A breakup.

I always get a little sad when you see an agency and a client break up after a long and successful run. It makes me feel gloomy for the industry--when an agency's work saves a client or drives a client's success and then they are dismissed. Undoubtedly, the reasons for advertising breakups are as complicated as the reasons for relationship breakups. But somehow, I always take the side of the agency.

The latest breakup involves Carmichael-Lynch, the storied Minneapolis agency, and Harley-Davidson, the storied Milwaukee motorcycle manufacturer.

For 31 years Carmichael-Lynch has done outstanding ads for Harley. Helped them stave off bankruptcy. Helped make them iconic, cool, a standard in a motorcycle world teeming with cheaper Japanese imports.

And now it's over.

Mark-Hans Richer, Harley's chief marketing officer explained things, incomprehensibly, this way: "We've had a good run with Carmichael Lynch over the past 31 years but as our brand has grown globally and with new, broader audiences and cultural opportunities, we've been working for some time with a more diverse group of agency partners. Our strategies have been moving away from a singular consumer target and a one-size-fits-all agency solution. Rather than accept this new reality, CL chose a different path and we respect that."

I'm not sure what Richer's words mean. Like I said, they're incomprehensible.

It probably means Harley's work will suck and no one will see it.

Advertising memories.

When I was a kid, this is in the late 60s and early 70s, it seemed like the world was falling apart. People were protesting things, burning buildings. Soldiers were shooting students. Students were taunting cops. Authority was a thing of the past.

For a kid--and kids grow up better in worlds that have absolutes of good and bad, this was all very confusing. There was no permanence, no order. No good and bad. It was all uproar.

As a consequence, baseball became very important to me. It was the same game it always was. You could rely on it.

So pretty much every evening, I would turn on the old black and white RCA Victor set we had and watch the Mets or the Yankees play. Being in a city with two ball teams basically meant that from April 'til October there was a game on every night.

Schafer beer was one of the major advertisers. And while most of their commercials sucked, I remember this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8__0FfSR_mw which, for whatever reason, I can't seem to download.

This Schafer spot was a great story. It told a story that was somehow both funny and comforting. Like this Alka-Seltzer spot, which I was able to download.

In a world that was going crazy, these spots made things seem ok.

Ad of the week.

Point one is especially illuminating. Click on the ad so you can read the type.

El Greco, half a mile below ground in Chile.

A picture of the buried miners from Chile and an el Greco.

No way out.

Of all the evils caused by holding companies and agency consolidation, the worst is that they prevent you from getting angry.

Here's what I mean.

Not long ago these agencies existed in New York.

Kenyon & Eckhardt.
Bozell Jacobs.
Scali McCabe Sloves.
Ammirati & Puris.
SSCB Lintas.
Deutsch.
Lowe.

Six agencies. Now, scraps of those agencies are all rolled into one steaming amalgamation of faceless fecklessness.

Now, if you worked say, at Scali, and you weren't getting good assignments, you had no respect for your boss, or you were just bored you could put some nice slacks on and get a job at, say, Bozell.

No more.

Now if you hate where you are there's nowhere to go.

So we lower our pulses.
Our emotions.
We disengage.
Rather than seizing the day, we just hope to get through it.
There's no place to go.
No way out.

The 20 most popular words in PR.

According to a document that just came across my desk, below are the 20 most popular words in British press-releases.

Leading.
Best.
Solution.
Great.
Leading provider.
Award winning.
Largest.
Unique.
Innovative.
Innovation.
Extensive.
Exclusive.
Dynamic.
Real-time.
Easy to use.
Fastest.
Premier.
Innovator.
Top.

Accordingly it seems that the United Kingdom has spent much of the year promulgating leading and innovative award winning solutions exclusively easy to use. Or some such.

Uncle Slappy returns.

Since I was away for much of the last two weeks, and since the World Pinocle Championship was being held on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, my Uncle Slappy took the train up from Florida to spend some time in New York. At his request, the post below is from him.

