Santa or else.

SPOLER ALERT: DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED MAD MEN SEASON FOUR EPISODE TWO.

The haze of liquor and cigarette smoke that hangs langorously over Mad Men doesn’t obscure the piercing truths about our business that still have the capacity to hurt.

Last week’s episode, when the Lucky Strike client Lee Garner, a good ol’ boy and closeted homosexual (he had Sal fired in Season 3 when his advances were rebuffed) forced Roger to put on the Santa suit at the office Christmas party, it tore at my heart.

In a beauifully nuanced escalation, the client went from jovial “suggestion” to more insistent request to a chilling command. And it was made all the worse by playing out in front of the entire staff.

And by the fact that it was Roger.

Choosing Pete would have meant nothing. Steeped in self-loathing, Pete would have seen donning the Santa suit as an escape from himself, not to mention a career-enhancer.

Don? Wasn’t gonna happen. And Lee knew it.

Burt Cooper? He already plays the jovial fool.

No...to exert maximum authority and to inflict maximum pain, the client chose Roger...elegant, patrician, unflappable Roger. Roger, whose ties to American Tobacco go back a generation on either side. Roger, whose inherited relationship occasionally lulls him into believing he is something other than a vendor.

Put on the suit, Roger. Put it on so I can remind you of exactly where you stand in the order of things. Put it on for your wife, your partners and all the employees with their stricken expressions to see.

As I sat there and watched in sick fascination, my wife turned to me and asked if anything like that ever happened to me and my partners.

A highlight reel of slights and humiliations, verbal cuffings and inappropriate demands unspooled through my head.

Not that overtly, I said. But do some clients look for and exploit opportunities to make us choose between our dignity and our paycheck? Yes.

We may just have to put on the beard, or carry the sack, or bellow “Ho, ho, ho,” but it’s putting on the Santa suit, it’s still uncomfortable, and the alternative, the unspoken “or else” is still terrifying in its unknowability.

Spies like us.

With the ten Russian deep-cover spies safely in the hands of the KGB (and wishing they were back waiting in the checkout line at Costco), it got me thinking what good advertising creatives they’d be.

Great creatives are natural snoops and voyeurs. They are not Joe Sixpack, but they need to create beer ads for him. They are not Soccer Moms (well, most aren’t) but they need to sell them cookies, hand sanitizer, minivans and back-to-school supplies. They are not Seniors but they need to sympathize with their aches and pains and need for financial security. Most agency creatives are urban hipsters, frat boys, geeks, emos or some other strain of boho.

So what you have are these well-educated aesthetes living undercover...listening, observing, furtively turning on Fox, scooting in and out of Wal-Mart on the DL, trying to understand regular Americans and, via the ads they make, trying to become one with them.

Every Tide commercial you ever saw, every redneck ad about huntin’, fishin’ and racin’, was an act of subterfuge, carefully concocted by people who have spied on these worlds, but who are Other.

So when the Kremlin gets done “debriefing” you, you clever moles, you may want to think about putting together your books. Anyone who can put together that convincing a facade of American strip-mall consumerism is someone who can sell anything.

Alex Bogusky's gone. I'm not.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704525704575341131866209048.html

From what I gather, Alex Bogusky's been getting out of advertising for a while..first the diet books, then the Dilbert-worthy move to "Chief Disruption Officer" at holding company MDC, and now peacing out for good.

What causes one of the best-known and most successful creative directors of the last 10 years to hang it up at the age of 47?
Is it boredom? After you've collected your 20th Gold Pencil and enough Lions to devour Siegfried & Roy, does the job of creative director seem pointless? What happened to the "My best work is ahead of me" mindset?

Lots of creative directors go onto 2nd lives that are more lucrative and maybe more fulfilling than their first ones. Look at Jim Patterson or Andy Spade or (heaven forbid) Donny Deutsch. But these guys never kicked ass creatively to the degree that Bogusky did, so it's easy to imagine their needing to scratch the itch a different way.

Then there's the whole sub-category of advertising copywriters who made the switch to commercially successful writers--Peter Mayle, Augusten Burroughs, Robert Goolrick. I don't know about Mayle, but the last two worked for me at different times, and though very different people, have in common a healthy disdain for advertising, copywriting, and everything and everyone associated with the occupation.

They're all gone, out of the business. Part of me thinks I should at least be curious about joining them.

But I'm not.

I want to keep doing this while I still have my wits about me. I like making ads. I like learning new ways to make ads. I like working with artisans--photographers, directors, editors, musicians--to make ads real. I get a ridiculous child-like thrill seeing my work, or the work of people I manage, go out into the world.

