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.

It's not lousy advertising. It's...

I have to believe that knowing how advertising uses language makes it possible for us to make better, more informed and honest advertising. Now I don't usually get political but I recently found something offensive that was, essentially, not good advertising.

House Republicans last week promised to drop a provision in their No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act that would redefine rape. With this qualification, financial help would only be granted to those who had been "forcibly raped." This would add layers of gibberish and semantics, layers of testimony and bureaucracy to the court system that would frustrate

enough victims to save valuable tax dollars.

Yes, the effort was dropped and no doubt that was a good outcome. I just find it appalling that "forcible rape" was even considered.

I suppose this sort of thinking is not uncommon. We advertisers do it all the time. We say that a TV channel isn't a number on your remote, we say it's HBO; we call a used car previously owned; and we call a large coffee a Venti. We create shades of gray, split hairs, craft our connotations and our euphemisms to play off subjective tastes. When we hype our claims, we try to do it with a qualifying wink. And let's face it, most of our work doesn't really involve ethical considerations. There may be more nourishing cereals but Cap'n Crunch is not the devil incarnate.

"Forcible rape" however is gross. I remember having the same reaction to "free fire zone," a phrase first used during the Vietnam War, which makes blowing everything away in a certain area sound like free stuff is being given away after a store has burned down. "Free fire zone" and "rape" are never good. They are never even not-so bad. There are ethical considerations involved.

Webster's says "rape" is "sexual intercourse with a woman by a man without her consent and chiefly by force or deception." Oxford says it is a, "violation of a woman." So "forcible rape" is still "rape," meaning that someone is attempting to hide what is meant.

I don't want to hide what is meant. Deception is deception. Lying is lying. "Forcible rape" is fallacious advertising.

Good feels a whole lot gooder after a lot of bad.

Chicken soup. Turkey broth with pastina. Tea. Crackers. Ginger ale. Toast. Pills. Nose spray. Wooly blankets and piles of pillows, all warm and fluffy. That was my week, largely spent sick in bed. Then there was my wife who said, “Oh, poor baby.” It’s almost a shame to feel better.

This morning, as if being jarred from a dream, she said, “You’re feeling better –– go get the newspaper and, while you’re out, pick up some lettuce at the market." As I said, it’s almost a shame to feel better.

But then on TV and online, I witness the Egyptians who succeeded in liberating themselves. Peaceably. If real joy is best appreciated when it is relative to its opposite, Egyptians are experiencing something truly wonderful.

And it makes me feel good to feel better.

This post has no pictures.

How do you get people’s mouths watering? How do you get them salivating? Flipping the stations recently, I realized that PBS's Lidia Bastianich always does it for me. There's something about her auntly appearance and her genuine Italian-ness that I trust. I can see visiting her, gorging myself at her country table and then waddling to her living room to nod off in her La-Z Boy, completely content. (I don’t know why exactly she would decorate her house with a recliner a la Frasier Crane’s dad, but she’s all about comfort so it seems fitting.) Lidia, oh Lidia... 

And this reminds me of a night on vacation in Mexico a few months ago. My wife and I were out to dinner at a new restaurant and we struck up a conversation with the maitre d’. It being new and all, we were curious. And being just before the rush of reservations, the room wasn’t too busy for him to chat with the friendly Americanos.

 We asked what he was doing to get the word out. I mean, we had just had a scrumptious, lovely meal––people should know about this place. 

 He said he was relying a lot on word of mouth. To spark some buzz, he was doing various things, like collecting email addresses and inviting hotel managers in with the hopes that they would recommend it to guests. He qualified, however, that he didn't feel comfortable with advertising. An ad agency would presumably want to photograph the food, and the chef would never allow that. The chef wanted his guests to be “surprised” by how good the food tasted and that photography would set up “false expectations.” The chef was firm about this.

 And that reminds me of something I recently read in “I Wonder,” a truly wonderful book by Marian Bantjes. Apparently, in Islam, Muslims have an aversion to the depiction of heavenly or earthly creatures, so as not to challenge God. There’s a desire not to stunt the imagination with the depiction of things; but rather to create amazingly intricate and beautiful ornamentation. The thinking is that the greatest sense of awe and respect comes from the release of the imagination, unrestricted by literal thinking.

 There’s something to that. Done right, it demands the highest level of creativity, which will seem to most people a lot riskier than a nice product shot.

 And the restaurant? As this was an inspiring meal, I am compelled to say that if you ever vacation in Cabo San Lucas, give Casianos in San Jose Del Cabo a try. Call for a reservation at +52 624 142 59 28. I’m hoping it will be very busy.