From Greg Hahn: Ads that influenced me.

Greg Hahn is something rare. A legend who deserves to be a legend. 

He's produced great work for decades, from wherever he's hung his hair. Mischief, BBDO, Fallon. 

I asked Greg some months ago to write something for Ad Aged. He was kind enough to say yes.

Thanks, Greg.

--

About 100 months ago in April of 2020, George graciously reached out to me and asked if I would write a piece for his blog. I softly committed and quietly hoped, like many of the commitments I make, that when the time comes, he would forget about it. 

After all, writing for his blog is an intimidating gig. People read George's blog because of George, not for me. It would be like going to the Broadway performance of "Network" starring Bryan Cranston only to hear "For tonight's performance, the role of Howard Beale will be played by Greg Hahn."

 

But still, he persisted.

 

And you do not stay a top writer in this business as long as George has without knowing how to get results. The rest of this blog is that result.

 

Rather than try to fill George's shoes and write about the current state of Advertising, I'm going to put on my own shoes and take a step back to write about three ads that had a big influence on me as I was just starting out.

 

The three ads I chose are pretty different but do have one thing in common. they are grounded in simple logic.

 

They are not flashy or overly produced. They simply offer a strong compelling piece of logic that makes you think something new or different. They make their point much like a trial lawyer. When it's at its best, Advertising can be like the closing argument in the court of public opinion.  

 

The three I am writing about are like that.

 

The first one is for Nike starring Charles Barkley from the mid-'90s.

I saw this before I got into Advertising, and was instantly struck by the writing, the simplicity, and the crafting of the argument.

 

I didn't feel like what I thought was an ad was supposed to be at the time. I didn't know exactly what it was, but I knew I wanted to do it. By the time it got to "Just because I can dunk a basketball, doesn't mean I should raise your kids" I was like, "Hell yeah, Charles Barkley." At the time, I'm pretty sure I thought Charles Barkley wrote this ad.

 

The second ad is from the highly influential but no longer in existence LA agency Stein/Robaire/Helm for the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum.

 

It's pretty hard to find on the internet so I'll describe it. The commercial (remember this was the 90s) is a simple lockdown shot, super-8 footage, of a guy watering his lawn for the full 30 seconds. It's compelling in its lack of attempt to compel. After about 20 seconds, type comes over the scene: "This is life". A few seconds later a second super comes up: "That's why there's art."

 

I remember seeing this as a junior when I lived in LA. Again, I was kind of knocked back by the simplicity and the power of the thought. It does what the Nike ad does but in a very different way. Rather than relying on long-copy to walk you through the argument. It makes you experience something, puts you in a moment, and then concludes with a few perfectly chosen words. 

 

The last one is a legit classic. The "Snowplow" ad for VW-because you can't write an article about influential ads without mentioning VW. It's a law, I checked.

 

 

Again, there's nothing technical or flashy about this one, It's just pure logic. A thought so powerful it changes the chemistry in your brain.

 

As a writer, I can't help but admire the skill and precision with which these ads make their point and genuinely affect the way you feel about something. The basic approach transcends time or technique or media. It's whatever-is-next agnostic. They're each based on a single thought that's perfectly obvious, but only after someone tells it to you. In today's terms this would be called an insight.

 

And then there's this:

 

A reminder that sometimes the best approach is, don't overthink it.

The New Ad School: A modern curriculum.

Nearly 200 years ago, Herman Melville (who never won even a single Webby) wrote, "A whale-ship was my Harvard and my Yale College." That was his quaint way of suggesting that life experience might be as valuable as formal education.

Nonsense. 

Today virtually everyone in advertising goes to ad school to study ads!

What progress since the days of the old spermaceti-meister.

Who cares about the hoary, gendered and canceled notion that, as encapsulated by Alexander Pope, "the proper study of mankind is man."

We are much more apt to find what Bill Bernbach called "simple, timeless human truths," if we study not human behavior but the fake, precious and antiseptic ads that dominate awards' competitions.

With that in mind, GeorgeCo., a Delaware Company, LLC, is proud to introduce the GeorgeCo., a Delaware Company, LLC, Advertising School--a modern ad school, with a modern curriculum that will quickly put young and old ad students-alike on the path to a robust five-figure salary in the glamorous world of Madison Avenue.