You'll get my keyboard when you pry it from my stiff cold fingers.

Because "very small" didn't sound right.

John Lennon's handwritten lyrics. These are the "finished" words. The other side of the page has even more scratch-outs.

Sold at Sotheby's on Friday for $1.2 million.

All out of proportion

Live sports, broadcast in HD, seen on a properly configured HD TV, is a visual treat. Watching commercials dropped into that broadcast: much less so. Last night watching the Yankees game I saw, in one commercial pod, the following:

--a spot letterboxed vertically and horizontally

--a spot stretched to fit 16:9

--a spot in 4:3 with vertical letterboxing

While TV manufacturers are busy hawking the next technology--3D--advertisers and their agencies and production partners are still coping with HD and widescreen.

Like Afghanistan, there are no good options, only bad and more bad. Consider: if you finish your spot in cinema (widescreen) 16:9, viewers with regular (4:3) TVs will see it horizontally letterboxed. If you finish it 4:3, viewers with widescreen TVs will either see it vertically letterboxed or stretched like Super Putty to fit the screen.

Wait, you say. Widescreen is here to stay, and so is HD. Maybe, but remember: that big beautiful 1080p screen needs to be properly configured and provided with HD signal. The first is beyond most people's capability and the second is rarer than you think. Why do you suppose all those TVs in bars, gyms, banks and lobbies have their Fox talking heads all looking unnaturally wide (and Rush even more so)? Because no one set the controls. And all those Law & Order episodes cha-chunging away till for the rest of time? Low-def, baby.

The interesting thing (to me at least) is: no one outside the business even notices. First, because it's a commercial break and who cares, and second, because in a world of Flips, grainy videos and 2-inch screens, production issues don't matter much.

But take it from me: if you're selling a weight-loss product, you do not want your client seeing her commercial with everyone in it looking like a double-wide trailer because it's been stretched to fit the screen.

No thanks, I’d rather watch grainy video of oil gushing into the Gulf all day long.

I thought my last post would also be my last word on BP’s benighted ad campaign, because it’s hard to have an original take on something that every last man, woman and child on earth think is stupid.

So instead, to take my mind off all the unpleasantness, I YouTubed up an instructional video on fly tying. I’d be walled off from all the noise, in my own fly fishing geekdom, and I’d be safe.

And then I saw this:


Never mind how frikkin' ridiculous this is. If I wanted to watch BP CEO Tony Hayward lying through his teeth, I don't need to go on BP's YouTube site. I can watch the same clip, with better commentary, on Jon Stewart.

No, my question is: How did they find me? And why? It’s like one their tar balls washing up in an Indiana cornfield instead of a Gulf Coast beach. Does BP have so much money to throw at this ad campaign that they can afford to target the most obscure reaches of the internet? Is this ad also appearing on sex dungeon sites? Or Elvis impersonator sites?

BP: go aggregate Liz Cheney’s eyeballs. Leave mine alone!

I hate BP. But I hate myself more.

In an early post on this blog, I expressed some qualified admiration for the nuanced way BP approached the energy/environment discussion when its corporate campaign launched around 4 years ago.

Reading that post now, with BP trying to suppress pictures of dead animals and denying the sub-surface plumes clearly visible from space, I want to throw up.

But it's not about me and my gullibility, is it? Let's shift the discussion and think about someone with much bigger problems than mine. Let's think about the person who has to write the ads running now.

Let's imagine that it's a guy (for no good reason other than to pick a pronoun).

He's in his mid-30s, a Group Creative Director somewhere (they wouldn't give this to a junior creative). He lives in Park Slope. He and his wife belong to a food cooperative. The only car in his life is a hybrid and has a Zip logo on it.

He thinks BP is a bunch of lying, Earth-despoiling wankers. But he needs this job.

Painfully, letter by gut-wrenching letter, he types out the words

We will get it done. We will make this right.


He stares at what he's written. He looks at his fingers, at the keyboard. He is a marionette. He is a cockroach. He is only following orders.

His art director pops his head in. "Make sure it fits on 2 lines" he says.

Same shit, different accent.

I’m back from two weeks in Scotland and I’ve watched a good bit of British television waiting for the sun to set sometime after 11 PM so I could go to sleep. And that meant the chance to watch a lot of UK advertising.

I’m here to report that it’s fookin’ rubbish, as the Scots would say. Just as we Americans generally mistake an English accent for a sign of intelligence, we hear those same plummy tones in their spots and give terrible English advertising a free pass.

