New work from Satan, Beelzebub & Partners

Part of a series exploring financial opportunities in calamity. Other executions include one on monetizing Darfur relief efforts, and an ad whose headline is “How to profit from the coming global food riots.”

Why stock photography sucks.

The Getty family is pretty idiosyncratic: miserly billionaires, wayward heirs, kidnappings. If only the stock photography with the Getty watermark were as interesting.

Getty Images has grown as digital photography and the internet have grown, sucking up smaller houses along the way, feeding the insatiable maw of zillions of ad agencies, editorial departments, graphic design shops and web content generators too cheap, too time-pressed or too indifferent to go out and shoot something.

There was a time when art directors drew pictures of people and things in layouts and asked clients to imagine a certain mood, a style, an emotion.

Now art directors spend hour after hour hunting in vain through the Getty catalog for a shot that resembles what they have in mind, Photoshop the crap out of it to get it even closer…and then still have to ask clients to imagine a certain mood, a style, an emotion.

Because it ain’t there in the stock image. But unlike the crude drawings in old-school AD tissues, these pictures—at least to the uneducated client eye—look, well, real.

And, by client standards, uh, just fine.

Show me a creative who hasn’t had to run the stock image he put in his comp after the client glommed on to it and wouldn’t let go and I’ll show you a dead or long-retired creative.

I know there are alternatives...Corbis, Veer, istock, Flickr etc etc. Doesn’t matter. It all looks the same. And some pictures have been used so often, on so many web pages, in so many bad B-to-B ads, they have this eerie, familiar quality to them—like supporting actors who show up on CSI and Desperate Housewives in the same week. There’s Mr. Young Techno-Hipster-with Reflected-Glow-of-His-Laptop guy! There’s the Sassy-Sister-With-Her-Groceries lady! And here’s the Peaceful-Old-Guy-on-the-Dock!

Information wants to be free, the saying goes, and I guess that goes for watermarked stock shots. But pictures, real pictures, want to be made, not downloaded.

Here--wipe your ass with this soft white Golden Lab puppy.

Well, what am I supposed to think when a dog is used as a metaphor for toilet paper?

TP advertising veers between cutesy euphemism and snark. This new Cottonelle campaign manages to combines them. At least where I see it—plastered all over the Grand Central Station subway (“Too much bran?” one headline nastily enquires).

Did Charmin’s stupid “Bears shit in the woods” campaign goad Kimberly Clark into sacrificing innocent puppies to the cause of anal comfort? PETA people: you ought to get on this.

You were great. Now get out.

A recent Ad Age article says that Absolut's new advertising--the first since the famous "bottle" campaign--is driving sales. This is in sharp contrast to the last few years, when the brand's sales were flat to declining.

Campaigns with "legs" are so rare in our business, I hate it when one of them needs to be shown the door, like bad guests who have overstayed their welcome. It justs fuels the ADD-like behavior of clients who tire of their ads long before their customers even know they exist.

Hank Seiden

Hank Seiden, founding partner of my agency, passed away this week after a long battle with prostate cancer.

The memorial service was on Friday, and many of the advertising luminaries of his era—Jerry Della Femina, Tony Isidore, Dick Tarlow—came to pay their respects.

Funerals in general being for the benefit of family and friends and not industry insiders, there wasn’t a lot of advertising talk in the service. But Hank had a number of strong beliefs about advertising, beliefs he was not shy about expressing in his columns and books.

Hank’s central belief was that strategy is more important than execution. In other words, a brilliant strategy will work even when couched in a crappy execution, but a crappy strategy cannot be saved even by the most brilliant execution.





Right or wrong, this was a peculiar stance for a creative director to take, and it put him, both metaphorically and often literally, on the client side of the table. It also earned him the scorn of many in the creative community—a scorn which he wore as a kind of badge of honor.

Hank was a copywriter by training and a creative director by title, but in truth he was really what we now call a planner. He was superb at helping his clients chart a course for where they should position their products vs. the competition, who they should talk to, and what these prospects would find persuasive. He was completely indifferent to the craft aspects of the process, whether out of true lack of interest or feigned, I’ll never know. And predictably, with every passing year, he grew further and further disengaged from what he dismissively called “the fun and games of the business.”

Hank was also a brilliant client handler, and he inspired intense loyalty from a lot of very senior client-side executives. After retiring from Jordan Case, he was able to draw on that loyalty to start what is now Seiden Advertising. I joined Seiden at Hank’s invitation in 2000, essentially to take over as Creative Director because he was finally ready to hang it up.

