The impossibility of advertising.

Suit: I want results,

it’s what I am tailored for.

The pinstripes impress

consistency and routine;

the arm hole is snug

to allow arms a swing;

the trousers cut slim

to guide the knees; 

and I stride forward, 
progressing directly 
with hardly a break

to my goal
and my goal after that.

My achievements 
will
be 

linear

like kissing buttons.

Sneakers: We wanna play

and run,

because to get there,

we have to go
and just know

before we know why,
chasing a notion

wherever it takes us,

down side walks

and side streets.

Goals?

Creativity isn’t a goal–

we’ve got a good feeling though,

up in the air.

Creativity is activity

for good soles

a pivot point,

a toe spring...

Lemons and peaches.

  Lately I’ve noticed the dearth of ads that pose strong, compelling arguments. I have a problem with that, because I think it’s a big part of what we get paid to create. I also think that arguments can be made creatively, which is to say that a good strong one will sell product. I’m not talking about something that reads like a lawyer’s proof. I’m talking about a whole argument that doesn't feel like a whole argument. In fact, we may not see the whole argument but it’s there. It’s there, but not there. Because with the right execution, any missing link ends up being conjured up.

  When I was a kid, this was essentially how my dad would persuade me to do chores around the house. He rarely posed the entire argument. A simple order – “Clean the garage, Marty,” stated in a certain tone, and it was all clear: ‘If you don’t clean the garage, then you will become dead meat.’ My Dad understood the finer points of rhetoric.

  Let’s take a little ad you may have seen once or twice, a really succinct ad, and one that both leaves plenty to the imagination and epitomizes creativity: the Volkswagen “Lemon” ad. Though there is only a product shot and a one-word headline, the syllogism, or what Aristotle called an enthymeme, is complete. There are premises that present facts, or accepted opinions, and a simple deduction is made. And it is far from random:

If a car that looks absolutely perfect in the factory is said to be flawed, because there are 3,389 inspectors and they can detect shortcomings that the average person can't see, then those engineers must be really anal retentive Germans and the Beetle I buy won’t be a lemon at all – it’ll be a peach.

  With the right creativity, a complete argument can be made. I think some of us have forgotten that (there are plenty who don’t know it, but that’s a whole other problem).

  For instance, in the name of sparking conversations, because it’s all about the conversation now – right? ­– we may create a lot of chit chat but the argument is often left incomplete. And sometimes we make it all about a higher order benefit and present an argument that is ultimately unfounded. Do we think persuasion is impossible? Are we afraid consumers will think we’re too pushy? Did we ever think that maybe the creative doesn’t leave out the right things? Could it be that the creative isn’t really creative? All I know is that we still need to seal the deal. Even if parts of the argument are given out piecemeal, in different media.

  Of course, that presumes we are still in the business of persuasion.

Bird shit

 Have you seen the TV ad for Obama with Big Bird? (http://bit.ly/Rb0yzL) With mock seriousness, it spoofs Romney as the candidate who knows that the real enemy of the economy is not Madoff and the Wall Street “gluttons of greed” but the yellow-feathered devil incarnate itself.

 I think the ad reeks of ad people being addy.  I think it schtinks (a morphing of “stinks” and “schtick.”) Howard Fineman, in The Huffington Post, did, however, elaborate a bit more than me. He wrote, “It’s not just that crusading for avian rights is silly, or that PBS funding is somewhat indefensible. It is that deficit-reduction is a Republican issue, not a Democratic one. Has anyone told the president that the annual deficits have been more than 13 trillion a year?” The Democrats have more important issues to be talking about.

 Dave Trott recently pointed out (http://bit.ly/SQgbic) that President Clinton, in his speech at the Democratic Convention, bequeathed to us advertisers words to live by. “When people are hurting,” he said, “explanation trumps eloquence every time.” The Big Bird ad team should have been listening. Along similar lines, a teacher of mine at SVA said, “Better to be clear than clever, than clever and unclear.” However you look at the spot, the conceit dominates the point.

 And, it would have been nice if that ad team had thought about the audience. Combining the language from each of those two quotes, here’s a more fundamental one:  “When people are hurting, seriousness about their problems trumps self-indulgence every time.” I said that.

The first presidential debacle

The other day, I had all sorts of clever openings being pitched to the creative director inside my brain, openings that would engage and dazzle with amusement, openings that would perk up a droopy head in need of something uplifting after the first presidential debate. Now that I’m in front of my keyboard, I have no idea to where those words vanished. Whatever.

