Three times.

I've been dealing of late, in addition to a lot of work and a good amount of freelance, with some personal matters that are rapidly coming to an end. That is, someone I've known for my entire life is about to kick the ol' bucket and pass the pearly gates. Or, more likely, the gates to hell.

That's well and good and what will be will be. And, as Michael Corleone said in "The Godfather" of Hymen Roth, "he's been dying of that same heart attack for twenty years."

The person in question in my life has been dying her slow death for even longer. And now it looks like she's finally, after forty years, telling the truth.

Naturally I talked to my spiritual advisor, my therapist about this, my therapist whom I have been "married" to since 1996. I talked about the chasm between me and this person--about our lack of reconciliation as she approached her maker.

I have tried to make amends, I said. I spent my life trying to reconcile.

He replied with his usual Talmudic wisdom. "You ask forgiveness three times. That's what the Talmud says." So I've asked forgiveness from her for the sins I sinned in her eyes. I asked forgiveness from my old man who was guiltier than I'll ever be, so guilty that his guilt spread over me. And I ask forgiveness from a god I pray to but don't believe in.

I don't mean to go all Jewish on you. But asking forgiveness three times seems like the greatest extent of what we should do in our lives.

Ask clients to accept work--three times. And then let them bury themselves in mediocrity. Ask agencies to promote you--three times. And then leave and leave them to finding three people to replace you.

Ask three times.

That's enough.

Some thoughts on the Olympics.

On Friday evening, I heard an interesting interview on NPR with two Olympians--one a rower from the 1996 games and one a team handball player from the 2000 games--who both finished ninth in their sports. It came out that more than 80% of all Olympians don't win medals.

80% of some of the best athletes in the world go home empty-handed. So the question becomes, are those athletes losers, after all, they are not "award-winning."

Our current award-mania would make the man who finishes fourth to "Usainity," an anonymity. Someone not to be considered. A poor performer. He can run at, merely, 26.5 miles per hour, not at Bolt's 27 miles per hour.

I think about this also in terms of advertising. Despite all the work that people say sucks so bad, much work is really pretty good. Sure too much is shackled with saying too much. Sure you can sometimes smell the mendacity from miles away, but much of the work we see is pretty good. Or goes to build a business. Or define a brand.

Not all work can run a 9.58. Some work runs a 9.92.

That doesn't mean it sucks.

Much of what is wrong with our judgment of advertising comes from our judgment criteria. Not all brands are cool. Not all brands are universally known and so can get by with the slimmest allusion to what they actually do.

In fact, some commercials--and they will never win awards or echo through the blogosphere--are smart, informative, persuasive. They are not sexy, fast and notorious.

Today, qualities like smart, informative and persuasive make them also-rans.

200 years of 'the book is dead.'

Harvard English Professor, Leah Price, has a typically pointed essay in today's "Sunday Times Book Review." Like much of what appears in those oh-so-erudite pages, I almost always find something that wiggles its way into the world of advertising.

You can read Price's essay here and it's well-worth your effort: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/books/review/the-death-of-the-book-through-the-ages.html?src=twr My father was absent for most of my life, busy at work, away on business or waist-deep in his fifth martini and his eleventh secretary. But he still, somehow, drilled into my head that if you want to learn to write, you ought to read the "Times'" book reviews. I never thanked him, though I should have, for that.

Price's essay is about the death of the book. We can extrapolate from dying books to other dying media: television, print, radio (of course) and more.

She starts her essay by citing an article that ran two decades ago in the Book Review by Robert Coover called "The End of Books." Even in those more paper-friendly, pre-e-book times, Coover "questioned whether print could survive the age of video transmissions, cellular phones, fax machines, computer networks, and in particular out in the humming digitalized precincts of avant-garde computer hackers, cyberpunks and hyperspace freaks. Was the book as 'dead as God?"

Price jumps off from Coover and gives us a little "the book is dead" history.