Here's a sampling of this year's courses:

1.       
Youth: not wasted on the young. Agency survival. How to stay under the age of 28. Forever.

2.       
Yes-person, 101. Nodding your way to success with timely head-movement-derived ass-kissery.

3.       
What color is my golden parachute? The art of failing up and up and up.

4.       
The 700 Club. How to win 700 awards with a single ad that never ran.

5.       
You won't read this. Copywriting tips for a 'nobody reads copy world.'

6.       
What's in a word? The world's 200 most meaningful meaningless words and how to use them.

7.
What's in a word? Again. The world's 200 most meaningful meaningless words and how to use them. Again.

8. 
The name game. Strategically dropping the names Lance, Noam or Spike in every meeting. They really want to shoot your banner ad.

9.      
A Cannes-do attitude. Imitating last year's Cannes winners for fun and profit.

10.
Cleaning the seas. Removing a Texas-sized gyre of ocean plastic from the Pacific with one 300x250 banner ad.

11.
Fighting for equality. We learn how to make woke ads for a brand that uses slave-labor to manufacture its products.

12.
'It's dead.' A two-semester seminar on declaring things dead without evidence or foundation.

13.
Harkening 101. A look back to pre-historic advertising times--the 1980s. [Guest lecturer: Mark Read].

14.
I don't do radio. 500 ways to say, 'I don't do radio.' (Kaore au i te reo irirangi) in Maori.

15.
Leadership through Pontification. A four-semester course on everything you need to be the emptiest of empty suits. Learn: 'that's not what Wieden would do.' 'It's close,' and 'Try something different.' Special focus on never showing up with ideas of your own--only criticizing others'.

16.
Something about TikTok. We will say things with utter conviction. Special attention will be paid to ululating and undulating.

Seven Trumpian lies commonly employed by the modern ad industry.

LIE: You can get something for nothing. 

TRUTH: There are no easy solutions. No magic bullets. No marketing panaceas. No magic. No free media. Success takes work (and sometimes luck) but mostly work.

LIE: Experience doesn't matter. 

TRUTH: No, anyone can't do it. And knowledge of what's gone before and human behavior is important.

LIE: It's an if/then proposition. 

TRUTH: It would be nice if there were causality in the world and if we did this marketing action then this reaction would occur. The truth is, as Bernbach repeatedly said, persuasion is an art, not a science. And quantification is nearly impossible to predict.

LIE: Trust me. I'm an expert.

TRUTH: No one knows anything for sure. There are people with good track records, but a coin that lands on "heads" 99 times in a row, still has a 50/50 chance of landing on heads the next flip.

Or as Czeslaw Milosz once wrote: “When someone is honestly 55% right, that's very good and there's no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it's wonderful, it's great luck, and let him thank God. But what's to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he's 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.”

LIE: _________ is dead.

TRUTH: As Faulkner said, "The past isn't dead. It is not even past." Human behavior has changed very little in the past 400,000 years. 

LIE: I alone can do this.

TRUTH: There are a lot of qualified people in the world. And a lot of decent agencies. Most agencies have a lot of talent. Failed advertising comes from bad client behavior that's accepted as ok by an agency because they're afraid of what will happen if they're honest.

LIE: Repeating a lie makes it true.

TRUTH: Echoing Gertrude Stein, a rose is a rose is a rose. And a lie is a lie is a lie no matter how often you say it's true. Those who say, for instance, "no one watches TV anymore," or "no one reads," or "people have short attention spans," are pushing an agenda--nothing more.

Guest post from Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times.

Trump Incites Rioters

The president may use the language of patriotism, but these are the actions of Benedict Arnold.

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

• Jan. 6, 2021

Credit...Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“If the Democratic Party wants to stand with anarchists, agitators, rioters, looters and flag burners, that is up to them. But I as your president will not be part of it. The Republican Party will remain the voice of the patriotic heroes who keep America safe.”

— Donald Trump, Aug. 28, 2020

Wednesday was a horrifying and shameful moment in American history. I’ve covered attempted coups in many countries around the world, and now I’m finally covering one in the United States.

