Experience this!

There have always been people who get easily distracted, brief-brained people who'd chomp away on popcorn during a Bergman film, people who'd talk during a revelatory homily, but with social media, we now have to contend with the arms of those people entering our view of the stage or screen every two seconds to snap a photo with stupid little smart phones. I suppose those are the same people who go to Europe and see a different city each day. It's enough to say you were there; it's a Foursquare world after all.

But what the hell. I should lighten up, right. So, with my new iPhone 4S, I snapped this little gem the other night of Patti Smith at the Bowery Ballroom. As you can see, she is really into it, offering up her heart and soul during the poetic rant of Rock ‘N Roll Nigger. I think in that one song she says what Lady Gaga could only dream of communicating about everyone’s potential to express themselves. It was sooo amazing!

Trash

The above title is the name of a New York Dolls song, which I thought I might be able to reference in something about the Sydney Opera House, but, when I thought about it, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Sydney Opera House and what I had recently learned about it. Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to use it one day for something else, if for no other reason than the fact that I love the song and I love the band.

Anyway, I learned that the original design for the opera house was the result of an international competition. As the story goes, there were three judges going through entries and they had narrowed it down to a few finalists. Then came Eero Saarinen, the famous architect who has now been immortalized in crossword puzzles for his odd four-lettered first name. Arriving late to Sydney, he saw the final entries and wasn’t crazy about any of them. So he started going through the trash. And there, among the rejected entries – and mind you, there were some 200 hundred entries – he landed on a little something by a Swede named Jorn Utzon which he thought was outstanding.

Several years later, the American architect, Louis Kahn, wrote that, “Light didn’t know how beautiful it was until it was reflected off this building.”

I’m thinking of getting a little photo of the Sydney Opera House for my office. It would be a reminder to think twice before killing an idea.

Midnight in Wherever*

A week or so ago my wife and I were in Cannes and one night we decided we'd forgo the bouillabaisse and rosé for a movie. This is an unusual thing to do in Cannes. I know this because there were only seven or eight people in the theater.

We just thought it would be cool to see Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, walk out of the theater with the afterglow of Paris and still be in France. I love that movies can do that. Perhaps it's not such a good idea with something by Wes Craven, but, from the good reviews of Woody Allen's movie, we thought this could make for a lovely evening.

And Minuit a Paris was really lovely. I thought Owen Wilson played a credible Woody Allen. I thought Marian Cotillard was enchanting and, good god, so beautiful. And I thought it was funny when Owen Wilson's character, Gil Pender, realized that he doesn't want to live literally in the past because, whether in the Renaissance, the Belle Epoque or the 1920's, there would be no Zithromax. I decided I needed to download some Sidney Bechet so I could conjure some of this mood at will, like when heading home on the commuter train from Manhattan.

Now, I wonder if the thought of going to the movies in Cannes had something to do with the ad festival. The festival encourages us to think globally, to think how something might play in other countries. Maybe while I was studying the shortlisted print and outdoor ads, strolling up and down the gallery of ads and being blown away by several of them, I was thinking about the potential effect of artful communication. I'd like to think so.

All I know is that great work takes people to places they want to go.

*The photograph above is from the beautiful book, Paris by Night, by Brassai. Brassai was from Hungary.

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.)

The thoroughly amorphous brief.

Ever dare your fellow presenters to say something stupid in a meeting? It's a fun game. You can play it at dinner parties, too. You come up with a ridiculous word, the silliest you can think of, and you weave it into your presentation. I once gave it a go and had to say the word, "dunderhead." When I said it, though, "dunderhead" only made me look like one.

It's hard to accommodate agendas. I once had a client who forbids all words beginning with "un." Having something to do with certain negative words, his theory only made me thirsty for a 7UP and, unsurprisingly, gave him a headline that was unsmart.

  We do this sort of thing all the time when we write pithy strategy statements. These directives read with the terseness of a tag line. Very often, they contain the well-chosen word that sings “written,” which, like a cheerleader, cheers its personal agenda on into the finals.

  A few years ago, I had a brief with the word "mojo." With that as a guide, the first 3 campaigns I reviewed depicted the benefit as some sort of voodoo power, as if the wholesome product came with a hex or something. Had it been described as "an energetic feeling," we would have been better off. Clever strategy statements are often misleading.

  I want neutral. I want the right amount of vagueness, with all the edges rounded off, void of fancy words and style agenda. Facts, however, I do want – lots of them.

  I want facts about the target until the target becomes a human being; I want facts about why the target should buy it and specifics about what they should buy this instead of. Tell me what makes him or her tick. Whether I understand them or not, give me as many facts about this business as possible. Like the points on a Seurat canvas, the facts add up to something. A ton of them give the creatives a gut feeling, a gestalt toward which they can work; not only that, but enough facts will create a vibe against which a creative director can judge work.

  That's not to say a brief should lack focus. We should be aware of the objectives and constraints, work within specific and agreed bounds, bounds that every one understands and appreciates. However, the briefing document should restrain from admitting any executional preferences.

  Yes, it's difficult. Journalists have struggled with the subtlety of yellow journalism for centuries, and when you think about it, it's impossible to be totally objective. Our instinct tells us that we will improve our writing if we are reductive and succinct, so in coming up with one word that says what 3 words say, we come up with words that draw a little too much attention to themselves. Strunk and White gave the best advice of all: “Just say the words;” I would only add, and give us facts – give me liberty and give me facts! Diffusing our prejudices with facts, grounds the document in the realities surrounding the problem.

  I did some poking around. BBH once distinguished between "What is the product?" and "What is the brand?" I like that.  JWT harped on the "key response." I like that, too. BMP liked to ask, "What do we know about them that will help us?" Russell Davies went through a, "What is it FOR?" phase. Chiat asked for the most "disruptive" thought. Fantastic. Why not think about all these approaches, so I'm swayed by none of them.

  When we start out, we are describing something amorphous, which we are encouraging the team to create. Let’s keep it that way. It’s really okay. The brief doesn't have to be perfectly articulate or pithy. It doesn't have to be crisp or quotable. It doesn't have to be crafted, except to be neutral. It simply has to be ambitious.

Post blues

The blues give a lesson in survival. They teach us that sometimes it's good to vent, declare our complaint, declare our complaint again and then see where the words and the rhythm lead us. It's catharsis. It's sublimation. It's how we get stuff off our chests.

So you know those profit margins, the absurd criterion for determining what is and what isn't billable hours, the economies of scale that have no basis in what could improve our product, all that emphasis on PR and agency profile and agency report cards, the CFO's that don't understand where to put the money, the mad men and women who keep accounts in their hip pocket, the management with no managing skill, the plagiarizers, the memorizers and the self-promoters...well, fuck you. FUCK YOU! You give me back pain, acid reflux and you exacerbate my insomnia.

What am I gonna do about these things? Some would say I really don't do very much, this being pretty much all I do. Fine. It makes me feel better to write about it. It cleans the slate. It cleans the slate so I can do a better job at work. See, Creativity can be a useful tool for Creativity. And a blog can be like the blues.