Rediscovering your voice.

Of late I have had what seems like dozens of meetings with clients and agency colleagues where we've spoken about things like content strategy (that's content, as in table of) and storytelling. I find these discussions as close to excruciating as home lasik surgery. Painful, dangerous, and unproductive.


Last night I opened a pdf I have carted around for a decade. It is an IBM annual report from 2002 and it features about 40 pages under the heading called "16 Decisions that Transformed IBM."


What some people feel about Apple, I feel about IBM. Like me, IBM ain't flashy. But they're there when it matters, doing the heavy often anonymous lifting that needs to be lifted.


About three-quarters of the way through this document there's a page that speaks to me. I wish it spoke to more people. It's titled "We Found Our Voice." Here's the copy: 

"We recaptured something we’d lost—our ability to engage our customers and our industry in a meaningful conversation about what matters to us, and to them. 


"This wasn’t about cranking up the volume, issuing more press releases, or producing memorable TV commercials. It was about rediscovering our confidence and articulating what we believe. Things like: 


• we are entering a post-pc era.
• the dot-coms are fireflies before the storm. 
• the winners in this industry will do one of two things: innovate or integrate. 


"When we rediscovered our voice, we discovered something else: our sense of direction, the courage to stand apart from the crowd and, ultimately, what it means to speak out like a leader again."


If you care about communications, please spend careful attention to that last sentence. 


There's a lot of bullshit that pummels our industry like asteroids hitting a forgotten moon. What really matters, however, is very simple. Speaking plainly, clearly, memorably and actionably.

Simply communicate simply.

When I was young in the business I adopted a simple process. When I was given a brief--yes, we were given briefs in those days and they didn't take a month to write--I would take that brief and work at it for hours.

After those hours I was able to distill the brief down to one short, clauseless sentence. Not a 37 word sentence. A short, honest sentence. My partner and I then had something workable to work from. The only thing left to do that point was to take that single sentence and find a way to be creative with it.

This seems to me to be the way to communicate nearly anything. And has been the way to do so since we wrote on clay tablets or before.

1) Take in information. 2) Figure out what's important. 3) Say it in an interesting and memorable way.

1) I can talk to you about things I've never spoken to anyone about. 2) You are the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. 3) I love you.

If you can't say it simply, don't say it at all.

Shut up.

Yesterday I had one of the worst days in a career marked by hundreds, if not thousands of worst days. I was forced to sit in perpetual meetings about work I will ultimately have to do populated by people who mouthed words that were almost completely devoid of meaning.

In one, a planner-type kept talking--endlessly talking--about doing things for one brand based on something a brand from a completely different category, with a completely different place in the market was able to do. It was like hearing someone talk about selling bicycle tires based upon the taste of Wheat Thins.

In another meeting twelve or so people on various phone connections across the country miscommunicated about something called a content strategy. I heard about editorial calendars. I heard about content creators. Until I spoke I heard nothing about consumers and what would interest them.

I read briefs, emails and comments from people and I might as well be reading Swahili, a language I do not comprehend. To wit, this note based on a simple solution that I proposed. "The only problem I see here is that these sorts of journeys (specifically on the consumer and client side [not treated in the attachment but anyway]) bump up against the content syndication model's consumer/client journey. The question is: do we accept the content syndication model as the roadmap (for lack of a better term) for the journey."

I have always known that the world can be divided, simply and decisively, in two. There are simplifiers. And complicators.

Bob Hoffman, that sage Ad Contrarian, has written about this better than I can. http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2010/02/age-of-complicator-part-1.html 

Pause.

I have just now happened across an interview with Milton Glaser, probably the world's foremost graphic designer and someone I had the absolute pleasure of working with for about a week one year or so ago. You can read the interview here: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/04/milton-glaser-21-questions.html But here's the question and answer I really liked:

In one sentence, what do you actually do all day in your job? 
"I sit around pushing pieces of paper until they look right. "

In fact, I don't want to write about complications any more.

I just want complication to be over.

Advertising lessons from Daniel Defoe.

Over 300 years ago in 1703, Daniel Defoe was--as he was so often in his life--in deep shit. He was not only a bankrupt, he was also a dissenter. Both positions led to pretty severe punishment.