What happened to President Obama? Instead of being outraged at the clear shift from the hard-right platform that Romney had been running on for two years, Obama kept looking for the right logic to retaliate. When Romney accused the president of “trickle-down government,” a comment not often launched at Democrats and Socialists, Obama cleared his throat and remained in search of the perfect set of facts. When Romney attacked the Dodd-Frank reform, Obama didn’t remind people that the law limits greedy chicanery like the derivatives trading that led to the 2008 crash, he stayed the course, ever rational and professorial.

He’s a smart man, Obama, but you get the feeling that while he obsesses about the substance, all that other stuff, however much a reality, he finds difficult to endure. While he had the facts on his side, he lost the debate. So what happened?

He forgot the fundamentals. The moment Romney claimed he had no plans to lower the taxes of the wealthiest 1% (WHAT?????), I suspect Obama was taken off track; and, being internally driven and focused on the argument, he delved into his notes and thus into a proclivity to neglect the audience. But this is about winning over people’s minds, and in being such, Obama became unable to arouse in the audience the one thing that makes persuasion possible: Emotion. You can have all the facts in the universe, but it is emotion that has the power to modify people’s judgments.

Look, this is 2000 year-old stuff, going all the way back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric: If you believe you have suffered a slight from someone who is not entitled do so, from someone who does not have the facts straight, from someone who has just attempted his biggest flip-flop ever, there must be some sort of outrage. The speaker has to highlight such characteristics of the case that are likely to provoke outrage, even anger in the audience.

I keep a quote handy that pertains to this exactly. It’s from an 18^th century writer named George Campbell. He writes, “So far, therefore, is it from being an unfair method of persuasion to move the Passions, that there is no persuasion without moving them.” I keep this quote handy because it reminds me that rational people, like Obama and a whole lot of clients, seem more comfortable with cold facts and juicy RTB’s – while doing what is necessary to move the passions feels like play-acting and fluffiness.
               Persuading people demands that we put ourselves into someone else’s shoes and figure out what the most effective emotional appeal would be for them. It demands style and artfulness as well as the correct rhetoric. It means that perhaps this little post could have benefited from a clever opening.

Give diversity a chance

The other day, I read John Heilemann’s article about Joe Biden in New York Magazine. It was a fair article, balancing the gaffs with his mettle and making the point that you have to give Joe a chance to prove himself, because, as we all know, Joe Biden will sometimes say stupid things.

In the beginning of his term – remember? – he several times made us cringe, especially when he said that, “it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama” with a “generated crisis.”  But, despite a difficult start with the president, there was a thaw and the two gradually developed a bond.

Heileman writes, “Over time, a sense of personal chemistry has flowered alongside professional esteem.” Biden is quoted as saying, “I think the bottom line is, what they like about Barack is Barack doesn’t pretend to be what he’s not, and I don’t pretend to be what I’m not.” “We’re an unmatched matched pair,” he concludes. The president gave him a chance; I suppose they gave each other a chance.

Likewise, take Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan. They gave each other a chance, too. Michael guest-hosted until he could get past the blond bubbliness.

Look at the Ramones. Despite Johnny being the punk version of Ted Nugent and Joey being an OCD Jewish liberal, they found a rhythm, gave themselves the same last name and made beautiful music together. (Compare that to the Osmonds, where Donny and Marie share chromo somatic vanilla for DNA, yet we want to beat them with a baseball bat as soon as they smile.)

A few years ago, I had this creative department with a Thai girl, a Korean, a Mexican, two African Americans, an Indian from India, an inked up creative manager, 3 Jews, a bald German that looked like Mussolini, 2 Italians (moi included), 3 maybe 4 gay people and then, get this, I went and hired a white guy who was born in Connecticut, of all places. It turns out that he was, as one of the copywriters described, the “darkest white guy” we had ever met. Sure, he occasionally turned up the collar of his polo shirt, but he had enough good taste in his sick sense of humor to compensate.

         You see, to make diversity pay off, people need a chance. HR charges us with making our agencies more diverse yet rarely are we told what it will take to work, rarely told how to evaluate a young person’s site for potential, rarely told how diversity could do more than make a holding company look good. We need mentorship programs, we need managers who are fascinated by people who think differently than themselves, heck, we need managers. We need to do something other than find different looking kids and plop them into agencies as if from an alien ship. Fine, there is no amount of tutelage that will sway me into hiring a fan of Josh Groban for the creative department (my tolerance has limits) but I do believe a little guidance will go a long way.

