Brevity.

Over the past two months I have conceived, written, produced and shipped nine commercials for two separate clients.

I am not pro any one medium over another.

But there's one thing I'll say in favor of TV over perhaps anything else.

You have to, quickly, in 15-seconds or 30, get attention, communicate something, and persuade.

To be successful you have to embrace brevity.

You have to be scrupulously reductive.

Taking everything out.

These are disciplines that are lacking in much of today's world. Yes, I know Twitter only gives you 140 characters. But that's a different kettle of fish.

When I was young in the business, I was often stuck.

I felt I had no ideas, no way to solve the brief I was assigned.

Often what I did was write.

And write.

And write.

Doing so allowed me to focus.

To start wide and then narrow.

Narrow down to a single sentence.

That usually became my headline or a tagline.

The discipline of brevity is a discipline there's too little of.

My advice?

Work long hours making things short.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams, 1925-2013.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams died on Monday. She was 87. And you can read her obituary here:obituary

She was the daughter of arch-racist Strom Thurmond--America's longest-serving Senator at the time of his death--and the Thurmond family's maid. The maid, Ms. Washington-Williams' mother was 15 when she gave birth.

He rewarded her, through intermediaries, $200. I assume for services rendered.

In 1948, Ms. Washington-Williams' mother died and Strom Thurmond, then Governor of South Carolina, ran for President as a "Dixiecrat." He carried five states and won more than one-million votes. He said at the time “All the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes...”

I like reading stories like this. 

Stories of colossal hypocrisy and sin.

They make me think advertising isn't so bad.

I need work.

I like to kick back as much as the next guy.

In the patois of today, I'll even take a moment or two to chillax.

But I need work.

I need to be busy.

I need to be thinking.

I need to be doing.

I need to be juggling assignments.

I need to be challenged.

I need to have a knot to untie.

It's not all noble.

I need to compete against others.

I need to find the answers sooner.

And better.

I need to win.

To surpass.

To win.

That's what work does.

That's what it's done since we were living in caves and hunting mammoths in groups. There was always one cro-mangon who led the way.

Work can be nasty.

It can certainly be unfair and petty.

Like life.

Because, after all, it's just like life.

But like life, what's the alternative?

Summer Soldiers.

Of all the types there are to dislike in our business--and there are many, I've decided I like Summer Soldiers the least.

I despise them more than I despise the bullies.

I despise them more than I despise the do-nothings.

I despise them more than I despise the blow-hards.

And the jargonistas.

And the know-it-alls.

And the haters of advertising.

And the ignorers of facts.

And the doyens of data.

Summer Soldiers are the types that are all over an assignment when the sailing is smooth, when the living is easy. They're the first to disappear, to meld into the forest, to show up missing, when the work gets hard. When the edit isn't working. When you're staring at disasters.

Summer Soldiers evaporate when the going gets tough.

Then, when the corner is turned, when sweat and toil and determination prevail and the work begins to work--there they are, triumphant, vain and glowing.

They've returned.

They're there.

There's credit to be grabbed.

Every assignment, or nearly every one, has an arc.

And most often part of the arc is that moment of terror when things seem to have taken a turn for the worse.

I've found that that's when the real work begins.

The ingenuity. The elbow-grease. The client modulation.

Those are the moments creatives show their true colors.

That's when you need to come through.

That's when it's apparent how different the real world is from ad school.

You can't just wash your hands and go onto something new.

You have to work.

And that means showing up.

A writer.

Joseph Mitchell worked as a writer at "The New Yorker" from 1938 when he was hired, until 1996 when he died.

He published hundreds of pieces, many of which were collected in book form in "Up in the Old Hotel," "McSorley's Wonderful Saloon" and other volumes. Copies of these great books are widely available. You can probably pick them up for a dollar or two (plus shipping) on abebooks.com

Mitchell is also famous for his 32 years of writer's block.

He didn't publish anything from 1964 until his death, though he regularly showed up at his office at "The New Yorker."

Just yesterday, my copy of the magazine arrived in my mailbox and there it was, something previously unpublished by Mitchell.

This is like finding a never-before-seen Caravaggio or an unheard etude by Beethoven.

Here's what the magazine had to say about the piece.

"What follows here is the initial chapter of a planned memoir that Mitchell started in the late sixties and early seventies but, as with other writings after 1964, never completed."

You can buy the magazine for $6.95 and read the story.

Here's the bit of it I liked the most. A rumination on aging, I think.

"Because of all this sort of thing, and because of other and perhaps far more interesting things that I will mention later, I used to feel very much at home in New York City. I wasn't born here, I wasn't a native, but I might as well have been: I belonged here. Several years ago, however, I began to be oppressed by a feeling that New York City had gone past me and that I didn't belong here anymore. I sometimes went on from that to a feeling that I never had belonged here, and that could be especially painful. At first, these feelings were vague and sporadic, but they gradually became more definite and quite frequent. Ever since I came to New York City, I have been going back to North Carolina for a visit once or twice a year, and now I began going back more often and staying longer. At one point, after a visit of a month and a half, I had about made up my mind to stay down there for good, and then I began to be oppressed by a feeling that things had gone past me in North Carolina also, and that I didn't belong down there anymore, either. I began to feel painfully out of place wherever I was. When I was in New York City, I was often homesick for North Carolina; when I was in North Carolina, I was often homesick for New York City. Then, one Saturday afternoon,while I was walking around the ruins of Washington Market, something happened to me that led me, step by step, out of my depression. A change took place in me. And that is what I want to tell about."

Ratings agencies rating agencies.