Trump and his enablers talk a good game about patriotism. They denounced President Barack Obama for sometimes not wearing a flag lapel pin. They criticized Colin Kaepernick for protesting police brutality by taking a knee rather than standing during the national anthem — and then Trump incited a mob on Wednesday to invade the United States Capitol. The rioters encountered a minimal police response, not the kind that Black Lives Matter protesters received.

Image

Demonstrators at the Capitol in June protested the killing of George Floyd.Credit...Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

Many of those pro-Trump rioters probably dispute the idea of white privilege. But the fact that they were allowed to overrun the police and invade the Senate and House chambers was evidence of that privilege.

“We are witnessing absolute banana republic crap in the United States Capitol right now,” Mike Gallagher, a Republican representative from Wisconsin, tweeted, adding an appeal to Trump: “You need to call this off.”

What the pro-Trump rioters attacked was not only a building but also the Constitution, the electoral system, our democratic process. They humiliated the United States before the world and left America’s enemies chortling. They will be remembered as Benedict Arnolds.

“Our democracy is under unprecedented assault, unlike anything we have seen in modern times,” President-elect Joe Biden said. He described it as “an assault on the citadel of liberty, the Capitol itself.”

“Our Constitution was the product of centuries of tradition, wisdom and experience. … A radical movement is attempting to demolish this treasured and precious inheritance. Left-wing mobs have torn down statues of our founders, desecrated our memorials.”

— Trump, Sept. 17, 2020

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Coming Home

How the Oldest Old Can Endure Even This

Patriotism is not about words. It is not about waving flags or singing “America the Beautiful.” It is about struggling, imperfectly and inadequately, to make this country we love a better one.

It is not about a president supporting an insurrection or trying to win another term despite having lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

Whatever a president’s rhetoric, he betrays the Constitution when he oversees a campaign to overturn a free election guaranteed by that Constitution, and when he galvanizes rioters to overpower our democratic process.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, isn’t someone I usually agree with. But he was right when he finally stood up to Trump and warned the Senate that legislative moves to overrule voters by excluding some states in the Electoral College count “would damage our republic forever.”

The bankruptcy of the extremist G.O.P. position was evident as Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia joined in sabotaging the election by trying to negate the Arizona vote. Having just been rejected by voters, she in turn rejected voters.

“President Trump is promoting national unity through renewing understanding of and commitment to America’s shared founding principles.”

— White House “fact sheet,” Nov. 2, 2020

After a year in which Trump presented himself as the law-and-order president and denounced protesters as rioters, he summoned supporters to Washington and unleashed them as rioters on the Capitol as the Electoral College votes were being counted. “Be there, will be wild,” he tweeted.

“Let’s have trial by combat,” his lawyer Rudy Giuliani told a rally of Trump supporters shortly before they stormed the Capitol.

So pro-Trump crowds dismantled security fences and invaded the Capitol. You can call them rioters or terrorists or coup plotters, but they were not Making American Great Again.

In Portland, Ore., last summer, I saw federal authorities periodically use tear gas even against protesters who were peaceful and outside — so it was astonishing to see waves of protesters overrun the Capitol with almost no response. Leftist protests sometimes did become violent and destructive in Portland and other cities, and when that happened Biden repeatedly denounced them; he stood up to his base. Trump in contrast incited violence by his base on Wednesday morning.

There have been whispers that Trump might try to take advantage of disorder at home or a crisis abroad by invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying military forces to interrupt the presidential transition. We should all be on alert and remember the warning of every living former U.S. defense secretary that the military should stay out of such a crisis.

Trump’s assaults on truth are not as visible as assaults on the Capitol, but they are also damaging. Some 62 percent of Republicans say they do not accept Biden’s election, and that is toxic for democracy and lays the groundwork for this kind of violence.

Trump and other Republicans talk about personal responsibility and obeying the law. So Tanya McDowell, a homeless African-American mom, was imprisoned after misleading school officials about where she lived so that she could send her young son to a better school district and give him a better life. But, hypocritically, Trump fails to take any responsibility after a term in which he has lost the House, the presidency and the Senate — and then unleashes mobs to terrorize the Capitol.

As I said, I’ve covered other attempted coups, and history usually catches up to autocrats and thugs — eventually. They end up in prison, exile or disgrace, whining about the unfairness of it all, monuments to the perils of demagogy and authoritarianism. 

Belief.