This was only fitting, I guess, because 26 years previously, Hank had also been my first boss in advertising, at Hicks & Greist. I was there for little over a year, but learned a huge amount from him. There’s no doubt that a lot of my bedrock beliefs about communication were formed during that time.

A lot of what I learned from Hank I’ve since unlearned. I think craft is holy. I think strategy doesn’t matter in a lot of categories, and I think bad execution can ruin a smart strategy.

But, hey, everyone has to start somewhere. I started with a guy who knew a real idea when he saw it, and saw past the smoke and mirrors that still occasionally blind us.

And for that, I’ll always be grateful.

Time well spent

This is the Whole Earth Catalog.

It came out in 1969.

Printed on newsprint, in hot type and black ink.

It is an instruction manual for the world we have just begun to live in.

The subtitle is “Access to tools.”

A line that would work today for Charles Schwab, Williams-Sonoma, Adobe.

The Whole Earth Catalog contained some of the earliest references to:

Composters

Solar heating

Dry wall screws

accupressure

and a bunch of other stuff you can now get down at the mall.

It was embraced by people who viewed commerce with contempt, who mistrusted the Man. who were both deeply idealistic and reflexively cynical.

They pored over it, learned from it--and bought things from it. Lots and lots of things.

If you make ads, you could do worse than spending some time with the Whole Earth Catalog. You can find it, cheap in digital form, not so cheap in analog, on its direct descendant, the internet.

Totally authentic bullshit.

In this week's Adweek, someone named Kamau High wrote a nonsensical piece entitled "Six Trends You Should Know." Trend #1: Authenticity.

The idea of authenticity as a fashion is so richly ironic and so sad, because it suggests that the author (and most of his readers) have no fucking idea of what authenticity is.

Authenticity is not a trend. It is the result of not knowing or not caring about trends. It's a Carrhart barn jacket on a farmer, not on a hipster. It's barbecue in the Texas hill country, not at Hill Country. It's the Paris in France, not the one at Epcot.

The greatest thing ever written about authenticity--what it is, and why it matters--is Julian Barnes' novel England, England. Read it. You won't be sorry. Then continue on with Mr. High's article on 2008 trends.

Trend #2: Faux Traditionalism.

New Year's Resolutions

Find nicer ways to say no to clients.

Find more occasions to say yes to clients.

Use less stock photography, or at least use it differently.

Dress better in the office. It suggests to people that I have my shit together.

Don’t just network when I want something.

Go 100% pun-free.

Make an ad that works on a 2 inch screen.

Be the same person on the business that I was during the pitch.

Re-read Ernie Schenck’s essay in the current CA at least once a month to keep my head from journeying too far up my ass.

In America, anyone can advertise whenever they want.

I watched the Las Vegas Democratic debate Thursday night, start to finish (and an odd finish it was, going out on the inane diamonds-or-pearls question), but nothing the candidates said could match the accompanying ads for highlighting this country’s weirdness.

I’m not sure if this was somebody’s idea of a joke, but one of the big advertisers was Clean Coal USA, which if you wipe away the light, airy, blue sky art direction, is the same grimy coal industry it’s always been.

That’s right. America’s coal mine owners crawled out of Dick Cheney’s butt long enough to underwrite the Democratic Presidential candidates’ prime-time debate.

Am I missing something? Are all these candidates in the bag already? Have they cut their deal with Big Energy? (Say it isn’t so, Dennis!) Or are the mining interests playing some kind of deep game, hoping that the more Americans watch these people bloviate, the more they’ll be inclined to commit to Mitt?

Oh—there was also a jaw-droppingly cheap and bad :60 DR spot for some sort of CD video bible. It showed a white nuclear family smiling and hugging on the couch as they watched the faux-parchment pages flick by on their big ol’ flatscreen.

Somehow, I don’t think they were TIVOing the debate while they watched.

Meeting cute in the Obituary column

Died yesterday and reported in adjoining obituaries: Peg Bracken, author of the "I Hate to Cook" cookbook, and Vincent DeDomenico, creator of Rice-A-Roni.

Three years before Betty Friedan told '60s women it was OK to be bored by kitchen duties, Bracken showed them how to short-circuit them with convenience foods. And a grateful food industry, Mr. DeDomenico, included, was right there to help.

Bracken, by the way, was an advertising copywriter. There's a shocker. Her recipe for "Skid Row Stroganoff":

Start cooking these noodles, first dropping a bouillon cube into the noodle water. Brown the garlic, onion and crumbled beef in the oil. Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.

What do people see when they look at ads?

