Measurement.

Yesterday I had one of those horribly enervating meetings. Not the kind that make you question why you persist in the industry. The kind that make you wonder why assisted suicide is illegal.

We were discussing, in all its glorious banality, an integrated campaign. How will we apply measurement to each of the channels we're in?

I kept saying we can't apply measurement until we know what each communication is meant to do. You cannot rate the efficiency of a garden hose if you think it exists to make a pie crust.

Yes, that's right, people kept jabbering. But how will we measure it?

It was a beautiful sunny day in New York yesterday. The previous months of humidity had dissipated and there was even a slight touch of autumn in the air. Even so, we went around and around like this for about three hours, talking about measurement when we don't know what we're measuring for.

We do so much, it seems to me, so much pseudo-science that's meant to bring us success. And all of that pseudo-science isn't, in the real world, worth a bucket of warm spit.

If you want your marketing to be successful, forget pseudo-science. And look to successful brands. Learn from what they do. Copy it. Do it.

And while we're on the subject of learning, learn this: Success costs money. There are very few brands and very few people who can get by on good looks alone.

Round heels.

Every once in a while, someone asks me why I read with such avidness, obituaries. They seem to think it's because I have some morbid fascination with death.

It's really not that. Every time I read an obituary, I find out something interesting--something about someone notable, or a little bit of information I hadn't heard before.

Yesterday, "The New York Times" ran an obituary of an Emmy Award-winning actor, William Windom. Windom won his Emmy for a short-lived TV series that ran for one season which was based on the words and pictures of James Thurber. He is probably best known for a Star Trek episode, "The Doomsday Machine," and for his role as the leading doctor in 50 episodes of "Murder, She Wrote."

All that is well and good but what really got me in Windom's obit was a quotation about enrolling in college and getting laid. Enrolling in Biarritz American University in France, Windom said “To be honest, I signed up because I thought it would be an easy touch and we had heard that actresses had round heels.”

I had never before head the phrase "round heels." It refers to a woman of lax morals. Her round heels make it easier for her to lie down and assume the position.

Some early advertising memories.

When I was 22 I worked for a short while on the Pabst Blue Ribbon beer account. This was back in 1980, decades before Pabst became the ironic hipster brew it has now become.

I'll admit, I can't quite accept doing things for ironic purposes except being ironic. I don't understand ironic clothing, ironic bicycles, ironic food and drink, ironic music, ironic tattoos.

I always drank beer based on one of four reasons. One, I liked the taste. Two, it was local in some place I wasn't and I wanted to try it. Three, it offered a cheap way to get drunk. Or four, I ordered something else and the waiter heard me wrong. (On Saturday night, I ordered a Peroni and got brought a Corona. The difference was too negligible to me to make a fuss.)

In any event, I was 22 and working on Pabst. Pabst at the time was about a dime less a six-pack than premium beers like Bud, Schlitz and Miller. It was a blue collar beer for, in the words of Sheldon Leonard, "guys who like to get drunk fast."

We had decided to do research--I guess today we would call it ethnographic, so we flew down, about six of us, including the CEO of the agency, to Chapel Hill, North Carolina to do it. Rather than sit in a sterile focus group facility, we would go to bars and drink with students from University of North Carolina, Duke or slightly further afield, NC State.

I was the ringer in the field, being the same age or younger than most of the kids.

I don't remember much about the evening except for two things or three. First, I got drunker than I had ever been in my life and I haven't been that drunk since. Second I was with the CEO of the agency who was also drunk as a skunk and made an ass of himself. Third, the CEO almost got us killed when he drove us to the hotel after our research and couldn't stay on his side of the double yellow.

Currently Pabst is the 18th best-selling beer in the US, up 16% year over year, selling $204 million of beer. Back in 1980, it was the number two brand in the US.

I'm not sure what any of this means, except this. Pabst will never be ironic to me. No matter how many hipsters wallow in their swill. And in the 32 years since that night I've had exactly one Pabst Blue Ribbon. And even that I couldn't finish.

--
BTW, the heavy-set black pianist in the opening of the above clip is the great "gut-bucket" barrelhouse impresario Meade "Lux" Lewis. He is wearing two-types of plaid, completely without irony.You could do worse for yourself than downloading some of his work.

Pushing a rock.

There are many diletantes in our business.

Summer soldiers.

Downhill runners.

Eat dessert first-ers.

These are the people who come in at 10:30. Take 30 minutes to get settled. And still find time for lunch.

Yet, they're always busy when work needs to be done.

