A waste of time.

Uncharacteristically, I watched a ton of American football this weekend. I seldom watch sports on TV but I suppose because it was uninviting out, or because I was chilling with my daughter before she leaves for her last term of college, I had the games on for a number of hours.

Now I'll admit, the way I watch sports on TV might be unorthodox. I almost always turn the volume all the way down and turn on New York's last classical music station. Watching steroid abuse to the music of Wagner or Mahler somehow works for me. And I find I don't miss at all the banal "insights" of the ten or a dozen commentators saying essentially the same thing over and again.

I happen to think if America wanted to end war for all time, we should have our networks cover it with the same assiduity with which they cover football. I think if we saw every angle of every attack and the concussion of every explosion, our wars would either be #1 in the Nielsens or banned for good.

In any event, the games had good story lines. In the AFC, it was two old-master quarterbacks facing each other once again. In the NFC, it was the two emerging QBs going mano-a-mano.

Like I said, I watched with the sound off and the laptop on. I probably had the TV on for three hours.

It's 48 hours later.

My brain is almost recovered.

And I can recall not a single ad.

The conformity machine.

When my younger daughter was home, she often watched a show on television called "America's Next Top Model." In this show, young women from around the US were processed to meet a preconceived notion of what a model should look like, walk like, pose like and talk like.

If you think about life over the last 50 years, despite all the corporate mumbo-jumbo about diversity, America has become a great conformity machine.

We eat at the same bland chain restaurants, shop in the same bland chain stores, listen to the same bland chain news and express the same bland chain opinions. We don't want questions marks in our life, we prefer the tried and true. That's why our cities look the same, our tv shows have the same laugh tracks, our presidential candidates make the same speeches and even most Hollywood stars remind you of someone else.

I often look at creative portfolios and, these days, almost invariably, there's some navigation that is headed "Awards." A list follows that's as long as a baby's leg. They've won gold here, merit there, silver and bronze. And their work looks like everything else of the last five years. In fact, I fully predict in the next three or six months, some dimwitted brand will do something over-the-top involving caricatures of moms being dragged by caricatures of 70s automobiles. It won for Wieden; it's good enough for me.

The key, of course, to getting noticed is being different. But all the committees, all the comfort-seekers, all the research and focus groups push you in a diametric direction.

No one will get fired for producing work that's already been seen.

Lost, a Love Story.

Hiroo Onoda died yesterday at a Tokyo hospital. He was 91 years old. You can read his obituary here.

Onoda had been a second lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. When the American army was reclaiming the Philippines in bloody fighting, Onoda's superior officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi gave Onoda his final orders: to stand and fight.

Onoda followed those orders for 29 years. He did not emerge from the Philippine jungle and surrender his sword until 1974. At that point Onoda was given a hero's welcome in Japan. When he was asked what had sustained him while hiding and surviving in the dank Philippine jungle, he said "I was fortunate that I could devote myself to duty in my young and vigorous years." He had nothing on his mind, he said, "Nothing but accomplishing my duty."

Duty, it seems to me, is an antiquated concept in our modern world. We seem more concerned with fashion or artifice than simple human truths. We seem enraptured and captured by the latest latest and so awed by it and the fool's gold of for-profit awards shows that we forget our duty. Our duty to our clients. Our duty to sell. We are way more concerned with what we say about ourselves than what we actually do. I suppose the advertising metaphor is this: we are all sizzle and no steak.

I've spent parts of the last two weeks "supervising" the creation of a social media strategy and 75 posts that will appear of Facebook and LinkedIn. I've never been involved in creating such things before, and I suppose I could say that I am happy, and better off, for the experience.

I've learned something, too. I've learned now what people mean when they say they're trying to get engagement or they're trying to spur a conversation.

This is the world today, and I can't pretend it doesn't exist. And sponsored posts that ask questions like "What's an exercise you could sneak into your day?" are, I'm told valuable to a brand. I suppose at some level they are. To the few people who see such posts and who have donned non-cynical rose-colored lenses, I guess they say the brand is fun and engaging.

A leading Tokyo newspaper, "The Mainichi Shimbun," said this in an editorial after Onoda returned home. "To this soldier, duty took precedence over personal sentiments. Onoda has shown us that there is much more in life than just material affluence and selfish pursuits. There is the spiritual aspect, something we may have forgotten."

I think we have forgotten so much in our business.

I think we have forgotten selling, persuasion and mass.

We use large words and pseudo-science and well-educated illogic to convince ourselves and the clients that pay us that such things no longer matter in the modern world. We have whole companies dedicated to the notion that "new" is the only thing that matters and they have the spurious metrics to prove it.

