Getting 'Faced.

After disdaining Facebook from afar ever since my daughters starting obsessing over it 4 years ago, I joined up 3 weeks ago so I could disdain it up close.

I was not disappointed.

After I completed the signup process, the first person suggested to me as a Friend (as opposed to a l/c friend, who is someone you actually know and like and see from time to time) was my 75-year old former boss from the ‘80s, now living la vida loca in Boca. Facebook had clearly jumped the shark long before my sad 57-year old self signed up.

I went to my Homepage?/Room?/Place?/Wall? and gazed in wonderment at the spectacle unfolding before my eyes. I felt guilty and ashamed—but not enough to keep me from scrolling, mesmerized, through the idle thoughts of current employees, bikini photos of ex-employees and the minute-by-minute documentation of all these people’s lives.

It would be easy to think, Jesus, who cares? Except that each dispatch—“Just got back from the dentist.” “Psyched for the weekend!!!” “Having ramen for dinner.”—is greeted with a chorus of thumbs-up validating comments.

I felt like Shelly Duvall's character in The Shining when she discovers the bat-shit crazy stuff Jack Nicholson's been writing all this time. The horror!



Three weeks rummaging through this dumpster of compromising pictures, coma-inducing reportage and rampant narcissism lead me to these conclusions:

1. People have way too much time on their hands.

2. Facebook is an irony-free zone. It may be a relatively new medium, but it’s about as edgy and cynical as Lutheran Bible camp.

3. Using a Facebook Wall to talk to someone is like using a Predator Drone to conduct diplomacy.

4. When your client, regardless of category or target demographic, asks you whether they should have a Faebook “presence” (the word itself is a dead giveaway), say No.

Regarding the latter, I used to say No without having ever been on Facebook myself. Now I can say No with much greater confidence. And, because I’d never ask a client to do something I wouldn’t do myself, I’m de-Friending?Listing?Booking? myself today.

A challenging day.

Humankind cannot bear too much reality."
--T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"



It's been a challenging day.

The weather has been challenging, the fraudulent use of my credit card in Madrid is a challenge, and my painting contractor's sudden, unexplained disappearance will certainly pose a challenge going forward.

My 3rd quarter mutual fund letters to shareholders make abundant use of the word "challenging," as do CEOs reporting missed targets on analyst calls. Having all their franchise players injured was certainly a challenge for the Mets.

The beauty of "challenging", as opposed to, say, "totally and completely fucked," is that challenge is noble and invites rising, whereas total and complete fucked-upness is depressing and invites sitting down or--even better--going to sleep.

Euphemisms have their place in civilized life. They grace the skids for little white lies meant as a kindness, and they minimize the gross factor in discussions about bodily functions. But I've never understood euphemisms that mask truths, fool no one, and leave neither speaker or listener feeling better.

Make yourself scarce.

Seeing these new Starbucks ads everywhere confirmed my feeling that whatever elan this brand once had, it has lost. In fact, the sheer ubiquity of the campaign added to the problem. I mean, here’s an ad that basically sells scarcity—we use only 3% of the world’s beans—and then they plaster the message everywhere!

Part of what used to make Starbucks cool was that they didn’t advertise. Yes, they did the occasional (and sweet) holiday effort, but they didn’t spend a lot, the ads didn’t sell very hard, and it all felt artisanal and small-bore...exactly what you want from makers of $3.00 cups of coffee. Dropping $100 million on an ad campaign says “We’re the Micky D of coffee” no matter what the headline is.

In a spectacularly misguided effort at social-network relevancy, Starbucks CEO Howard Shutlz laid out his thinking for the company’s “partners” (read: hourly employees) in this YouTube video:


If you’ve built your brand through advertising (as, for instance, Folgers did in coffee), then there are good reasons to keep advertising. If you built your brand as “the third place”—essentially, an experience rather than a bunch of product claims—then advertising ought to be a waste of money at best.

Bring back the dead guy in the fedora.

Let's say you were Lexus and you were introducing a vehicle in a new segment, somewhere between the ES and GS. Wouldn't this be an appropriate headline? Builds on their endline of the last 20 years or so, highlights a new entry, has the self-confidence bordering on swagger that Lexus has earned.

Too bad it's an ad for...Buick. What? You didn't notice that?

A new-business koan.

Which is worse: not getting past the RFP stage of a pitch and then seeing the hilariously bad new campaign from the winning agency? Or not getting past the RFP stage of a pitch and seeing the so-good-it-hurts kickass campaign from the winning agency?

Where the wild type treatments are.

One is for rebellious children of all ages.
The other one is for...rebellious children of all ages.

What makes an ad look old?

I was leafing through Penthouse while getting my hair cut and...

Wait. It's not what you think. It was the April 1974 issue of Penthouse, part of a big moldy stack my trendy barbershop found and keeps on hand. As a sociological artifact it was fascinating, on a lot of counts, most of which are not appropriate to discuss in a family blog.

Being the focused adman I am, I skipped right by Miss April, the Penthouse Forum and other appeals to my baser instincts, and focused on the ads. They seemed older--far older--than their 35 years, and I tried to figure out why. One obvious reason is that most of them were for cigarettes, but cigarette advertising wasn't banned until relatively recently, so that wasn't it.

There was the grainy, dirty quality of the photo reproduction--but now that look is slavishly recreated for its retro appeal. Ditto the haircuts and outfits (and 'staches on the guys).

ThenI realized what it was that dated those ads as surely as carbon dates rock: the typography.

Windsor. Remember Windsor? Sam Scali used it for Perdue then everybody got on board.
And Avant Garde. Lots of Avant Garde Extra Bold. Which now looks very not avant garde. And everything tracked super-tight so all the letters touched and the kerned characters got so intertwined they were almost x-rated.