In 1835, with the rise of newspapers Théophile Gautier’s had declared that “the newspaper is killing the book, as the book killed architecture.”

She cites similar predictions from H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Marshall McLuhan and others. Books would be replaced by all manner of science fiction.

Price says, "Every generation rewrites the book’s epitaph; all that changes is the whodunit."

Here's Price's money phrase, at least as far as I'm concerned: "In hindsight, we can see how rarely one technology supersedes another. Television didn’t kill radio any more than radio ended reading. Yet by 1927 a librarian could observe that “pessimistic defenders of the book . . . are wont to contrast the active process of reading with the lazy and passive contemplation of the screen or listening to wireless, and to prophesy the death of the book.” By 1966, in a Life magazine profile, Marshall McLuhan lumped books with other antiques: “clotheslines, seams in stockings, books and jobs — all are obsolete.”

Remember these words.

Yesterday I wrote about the runaway costs that come from having unclear direction and unsettled briefs. Today I want to talk about something even more pernicious, more dangerous and more expensive.

This waste of money is easy to understand though no one understands it. It is summed up by this simple phrase: Mediocrity is expensive.

Mediocrity is expensive.

In that millions are spent on work, on words, in efforts and speeches that no one will ever remember, act upon, or pass along.

Work that goes nowhere, says nothing and inspires no one.

Mediocre work often costs as much to produce as great work. It goes through as many if not more layers of approval. It plays just as frequently to applause from the "amen-chorus."

Yet it has no impact.

If you're concerned about money, as everyone claims to be, if you want more "bang for your buck," as everyone parrots, remember these words:

Mediocrity is expensive.

Measure twice.

We live in an age of penury. An impecunious era. In which every penny spent is examined and worried about and mourned as a loss.

Clients and agencies are constantly moaning about budgets, scope creep, allocations, SOWs and the like. Thousands of dollars are spent trying to save hundreds of dollars. When, truth be told, we can make this really simple.

If you've ever done a home-improvement project, you quickly learn the adage "Measure twice, cut once." That is, if you do your home work upfront, you have, ultimately, less work to do.

Virtually every assignment I get, from the largest to the smallest, is devoid of accurate "measurement," that is a proper, thoughtful, and approved brief. So, of course, what happens is we, as creators, flail about trying to make sense of the senseless. And then when we do, we often find out from the clients, that their objective of what they want from their communication has changed.

So, we go back to square one. We start "cutting" again.

And again.

And that's how costs get over-run. And agencies and creatives get the "rap" of being expensive.

Busy.

I've been busy of late, busy at work, preparatory to shooting a new television campaign. And busy writing speeches for various C-level executives of the client for which I toil.

Busy, I've found through 30 years of working, begets busy. Busy people know how to get things done, and like matter to a vacuum, busy sucks work toward itself.

The consequence, in short, of busy is more busy. And my freelance switchboard has been lighting up like a Christmas tree. In fact, if my freelance sustained at its current level, I might have to hire a freelancer to handle some of it. (That was a joke. I work hard for the work I get. It provides extras for my family, like maybe a car or a vacation. And most of the freelance I get is about 30% pro-bono, that is, I like the people or the project and I make my rates amenable to them.)

There's really not much point in my post this morning. Except to say this. If you're looking for work, don't tell people you're looking for work. Tell them how busy you are. And work will then, almost magically, find you.

A blog you should know.

My good friend Keith whom I've worked with at two different agencies, has fired up his typing fingers and begun a new blog.

I know.

You're already waist-deep in blogs.

Do you really need another one?

Yes.

Keith can write.

And think.

And make you laugh.

And he's some decades younger than me, and the Ad Contrarian, and George Parker
and Dave Trott.

He has a different way of sniffing out the world.

Spend some time with Keith.

You'll enjoy his company.

http://keithrbyrne.tumblr.com/

56 headlines.

Some days you need to be a machine.

Some days there's so much that just has to happen that you have to find a way to get it all done.