More and more of us in the business, those who still hold onto some of what were the old verities, I think can relate to Mr. Onoda. To his sense of duty.

But we are left to struggle in a jungle.

And no one wants to repatriate us.

Expensive creative.

I'm not sure if there's a client anywhere who doesn't go to sleep counting the ways their advertising agency is expensive.

It's a constant complaint, and the expense of creating work is always blamed on agencies.

I think the fault is shared. And the client has to step up and assume some responsibility.

Back in the days when we had traffic departments, we had three formal rounds of creative reviews.

Now we have 30.

Literally, 30.

These stretch over weeks and months. Each round often contradicting the round that came before.

Creative development often involves a couple do-overs as well.

Mostly because no one's read the brief, or taken it seriously.

There's an old adage in carpentry: Measure twice, cut once.

Those words can probably be applied to our business.

It would save a lot of money if they were.

Two thoughts on writing.

At least once a week I get an email from an account person or a project manager thanking me for being as fast as lightning.

There are two reasons behind my...celerity.

1. I realized about 20 years ago that really the only time I get in trouble at work is when I avoid doing things. When I procrastinate (which leads, often, to lying) bad shit happens. So when I have something to do, I usually do it now. Now is a good habit to get into. I enjoy not having things hang over my head. I like having a clean plate.

2. I don't actually write until all the words are in my fingers. What I mean is by the time I sit down to a piece of copy or a script, I've already written it and rewritten it in my head. I'm probably no faster than a lot of other writers. But facing the keyboard occupies very little of my time. Which makes people think I am faster than I am.

Wednesday Mendacity Report.

There's a spite machine that fuels the internet. You need only to read the comments on a site like Agency Spy to know what I mean.

Everyone is a hack.

Every commercial is derivative.

Everything sucks.

Much the same attitude prevails within agencies.

Even when I worked on the biggest account in the world at the time (IBM) which was producing literally hundreds of good commercials, there were scores of effete people within the agency who wouldn't deign to work on the business.

Last night I got an email from a client. A few colleagues and I had created a four-minute video for her to show at a conference. It did the job. It was thorough, thoughtful and well-produced. I'm not saying it was "Citizen Kane," or even the "Citizen Kane of Industrials," but it was good and polished.

She wrote a note saying it received "spontaneous applause," from the sales teams it was done for.

Immediately, the emails started flying into my email box. "I'll clear a place on my trophy shelf," said one. "I've already entered it into the One Show," said another. I understand the sarcasm. I'm often guilty of the same.

But what most people don't realize is that work--no matter what career you pursue--is a slog. There's a lot of mucking about and doing the best you can do under the circumstances. The fact of the matter is that some time in your career you may have an adult leakage commercial to do. Let's face it, when Michelangelo was done painting the Sistine Chapel, his wife might have asked him to paint the second bathroom.

Life, and careers, is not about only doing the things you want to do. I wish it were, but it's not. As Tennessee Williams wrote in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "Heroes in the real world live 24 hours a day. Not just two hours in a game....The truth is pain and sweat...paying bills...The truth is dreams that don't come true and nobody prints your name in the paper till you die."

That's the truth of work, too. And what's been sullied by the charade of award shows that display anything but the truth (work that's never run created for clients who don't exist.)

We no longer show the truth of work.

We hold this misbegotten notion that somehow we are above doing the hard work of work. And we disparage people who tend to their knitting.

There are literally scores of people, in fact, who produce nothing but decks containing ideas that never become real. Deck after deck after deck, month after month after month.

Or they produce fake work and fake case study videos saying how great the fake work was ballasted by fake metrics that prove it's worked.

To go back to Tennessee Williams, all of us have a choice we make everyday.

It's a stark choice.

The choice between the truth of pain and sweat. That is, dignity.

Or celebrating the shiny, phoney and glib. That is, mendacity.

Collective wisdom.

Man, I'm beat.

We've had two straight days of clients in town, which means two straight days of meetings. Two straight days of airless conference rooms with too-bright lighting. Two straight days of bad sandwiches made by low-wage workers.

It's enough to put me in a worse mood than usual. Two straight days.

Nine days out of 10, I'm the first one in in my office. The motion-sensors sense my presence and the lights flicker on. At the hour I get in, the conference rooms that gird the floor I work on are empty. But in an hour or so, when most other people get in, they're full, and they'll be full until the agency empties out in the evening.

Conference rooms are a relatively new thing.

When I look back on earlier jobs, jobs I had in the 80s and 90s, what I remember is each floor had maybe one or two conference rooms. These were for meeting when clients were in. Otherwise, you found a way to meet without going into a sterile environment.