Not necessarily what they’re supposed to, as this very cool experiment seems to suggest. Thanks to The New Shelton Wet/Dry blog for finding this fascinating (appalling?) piece of research.



In a rigorous controlled study 52% of the people who were asked to look at this picture could not recall the woman falling to her death.

For every creative who ever fought tooth and nail to keep the composition of his ad just so—which is to say, all of us—this is sobering stuff.

Take these pretty nice lingerie ads, courtesy of AdGoodness, for example. Here's one, if you're too lazy to click:



It's all about controlling the viewer’s eye and directing it to a particular, uh, place.

But what if the headline has it all wrong? What if the viewer remembers only the Tyrannosaurus? Or only the zebra rug?

And we're arguing about the placement of the logo?

Brands come and go, but "Blade Runner" still rocks.

I saw the newly-released "Blade Runner" this week.

Gone is the stupid narrative VO and hilariously inappropriate happy ending.
What remains, remastered and gorgeous, is Ridley Scott's vision of the near future.

And a big honking Pan AM logo glowing through the murk in the evening LA sky.

"Blade Runner" has a lot to say about the fragility and impermanence of life. And, maybe, of brands.

Post-pitch

Yesterday was the finale of a 3-month pitch, the full-on gantlet type: detailed RFP, “chemistry” meeting, interim working meeting, and the ultimate presentation to the CEO and her courtiers.

It was good. Real good. Smoke-a-cigarette-after good.

I quit cigarettes 23 years ago, so this post and its musings will have to do.

Honestly—is there anything better than a clean brief and no process except kick as much ass as you can in the time allotted? Pitches—especially those where agencies are asked to do spec creative—are fubar in many ways, and everyone whinges about it at 4As meetings and such. But looked at another way, it’s what we do in its purest form, and at no point in the agency-client relationship is it going to get better.

And being a principal in a small agency, and having a partner who knows what he’s doing, I know we can leave it all on the field and make some other agency beat us.

I worked at two large agencies where that wasn’t the case.

At both places, there would be this moment at the end of pitches that I dreaded: the CEO Takes Off His Reading Glasses and Stands Up Moment. Otherwise known as the If You Just Shut the Fuck Up We’ll Win This Moment. Where in 5 minutes of pointless bloviation, the guy would demonstrate that a) he hadn’t seen the work or thought about the prospect’s business until right before the presentation; and b) would in all likelihood continue at that level of involvement going forward. And months of work and 2 hours of great presentation would go down the drain.

I don’t know if we’re going to get this business. I think we should. But I’ll have no regrets if we don’t. I think I’m going to go walk the dog now. And smoke a cigar.

Cultural Alzheimer's?

The old cliche is that those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.
In world affairs, the consequences are usually tragic. In advertising, they're more often inadvertently hilarious.

Last night I heard Electric Light Orchestra's "Hold on Tight to your Dreams" emanating from the TV and I thought, "What the fuck! The National Coffee Association is back on air?"

Because for those of us whose memories stretch back that far, that music is inextricably tied to a cheesy effort to make coffee hip. It was in the pre-Starbuck '80s when coffee sales were tubing and an entire generation was chugging cola for breakfast.

Except now it's the sountrack for the advertising for the new Honda Accord, which is a pretty good looking car from a pretty classy brand and now there's a sonic layer of cheese all over it.

At least in my mind. But here's my question: are the creators (and approvers) of the Honda work...
a) oblivious to the music's prior advertising life?
b) aware but don't care?
c) ironically commenting on it in some meta way that's beyond my comprehension, like sampling crap 70s pop songs in rap beats?

Freelance Envy

I had a bout of Freelance Envy recently, having brought in a team for a project I was just beyond the beyond-o on. They did their thing (very well, I might add), dropped off the files and their invoice and said the magic words, the words only freelancers get to say:

“Here you go. Hope you like it.”

I never had the intestinal fortitude to go freelance full time. Waiting for the phone to ring while writing out mortgage checks was just not something I could handle.

There was a brief period years ago while I was “exploring other opportunities” as the press release put it, when I did freelance, and boy, was it fun. It was good money, too, but honestly, if it weren’t for those pesky mortgage checks, I would have done it for free.

Think about it: an agency pulls freelancers in for only two reasons: 1) they’re short-staffed and the client’s freaking; or 2) the people on staff (or the last batch of freelancers) couldn’t crack it and the client’s freaking. Either way, the agency is desperate and at least temporarily open to a new take on things.