What’s remarkable is how the advertising in each category tends to suck more or less exactly as much as its counterpart in the States. Royal Bank of Scotland, which imploded more thoroughly than Citi or Wachovia and is now owned by the taxpayers, is running “real people” testimonials with the line “Here for you.” Sound familiar?

Jaguars and BMWs veer around hairpin turns in cool, desaturated, misty worlds devoid of oncoming vehicles to a trendy music track. Sound familiar?

An analgesic...can’t remember which one...was a cheesy problem/solution POS with a graphic demo showing the wonder ingredient rushing to “the site of the pain.”

Fairy Liquid (P&G’s UK version of Dawn) is doing a down-through-the-generations-mums-have-always-trusted-Fairy spot. Sepia to black and white to Kodachrome to today. Classic Procter twaddle.

Speaking of Procter & Gamble, they started this “If it works here, it’ll work there” business years ago. They even had a name for it: Search and Re-apply. Really. I know firsthand because I was always being asked to try the campaign that worked in Yemen or Uruguay or Chechnia back when I worked on P&G business.

And of course, depressingly, they were right, as they are about most things having to do with marketing. People are all the same. Blood pudding at breakfast instead of bacon doesn’t make for a different insight. It’s just a different part of the pig. The only reason for a global brand to do different advertising in each country is politics...keep the locals feeling empowered.

That’s why I want to laugh when I hear clients at focus groups in New Jersey (the world capital of focus groups) say that perhaps they should do more groups in Minneapolis or San Diego or wherever to get a more varied perspective.

Are you kidding? You can go to fookin’ Scotland an’ ye’ll hear the same bollocks, mate!

Look both ways before you name that thing.

So I was driving along this weekend listening to NPR and I heard the following:

"This program was made possible by Barnes & Noble, makers of the Nookie reader."

Christ, I thought, aren't there enough compendia of nookie in the world already?

Two minutes online set me straight: Nook® E-Reader.

A suggestion to anyone in the business of naming stuff, especially stuff whose modifier or descriptor ("E-reader") is not common parlance yet:

Put it in a sentence. Read it out loud. Sometimes the word right in front or right in back of your brand name can combine in unpleasant and unexpected ways.

What Nike and the Catholic Church have in common.

Well, for one thing they both exploit children.

For another, they are both so hermetically sealed off from the world of their constituents that it can lead them to say and do stupid and hateful things.

The Nike Tiger spot: mea culpa? Teachable moment? B-roll of a news item no longer news? Orville Deadenbacher II?

Who cares? It's the fact that Nike thought it was OK to leverage this miserable behavior in any way that's so galling.

You have to actually believe that preserving the millions of dollar of equity Nike built up through Tiger trumps simple human decency, in order to do an ad like this.

Sort of like you have to think the reputation of the organization is more important than the sufferings of individuals in order to compare criticism by its victims to anti-Semitism.

As the Semites would say, it's a shonda.

Footlong, I wish I knew how to quit you.

Three posts in a row about Subway advertising? That's the meme talking.

But obsession spun into revulsion yesterday. During one of the car/fast food/cellphone/car/fast food commercial breaks interrupted on occasion by the NCAA tournament, a new Subway spot appeared featuring two guys and footlong meatball subs.

Their shared passion for...meatballs and footlongs...sends them off into a homoerotic reverie. When they snap back to the here and now, awkwardness and overcompensating bro-ness ensues.

Ugh. Didn't Snickers try this bullshit on the Super Bowl last year, playing homophobia for cheap laughs with the frat boy set? Just because Subway is (quite rightly) perceived as skewing towards women with their emphasis on healthy eating and weight loss doesn't justify this stupidity.



"I think I'll just stick with the turkey wrap."

$5 foot longs are f---ing fabulous!

Vice President Biden caught on mic; calls health care bill a 'big f---ing deal'

How long before the F-bomb is dropped into advertising? It's going to be in my lifetime, I'm pretty sure of that. And maybe even while I'm still sentient.

Why am I so sure? Because I hear it every night on teevee, and every day seeping through someone's ear buds on the subway or the elevator. Advertising lags popular culture and mores, but only by about 5 years. By the time the generation of marketers raised on Jay-Z and The Sopranos makes it to the C-suite, you're gonna hear advertising that sounds just like open-mike night at the White House.

By the way, not to carp or anything, but "big f---ing deal" usually means it's not a big f---ing deal at all. What the Vice President meant to say was "...f---ing big deal" as in "That $5 foot long is f---ing fabulous!"

