 75% recall.

During my first lesson, the teacher brought out "The Wall Street Journal." At the time the paper had eight columns across and very few visual interruptions. The teacher explained that newspapers were designed so that they could be read quickly. You could read down a column in a newspaper and your eyes didn't need to scan from left to right. You could read unimpeded right down the page, in other words.

Column width was created for a reason. There was purposeful interaction design behind it.

Today of course we set type based on aesthetics not functionality. We make things hard to read either because we inherently believe what we've written is unimportant or we don't know better or both.

I guess I don't mind, really, interaction design.

What I really don't like is blowhards who don't know what they're doing and shroud their ignorance in a lexicon that makes mysterious that which should be logical and simple.

The smells of New York.

This morning was one of those perfect Spring days that occur all too rarely. There was a bit of bite still in the air, a fair breeze and a light blue sky punctuated by billows.

As I do on Thursday mornings, I walked across Central Park, from East to West and tried to focus on the world without the ever-encroaching bullshit of work. These days I suspect Cindy Crawford could walk naked in front of most people and they would barely look up from their handhelds. The world--in the form of ever-present screens--is too much with us.

This morning there was the pink aroma of flowers and blooming trees in the park. Smells are odd in the city. They are seldom subtle. They have to be strong to be noticed. A thousand pounds of garlic being wok-fried at Szechuan kitchen. The greasy smell of asphalt and tar being laid. The acrid stench of hotdogs and horse shit down by the Plaza.

But today, we had flowers.

When my brother was a teenager, he had a summer job as a toll collector in the Bronx not far from the Stella D'Oro bakeries. There he would make his change and collect his quarters and smell their anisette cookies, their bread sticks and their various biscotti. The smell of the ancient factory permeated the Kingsbridge neighborhood.

Those smells are gone now. The big Stella D'Oro sign that towered over the Major Deegan Expressway has been painted over. The bakery was sold to various conglomerates through the years and eventually the Bronx plant was closed and operations were moved to Jersey.

There was quite a lot of rancor when Stella D'Oro closed. Union workers in the Bronx being replaced by non-union workers in Jersey.

The landscape when I was growing up was dotted with Stella D'Oro trucks. And the air-waves were rife with radio commercials with the lilting Stella D'Oro jingle. "There's a place in your day for Stella D'Oro."

That's all gone now.

Like a pleasant smell blown away by the wind.

Legs, see Field Hockey.

When I was about 13 I was blessed with an English teacher who taught me a lot. Truth be told, however, I didn't realize what he taught me until about 20 or 30 years later.

I forget what we were reading, it might have been something from Dylan Thomas' "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog." Or it might have been John Updike. Whatever the story, my teacher spent about a full week talking about a single sentence, one that described a young girl as having "field hockey legs."

Maybe there was a bit of Humbert Humbert in my teacher. But somehow between his near-obsession with the phrase and the actual "field hockey legs" of some of my distaff school mates, the words stuck with me.

More important what stuck with me is the drama of perfect language.

Every now and again I have to write something that isn't merely a stringing together of copy points with artful conjunctions and transitions.

I always hold what it is I am writing to field hockey legs.