Of the myriad reasons behind the world-wide economic collapse that began in late 2007 and continues to this day, the complicity of ratings agencies should not be overlooked.

These agencies, like Moody's and Standard & Poor's routinely inflated ratings at the behest of financial institutions. They did so in a quest to gain the business (and therefore, fees) from financial institutions. That is, if you rate my junk as AAA, I'll give you tens of millions in fees.

The above is not merely the ravings of a "red."  Just yesterday the Justice Department filed fraud charges against Standard & Poor's (the nation's largest rating agency) accusing them of inflating the ratings of mortgage investments, thereby setting them up for a crash when the financial crisis struck.

The Justice Department said that S&P "knowingly and with the intent to defraud,devised, participated in, and executed a scheme to defraud investors..."

Naturally America's other ratings agencies are not without guilt--and the D o J has suits against them. Joe Nocera, Pulitzer-Prize winning business writer for "The New York Times" said on National Public Radio this morning, that ratings agencies, competing for business, routinely cooked the books and promised higher ratings in order to gain revenue.

I listened to Nocera this morning and I thought that these corrupt entities are really not ethically distinct from the ratings agencies that seem to rule our business.

I call it "The Awards-Industrial Complex" that in essence rates agencies and ads based on criteria that matter very little in the real world. In today's world, we compete not for market-share, but for award-share.

In a business where business should be the measure of all things, we have succumbed to the spurious allure of cheap trophies.

We worry more about how we're rated than about the money we generate for our clients.

PETP.

As you'd know if you knew him, Uncle Slappy was waiting impatiently for me to return home from work. He and Aunt Sylvie are city people and they have no problem, while they're here, taking a stroll, going to a museum, or seeing a movie. I'm thankful that at 85 and 84 my Aunt and Uncle still have all their faculties in tact.

Nevertheless, Uncle Slappy could barely wait for me to come home from work. Not only did he want to watch Jeopardy! with me, he was fully and eagerly anticipating watching the Knicks, who were slated to play the Pistons of Detroit at the Garden at 7:30.

With my wife out of town, and not particularly feeling like cooking, I asked Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie if they wouldn't mind a light dinner of the sandwiches that were left over from yesterday evening's Super Bowl party.

They both agreed that sandwiches would be fine and I began putting a nice platter together for each of them.

Aunt Sylvie, who at 84, is still slim and still watching her figure asked for nothing but turkey. Uncle Slappy was less diet-conscious and requested "pastrami. Straight up."

We turned on the Knicks and commenced eating our sandwiches in front of the flat screen.

"We saw the George Bellows exhibit at the Met today," Aunt Sylvie said.

Slappy quickly cut her off.

"I joined an organization today," he offered. "An important organization."

I did nothing more than nod in his direction. And he continued.

"PETP," he said, pronouncing it "pet pa."

"And what is pet pa," I inquired. I am used to playing the straight man to Uncle Slappy.

"It's an important organization, doing noble work. It's People for the Ethical Treatment of Pastrami. Now this pastrami," he eyed his Carnegie Deli-sized phonebook of a sandwich, "this pastrami has been treated ethically."

"Mm hmm," I concured.

"Too many people take Pastrami for granted. They serve it cold, not warm. They eat it on white, not rye. It's wrong, I tell you. Wrong."

Fortunately at this point the Knicks came on and Slappy lost himself in the game.

Ben Shahn in New York.

Over 80 years ago the great artist Ben Shahn painted "The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti," a depiction of the slain men who were electrocuted allegedly for killing two men during the robbery of a shoe factory in Braintree, MA.

Anyway I saw this photograph today from Ed Koch's funeral that reminded me of Shahn's best work.

Some thoughts on the game.

Well, another Super Bowl has come and gone--another drunken orgy of bombast and violence and, now, for the first time in American history, evidence of America's decline into third-world-ness. We are in debt and bankrupt in so many ways, we can't even keep the lights on.

At least no one was shot on the field, during the game, though my guess is that as a country we've kept up our daily average of 33 gun deaths.

I turned off the game before it got interesting. I looked at the clock around 9:30--I had already endured three hours of noise and I said to my wife "I've had enough." I went into our bedroom to see if I could still read after 180 minutes of inundating dumbness.

We had people over, Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie as I had mentioned in an earlier post, a cousin in from San Francisco and my brother-in-law, his girl friend and my 15-year-old niece. We ate deli sandwiches and cake and drank about half a beer each and talked over the announcers who were talking over the game.

I didn't have much luck shhhsing people quiet when the commercials came on, but that, too, was ok. I had seen most of them online before the game.

Nothing stood out for me. I enjoyed some of the spots, but no new car is on my shopping list and my refrigerator is devoid of Bud and Beck's.

In all it was a not-unpleasant diversion.

That said, I'm glad it's over.

A sign of the times.

There's a meme running around now called "What a $4 million Super Bowl Ad Could Buy in Digital." You can see it here: meme

The meme, to my mind, makes a lousy argument.

I'd way rather have a spot on the game than, for instance, an eight-day You Tube homepage ad. The fact is, I can't remember ever even seeing a You Tube homepage ad.

It seems to me that people are still bickering over channel efficacy as if it's an either/or proposition. Either you do traditional or you do digital. No one wants to say that it's proper, intelligent and effective to have a mix.

This reminds me, of course, of the perennial battles between different branches of our armed forces.  The air force always asserted it could win a war on its own. The army, navy and marines have made similar claims.

The real answer is that it takes a variety of forces to carry the day.

But it's so much easier to assert that "____________ is dead."

In any event, here's a sign I saw in my neighborhood. Not bad for a medium that doesn't matter.