Don't think about the 37 things you need to do.

Think about the next thing you need to do.

Do that thing.

Then do the next thing again.

Somedays work is like that.

It's ok if it is.

And it's even better when your account people understand and appreciate how much you're doing. How simple you're making things. And how good and efficient you are.

Years ago I was handed a steaming pile of shit. For worldwide usage, the client needed seven alternative headlines for eight different products.

56 headlines in all. And of course, they had to be on brand. And good.

My account person, maybe the best I ever worked with asked me to write them. I had scheduled a personal trip to San Francisco and told her I'd write all 56 if the client paid my airfare. It was done and they were.

I guess there's a lesson in that.

When people go above and beyond go above and beyond in rewarding them.

Death of a.

One of the many maladies of modern day life is the absence of precision in speech. We have become, societally, expert at delusion. We major in memory loss.

My thoughts today, of course, are precipitated by our total lack recall on this the 67th Anniversary of the atomic-devicing of Nagasaki in which tens of thousands died literally in a flash.

We're too busy watching beach bikini volleyball to care.

In any event, here's Arthur Miller's final soliloquy from "Death of a Salesman."


LINDA: Forgive me, dear. I can’t cry. I don’t know what it is, I
can’t cry. I don’t understand it. Why did you ever do that? Help
me Willy, I can’t cry. It seems to me that you’re just on another
trip. I keep expecting you. Willy, dear, I can’t cry. Why did you
do it? I search and search and I search, and I can’t understand
it, Willy. I made the last payment on the house today. Today,
dear. And there’ll be nobody home. (A sob rises in her throat.)
We’re free and clear. (Sobbing more fully, released.) We’re free.
(Biff comes slowly toward her.) We’re free... We’re free...
(Biff lifts her to her feet and moves out up right with her in his arms.
Linda sobs quietly. Bernard and Charley come together and follow them,
followed by Happy. Only the music of the flute is left
on the darkening stage as over the house the hard towers of the
apartment buildings rise into sharp focus, and the curtain
falls.)

Some thoughts on hagiography.

Of the many ailments that afflict our business, perhaps this one is small scale. Like a cancer patient with a blister. It's painful, but it the great scheme of things, inconsequential.

I'm talking about the proclivity held by so many of glorifying--maybe even deifying people because they once created a cool campaign, came up with a great logo or won some piece of well-designed scrap iron.

We make people heroes, forgetting completely (or worse, never knowing or understanding) the F. Scott Fitzgerald quotation, "Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."

Hero worship whether its of a brand, a band, a creative director, a director, a baseball player or, beneath the guise of patriotism, a country, sickens me.

It is a view of the world through a defracted prism. It is a picture in a concave mirror. That is, it is un-real.

Years ago, I worked for a writer who was taught to believe in his own genius. He was a Hall-of-Famer. He had won more awards during a ten-year-period of the 60s and 70s than just about everyone else combined.

Now, ten years later, he had convinced himself that everything that sprang from his head was fully-formed and beautiful like Athena from Zeus.

There are people in all corners of all agencies who are fully-invested in their own genius, their own heroism. They believe because they were lavished by praise once, that all they create is praiseworthy.

(Speaking of Mitt Romney--who's penchant for wealth was given a boost by bestowals from his father who was President of American Motors and Governor of Michigan, they are people like George W. Bush, of whom someone said, "he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.")

My ex-boss--who was a hero to some--once said of people like this, "They have a Titanic attitude and a minnow in the engine room."

They are more show than go.

More talk than action.

Or as someone like Tommy Lee Jones might say, "all hat and no cattle."

I read an article last week about a baseball player who over the course of his 15 year career never scaled the highest heights. He's never led the league in anything but once a long while ago in games played. Yet when you look at the accumulation of what he accomplished over his span, it's impressive, perhaps more-so than that of his more illustrious peers.

Ah, you've heard it before.

It's not one sprint. It's a dozen marathons.