Uncle Slappy on basketball and the 60s.

Uncle Slappy called last night to talk basketball. The New York Knicks have just hired professional basketball’s winning-est coach giving that woe-begone franchise its first glimmer of real hope in a long time. Further, college basketball’s March Madness is in full fury, and you can hardly turn on the Boob Tube without seeing a bunch of black men in shorts doing amazing athletic feats.

Truth be told, Uncle Slappy’s been a basketball fan since the game was dominated by a team called the Philadelphia Sphas. The Sphas won 11 championships in 17 years in the old Eastern Basketball League and its successor league, the American Basketball League.

In those segregated days, basketball was dominated by Jews and, in fact, the name “Spha” stood for “South Philadelphia Hebrew Association.” Their team was manned by such stalwarts as Harry Litwack, Cy Kasselman, Irv Torgoff, Max Posnack and Red Klotz. Perhaps to drive home the point, their away uniforms said “Hebrews” across their chests and both their home and away uniforms, of course, were adorned with the Jewish six-pointed star.

Uncle Slappy grew up during the era when a guy my height (6’2”) would qualify as a center and a two-handed set shot was a legitimate offensive weapon. Like a lot of fans from that era, part of him still believes that today’s players, for all their prodigious athletic gifts, have nothing on the plodding Jews of yore.

“I wish,” he began the call “the Knicks could bring Red Holzman back, along with Phil Jackson,” he said.

“He was a great coach,” I admitted. He had, after all, led the Knicks to both of their championship seasons.

“Jackson was wild when he was a player, what with the long hair and the bell bottoms.”

“But he was quite a ballplayer,” I moderated.

“Everything was crazy in those days. Hippies, Drugs and the Women’s Lubrication Movement.”

I said nothing for a good minute, and he waited me out.

Finally, I said “Say goodnight, Uncle Slappy.”

He’s done this before and he did it again. “Goodnight, Uncle Slappy.”

Some thoughts on door handles.

About 20 years ago when I was working on the Mercedes-Benz business, I became fascinated by door handles.

Most, I noticed were flaps. To open the door you used just two or three fingers and lifted a thin metal flap.

On all Mercedes vehicles, there was, instead, a bar that you had to grip and pull out.

Both methods seems like good ways of opening doors, but I wondered about the difference in style.

I asked a marketing person and then another and of course they had no idea. Finally, they connected me with a Mercedes engineer. He explained it all to me.

If there were a crash, he said, a two or three finger flap doesn't give you much pulling power. However a grip gives you much more.

What I learned from this episode beside a bit about door handles, is that marketing people don't usually know very much about the product they're responsible for selling. At Mercedes, for instance, the smartest people are engineers, not marketers. At banks, the smartest people are usually financiers, not marketers. Same goes for technology companies.

All that said, I've always believed that most clients don't understand the product they're selling or the market they're selling into. Therefore, it's the agency's job to really get under the hood.

Today, instead, agencies don't take on that responsibility. They are busy inventing products, or financing start-ups, or entering fake ads into award shows.

That's well and good, but is it the business you're in?

Sorry if this is old-fashioned.

I happen to think you should master the job you're paid to do before you go off and do something else.

Refreshingly expensive.

If you or yours are looking for a copywriter who can quickly get the lay or the land, who can quickly sift through petaflops of information and turn it into something good, compelling and often times, funny, please contact me. It's time I looked for work.

Ten things I can do.

1.       I can write. Headlines. TV. Radio. Websites. Long copy. Short copy. In-between copy. Legal copy. Briefs. Manifestos. Positionings. Awards entries. Funny vacation emails.

2.       I can lead people. Account people. Creative people. Planners. Clients. I can inspire them to do more and better. I can raise their level of ambition so better work happens.

3.       I can question. Briefs. Bosses. Focus-group learnings. Group-think. Clients. Accepted wisdom. I can turn things upside down and get at answers that are more real.

4.       I can get it done. Fast. Brilliantly. No matter what the assignment, product or media. With insight and intelligence. Charm and wit.

5.       I can speak many media languages. Traditional. Direct. Interactive. Viral. Word of Mouth. And because I understand these languages, do excellent work no matter what.

6.       I can make people laugh. In commercials. In copy. In observations. In meetings. In the hallway. Over dinner.

7.       I can make people act. So they buy what we’re advertising. Or they buy the ads we’re selling. Or they get off their duffs and actually do something.

8.       I can disseminate. I can evangelize. I can wax eloquent about the massive changes that are happening right now. I can stay on top of those changes and help others stay on top of them, too.