But Defoe didn't take things lying down. Before he was to be pilloried for his religious beliefs (or disbeliefs) he wrote and distributed a broadsheet poem, "A Hymn to the Pillory." It should be said here that being in the stocks was no picnic. Defoe feared it more than he feared prison time in London's notorious Newgate prison.

While you were in the stocks, people would abuse you. They would throw rocks, fruit and other projectiles. They would beat and mock you. And your reputation, once having been cosigned to the pillory was ruined.

His "A Hymn to the Pillory" instead made Defoe a hero. People rallied to him. He wasn't heckled and abused, he was praised and exalted.

Katherine Frank, author of "Crusoe" describes it this way--a way that has bearing to our industry. "The moral of "A Hymn to Pillory"--and indeed of the pillory episode in Defoe's life--was that the Ingenious inherit the Earth. Survivors are those who create in the face of all the dark forces that seek to destroy them--those who, like Defoe, are resourceful, determined and patient. They ride out the roughest storms. They make it to land and, once there, they patiently and creatively make a paradise out of desolate exile, a kingdom out of their captivity."

It seems to me that Defoe presents an example to live by. Use the power of words, the power of your point of view, the power of satire, humor and irony to overcome hardship.

This is what we must do at work and in our work.

You can learn a lot from what happened 300 years ago.

A quiet Sunday in Manhattan.

In contrast to much of the weather we've had in Manhattan since the beginning of April, today was cold with temperatures in the 40s and 50s and wet. The forecast deluge--they were predicting three inches of rain and 45 mph winds--hasn't as yet occurred but nonetheless it was a lazy day. 

By the time my wife and I got home from our run and 20 minutes on the stationary bike,  we had very nearly beaten the rain, I had decided it was a day to read all dozen or so sections of "The New York Times," to listen to some classical music on the radio and to rest my size-12 slippered feet up on the ottoman. It's not a bad way to spend a rainy Sunday--a good recovery from the noise of the week.

Around three I zipped up my Mackintosh and walked to a little barber shop in my neighborhood. It's a small shop with an Italian name but it's run by two Jewish men who emigrated from Russia when the Soviet Union broke up. Jacob, the owner, was a dentist in the old country, but here he is cosigned to snipping and clipping. He has through such efforts put his son through pharmacy school and his daughter is on her way to becoming a nurse. An impressive American tale.

My leonine mane had gotten a bit unwieldy and I hadn't shaved since Friday morning--and I was feeling a little blue, so I asked for the works. First Jacob got my hair in shape. Weed-whacking my gray until it was corporately acceptable.

Then he inclined the chair way back, rubbed some eucalyptus salve on my whiskers and wrapped me in a succession of towels each one hotter than the last. After about ten minutes, he took his straight edge and, as we say in the hood, "cleaned me up good." With one more hot towel, and a light sprinkling of Pinaud's Clubman aftershave, I was ready once again--fortified--to face the world.

Getting an old-fashioned shave and a haircut from an old-fashioned barber is one of the sublime little pleasures of life.  If you're an old-film nut like myself, your mind goes back to Johnny Rocco in "Key Largo," or any number of 1930s film mugs who got plugged while wrapped in a towel.

It cost me--with tip--$60 for the works. A small price to pay for time away from the world and a trip faraway.

Looking forward by looking backward.

In today's "New York Times" there are two separate articles that I think are important harbingers that something is rotten in the digital world. While digitally-driven companies like Google and Facebook claim they want to change the world--that kind of hubris is in their very mission statements--they don't seem to realize that real human intercourse will never be replaced by binary code or 140-character tweets.

As I mentioned in a previous post, travel agents, all-but-obsolete travel agents, are making a come-back. Also in the paper today is an op-ed by a psychologist and professor at M.I.T. called Sherry Turkle. Turkle's article is called "The Flight from Conversation," and it's about, in broad terms, modern-day man's inability to connect with other people. Turkle's article starts this way, "We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection." You can read the well-worthwhile article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-conversation.html?hp

Turkle's point is a simple one. We have millions of ways to connect, but few ways to really make connection. She says, "At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates..."

