Learning about advertising from a 3-year old.

I recently viewed 3 readings of Billy Collins’s poem, “Litany” on You Tube. One was by Billy Collins (http://bit.ly/cfldS); one was a recitation by a three-year old (http://bit.ly/bkZIYm); the other was a by a guy who read and smoked a pipe at the same time (http://bit.ly/j7wNqZ). Not surprisingly, Billy Collins was smart and funny and wonderful. And for second place, it was between the 3-year old, who had memorized the poem, and the guy with the pipe.

Admittedly, the guy who read the verse and smoked a pipe at the same time was impressive, especially when his pipe went out and he non-chalantly loosened the tobacco, tamped it and lit it up again. All while reading! Did I mention he had a beard that made him look quite – quite! – erudite?

And admittedly, the three-year old didn’t appear very erudite. Occasionally, he looked around the room at his toys that seemed to beckon him, a distraction which subverted any erudition that he might otherwise have exuded and made it impossible for us to imagine him at dinner parties using words like “droll” and “Nietzschean.”

Nevertheless, despite this obvious handicap, the 3-year old was remarkable. Seriously, a few of his lines flowed with surprising ease, so naturally that I forgot he was reciting a poem. I heard the words as someone would speak them. His approach was appropriate, because if you’ve read Collins, you know that he can be a deceivingly complex poet who very often uses the colloquial and its rhythms. This child may have been flawed and lacking in polish, but he was impressive. The little guy deserved second place.

Our own work should be so effective. If engagement is to take the consumer unaware, our creativity must not smack of advertising or affectation. It should be “smart,” just without the quotation marks. Most of the time, I would venture, it should touch the part of us that we have in common with each other – it should touch the child within us all.

Don't be a lawyer joke.

Recently, my wife and I had to take a PTO to square away some legal matters concerning our appartment in Chicago – not at all how I'd like to spend a day off. Nevertheless we flew to the Second City, checked into our hotel and headed down the business side of Michigan Avenue. Once ushered into our lawyer's office, my wife sat on the couch, while I antsily snooped around the room. I scanned the spines of the tomes and journals, noted the obligatory diplomas, attempted to read an entry or two of his day planner for something juicy, spotted some folders on his desk and wondered which one was ours, and read a couple of lawyer cartoons that were taped to the wall which weren't very funny. My god, this was a dull place. On the floor beside his desk, he had one of those big boxy briefcases that contain a filing cabinet worth of case folders –– you know, so he could transport half his dull office home with him every night. I sat down.

I theorized that his world was filled with all kinds of promises – promises that are broken and promises that are kept. When people break the law, they break a promise. There is an initial agreement, a lot of discussion about the interpretion of the law, but the existing law doesn't usually change, in which case we promise to uphold it. Hey, we had a tenant that broke a promise –– that was why we were in Chicago in the first place –– she wasn't paying her rent. While we hadn't met our tenant in person yet, she promised to be a bitch.

Anyway, we attended the hearing, the judge ruled in our favor and the law gave us a new promise: The tenant would be evicted.

A couple of days later, back in New York, there was this hour-long meeting scheduled to talk about work. I didn't know why there was this meeting, perhaps it slipped onto my schedule while I was away, but it seems there are lots of meetings that I attend whose purpose is not clear, so I didn't question it. The thing was, the creative team was asked to share their thinking, but they didn't have any real ads yet. They believed they had a cool idea; they even seemed excited about it, just the executions weren't ready to be shared yet. So in swooped the critical thinkers.

Everyone had their opinions; everyone hypothesized about what the ads should look like. Ugh. The meeting that was only scheduled for an hour, and probably would have only taken an hour had we full-fledged ads, ended up taking 3 hours. Serious concerns were bubbling up like club soda. It was excrutiating, everyone trying desparately to establish a predictable premise to which we could be gladly held. 'Promise us,' they seemed to say, 'that the work will clearly come out of the brief.'

Well, a serious creative department should avoid making promises. I don't like promises. I don't believe that we should be in the habit of making them.

Ironically, just two days later, the team revealed their thinking and while it wasn't at all what anyone had in mind, everyone loved the work. Even more surprisingly, the work was on strategy.

You see, if we had made a promise, serendipity would not have been able to happen. If we had made a promise, something that was half-baked may have been trashed. If we had made a promise, the unexpected would not have materialized.

So leave the promises to the lawyers. They feed on predictability.

(P.S. I feel it was somewhat of an achievment to have written this post and resist the temptation to tell a lawyer joke. But we all know the problem with lawyer jokes, right? Lawyer's don't think they're funny, and no one else thinks they're jokes.)