OK, Mr. Hoity Toity, I'll admit I'm no Spring chicken but I have to tell you I don't trust anyone under 50. It seems that entire generations in America have had their ferstunkeneh heads fall off their shoulders.

I could talk about how they get their news from shiny white teeth where they talk about virtually nothing but Lindsay Lohan's tuchas, or from free newspapers where ads for laser bunion removal take up more space than actual articles, I could talk about all that. But I won't.

What I want to talk about, schnook, is symbolic.

For the last four days in New York it's been pissing rain like a racehorse. Ordinarily I'd stay home under such conditions. But with the Pinocle championship going on, I had to take the train up to the Concourse. What do I see amidst all this rain liquifying, you should pardon my language, dog feces, dog urine, bum vomit and general filth? What do I see walking through this near toxic slurry? I don't even want to go out this my rubbers on! But what do I see?

I see skinny girls talking on cell-phones in the rain and walking through puddles wearing flippy floppy sandals.

Just touching with your little finger the filth that runs through New York when it rains could give you deadly cancer of the ear--but these girls--and some boys, too, mind you, are slogging through puddles like Washington crossing the cockamamie Delaware in sandals that maybe, just maybe, are appropriate for the beach.

This is the generation we are trusting our futures too, Big Shot.

Me, I'm sticking to pinocle.

And then one day he climbed up to the top of a bell-tower with a high-powered rifle and just started shooting...

Dear Clients,

I know some MBA somewhere has powerpointed that we must deliver "experiences" to clients.

But come on.

When your kid is in school, she's there to learn her ABCs.
She's not there to have an "alphabetic experience."

Leave my copy alone.

Or you'll have a negative creative director experience.

A bit more on Tick Tock.

The last time I saw Tick Tock Tannenbaum was in the summer of 1975, just a few months before he was presumed dead.

I had just finished high school, hadn't yet entered college and I had a lot of time on my hands. That summer I worked at Playland, a small amusement park in Westchester County that was situated alongside the murky waters of the Long Island Sound.

The job I had was simple. Basically, I sat in a small booth in an arcade and made change. When the arcade got crowded, I was meant to walk around and make sure nobody monkeyed with the machines. Or if someone lost a quarter, I used the trip they gave me to clear the coin slot. Or I gave them a quarter for a new game.

Most of the time, however, the game room was empty. I sat in my booth and read books. That's what I was doing when Tick Tock showed up.

"Fuck face," he said, "whatcha reading?"

"Uncle Tick Tock."

"Cheese it, keed." He slid through the recess in my booth a small parcel wrapped in old newspaper. "Hold this for me until I come for it. Don't rat to the Potsies, ok, keed?"

"Sure. What is it?" I asked naively.

"Cheese it, keed," the old man repeated, "I gotta blow."

I kept Uncle Tick Tock's package in my change booth for the rest of the summer. He never showed up. I took it to college with me that fall and secured it in the bottom drawer of my desk underneath a sheaf of typewritten pages.

When I heard Uncle Tick Tock died later that year, I removed the package from my desk drawer. I deposited it in my trash bin.

I didn't have the balls to open it.

It's arrived.

I worked at Ally & Gargano, nee Carl Ally, although not in its glory days when it was arguably the best agency ever. Last night I got home at 2AM from a harrowing luggage experience and found that the good graces of our postal system had delivered, in my absence, a mammoth book compiled by Amil Gargano of the agency's best work.

No, I am not living the the past Anonymous. I am not slip-sliding into curmudgeon-hood. I am simply admiring great work like a ballplayer might admire Ted Williams' swing or Joe DiMaggio's centerfield prowess.

It is a book that marks an era in advertising. And it features advertising that helped define what advertising is. In subsequent posts I may dive deeper into some of Ally's ad campaigns.

If you love advertising, as I do, its craft and its bullshit, you ought to drop a dime on this tome.

It's not cheap.

But good advertising seldom is.