What can we possibly learn from a traveling salesman?

    In the early 1900’s and through at least the first half of the century, a traveling salesman would knock at your door and, if he were any good, immediately do two things to begin his sales pitch. He would make two gestures – one with his right hand and one with his left foot: he took off his hat and he stepped backward. Instinctively you would open the door even wider, inviting the salesman inside. With those two gestures, his sales pitch would become a sales talk.

    These days, it isn’t that easy to get invited inside someone’s home, except in porn movies or slasher films. But the thinking behind his two gestures still holds true. It sets just the right atmosphere for effective advertising.

     There’s the courtesy of the lifted hat from a well-dressed professional and the deference expressed in the backward step, disarming your instinct for self-protection. In a matter of seconds, the salesman laid the foundation for respect and credibility. The step backward left a space for you to fill.

     Now let’s talk about the majority of pop up ads, pre-roll ads and hot links. In a medium designed to fulfill instantaneous wants and needs, these ads screw with our rhythm. There is no knock at our door and there is no deference and there is no space for us to fill. These things are in our face.

     My point is this: There are principles behind the successful techniques of the past, lots of valuable lessons that we can and should learn from. All we have to do is realize that we are in the business of persuasion and suddenly we have the history of human behavior from which to draw.
     As the salesman left, you would smile as he walked down your front steps. Then, almost breathlessly, you’d head back into your home and realize that you had committed yourself to 29 monthly installments of the Encyclopedia Britannica that the nice young salesman represented. You had been sold. And you didn’t mind one bit.

It's so good, I'm tempted to steal it.

     You know Colum McCann, the writer? The New York Times wrote a piece on him in last Sunday's magazine and it reported about an organization that McCann helped found, Narrative4. The organization "brings together kids from different places – sometimes directly contentious places, sometimes just places with their own hardships – and how over a span of days the kids pair off, one from each place, and exchange the story that most defines who they are. At the end of their time together, they tell the stories to the larger group, taking on the persona of their partner – an exercise, McCann said, in "radical empathy.""

     I love this. Imagine an agency that embraces "radical empathy"? Imagine this exercise being part of the criteria to join an agency? Imagine an agency that is serious about its ability to tell the right story to a consumer? 

     I wish I came up with "radical empathy." Hopefully, I'll have plenty of opportunities to borrow it. And if I ever forget to give Colum McCann credit, let this be my admission of his ownership.

I. About management

     I seem to obsess about how to motivate people, not just consumers, but fellow employees. Maybe it's the old teacher in me. All I know is that, when it comes to the engine of the agency, I can't ignore the sputtering. 

     Recently, someone told me that half the kids coming out of VCU believe they will one day be on their own. In other words, 50% of the kids are not dreaming of working for JWT or Publicis or DDB. My guess is that the other 50% are dreaming of working for Weiden and Droga. 

     They may have a point and it may very well be a legitimate one, but their thinking is flawed – natural to youth but flawed.  They are dreaming of results – glory, wealth, hardware and one’s name on the door, when the real joy of being creative is the process, the journey, the moment. Who’s going to help them with that? To see not only that there is a joy in coming up with a clever idea, but to see the deeper joy in mastering that idea, working out every detail, every flourish, every word. Really owning it.

      I believe there is a cry for that joy – to make that job a craft, to have an earned pride that goes beyond wit, something that a superficial accumulation of skills on a resume won't give them. But they can’t hear their own cry – it's muffled under all the distractions of technology, holding companies, bad management, and so on. And this joy is not something they have much experience with, anyway; so whether it was once on a college art project or on a spec ad for the portfolio, they probably didn't know what it was, didn't have a name for it, only that it felt good. I believe, I have to believe, that this cry is fundamental to truly creative people. No, it’s not about having done big things; it’s about becoming big in the doing. I have to believe that. The quality of the execution, the thing we are ultimately responsible for, depends on it. We have to hear that cry and then help them answer it. If we don't, the most talented people won't stick around. More tragically, some of them won't even know why, wherever they go, unfulfillment keeps following them.

     Essentially, it’s a cry for creative directors who know how to manage. We need to hire and train people to be effective with them. We need the Phil Jacksons of advertising. We need people who know how to give form to that amorphous cry within. That said….

