Are you sitting down?

Yesterday I had two client meetings, meetings with two different clients. As usual, I followed my usual tack with clients. I was assertively honest and candid and I over-delivered--giving them more than they expected.

Yesterday both clients took in what I had to say, quickly bought what I had to sell (and then some) and thanked me for my work and my presentation.

--
The photo above is a sculpture of Diogenes found on the campus of the University of Southern California. For most of his life Diogenes "searched with a lantern in the daylight for an honest man." Though Diogenes never found an honest man, he had, in the process, "exposed the vanity and selfishness of man."

Incipient notes from Down Under.

As I am about to re-orient myself to a different part of the world, I thought it made sense to change the orientation of this post.

An aphorism I've learned from bad bosses.

"Loyalty is the new competence."

Lingua Quartus Imperii.

The Latin above means "Language of the Fourth Reich." I've updated the Latin from Viktor Klemperer's "Language of the Third Reich."

Klemperer was a "mischling," a "half-Jew" living with an "Aryan," so though he was stripped of all his civil rights, his ability to make a living and though he suffered massive cruelties and indignities, he was somehow allowed to live in a "Jew House" in Dresden and--almost inexplicably survive both WWII and decades of Communist rule.

Along the way, Klemperer, a philogist--a studier of language--kept a diary thousands of pages long and also wrote extensively on the perversion of language--the masking of meaning--perpetrated by the Nazis.

Right now I am reading "The Dark Side: The inside story how the war on terror turned into a war on American Ideals." And Jane Mayer, the author, details the Bush/Cheney/Addington's assault on our own language.

Here's what I mean: "As William Safire, the conservative language columnist for the "New York Times, wrote, "Some locutions begin as bland bureaucratic euphemisms to conceal great crimes...In this past century, the "final solution" and "ethnic cleansing" were phrases that sent a chill through our lexicon."

Mayer then points out that the President used euphemisms like "enhanced," "robust," and "special" interrogations that included beating people to death, applying electric shock to their genitals, waterboarding and the like.

Listen carefully. And you will hear.

When things get complicated.

Look at something simple. And beautiful. And timeless. This is from Andre Kertesz. He shot it 80 years ago.

Don't under-estimate advertising.

Amid all the sturm and drang about the death of advertising--about how consumers are impervious to messaging, a new book has come out that was just reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. It's called "BUYING IN: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are." And it's by Rob Walker, who writes "Consumed," a weekly shopping-culture column in The New York Times Magazine. You can read the review here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/review/Manjoo-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

The point seems to be as more and more people say they pay no attention to advertising, consumers, in fact, are ever more consumed by consumerism. Here's what seems to be the pithy-core of the book:

"Few of us will admit that we frequently succumb to salesmanship, and that marketing produces in us needs we never knew we had. Advertisers play along, assuring us that we’re tough to persuade; the trade press laments the birth of a “new consumer,” shoppers hopped up on YouTube and TiVo who are said to have developed a strange “immunity” to advertising. “I’m not much of a consumer,” knowing youngsters confess to Walker — just before they launch into arias on the transcendent qualities of their favorite MP3 players or preferred brands of beer."

In other words, advertising can quote Mark Twain "reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

150 Shopping Days left until Christmas.

Here it is, late July and we are already inundated with back-to-school ads. I realize that school starts before Labor Day for many kids these days, but it still seems like marketers are rushing the season.

But that's not the point of this post. My point is this: I think this is one more example of marketers lying or, at least, dissembling to their target.

Every once in a while, my wife nails one.

My wife (shown above) is an ECD at an agency whose name will go unmentioned to protect the innocent and the imbecilic. This morning she jumped into a cab early so that she could get to work to sit in on a two-hour conference call with the client.

She just gave me a call and said she put the client on MUTant.

The "No money down" economy.

Last year, starting around this time I wrote a few posts--with my usual de Toquevillian perspicacity--about something I was calling the "low-bid economy." You can read them here if your time-sheets permit any non-billable time whatsoever: http://adaged.blogspot.com/search?q=low+bid+economy

This morning, amid the housing crisis, the oil crisis, the credit crisis and news that the nation's foremost stock exchange has lost 20% of its value over the last 12 months, I am visiting the low-bid notion again but with a slight twist.

We are still living in a low-bid nation. Even worse, however, we are living in a no-money-down world. The world of $150 take-out, $1200 handbags, and $15,000/month summer rentals. Of course as agency people this affects us, perhaps most overtly in online marketing.

Here's what I mean. Clients routinely build expensive websites, develop ornate applications, capture compelling content (capture that content! it's getting away!) only to leave these marketing elements unpromoted and floating around cyber-space--never telling consumers where these things are or even that they exist.

As they used to intone on the old TV show Dragnet, dum de dum dum.

This is because clients don't want to pay for real marketing. They bought their marketing with no money down, no money to propagate what they've produced. Ah! Another example of marketers believing that consumers are waiting and waiting eagerly for yet another message.

Whatever happened to writing?

I saw Batman this weekend and while it was entertaining it was a comic book--nothing more.

I thought of Carol Reed's and Graham Greene's and Orson Welles' "The Third Man." I don't it's ever been matched.

The shibboleth of the day is "story-telling." Read the story below. Has it ever been better done?

Opening narrator:
I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. Constantinople suited me better. I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market. We'd run anything if people wanted it enough and whom had the money to pay. Of course a situation like that does tempt amateurs but, well, umm, you know they can't stay the course like a professional.

Now the city is divided into four zones, you know, each occupied by a power: the American, the British, the Russian and the French. But the centre of the city that's international policed by an international patrol. One member of each of the four powers. Wonderful! What a hope they had! All strangers to the place and none of them could speak the same language. Except a sort of smattering of German.

Good fellows on the whole, did their best you know. Vienna doesn't really look any worse than a lot of other European cities. Bombed about a bit.

Oh, I was going to tell you, wait, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, an American. Came all the way here to visit a friend of his. The name was Lime, Harry Lime. Now Martins was broke and Lime had offered him, some sort, I don't know, some sort of job.

Anyway, there he was, poor chap. Happy as a lark and without a cent.