What Turkle suggests is this, "Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters."

 :-( My dog ran away, my wife is having an affair and my dad has cancer.

Here's some more Turkle: "We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely. 

"I am a partisan for conversation. To make room for it, I see some first, deliberate steps. At home, we can create sacred spaces: the kitchen, the dining room. We can make our cars “device-free zones.” We can demonstrate the value of conversation to our children. And we can do the same thing at work. There we are so busy communicating that we often don’t have time to talk to one another about what really matters."

I think at some point more people will realize that community--real community, not a Facebook group, and people, real people, matter. All human contact cannot be digitized. Such technology might be changing the world, but perhaps not for the better.

Many exponents of new media think that anything new changes everything old. But much of what is old is hard-wired into us. The touch of a loved one. A dewy-eyed look of understanding.  A sign. A real laugh not an LOL.

In other words, a kiss is still a kiss/a sigh is just a sigh/ the fundamental things apply/ as time goes by.

People need people.

There's a notion in the world that people are no longer necessary. Because we have machines--smart and facile machines--we can take people, who are costly and who on occasion take time off, out of the equation.

You see evidence of this belief everywhere you go. In Manhattan, big box stores operate seemingly without people. I walked out of a Bed, Bath and Beyond with a $14.99 shower curtain without paying because no sales help was manning the cash register.

This people-less future notion is rampant in digital agencies and among futurists. People, they espouse are too expensive. Face-to-face meetings or sales are costly and time consuming. You can replace all those interactions with machinery, software and binary code. Or there's an app for that.

We seem to have all but eliminated factory workers from our factories and farmers from our farms.

The problem with the peopleless future is that earth is still peopled by people. And we all need something do. We also need--even misanthropes like I need--people to interact with.

Just now I read an article in "The New York Times" that travel agents are making a comeback. "...nearly one in three leisure agencies is hiring, according to PhoCusWright, a travel research firm. And in 2011 travel agencies experienced a second consecutive year of growth; their bookings account for a third of the $284 billion United States travel market."

One traveler who uses a travel agent said  “I needed recommendations and someone to steer me in the right direction...There are so many [options]... with every site displaying beautiful pictures and tantalizing offers, it can be overwhelming. I wanted somebody from a reputable agency who could say yes, you’ll enjoy this stay.”

Those seem like basic people needs. Needs that appear to be un-meetable by software alone.
All this makes me think. Maybe DIY--do it yourself--is over done. Not DOA but not the cure for all business ills.

People need people.

They need a throat to choke. Or a hand to hold. Or someone to trust.

Just now I listened to Peggy Lee sing her sultry version of "Black Coffee." There's a line in the song, "Love's a hand-me-down broom."

No software will ever be able to write anything so good.

Partnerships.

Today on my way in I listened to two pieces of music that got me thinking about the nature of creative partnerships.

The first was a 7:17 minute piece from an album called "Mulligan Meets Monk" featuring of course Gerry Mulligan and Thelonious Monk playing a song called "Sweet and Lovely." The second was a piece of music from an Atlantic Ray Charles album called "Pure Genius." This is a recording of a rehearsal session of "Losing Hand" with a dialogue between Charles and his arranger, producer, partner, the great Quincy Jones.

Let's start by saying that I regard all four of the people mentioned above to be in possession of genius. And I think they each regarded their partners as possessing genius as well.

Mulligan and Monk play together, they rise in melody and harmony, but they also battle. At times what they play seems to fight. Monk hitting broken chords while Mulligan is sweet and sad. At other times, the roles are altered. Monk is playful, almost childlike while Mulligan is delirious, dissonant and atonal. Their relationship through this 7 minute piece is strained, tense, periodically combative but ultimately positive. They don't agree on everything--but they come through with the goods.

Charles and Jones have a different relationship. Jones puts his brilliance on the back burner and defers almost wholly to the surpassing genius of Charles. This might be somewhat like the famous line about the brilliant mathematician Johnnie Von Neumann: "There are three branches of math. Applied. Pure. And Johnnie Von Neumann."

Jones in this cut is extolling the Charles branch of music.