9.       I can call bullshit. As much as new media has changed our world, work either connects with people or it doesn’t. I can spot the difference between a snow job and something real.

10.     I can build trust. Because I always come through.

 George Tannenbaum www.georgetannenbaum.com

Free is expensive.

Like most people, I think, I have a good half-dozen email accounts. This is, of course, ridiculous. In my co-op, we get one six-inch by six-inch mail slot and that is enough. But when it comes to email, we keep adding accounts, mostly to stay one step ahead of all the spam we get.

The email account I prefer is my busiest (not counting my work email.) But the ratio of good mail to crap is about 1:4. It's been taken over by promises that I've won the lottery and inducements for an all-natural blood-pressure medication doctors don't want us to know about.

This barrage of crap is in effect forcing me to move neighborhoods. It's forced me out of an email address directly attached to my website.

The reason behind all this crap is obvious to me. Email is essentially free. So any mofo can send you reams of mail indiscriminately. As opposed to paper mail, it doesn't matter if you get an open-rate of 1 per 100,000. 

We as an industry and we as a society have fallen prey to the false promise of free. If Google, which is free, is worth $400 billion, it's because it extracts $400 billion of information from you--without your even knowing it. 

Likewise, in advertising, clients are always looking to cut costs on what they pay for work. What they get in return is work with no real insight, no truth, no real value.

This seems obvious to me. But we all blindly buy into it.

Even me.

The platform I write Ad Aged on is also free.

Sanguine thoughts.

I just read an article about a veteran baseball player, Carlos Beltran, who at the age of 36, just signed a big contract to play for the New York Yankees. Thirty-six isn’t tremendously old for a ballplayer, but it’s old enough so that if you’re not hitting, or your fastball has lost a bit of its pop, you start to hear whispers.

Beltran is hearing those whispers this Spring.  In the wake of signing a three-year, $45 million contract, he’s hitting just a few points higher than his weight. It’s shaken him. “When I’m home,” he said, “I can put a smile on my face and act like nothing’s wrong. But then at night, when I’m in bed, everything comes to my head. How come I’m in this slump? Why am I hitting .220?”

What Beltran’s taken to doing to battle his slump is something I wholly understand and wholly endorse. It’s something I do, too, in my own way.

Beltran takes his bat to his bedside. He’ll stir and reach over the side of his bed and find it. He’ll grip it. “I just feel my grip, work my grip, thinking, thinking. Sometimes a thought will come to me, an answer.”

Beltran will pop out of bed and practice his stance.

“This is my life,” he said. “You’ve got to care. I learned,” he continued “that you have to be strong mentally. Don’t worry about what people say about you.”

These are challenging times for aging ballplayers and copywriters. I might wonder when I lay in bed at night, ‘have I lost a step?’ As Beltran says, “when I’m in bed, everything comes to my head.”

I reach over to my Mac, or I get up and go into my office. I type. I try putting words together. Try making thoughts clear. I write something just to write. I'm not striving for a screenplay, a novel or even some copy. I'm just typing, but what I’m really doing is practicing my grip.

This is my life.

I have to care.

In olde New York.

About 35 years ago when I was just getting out of grad school and looking very hard for a job, I was talking to a prospective employer, an older man who was probably my father’s age.

I don’t remember anything about this guy, his name or the company he worked for. All I  recall is a story he told me.

He was taking the subway home from work late at night. These were the days when New York was not nearly so sanitized as it is today. The subways (when they ran) were rolling evidence that New York was Rome and the Vandals had gained the upper hand. The trains were filthy, covered with graffiti and it seemed that anarchy reigned.

My acquaintance got into a car that was empty except for a homeless man. Such a circumstance would be threatening even today. Back then, it was absolutely terrifying. We weren’t inured to homeless people as yet and New York was averaging over five murders a day.

But for whatever reason, he stayed in the car with the homeless man. And before long, they began chatting. They were two men, probably around the same age. One who was prospering, the other who was wrung out by life and tossed away like the old rags he was wearing.

They talked as the train clattered through 50^th Street and 59^th. Past 66^th and 72^nd and 79^th. Past 86^th and the abandoned ‘ghost station’ at 91^st Street. Past 96^th. Finally, my friend got up to leave at 103^rd and Broadway.

“Come with me,” he said.

There was in those days a 24-hour Twin Donut on 105^th and Broadway. Twin Donut was a pretty great place. It was clean, efficient and the donuts were sublime. It was empty at that hour and they sat at the counter and each had an old-fashioned donut and a bottomless cup of coffee. By this time, it was well after midnight, well past the hour when wives begin to worry.