Not coincidentally, those are the optimum conditions for creating great work. Add to that the fact that you don’t have to deal with internal politics or client comments, and it’s a pretty sweet gig. You’re the Gunslinger. You come into town, take care of business, and ride off into the sunset.

But then two nights ago The Seven Samurai was on TV and I thought about those master-less ronin, with nothing but their swords and their honor as they wandered from gig to gig, and thought about all the great work freelancers do that wind up as meeting fodder, or with some other jackass’s name on it for the award shows.

That’s the flip side of “Here you go. Hope you like it.” And it is no small price to pay for freedom.

Ideate this.

I love the new IBM commercials that riff off the stupid jargon infecting the process of coming up with new ideas. One part New Age hooey, one part consultant corporate babble, one part Dr. Phil "everyone's got a good idea" faux-empowerment, it's all captured beautifully in this campaign.

Here's my question: how many people within IBM (those good ol' "internal stakeholders") looked at these ads and didn't get the joke? IBM, like most other big companies, especially in tech, can ideate with the best of them.

A cursory look through IBM's website uncovered the following subjects:
"Expanding the innovation horizon"
"Drive strategic change"
"Transform your workforce"

That's halfway home on Bullshit Bingo, the way I play it.

By the way, if you've never played it, pick up your score cards here.

Please, no more:

Plink-plinky pseudo-Phillip Glass piano scores that are supposed to signal "thoughtful."

Question-themed copy. Don't ask me where I want to go, what I want to do, what my dreams are, what I'm working for.

Sales "events."

Drawings layered onto photography meant to suggest "possibility." Sprint: haven't you seen the Microsoft spots?

Looking off-camera when you're supposed to be looking at me. Sam Waterston (and Bob Giraldi): I'm talking to you. I'd look at you, too. if you were here.


Vodka commercials filmed on yachts not tied up in the marina. If you want to get drunk and be a danger to others on the water, get a Cigarette boat.

In case you were considering a career in advertising...

...take a long hard look at this article from last week's NYT magazine:

It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World - New York Times.

Especially this part:

"The plan is to build a global digital ad network that uses offshore labor to create thousands of versions of ads. Then, using data about consumers and computer algorithms, the network will decide which advertising message to show at which moment to every person who turns on a computer, cellphone or — eventually — a television."

You thought globalization was only about customer service reps and toys made out of lead? Think again!

I don't know what's worse--exploiting cheap foreign labor to crank out endless versions of ads that suck in the first place; or the idea of being replaced by an algorithm. It's not just media planners who should find this prospect frightening. Art directors, writers, planners, we're all grist for the mill.

I'm a short-timer. A few more years and I hang up the spikes. So this shit won't come down on me. But for people coming into the business, it's a whole new reason to march at the next G-8 summit.

The other 28 and a half seconds were just copy mandatories anyway.

Engaging at Any Speed? Commercials Put to Test - New York Times

It's hard to believe this article and the people and activities in it aren't a goof. Desperate media sales types trying to prove that 30 second commercials mashed by a DVR into 1.5 seconds of ultra-high speed gobbledegook still work?

Anyway, is it just us old farts that remember the first appearance of these little nuggets circa 1987 in Max Headroom? They called them "blipverts" then, and they had the unfortunate effect of blowing the viewer's head to pieces. Too much data in too little time, apparently.

That wouldn't be a problem now. Most current spots are so content-less, you could condense 100 of them into a nanosecond and you'd still be safe.

It's all a blur.

Marketers Struggle to Get Folks to Stay Put for the Commercials - New York Times

"The whole goal here is to blur the line between content and advertising message,” said Hank Close, president for ad sales at MTV Networks."

Listening to a media-sales executive exult that his network’s goal is to completely blur the distinction between content and advertising is like listening to a tobacco-industry executive talking about how cigarettes are nothing more than an optimized nicotine-delivery system.

The difference is, the tobacco guys were talking behind closed doors. This guy’s Tourette’s-like outburst was freely directed at the press.

Every time the firewall between advertising and content is torn down, it ends in tears.
The GEICO cavemen kicked ass in commercials. Advance sneak peaks at the TV series suggest it won’t last 2 weeks. Ham-fisted product placement eventually made series like “The Apprentice” and “Queer Eye” unwatchable. Ad guy Brian Tierney’s takeover of the Philadelphia Enquirer is headed down the same dead-end street.

The same technology that empowers viewers to fastforward past crap commercials also lets them post the good ones on YouTube and leverage the client's media buy by orders of magnitude. The challenge, Mr. Close, is not to pollute content with badly disguised ad messaging, but to make ads that merit watching.