If you spend the $1.29 and listen to this track you'll hear Jones feeding Charles his lines. You'll hear Charles wrestle with them and then with his demons. Then you'll hear the lines soar with the pain of life, loss and love.

This cut is all about Charles. But Charles is Charles because Jones is Jones.

Each scenario I think can be extrapolated to be about advertising partnerships, whether they're the traditional art-director/copywriter partnership or account/creative or agency/client.

Find a way to push and pull, to play off one another. Find a way to fight amiably and productively. Find a way to serve a surpassing idea or talent.

Doing so makes great.

PS. I couldn't find a You Tube recording of the Charles/Jones rehearsal. So what's posted above is just Charles. With Jones' reverb.

Ego-deficit disorder.

I had dinner tonight with some engaging and interesting people who happen to be clients.

I don't often go out with clients. In fact, this might be one of only two or three times in my career that I've gone out with clients without having an account person around to keep me from poking my eyes out with my fish fork. But tonight I went solo. And guess what? I not only survived, I had a decent time.

About half-way through dinner a thought started playing in my head. I'll try to work that thought out in front you--so bear with me.

There are two kinds of rewards we can get from work. One are the intrinsic rewards that derive from you knowing you have done your best and made a difference. The second are extrinsic rewards. These are rewards and awards that come from outside.

It seems to me that people who are satisfied by intrinsic rewards have an emotional sense of self, a confidence that allows them to analyze the validity of the job they've done and appreciate the effort they've expended. The satisfaction they feel comes from within. They don't need others to praise them. The praise they give themselves has enough heft.

People who satisfied by extrinsic rewards are, I think, less sure of themselves. They need their boss to applaud them. They need a cheap metallic artifact on their desk. They need laudatory loudness. They need their egos nourished by the outside because they can't feed their ego themselves.

If I had to go all macro on you, I'd say that too many people have been brought up who are constantly seeking praise. From childhood--when they needed to see their drawings hung on the refrigerator till today when they need to see their work gushed over.

This constant exaltation--from child childhood to adult childhood--has left many of us with out an internal praise-giving resource. This is an ego-deficit disorder. And is the reason behind our current mania for rating things with awards, stars, thumbs up and other sundry banalities.

Robinson Crusoe on Advertisng.

I get a lot of calls--mostly by email--from friends of mine who seem to be unhappily wallowing in some advertising job or another. They turn to me for advice or a soft shoulder. I suppose because I have nearly 30 years in the business and over 30 years in fairly intense therapy.

Last night I began reading a book called "Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth" by Katherine Frank. Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" is not only widely regarded as the first novel ever written, it has also remained popular and influential since it was initially published in 1719--almost 300 years.

One of the things Frank points out is that the survivors in survivor tales like "Robinson Crusoe" react to their condition in one of three ways. One: They despair and sink deep into gloom and inertia. Two: They are educated by and adjust their belief system and living styles to their new environment. Three: They attempt to reconfigure their new environment to look and behave like their old environment.

I think we in the agency business have the same three options in our work life--really two if you count out depression. We can sink into despair when facing a shitty environment. We can cower and turn off. We can embrace our environment and make things "work." Or we can attempt to alter the agencies in which we toil.

Crusoe, of course, turned his desert island into a small, rustic replica of 18th Century England. He recreated his own world--one he was comfortable in--off the shores of the Orinoco. We can, further, debate which is the right course of action: despair, adjust or reshape. And each response depends on your personal strength and the agency you work in.

Depression, inertia is never a good choice. But as to the other two, molding yourself or molding your environment, you have to have to take a long hard look. Are their people to learn from. Is there honesty and integrity? Is there a willingness on the part of the agency to learn?

These are the tough questions I believe smart people have to ask themselves every day. And I don't have an answer here. The fact is, I've made as many smart career decisions as dumb ones. Or better, a smart decision is usually 51% smart and 49% dumb. Whereas a dumb decision is usually 51% dumb and 49% smart.

I guess, in sum, it's not the decisions you make as much as how you grow having made them. I'm making less money--substantially less money--than I made six years ago but I suppose I am happier.

Of course, I've had 12 jobs in 28 years.

Maybe I'm the last one who should be giving advice.