They're ambulance-chasing scum, but they can write a mean headline.

Law firms are right up there with dermatologists and local real estate agents for horrendous ads. They all seem to think that a wildly grinning shot of the boss, combined with Microsoft Word clip art and garish typography, are the ticket. For New York subway riders, Dr. Zizmor's oeuvre is the apotheosis of the genre.

But a few days ago, on the back of a city bus, I saw a simply art-directed ad for a slip-and-fall law firm (whose name I forget, unfortunately) with a picture of a hand gripping a cane and this headline:

We've never seen a cane strong enough to support a whole family.

Whoever wrote that, if handing out business cards in the ER doesn't work out for you, give me a call.

And the winner for Next Bit of Hip Jargon Destined to Wind Up in an Ad for a Tired,Dated Brand is...

..."I'd hit that."

The critical moment may have been when Gabourey Sidibe said it about Gerald Butler on the Oscar red carpet show.

You watch. "I'd hit that" will wind up being the new theme for Pepsi or Bud Light or KFC in, oh, 12-18 months. That's the usual time lag.

The ur-moment for this type of thing was when Buick--Buick!--appropriated "It's all good" for a while in the early 2000s. Although I guess car companies would shy away from this one. "I'd hit that" and unintended acceleration problems don't mix, even in adland.

The perfect killer meme.

Admit it. "Five Dollar foot long" is the last thing you hear in your head before you go to sleep and the first thing you think when you wake up.

It's OK. You've been attacked and overwhelmed by a perfect storm of a meme, as has everyone else. We're just mindless bots in Subway's world, and if you don't believe it, check the numbers. $3.8 billion in footlongs is a frikkin' pandemic of footlong consumption.

Who came up with this killer mental tapeworm? Hint: not corporate, not the ad agency and it wasn't heard first in a focus group room. A franchisee in Miami did it because he likes round numbers and it's easier giving change on a $5 item than it is on a $10.

So much for the consumer engagement strategy.

So why, why, is "$5 foot long" so mercilessly effective? Let's break it down.

First, it's a jingle. The biggest dirty secret of advertising is that jingles work. No creative under the age of 60 wants to do them, the great jingle houses are all gone, but jingles are what everyone remembers.

Second, "Five dollar foot long" is an incredibly felicitous combination of sounds. It rolls off the tongue like it was coated with mayo, and the alliterative repetition of F sounds gives it that final touch.

Third, it's amazingly and incontestably dirty, yet manages not to offend those whose minds don't go that way...whoever they are. I mean, it's a full 12 inches long! And only $5! That's a lot of...value.

As Jessica Simpson said, in reference to full 1080p HD television, "I don't know what it is, but I want it."

Taking down the wall.

Now roll them cases out and lift them amps
Haul them trusses down and get'em up them ramps...

But when that last guitar's been packed away
You know that I still want to play
So just make sure you got it all set to go
Before you come for my piano

I haven't posted for 2 weeks because I haven't done anything for 2 weeks except wrangle a huge, complicated new-business pitch into shape. The presentation was yesterday, it was kick-ass and now we wait.

And now I take down the wall.

The wall is covered in cork tile, and I've had one everywhere I've worked since I became responsible for other people's work.

The wall is the only way I know where I am on a project. It starts with a brief, pinned up on the extreme upper left, and then blankness. Slowly, thoughts, questions, to-dos, swipe, scrawled end-lines fill the wall. These, in turn, are replaced by layouts, scripts and key frames, and then comps, storyboards and ominous patches of bare brown cork representing stuff that still needs doing.

Eventually the wall gets filled, and its next role comes into play. The pieces get rearranged, clumped into buckets, put into order...and some get tossed. At this point, the wall is not a chalkboard, it's a scoreboard. And since my office door is open 99% of the time, everyone comes by to check the score.

It's all very low-tech and also, especially at the end, very 30,000 feet, which makes it easy to forget how every piece of paper that went up on that wall was turned into something actual and beautiful by incredibly dedicated, hardworking people working crazy stupid hours.

From the elegant "place mats" that greeted clients as they took their seats to the rocking goodie-bags they got on the way out; from the perfectly edited video clips to the carefully recreated retail shelf environment they assembled in the presentation room; from the hours of taping and transcribing interviews to the wee hours of proofreading and revising, here's to Meredith, Matt D, Kim M, Jess, Anthony, Katie and Liz.

And now the wall comes down...easy as pulling out a tack. Five minutes, and the wall is bare again. This afternoon, the first casting selects from an upcoming shoot go up.