The two men talked for a good hour. About life, about sports, about nothing at all. Finished, my acquaintance emptied his wallet. Gave the homeless man something like $60, which was a lot of money in those days. Shook his hand and said good night.

There were thousands and thousands of homeless in the streets of New York back then. Some government program had decided it would be smart to close the mental hospitals. Literally thousands spilled onto the streets of Manhattan. Single Room Occupancy hotels were being slum-cleared by real-estate developers. Literally thousands more homeless appeared. The problem seemed intractable. And of course, many of the homeless were addicted to drink or drugs or both.

Giving $60 to one, along with a donut and a cuppa did nothing to change either the universe or a life. And sociologists will tell you it’s not how you solve a social problem.

It was small, inconsequential, not getting to the root of anything. The guy telling me this story wasn't trying to elicit praise from me. All the same, he felt compelled to tell me the story. Maybe it was his way of howling at the moon. It doesn't accomplish anything, but sometimes it's all you can do.

The world can sometimes be cold, indifferent and, yes, even brutal. There's really very little we can do to change those realities. We can't stop cruelty, eradicate poverty or really make much of a difference. 

But once-in-a-while, maybe we can try.

Fools. Greater and Lesser.

I warn you at the outset, this will get a little heady, so fasten your seatbelts.

There's an economic postulate called "The Greater Fool Theory" that does much, I think, to explain the world we live in in marketing and advertising.

The Greater Fool Theory states that the price of an object or of a service is not based on intrinsic value but instead on irrational beliefs and expectations of market participants. A price may be justified by a rational buyer due to the belief that someone else will be willing to pay an even higher price later.

In other words, I will pay X for, say, a signed shoelace from Miley Cyrus because someone else will pay X+5. There's no real worth, but there is a prospect of gain because someone is always willing to bid higher.

A corollary of the Greater Fool Theory, as I see it, is FOMO. Fear Of Missing Out. This is how bubbles get inflated. You know that Miley Cyrus' signed shoelace is crap, but everyone else is cashing in on celebrity ephemera so you have to jump in as well.

Advertising agencies used to create real brand value, and some still do. For instance, Wieden & Kennedy has probably added untold millions to Nike's bottom-line and P&G's through their work on these brands. Old Spice might well have died were it not for Wieden's brilliant work.

Likewise, Ogilvy's contribution to IBM's worth and UPS is notable, as was Chiat's work on Apple, and going far back DDB's on VW, Ammirati's on BMW, Ally's on FedEX and Scali's on Volvo.

What worries me is the massive amount of marketing expenditures that do not produce intrinsic value. Just a couple years ago we chased after Facebook "likes," regarding them as the secret sauce of marketing success. There's a new shiny marketing object seemingly every month. The one I've been hearing lately is that we have to send out paid posts on Facebook and Linked In because "everyone else is doing so."

The very definition of the Greater Fool Theory and FOMO.

I may well be excoriated for this, but as I have stated in this space before, I am a believer in Field Marshall Rommell's notion of concentration of force. Don't spread your marketing thin. Do what brings you the most good from the most people.

In other words, recognize that you can't do everything, you have neither the staff nor the marketing budget. So focus where you can make the biggest difference.

If we don't ignore the greater fool, we risk becoming one.

Me. Me. Me.

Jean Renoir, the director of more truly seminal movies than anyone else (look him up), once said "A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again."

I'm not one to compare myself to Renoir, or anyone else for that matter. But as I near having written almost 4,000 posts on "Ad Aged," one topic in particular keeps appearing.

It's simple. Irreducible. And obvious. Which is why, I suppose, I feel the need to repeat it so often.

Practice your craft. Every minute, every hour, every day.

I work in advertising, but first and foremost I am a writer.

Writers are born into a primordial swamp and asked to make sense of it. Sometimes we are asked to take columns of numbers and create a story. Sometimes we are thrown a powerpoint deck full of inchoate ideas and out of that soup we need to create something sensible and logical.

This is not about finding the right word, this is not about being precious. This is not about anything but digging and finding the core and expressing it in ways that haven't been expressed before.

This is the most important thing you can do in this business. And, most times, you have to do it alone. It's you and the same 84 keys that everyone else gets.

The best way, the only way, to do this is to do this. You practice every day. Write every day. Make something simple. Then throw it away and make it simpler. Then make it weird, strange, funny, memorable.

My ability to do this, to do this at the drop of a hat, to do this quickly and boldly, is my superpower. I can't bend steel with my bare hands, I can't make pixels dance, I don't have a compendious knowledge of the latest directors or film techniques.

But I can take a phone book and make something interesting out of it.

Because I work at it every day.