Ingmar and me.

Early on in my career I worked on Gorton's Fish products. Gorton wanted to trumpet the healthy side of eating fish. My partner and I came up with a concept based on the scene in Bergman's classic The Seventh Seal in which the protagonist plays chess with death. We had the bright idea to recreate the scene with a fish-stick playing death instead, and defeating it.

Somehow we sold the spot and we decided to contact Bergman to see if he'd be interested in directing it. We figured that was no more outlandish than Gorton's actually buying the spot. To our surprise, "Ing" (as he preferred to be called) said OK. He actually thought it was pretty funny.

Bergman had never shot a commercial before and he insisted on the first rough cut. When that came in at 128-minutes we realized we had a problem on our hands. "Ing" proved to be a nice guy, however, and once he understood what we meant by a "tir tee" he readily complied. The spot ran for over two years and picked up a host of awards in the European shows. We were shutout in the US, though. A bit too ethereal for the judges.

Adjö så länge, Ingmar. Goodbye, my friend. I shall miss you.

Two more things.

BusinessWeek has another winning article on the world of advertising, this time the top 100 brands in the world. Interestingly and sadly enough, not one of those brands is an advertising agency. So once again, the cobbler's children has no shoes.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/07_32/B40450732bestbrands.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_best+of+bw
And thing number two, I saw this at the border crossing between Canada and the US.

A world without advertising.

I just returned from one of the most isolated spots I've ever been. I was on Grand Manan Island, a lonely bit of land an hour-and-a-half by ferry from the nearest town--and that town, Black's Harbour, New Brunswick, Canada, had a population in the neighborhood of 1000, little more than the population of my apartment building in Manhattan.

In his new memoir, Peeling the Onion, Nobel Laureate Gunther Grass goes on a bit of a lamentation for Germany when it falls into the Western sphere of influence after WWII and again when East Germany re-unites with the West in the 1990s. Grass decries the gross consumerism and commercialism of the American way of life. I don't disagree with Grass completely. I detest our Manolo Blahnik, mall-obsessed culture. I'm sad that our national slogan is no longer E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, One) but, it seems, Shop Till You Drop, even in the middle of a crushing war and a Defense budget of over $500 Billion. However, the world without advertising and commercialism is a pretty bleak place, too. There are virtually no stores, no products in the few stores there are and just not a lot of things you want--because there's not a lot of cognizance of consumer desire. I'll stop this here before I become too much of an aesthete for ya. I guess I'll just sum up by saying, go ahead and be mercantile. Just don't be ugly about it.

Wireless-less.

Dear Readers,

It is almost August, the time when therapists and Ad Aged doyens take a hiatus to recharge. I will be fly-fishing in a remote area of Patagonia and also attending to the medical needs of some of the people in the area. Finally my medical training put to good use.

I will return on July 30th. Tanned, fat and rested.

OK, now I'm pissed.

About fifteen years ago I was working for a vaunted creative shop. For whatever reason, some senior account executive invited in a rep from Starch, the commercial testing cabal, to instruct us on how to get a better Starch score.

Now, Ad Age, that quasi-journalistic bastion of the trite and insipid, the doyen of the anti-intuitive, is this week running an article reporting that the Dynamic Logic company has tips for us on online-brand-building. They even include a call-out box with the bold-face heading "The right ingredients for online ads." For those of you reading Ad Aged while in solitary confinement or stuck in a nearly forgotten gulag somewhere and who are dying for something to read, here is the link: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=119276
But as the sign said on the way to the witch's fortress in The Wizard of Oz, "I'd turn back if I were you."

The reason I'm outraged about crap like Dynamic Logic is that it will be latched onto by so many purported marketing people. Rules will emerge. Do's and don't's. All of which, I suppose are ok if they do not devolve into absolutism. But you and I both know they will. Clients and internal reviews will be at the mercy of check-lists. In time, except for the talented-tenth of agencies, innovation will be stymied and be replaced by karaoke creative. Formulaic blather. Lack of experimentation.

The key to success in virtually any endeavor is the willingness to fail. I could, but I won't, insert a sports metaphor here.

OK, back to the anecdote I opened with. A famous creative director who later opened his own NY agency which later became a gigantic worldwide company, sat through the Starch meeting. He immediately revised a board he had sold to open with the ringing of a telephone--because according to Starch, such a device would boost a score. The ringing had nothing at all to do with the spot. As Adolph Eichmann said, he was only following orders.

Rainer Maria Rilke on Advertising.

I'm lucky enough to have some very smart--even profound--friends. This morning I had a conversation about many things with the profoundest of all.

All of a sudden and from absolutely out of the blue, he trotted out a reference Rilke,
the great late 19th/early 20th century poet and writer. Rilke, even at his most obtuse, probably
has more to say than your GCD or even ECD, so I re-read some excerpts of his "Letters to a Young Poet." I've pasted it here so you can all shake your heads and wonder how I actually managed to reference Rilke in my blog.

"People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it."

A thought on Grace.

Roy Grace, that is. Formerly of DDB and of Grace & Rothschild. Responsible for so many great ads and spots. Someone once asked him what he did as a creative director. Grace replied:

"I take out the garbage."

Grace meant, I think, that he eliminates work from the mix that isn't good enough. And he removes the extraneous crap that somehow always seems to get shoe-horned into work. I'm no Roy Grace, but I often disparage ads by saying "they're a negotiation, not a communication." That is, along the way different constituencies argued for and got their way and stuck in their idea. The end result is a rat's breakfast. And that's something no one wants to look at.

Words and pictures together.

Errol Morris, the Academy Award winning Director of The Fog of War and the director of the brilliantly simple Apple "Switchers" commercials, has a blog on The New York Times select.

Here is the opening of his my recent post and the url for it. However, if you're such an anti-intellectual cheapskate that you don't subscribe to the Times online, send me a note via AdAged and, against my better judgment, I will email you back a copy.

http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/

July 10, 2007, 2:14 pm

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

By Errol Morris

Pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words. But a picture unaccompanied by words may not mean anything at all. Do pictures provide evidence? And if so, evidence of what? And, of course, the underlying question: do they tell the truth?

People either hate creatives or don't understand them. Or both.

I am looking for a job, so every once in a while I succumb to the siren song of online job sites and submit an application. I responded to one today for an Executive Creative Director job and got a reply back with this text in the subject line.

RE: Executive Creative Director (EXECCREATE)

Now is it just me, or does the word in parens look like the word execrate, that is, to declare something hateful or abhorrent. To loathe something.

Do you like me?

Watching TV, listening to the radio, reading the newspaper, spending time online, of course we are inundated with messages. What follows is obvious, but, it seems, lost to so many marketers out there. People are loathe to buy a product or service from a company or person they loathe. That being said, it's fairly striking how few ads are actually likable. In fact, the 2007 Cone Cause Evolution Survey claims that two-thirds of American's consider a company's business practices when deciding what to by. (As reported in Advertising Age.)
http://www.adage.com/article?article_id=119214

I'd go a step further and say this: how you portray yourself in an ad is also a business practice. That is, if you're crass and ugly, manipulative and deceptive, people will be less apt to like you and therefore less apt to buy your product. OK. We all know what happens next. Unlikable ads stop performing so the client and agency panic and say something like, "we have to dial up the responsiveness." In so doing they make the ads even less likable. And in short order, someone's head gets lopped off.

Ads are, often, representational stand-ins for people. You don't buy from unlikable people. Why would you buy from an unlikable ad?