Years ago when I ran tens of millions of dollars of business in my group, the bulk of which came from IBM, some sluggard who ostensibly worked for me had the temerity to tell me he didn't like technology.

Oh.

Then, apparently, you also don't like a paycheck.

Here's the thing.

Work is work.

It doesn't get handed to you on a silver platter.

Even on so-called "good" clients you have to bust your hump and your partner's and a few other miscellaneous humps to make work work.

Work never never never sells itself.

It's work.

Early mornings.

Late nights.

Day after non-working-from-home day.

The road to Hell is paved with great comps.

That will never be anything more than a great comp.

A note to the future.

I am here for a few simple reasons.

I take client problems and I figure out answers.

I take their complications and I simplify them.

Then I put those simple solutions in elegant, intelligent and emotionally moving communications that change the way people think or act.

I am not here to make decks.

Or be an ersatz consultant.

Or to wallow in office politics and HR bludgeoning.

I am a gifted writer and strategist.

I am not here to make powerpoints "read better."

I am not here to kiss asses.

Or hold hands.

I do what's more important.

I make good ads.

Old eyes.

I am in pre-production on a new set of spots for my client which will feature a well-known Academy Award winning actor.

Almost invariably people ask me what it's like working with this actor and how much he gets paid. When they hear his price, their response is usually, "He gets that much for eight-hours work?"

I've taken to answering this way. "It's not eight-hours work. It's 40-years of work that's earned him his money."

This, I think, is an important distinction.

We often excoriate corporations for thinking, not long-term, but quarter to quarter. But, of course, in our own lives and workplaces, we do the same.

We often choose to hire the team with five-years experience over the team with 25-years because they are less expensive. We fail to consider, I think, the depth of experience, insight, pragmatism and moderation that experienced hands can bring.

This is not to say, of course, that people with fewer years under their belt can't deliver the goods as well or even, sometimes, better than the oldsters. Just as a hot young director can on occasion out Pytka Pytka.

This is not meant to be a comparison between youth and age.

What it is meant to do is remind people that there are many ways to measure success. And there's value, at times, in having eyes on a project that have seen much of the world.

Epiphany.

It just occurred to me: we have two people doing the work and three people scheduling meetings to discuss the work.

Theory and practice.

For longer than I care to think about, a gaggle of very smart theorists in my agency have been divining something they call a "content strategy." This deck will somehow show my client how to create, curate and publish content that people will actually want to view and pass along.

Their deck was beautiful. And 90 pages long. About 25 pages longer than Hemingway's "Old Man in the Sea." Which was a great book and a great John Sturges movie starring Spencer Tracy.

Believe me, this deck, even if it were starring Spencer Tracy would not be interesting.

We presented the other day to the client. Who in their fear-fueled and coffee-addled way said, "we don't understand."

So, for the last two weeks we've attempted to cull a 90-page tome into 40 pointed pages.

Still no go.

Last night my partner created four pages of content. With compelling headlines, interesting pictures and an organizational structure that can make our work replicable.
Which is the point.

Which leads me to this. An ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory.

Yes, the New Yorker.

Thoughts on the letter R.

During one of the last broadcasts from the London Olympics, NBC aired a long paean to England during World War II. It was history for those who have no sense of history--who have read nothing, seen nothing and learnt nothing from the past.

The usual newsreel footage was shown. The goose-stepping Nazis. Christopher Wren's cathedral amidst the flames. The heroic RAF. The crackle of Churchill's voice on the BBC.

Toward the end of the piece, they showed the tombstone above in which the great man is interred. I had never seen it before and it struck me.

My mother's father--who came from the old country just before WWI and settled in ghetto-ized Philadelphia had been, among other things, a cutter of gravestones. This might have provided a living for my grandfather, his wife and his five kids (four girls and one boy--my mother the youngest) but he was too mercurial, too thirsty and too in the thrall of the Whore of Babylon.

He had genius in his hands. Genius that might have sculpted. Genius that might have carved great words in great buildings. But he was cosigned instead to tombstones. Small monuments to the small dead.

When I saw Churchill's stone, I was smitten--yes, that is the right word--by the curve of the "R" as it fairly embraces the following "C."

It seemed irreverent to me. Playful. Anti-establishment.

That R captured, it seemed to me, the essence of Churchill. A man who led history's greatest triumph of good over evil--and who then was booted out of office.

I don't know what went through the head of the stone carver when he carved CHURCHILL in that granite.

I do like to think my grandfather might have, nonetheless, done the same.