But the band's on the bus
And they're waiting to go
We've got to drive all night and do a show in Chicago
or Detroit, I don't know
We do so many shows in a row
And these towns all look the same
We just pass the time in our hotel rooms
And wander 'round backstage
Till those lights come up and we hear that crowd
And we remember why we came

--Jackson Browne, from "The Load-out"

Here's your hoop. Now jump.

I'm in the middle of a big (for us) new-business pitch, and I'm also just wrapping up reading Game Change by Mark Helperin and John Heileman, an unbelievably fascinating inside look at the 2008 Presidential race.

A pitch, in theory at list, allows a prospective buyer (the client) to sample the actual wares of different sellers (i.e., agencies) under controlled circumstances. You can't just stand up and yammer for 2 hours and win a pitch. You have to analyze a problem, figure out a strategy, come up with novel ideas about how to execute, and throw in a few tiebreakers...a research video, a store mockup, or some other kind of meeting theater.

Maybe we should consider doing something like that for major political contests. Instead of watching candidates debate, posture, speechify and trash one another and then have to commit to one of them for at least 4 years, maybe we give them all the same brief and tell them to come back in 6 weeks with a presentation.

I'd rather watch a mood ripomatic than a political attack ad any day, and watching vendors jump through hoops is much more fun than listening to them bullshit.

Just leave the search consultants out of it.

Football, life and everything else.

My PC friends aren’t going to like this, but I saw nothing wrong with the Tim Tebow commercial. I vehemently disagree with the anti-abortion position it espouses, but this spot made its point simply, inoffensively, and pretty effectively.

In fact, the strongest emotion it evoked in me was frustration. Frustration with Planned Parenthood, NOW and other pro-choice groups who have let themselves and their cause get outmaneuvered and out-communicated. “Pro-choice” would describe 90% of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, but none of the talent there is being utilized.

I have this nagging feeling that pro-choice groups feel they are morally above something as unseemly as communication strategy or advertising...that these are activities only the Dark Side indulges in. Part of that whole “I’d rather be pure and lose than compromised and win” mind-set that cripples the Left.

I say: Shut the F up and go out and find your own upstanding mother and children. Film her talking about how she made an incredibly difficult and painful decision years earlier, when her circumstances would have condemned a child to abandonment or worse. Let her show her love and pride in her children. Put it on the Super Bowl and pass the nachos.

You’ll have something to cheer for and you’ll be doing your own daughters a big favor.

What's become of the baby?

Why is there a new baby on E-Trade commercials? Why does he have a new voice? Why is he less funny?

Don’t ask E-Trade. They’re pretending it’s the same kid, with the headline on their landing page announcing “The E-Trade Baby is back!”

Here are some possible explanations:

1) They didn’t shoot enough footage of the original baby before he turned big and uncute.

2) E-Trade got a new CMO who wanted a baby who was “on his team.”

3) The original copywriter left Grey and is now an ECD somewhere.

4) The original copywriter was also the original baby voice.

5) Somebody thought it would be a good idea to “optimize” the campaign as it headed into its second year.

My guess is the answer is some mix of all of the above. Really wonderful ad campaigns truly are lightning in a bottle, much more so than anyone associated with them would ever admit. Change even one element of the mix, and the spark is gone.

The speech is free. The media buy's gonna cost you.

I get paid to turn the business priorities of large companies into messages that influence how people think.

It puts bread on the table, children through college, and the occasional smile on my face.

So you’d think, when the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 this week that corporations were entitled to the same First Amendment rights as individual citizens, that I’d be as happy as Newt Gingrich.

I’m not.

For Justices Kennedy, Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas, let me point out some differences between people and corporations.

People have feelings, beliefs, hopes and fears. Corporations do not.

People have families. Corporations do not.

People have morals. Corporations do not.

People are mortal. Corporations, properly managed, can live forever.

People speak their minds in barber shop or blogs. Corporations buy TV commercials.

Do you really want to give an entity that has no obligation to do anything in this world except make money the right of free speech?

When I write an ad, I can’t lie. I can’t say using the competitor’s calling plan leads to genital herpes. Why? Not because it’s not true. Not because my client company doesn’t like telling fibs. The reason I can’t make stuff up is because my client can get sued and lose a boatload of money. Corporations don’t like getting sued.

But now any company or trade group with the money can pour millions of dollars into baseless lies about “issues” and candidates with no fear of legal or financial exposure.
Nice job, Supremes. Nice job.