Jargon.

I’ve written about this before, but I think it is worth repeating.

When I was at Ogilvy and under the well-feathered wing of Steve Hayden,

Steve got a promotion from President to Vice Chairman.

“The Wall Street Journal” wrote about Steve’s ascent and in their article there was a quotation by Ogilvy CEO Shelley Lazarus. It said, simply, “Steve never writes in jargon.”

I read that quotation.

And I read it again.

And I thought about it. I said to myself, I would like to be the industry’s best writer someday like Steve is today. I will take “never write in jargon” as my personal brief.

So often when I’m speaking with someone or listening to someone read from some over-wrought powerpoint, I hear a string of words that has no discernible meaning.

They might be all the “right” words.

The words that ring the right linguistic bells.

Words that get the phrasemeisters nodding.

But they are devoid of sense and meaning.

Or as Shakespeare put it and Faulkner re-put it:

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Love is a many splendored ad.

I was in a meeting the other day and the client teased me a bit--all in a good natured way (for a client.)

What they ragged me about was that I "love the account I work on."

I laughed, but nervously.

Of course I love the account I work on.

I love everything I work on.

I have to.

Because my job and the reason I've lasted as the 11th oldest copywriter in America-- is that I pour my heart, brain and soul into everything I touch.

Yes, I love what I work on.

Too much of what I see in the agency and in the world is not the product of love. It's by the numbers. It's rote creative. It's tepid, mediocre and meaningless.

You can psychoanalyze me and criticize me.

That's fine.

I know I put too much of myself into my work.

But how else do you do it?

How else can you make something good.

You have to love.

Fast.

For about 60 years now, or maybe more depending how you're doing your math, we have had "fast food."

For about the last ten years or so--again, depending on your calculus, we have had "fast fashion."

In each case, the long-term value of the product is sublimated to the desire for cheap, uniform and ubiquitous.

Until recently, I'd say, there was very little consideration paid to the real value of either fast food or fast fashion. Deleterious effects on one's health. Or environmental and socio-economic hazards.

If you want to characterize our present era in advertising and marketing, I think we could say that vast industry forces are compelling us to produce "fast advertising. Fast communications."

More and more often an agency's "edge" is their "speed-to-market" and their ability to produce cheaply.

Fast advertising.

What fast advertising winds up being, of course, is marketing fast food. It's advertising with no nutritional value. With empty intellectual or emotional calories. It is glib--it looks nice but has no substance. And it is undifferentiated.

I am always set back on my heels when I get to the "insights" portion of a brief or a discussion. Most often those insights are proffered by someone who's never used the product or who is 20 years distant from the target audience. Most often insights are simply verities. Things like "people prefer hot coffee (often with milk and a sweetener) in the morning. In warmer months, they sometimes drink iced coffee."

Just as fast fashion and fast food are the enemies of the intrinsic value of those goods, fast advertising is the enemy of effective communication.

It may look gleaming and delicious.

It may look "designer."

But looks alone are the barest and most shallow of facades.

Advertising if it's to be effective, must be real and true and extraordinary.

To get at the real, true and extraordinary takes thinking and time.

And you can't just supersize it.

--
By the way, Mark Bittman of "The New York Times," writes today about the aims of the "Slow Food Movement." Slow Food

Would that there were a "Slow Advertising" movement

Pain and sweat.

Most of work, most relationships, most pursuits have huge amounts of mundane in them.

The raising of the flag on Iwo Jima was a culmination. Not an instance. The horror leading up to the glory killed thousands.

Even the millions paid to an actor for a few seconds of commercial work is usually earned, in essence, over twenty or forty years.

In short, much of work is crap.

Humiliating.

Depressing.

Nasty, brutish and shorn of meaning.

But here's the thing: you have to do it. You have to slog it out. You have to show up.

Tennessee Williams said it this way in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

"The truth is pain and sweat...paying bills and making love to a woman
that you don't love anymore.

"The truth is dreams that don't come true...and nobody prints your name
in the paper till you die."

That's right.

Work isn't glory and Shutters and trophies and fanfare.

It's pain and sweat.

That's what the prima donnas don't get.

And never will.

A road trip with Uncle Slappy.

The five of us made a motley assortment. And it was 3:45 in the morning. Uncle Slappy, Aunt Sylvie, my wife, Whiskey and I sped home from Boston this morning--leaving three hours before dawn.

Passover or not, my wife and I had work to attend to and since Slappy hardly sleeps at all (except when he conks out watching the ferstunkeneh Knicks) we piled, the five of us into a tinny Mazda 5 and traveled home.

My wife had directions spoken to her by her phone. This was something that flabbergasted Uncle Slappy.

"What kind of job is that, being in a phone? Why didn't you rent a proper UPS."

"GPS," I corrected brusquely. I wasn't really ready for the Slappy show, working as I was on three hours sleep.

"In my day," the old man galloped, "we had proper maps. And no shiksa in a phone telling us where to go."

"That's progress," I muttered

"Yes," the old man agreed for once. "Progress means more efficient ways to get lost."