Of course, we live in an age in which it takes literally twelve people to do a banner ad. So we have to bring all those people together. Art directors, copywriters, analytics people, media people, technology people, a gaggle of account people.

We have become like the Chinese army during the Korean War, there are more of us just over the next hill.

We "deploy" teams and set them loose in conference rooms. Wave after wave of us keep coming.

And then we wonder--

Why can't we make a profit?

Open plans.

Once again last night I couldn't sleep.

It wasn't insomnia.

It was the awful beginnings of a chest cold.

Which I blamed, immediately, on the woman sitting to my right who has been sick but in the office next to me, since the beginning of 2014.

"The New Yorker," yes, "The New Yorker," had an article recently called "The Open Office Trap." You can read it here.

The article claims that "70% of offices now have an open floor plan." That despite studies that employees in open plans "suffered according to every measure: the new space was disruptive, stressful, and cumbersome, and, instead of feeling closer, coworkers felt distant, dissatisfied, and resentful. Productivity fell."

The article goes on of course, as "New Yorker" articles do. It details the negative effects open-plan offices have on our health, our productivity and our morale.

The plutocrats who run our businesses can say what they want about open plans.

And I'll still say this.

The only plan they're planning for is more money in their bank accounts.

Death in the Tempus Fugit.

Last night was warm in New York, warm and humid with an occasional spit of mist. I sojourned down the warren of winding hallways and entered the Tempus Fugit at just after two in the morning. There was another patron, an old man like myself at the other end of the bar. Other than he and the bartender, and Whiskey, my 22-month-old golden retriever, the joint was, as usual empty.

I assumed my seat at the end of the mahogany and was greeted by the sonorous voice of the bartender:

"How many thousands of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee,
That thou no more will weigh my eyelids down,
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?"

"Yes, you're right again, as usual. Once more I have frightened sleep away and have been visited by Insomnia."

He drew me a Pike's Ale (the ALE that won for YALE!) and slid it and a small bowl of salted Spanish peanuts over to me.

The old man at the opposite end of the bar got up off of his stool and walked tentatively toward me. He pulled out the stool alongside mine and deposited his keister upon it.

"Are the buzzing night-flies keeping you from slumber?" he asked, bastardizing the Bard.

"I don't analyze my Insomnia," I said. "We've know each other so long, I am smart enough to follow wherever She leads."

The bartender terried the place in front of him and pulled him a Pike's. He downed his juice-glass of nectar in a single swallow and placed the tumbler down hard on the surface.

"Another," he murmured.

"I haven't seen you here before," I offered.

He fiddled with his glass and reached over and took a small handful of Spanish peanuts. He spilled them on the mahogany in front of him, separated the nuts into little groups of two and ate them slowly.

"I've come for you," he said to me. "I've waited for you all summer, all autumn, and now it is winter."

The bartender sidled over and filled me again.

"He believes you've heard the Chimes at Midnight."

"Who hasn't?" I answered. "The Chimes at Midnight have no snooze button."

At that, they both laughed.

"The chimes pealed," the stranger said. "They never stop pealing."

Whiskey, at my feet, stirred. She nuzzled me with her black, cold nose. It was, she mentioned, time to leave. I walked over to the coat tree and assumed my jacket. I took her leash and collar out of my deep side pocket and accoutred her appropriately.

I said as I pushed two twenties over to the bartender:

"The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,
Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light,
And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels:"

They laughed, too, at that. I did, too, to myself.

Whiskey and I, without a hint of chimes, walked silently south. Toward home.

An advertising lesson from J.R. Smith.

The Knicks, my woeful New York Knicks, have a roster of players who have the collective maturity of a third-grader. One of those players, the supremely-gifted J.R. Smith, is probably the least mature of all of them. Despite all his physical gifts, he has been floundering this season. Last night while the Knicks we playing the defending-champion Miami Heat, Smith rode the bench, the team's coach punishing him for his immaturity just hours after the league fined him $50,000 for untying an opponent's shoelace. You can see Smith here in flagrante delicto.

Smith's mischief, I think, provides a lesson we all can learn from.

Like Smith, we in advertising work in a very small community. Once you get ten or 15 years in the business, it seems you pretty much know everyone, or know of everyone. You use the same headhunters, editors, directors. You go to the same parties, and cavort in the same circle.

Further, like basketball players, our careers are short. For every ad person who has a 30 or 40 year career, there are dozens who leave or are forced out of the business in much less time.

Small community, short time span.

That means, don't be an asshole.

Words and reputations get spread way too fast.

In other words, J.R., be a mensch.