         It usually takes time to learn that we share a quality with someone who is quite different, takes time to assimilate that strange quality with the qualities we’ve been comfortable with. Yeah, maybe the tension is all within our selves. Remember Jekyll and Hyde? People need a little help to get over themselves.

Yeats said it first and I'm okay with that.

    Since writing my last post, "Two Nudes", I came across this quote that sums up how I feel about most of the work coming out of ad agencies, work that rarely gets below the surface.

            The woods of Arcady are dead,
            And over is their antique joy;
            Of old the world on dreaming fed;
            Great truth is now her painted toy. 
   
    Damn, that's good.
    I thought of that nice Levi's film that quoted Walt Whitman's "O Pioneers" and that Volvo ad several years ago that quoted Kerouac's "On The Road." Sometimes it's better to let someone else do the writing. Let the best set of words win.

Two nudes.

      The other day this headline caught my attention: “Topless Woman Found. Details Sketchy.” It was in the New York Times (7/20) and, no, it wasn’t about a stripper – it was about a painting, “Odalisque in Red Pants” by Henri Matisse. Evidently, FBI agents in Miami arrested two people and accused them of trying to sell the portrait said to be worth $3 million. As the story goes, the theft was first discovered in 2002, when the Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas was contacted by a Miami gallery owner saying that someone had offered to sell it to him. They inspected the painting on the wall and discovered that it was indeed a fake, and a lousy one, to boot. Someone had removed the original from its frame and put the fake in its place, leaving it to be exhibited as if it were the genuine article. And no one noticed. For at least two years, no one noticed!

         Sadly, I found it analogous to our industry, where the quality of our work has been slipping, where we’ve put forth less original work, and yet hardly anyone seems to have noticed.

         In an interview with Contagious, John Hegarty said he, too, believed that quality has fallen off in the past three or four years, but his claim didn’t make much of a stir. It should have made a stink. We go about our business, tolerating way too many distractions, accepting the fact that we have less time and too few creatives, maintain more excuses for mediocrity than ever before, and we seem to forget what really great looks like.

         Yes, I see more technology, more integration, clever new media but I see less art. I wonder if I’m just being nostalgic, but I don’t think so. When I was grinding through the ranks, I was inspired more by clarity than by wit, more by something true than something weird. As a copywriter, I admired people like Riney and French and Delaney, people whose artfulness transcended their sell. Likewise, I’m more moved these days by imagination than innovation. And there’s way too much emphasis on the later.

         In a wonderful little essay in the New York Times Book review (7/29), Roger Rosenblatt wrote, “The difference between invention and imagination is the difference between Mr. Ed and Swift’s Houyhnhnms. One is a talking horse (of course): the other bears the burdens of civilization.” We’re spending too much time thinking about how we can make use of Pinterest, and less time making something that approaches importance.

While advertising can’t possibly achieve as much as art, there can be enough art to have a modestly similar effect. Trying is everything. Honda’s “Hate Something” and “Cog” did that. Janet Champ’s Nike copy moved me almost as much as an orphan in a Dickens novel. “Think different” did no less than ennoble creativity.

         If we hire the right talent, art directors and designers who need to imbue their work with art and copywriters who need to raise their work with poetry, people who want to make a difference while making commerce, those people will go beyond the deliverables. If creative directors give them permission to create big and think well of the world and push the virtues that they’ve always believed in, they will surprise us. While pursuing business objectives, they will surprise us. They will surprise themselves. Time and time again, advertising has surprised us by squeaking in higher motives and values. “We Try Harder,” “Live Richly,” the red and white Economist ads, that’s what they did for us. 

         I never expected that all work could become great, or even that all our day-to-day blocking and tackling shouldn’t be necessary, but I always had hope to create something more than advertising. I never gave up hope for that. I would study every award book, looking to burn with amazement and desire and envy. Do people still do that? Every week?

         Look, the ceiling is moveable and it only remains high if we keep pushing against it, otherwise it slowly settles. We have to keep an eye on our standards. Don’t compare your work to other work in that medium; compare it to something that once blew you away. Do that, and keep on doing that, and it becomes increasingly harder to live without the masterpiece.