But for once my wife found our way through the warren of winding Boston streets and onto the Mass Pike. In minutes we had the highway to ourselves.

Whiskey stirred in the far back seat, and Sylvie and Slappy did the same.

My wife kept her eyes on the road and her ears listening for the electronic shiksa.

The rest of us drifted into sleep until we hit the city.

Happy Passover, everyone.

The agency of the past.

Of the many things that annoy the crap out of me, one of the more prominent ones is the statement, ________for the future. Or ___________ for the 21st Century. Or the ____________for the digital future of the 21st Century.

From what I can discern, the 21st Century ain't shaping up to be anything worth writing home about; same with the future; same with the promises of digital. So far, customer service is all but eviscerated, wages have been pushed downward and things like courtesy and job security have become relics.

If I had to open an agency, I'd call myself not "The Agency of the Future," I'd say I was an agency of the past.

I'd say I was an agency built during an era when creatives actually understood the products and the marketplace they were working in. An era when client service was more than lip service. And an era when creativity strove to be unique and trouble-making rather than inexpensive and compliant.

Oh, I know. I'm another old, bitter curmudgeon.

But if you really think about the words ____________for the 21st Century, the only implicit promise contained therein is faster and cheaper. And in fact, from what I've seen, most things that promise to be fast and cheap are neither.

While I'm on the subject of Philip Roth.

My therapist, loathe as he is to own up to it, spent his youth about a dozen or so miles from where Philip Roth spent his. And though Roth and my therapist are probably about 20 years apart, my therapist's aunt was friends with the Roth family.

One Saturday my good doctor found himself in attendance at a Bar Mitzvah Roth was also attending. Some one came up to my therapist's aunt and bid her to shake hands with Roth. To meet the great man.

To which she replied, "I'm not touching that hand."

Philip Roth on writing, editing and awards.

Philip Roth, who many have called "America's greatest living writer" has just turned 80 and everyone (at least in certain rarefied circles) is celebrating the man and his over 50-years of literary output.

Roth was not only productive for over 50 years, many critics believe that his best work came in his 70s an estimation that only contributes to his prodigiousness.

This morning on NPR's "Weekend Edition," Roth was interviewed by the great Scott Simon, host of the show. You can listen to the 11 minutes here Roth and I strongly encourage it. There's much to learn listening to the old "pud puller" (it was he who "put the ID back in YID") much to learn about life and writing and sticking with it.

What I particularly liked was that Roth understood that "It isn't that you write down what happens to you every day — you wouldn't be a writer if you did that. But it gives you a sense of, you know, from your experience what life is like, and you weigh what you invent against your sense of actuality."

In other words, despite my quotidian posting—what I do, or what Twitterers do, or Instagrammers, is very different from what Roth does. He creates. He adds. He crafts. He makes art. We make virtually undifferentiated binary bullshit.

Second, is Roth’s grappling with the problem of “And.” That is, what word, what thought comes next—or what doesn’t come next.

In both these instances Roth isn’t just about producing. He’s about editing. Separating the crap from the good.  Something lost or all but lost, today.

Finally, there’s Roth’s view on awards and on those he’s won and hasn’t. (About the only thing he hasn’t won is the Nobel Prize for Literature.) About awards, Roth says, “Some mean a great deal to you, and when the prize befalls a certain book that you like particularly, it's wonderful. But look, receiving a prize excites the child in you, and then you go back to work the next day.”

Dante and advertising.

Dante, for all his brilliance as a writer, missed some shit.

He missed shit because he never worked in a corporate environment.

So he never had to imagine the horrors earned by motherfuckers who call a meeting on a Friday at 8:30--to discuss work they should be doing but can't because they are candy assed lazy turd munchers, and instead have you stay late to do their work and then they show up 15 minutes late for a conference call scheduled for their convenience.

That's all for now.

New titles.

I wrote a post last month called "De-Coding, Part 2." In it I imagined what would happen if agency titles encapsulated what agency people actually spend their days doing.

I sat in one of those long and unwieldy meetings today.

And I did some more thinking on the matter.

Here are some new titles I've come up with:

Chief Data Officer

Director of Data Sifting

Minutia Enlargement Sheriff
Serif Sheriff
Client Estrangement Officer

Punctuation Provisioner

Cliché Distribution Manager

Associate Director of Meetings

Curator of Disposable Trends

Powerpoint Illegibility Optimizer

Williamsburg Extrapolation Sommelier

Customer Journey Tour Guide

Director of Rounded Corners

Associate Director of Associate Directors

Ass-Embracement Manager

Chief Story-telling Officer
Director of Bullet Placement

Deck Construction Manager

Associate Director of Italics

General Manager/Distortion

Director of Ersatz Ideation

Chief Bombast Officer

Associate Director of Blathering

Obfuscation Ombudsman

Vice President/Second Guessing

Global Glibness Officer

Chief Chief Officer

Disambiguation Ambiguator

Community Infiltrator

Director of Hashtag

Social Media Medea

Financial Prevarication Associate

Director, Gouging

Confusion Coordinator

Panic Instigation Director

Generalized Anxiety Disorder Manager