One of the things no one talks about in the Holding Company-ruined advertising industry is the evaporation of belief. 

The systemic evaporation of belief.

For as long as I've been in the industry, I've been retained on an account, usually the largest account in the agency, or the second largest. I never had to worry about being billable or hunting around for my next assignment. In the serfdom-influenced-language of the modern economy, I was "owned" by clients. 

Yes. We use language like that. And you don't have to be Noam Chomsky to have a philologic field day with that nomenclatura.

What being owned, however, allowed a creative was simple. Belief.

If you took your job seriously, you learned the client. You knew the people. You knew what they made and why they made it. You understood why they did what they did and what they were good at. 

You also, over time, enjoyed a certain amount of intimacy with the client. You spent long fluorescent nights with them haggling over semantics, commas and type size. You frame-fucked together. You became part of a team.

So whether I was working on donut-and-coffee chain, a vaunted German automaker, a retirement company, a large technology company (or two) or an aerospace manufacturer in dire trouble due to a tainted culture that led to two plane crashes and over 300 deaths, you learned, you lived and yes, you grew to love elements of the companies you were charged with working on.

This is not brainwashing.

This is not propaganda.

It's different. It's learning as much you can about a company, weighing their good and bad and finding a way to believe.

I have a belief based on a lifetime of living and learning that the best people and companies are good or right 60-percent of the time and bad and wrong 40-percent of the time.

We fall down as a society when we believe people and companies are idealizable. Or perfect. Or heroic.

No. The only heroes are those without heroes.

Positing that, you can believe in a company, or an agency, or a spouse, or even a country, without believing it is wholly good, wholly noble, wholly without sin.

When you believe that despite missteps, mistakes and malfeasance a company does more good than bad, you can create good ads for them. Because now you understand them. Their core. Their ethos.

In my new career running GeorgeCo., a Delaware Company, LLC., I am most-often called on to help companies figure out who they are and what they do. My particular skill, or peculiar skill, is that I can render these definitions in memorable--even epigrammatic ways. Ways that allow the company to know who they are. And to march forward with a unified mission.

Maybe I'm just too old-fashioned for a world that seems to be ever-galloping into a new Dark Ages. But most companies and clients and products are ill-defined.

Not only do they themselves not know what their mission is, people don't either. They don't know their reason for being, what they do or why.

In the impecunious holding company cosmos where ad agencies and clients are run by people who are better at accountancy and processing than humanity and empathy, belief is discounted if not lost.

Over 50 years ago, Bob Levenson wrote this ad for Doyle Dane Bernbach and, really, the entire advertising industry. Today, oppressed by "razor-thin margins" and phalanxes of cost-consultants, our very way of working assures that the ad industry will die.

We no longer believe. Or allow ourselves the time to find belief in what we do. That's a prescription for death.

Or as Arthur Miller wrote three-quarters of a century ago, in a poem about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing:

When a man admits failure he becomes a pedestrian.
Brotherhood is when two men have the same mother.
Sacrifice is a car sold at a ridiculous price.
Society is when people listen to classical music;
or a Savings & Loan.
Law is order, Justice a decent return on money.
Progress is anything turning on and off by itself.
Beauty is teeth, deep skill, and the willingness.
Freedom is the right to live among your own kind.
A philosophy is a keen sense of land values
and the patience to wait.
War is peace waged by other means .
They know they are the Future.
They are exceedingly well-armed.

But does it scale?

The other day, I posted this ad on my social media sites. It did a little better than my usual ads--it got something like 70,000 views.

When I run an ad like this, I am stealing a page, or trying to, from Apple's playbook. I am up to my gills in business. But the best way to get more business is to have a line in front of your store. Because, after all, success begets success.

I think I remember an anecdote from Jerry Della Femina's book, "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor." In it, Jerry talks about how he and his partners were down to their last few dollars. They had attracted very few clients. 

They took those dollars and put them toward a lavish (Lucullan) Christmas party, inviting hundreds of prospects, industry people and, of course, the press. 

Word got out how cool and hot and prosperous Jerry's agency was. As goes the sizzle in this case, so comes the steak.

Back to my ad.

I ran it and someone commented on it: "Doesn't scale though." That's the indictment of our age. Akin to Eichmann's crimes against humanity. Doesn't scale.