II. The Chicken and the Wolf

     A Chicken spotted a Wolf that was heading straight for his coop and cried, "WOLF!"

     The Farmer, coddled in his Laz-E-Boy, mumbled, "Stupid Chicken!" and ignored the cry, for he had an invisible fence to ward off such intruders. Little did he know, however, that a car accident down the road had hit a telephone pole and tripped his electrical supply. Of course, the Farmer's great-great-grandfather used to respond all the time to a boy that cried, "Wolf" but that was before there were invisible fences.
     Meanwhile, the Wolf leapt in and ate the Chicken.
     The next morning the Farmer saw the white feathers scattered about, put two and two together and thought, "Thank God. Now I won't have to listen to that annoying squawk box anymore!"

Moral: It's not as easy to get human beings to do stuff as it used to be.

My vision video script

I don't see a lot of people who can put an argument together.
Sometimes it depresses me;
Now it angers me.
It makes no sense.
Clients pay us to convince people to buy their product –
Right?
And in order to do that,
we have to change people's minds –
Uh,
I'd call that persuasion.
I'd say we're in the persuasion business.
Forget media.
Forget the work that you are dying to do;
Set aside your post-modern proclivities;
Stop
And do as Tim Delaney once said:
'Write yourself out of the problem.'
Address the fundamentals.
Address the things that people need in order to change;
Because those things haven't changed.
Executions may have changed.
But what people need to change
Has not changed.
Read The Art of Rhetoric –
Bill Bernbach did.
It was written 2,500 years ago and it will tell you
More about persuasion than Mashable will.
What's the argument?
Why should people believe you?
What are people feeling?
And what do they need to feel to change?
If you're not thinking about those things
Then you're floundering.
If you don't care about those things,
Get out of the business
Because you're fighting it:
We are in the persuasion business.
Know the timeless truths
And then,
THEN make cool shit in service of persuasion.
We are not in the business of making things;
We are not in the business of conversations;
We are not in the business of making cool shit;
We are in the business of persuasion.
Ask any client.
It doesn't mean ads have to sound like "We bring good things to life"
Or "Have a Coke and a smile."
Executions change.
They don't have to suck like "1800 Empire" or Brad Pitt for Chanel.
Executions should change.
Media changes, too.
But last I looked,
We are still talking to humans;
So we are in the persuasion business.
It pisses me off that it's so hard.
It used to be we had bosses who knew this shit.
Now we have bosses who answer to bosses who know nothing about the business of persuasion,
Bosses who can't tell an argument from a social media strategy,
Holding company CFO's,
Uber anxious account people
Who live for down-to-the-minute arrangements
And big decks.
They know shit about persuasion.
But that doesn't change what we do
And clients know what we're supposed to do.
If you're to do it,
You have to defy all the Babel tongues around you;
You have to write down the argument,
Find the further reality,
Imagine the hook set in deep
THEN persuade people.
Forget the trends;
Write the argument,
Write beyond time,
Get to truths the world can't deny.
If you don't believe it's possible,
Go to MOMA
And see all the timeless ideas that look new,
Just rise above the sounds found in alphabet soup.
Wax logical,
THEN wax poetic,
Write the lines of the proof,
THEN write between the lines.
As simple as that.
It'll work and nobody will be able to fuck with you.
That's all you can do.
We are in the persuasion business.
Lean into it.
WE ARE IN THE PERSUASION BUSINESS!

The funny business of change

     I've been freelancing and when I'm not freelancing I'm networking and trying to meet nice, smart people. To confess, the next stage of my career isn't all worked out yet, so I want to learn all I can; I want to gain some perspective; I want to see how other people are doing it. But, my god, it takes work. Before you can have a regular conversation, everyone wants to complain. I don't know if I'd call it cathartic, because when it's time to move on, there's no indication that anyone feels any better than Steven Wright on a rainy day; and, if it were not for an inner sense of timing to send us back to work, I get the feeling it would go on for hours.

     What do we complain about? We complain how the industry sucks, and generally, we get right to the point.

     ME: Hi.

     AD PERSON: The industry sucks, doesn't it.

And just try to start the conversation off on a different note.

     ME: Hey, what about those Yankees? Shame about Jeter, huh?

     AD PERSON: See that, every industry sucks.

     So far I've concluded there's not a single person in the industry that doesn't believe it sucks. Even the maintenance people believe it sucks, but they're not complaining, because if it didn't suck they wouldn't have the high turnover rate of workstations to keep them busy. From what I hear, here's what sucking:

     -Advertising is not what it used to be.

     -Holding companies don't work.

     -Holding companies are run by bean counters.              

     -Holding companies promote account people who don't know how to work with creative directors.

     -Holding companies are the root of all evil.

     -Creative directors are expendable and everyone knows it.

     -It's all about speed over quality.

     -Technology has everyone's head spinning.

     -There are no leaders.

     -Clients don't know how to be partners.

     -The pitch process isn't about finding a good partner; it's about finding the next campaign.

     -The smart ones lost sight of the fundamentals.

     -The dumb ones still don't know the fundamentals.

     -The kids coming out of ad schools don't know the fundamentals and yet know everything.

     -There isn't enough art.

     I could easily go on, but what's the point. We all know there's a lot to grouse about. And believe me, I don't let all these people grouse alone.

     Which brings me to today. Just this morning, I was returning a book to it's place on the shelf – Louise Gluck, Poems 1962-2012 – and I decided to read a poem first – just one poem, any poem. I flipped through some pages and stopped. I could have been presented with page 452, but I got page 361 and these 3 lines:

     "The master said You must write what you see.

     But what I see does not move me.

     The master answered Change what you see."

I quickly set the book on the shelf. Fine, maybe I should shut up and do something about it.

      

The Beaver Who Could Have Written a Sonnet

         A short time ago, a Beaver saw a pretty female preening by the stream and thought she had the cutest set of bucked teeth he had ever seen. Though he had always been a fussy romantic, and quite a rare bird in the animal kingdom, where animals are almost as animal-like as young male humans indigenous to college fraternities, it was true: The Beaver was in love. And his best friend, Bardy, was excited for him.

         “How will you win her over? How will you move her with your passion? Will you carve her a sonnet?”

         “Not me,” said the Beaver, “everybody does THAT!”

         Though the Beaver belonged to the species of New England beavers known as the Beaver poets, he had no intention of doing what the others did when they were in love. Chiseling a poem into the wood of a maple tree seemed unoriginal. He was determined to make an indelible mark on the world. He didn’t know exactly how he would do that, only that he had to do something new.

         He thought and thought and racked his brain until he remembered having learned in history class about the American Indians who sent smoke signals; and then he thought, ‘Now THAT was cool.’ He believed immediately that with his paddle tail, he could send the clearest smoke signals the world had ever seen – an appendage would surely be more controllable than a wet blanket.

         So the next day the Beaver waddled all the way to the top of the mountain, gathered some dry leaves and twigs, sparked a fire and kept his eyes peeled on the valley. When a couple of hours later he spotted her strolling with her girlfriend along the east side of the stream, The Beaver laid his tail over the fire, waited a few beats for the smoke to build up and then unleashed his love into the clean mountain air. The thing was, while a beaver’s tail may not have the nerve endings and hence the sensitivity of the rest of the body, it is not, unfortunately, without feeling, so it burned the Beaver quite a bit more than he anticipated.

         The young females heard an “OwwwOwwwOwwwOwwwwww!” echo across the valley (http://bit.ly/Ynatm3). Recognizing the sound of a beaver in pain, they craned their necks toward the mountaintop and saw a small cotton ball of smoke – and beside the fire, the Beaver, his mouth agape and his incisors to the sky.

         “I have no idea what that crazy beaver is up to. He lifted his tail and smoke came out. Oh my god, I think he farted!”

         The beautiful beaver was repulsed. “Ugh! Can you imagine what that smells like if it smokes!”

         The girlfriend wondered, “Do you think a camper left behind some refried beans? I wonder why it was so painful?”

         “Who cares!” she exclaimed, “Ugh!” And she kept uttering, “Ugh.” Once she elaborated, “That thing could burn a hole through the ozone,” but she followed it with a quivering, “Ugh!”

         And so it was that the connection the Beaver had made was so disgusting, it indeed left an indelible mark on the girl's brain. 

Moral: Be true even if not new; be untrue and they go, "PU!"