Indeed, today the minute someone starts selling goat-lip hotdogs from a Sabrett's wagon situated on New York's Methadone Mile, she dreams of scaling into a fleet of wagons.

I parried the "doesn't scale" thrust thusly, "why is scaling more important than service and quality? It's not if your aim is to do a good job."

Is it wrong to have tattooed on your spiritual keister a bit of Wordsworth, a sonnet even?

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

For most of human history, it was considered good and noble to find a trade, to perfect your skills with years of attention and practice, to try to do the best you could with what you had. 

You served, served, that's right, served your customers with ardor. They treated you with respect. You were proud of the work you did. They were pleased enough to keep coming back and to keep recommending you to their friends.

In time, as you aged, you found someone 'educable,' and temperamentally-suited to your way of doing things. She would, inherit the craft and your book of business.

  Today, for whatever measly reason, personal integrity--even nobility--no longer counts for much. We have to have a vast Ozymandias-like purview. We have to do what so many do so publicly: Expand to the point of collapse.

  There's something missing in that dictum. 

  Integrity.

  The integrity of my name. Long may she flounder.

  If my name is on it, it's going to be done to my standards.

There's a lot that you can say for scaling. For selling to S4 Capital. 

I'd like something red and sporty and fast.

  And also a new car.

  Such things are not without their allure.

  Fortunately, I check my keister and remember.

I will not lay waste my powers.

  Some things are just not worth getting and spending on.

A belated Christmas story.

When my old man was a young man he grew up in what we would today call a ghetto. For blocks in every direction from 1056 S 51st Street, the rowhouses were filled with Jews. 

Even when my old man enrolled in Temple, the first in his Yiddish speaking family to go to college, he was safe among fellow Jews.

He met his wife, my mother, just blocks away. And his three best friends, all named Herb, were also just a yarmulke's throw distant.

My father burned with ambition, however. These were the days of the melting pot. The American Dream was being dreamt in vivid color. And Stan set his steely blue eyes on the center of the Dream Machine, New York's Madison Avenue.

These were pre-Doyle Dane Bernbach days. And Madison Avenue was still as WASP-y as mayonnaise. But eventually, Stan landed a job with a snooty ad agency called Kenyon & Eckhardt.

He packed his 1949 Studebaker to the gills with my old lady and everything they owned and moved from S. 51st Street in Philadelphia to plowed over farmland out in Queens that some developer had the wisdom to call Fresh Meadows.

I'm not sure how fresh it was and I know my father didn't know what a meadow was any more than he'd know what to do with Holy Water. But there he was.

My old man told me the story this way:

"We moved just before Christmas. I had never seen anything like it before. It seemed that every apartment in our garden apartment complex had some huge tinsel conifer radioactive in their living room.

"That's ok," I said, "the Goyim do what Goyim do." And I let it go at that.

"But then one day--it must have been a week or so after Christmas and on a Saturday or Sunday, I start seeing people driving around the neighborhood with their trees on the roofs of their cars. I had never seen anything like it.

"I rushed home and told your mother. 'Maybe it's a thing they do,' she said 'like a college tie or brass buttons on a blue blazer. It's probably just how the Goyim show off.'"

My father was having none of that. He was already feeling slighted as the only Jew at his agency. And he didn't much like the feeling of people lording things over him. He was conscious that he had grown up poor. His college was a commuter one. His Studebaker was a couple of years too old.  Maybe his suits were on the shiny side. He had more than a bit of a chip on his shoulder.

"That night," my old man continued, "I got some of the string your mother had saved from the bakery. She kept it in a big ball, because why should you throw out perfectly good string, and I got out your mother's brass menorah that was coated with the wax of a hundred Chanukahs. I tied it to the roof of my Studebaker and rode all over Queens with it, flashing my lights and honking my horn at the Gentiles every time I saw someone carting around their tree.

"It wasn't until months later that I realized all these people were doing nothing but, Christmas being over, taking their Christmas trees to the dump."

I waited for a few minutes for some sort of resolution. Maybe a bit of Pirkei Avote-- the Wisdom of the Fathers. He sat for a long while, rolling his cigar between his fingers like George Burns. And then he ended his story.

"George," he said, "be careful out there."