I stared at that type and got a whiff of antiquity. Which is ironic because a few weeks before, I had been in Rome and while walking through the Coliseum, I had admired all the, um, Roman type chiseled into the ancient stone and thought, 2000 years later, that it looked remarkably fresh.

Nothing says “We care” like a good ™ at the end.

You’re in good hands with Allstate.™

Reach out and touch someone.™

When you care enough to send the very best.™


When companies try to get all warm and fuzzy, often it’s the two little letters
in superscript that give the show away. Yo, all you $500/hr. intellectual property lawyers out there: isn’t there a way to protect ownership other than stamping the equivalent of “Hands off my themeline” all over your stuff?

The answer:

NO SCHOOL ON TUESDAY

What, in that stew of facts, could possibly be more relevant to the average parent? Or more exciting to the average child?

Your final exam in Marketing 101 consists of this question:

You need to send out a newsletter to parents and children of all California public schools to let them know of an upcoming event. Here are the pertinent facts:

1) The state has received a $500 million dollar anonymous gift to fund science and math education for every student, K-12, in the state.

2) All teachers, principals, and other administrators will gather next Tuesday in Sacramento to undergo special training for this initiative.

3) Leading scientists and mathematicians from around the world will be in attendance.

What is your headline for the newsletter?

NB: There is only one right answer.

Answer in the next post.

My thanks to Dick and Barbara Holt for supplying me with this wonderful thought experiment.

What if we made periods a happy time?

This is hardly breaking news, or even a new insight. Rather, it's a bitterly funny data point on the endless cluelessness of marketers when it comes to women.

Ir comes in the form of a letter written by Wendi Aarons to the Always brand manager (male, of course) at Procter and Gamble. It's well worth your time to read the entire screed, but here, to whet your appetite, is the opening salvo:

Dear Mr. Thatcher,

I have been a loyal user of your Always maxi pads for over 20 years, and I appreciate many of their features. Why, without the LeakGuard Core™ or Dri-Weave™ absorbency, I'd probably never go horseback riding or salsa dancing, and I'd certainly steer clear of running up and down the beach in tight, white shorts. But my favorite feature has to be your revolutionary Flexi-Wings. Kudos on being the only company smart enough to realize how crucial it is that maxi pads be aerodynamic. I can't tell you how safe and secure I feel each month knowing there's a little F-16 in my pants.

It only gets better from there. Given the fact there is a whole ecosystem of consultants, research firms, academics, agency leaders etc. who specialize in telling the Mr. Thatchers of the world "what women want," it's amazing that these tone-deaf marketing efforts crop up so often.

Even with a wife of 29 years and 3 daughters, I don't profess to know what women want.But here's a suggestion:

Pretend you're talking to a guy.

Whatever you lose in feminine sensibility, you will avoid sounding like a pandering, condescending idiot. If men had menstrual cramps, saying "Have a happy period, bro" would get you killed.

And if this turns into a depression, we're golden!

CMOs continue to the say the darndest things. Wal-Mart CMO Stephen Quinn had this gem in this week's Ad Age:

"We were fortunate that this recession came along. It played to our positioning really well."

Yes, Stephen, it's true. Wal-Mart was very well-positioned for customers facing job loss, foreclosure and loss of life savings. Nothing like that Katrina thing where all the shoppers were cooped up in the Superdome!

Christ, it's enough to make one yearn for the return of Julie Roehm.

Adventures in media, continued.

After your Metro-North ad has been used as a poker table, anything can happen. In this case, the ad became infinitely more attention-grabbing than its hackneyed right-side-up version.

A temporary breach in the firewall.

"Good fences make good neighbors" was how Robert Frost put it. "Don't shit in your own backyard" was my father's version. They were both right and that's why, as a matter of policy and self-preservation, I usually don't post about specific happenings at my agency. Nor do I use this blog as a vehicle to promote our work.

But today I'm making an exception. We launched our new Seiden agency website this morning and I like it a lot. Not too self-conscious, not hard to navigate, easy on the eyes. I'm sure in 18 months it will look like a Pontiac Aztec to me, but right now I couldn't be happier.

Stimulate this.

One of the many odious aspects of focus groups is using the term “stimulus” to refer to the creative work being subjected to the group’s malevolent scrutiny.

When I think of a stimulus, I think of a cattle prod. Or a latexed digit going where I don’t want it to. Which is maybe apt, since another odious focus group term is “probe,” as in “Let’s probe to see if this image is polarizing.”

Painful. Dehumanizing. Clinical. Stimuli are meant to provoke reaction. But often the reaction they provoke, in the stimulated and stimulator alike, is: please please stop.

Throwing out the work.

I was hunting for an old ad to illustrate a typography point to my creative team and as I dug, I started to throw.

I threw out things that started their life as physical mechanicals. Things that were set in hot type. Things that were set by Photo-Lettering and couriered back and forth. I tossed things that never were, and now never will be, digital files.

I threw work that was laminated because lamination was the archived pdf of its day. There were cheap laminations, and fancy ones with non-glare plastic, rounded edges and felt backing.

I didn’t throw away everything. Some of this stuff still elicits a “Huh...this really isn’t bad.” Some of it smiles back at me from an earlier, sweeter moment in time. But most of it was there because it used to ride around in a large black pleather bag (hence the felt backing) trying to get me a job.

These ads were trendy-looking at some point, and now look as bad as a ‘70s haircut. Or they were ads demonstrating I had experience in a category, something we mock clients for in RFPs but have no hesitation doing for our own careers.

Portfolios, physical or digital, are no longer useful in my life. The ads that were in them no longer need to sell me or impress others or tell much of a story of any kind. The ones that still make me proud go back in the drawer. The rest can go.

Ethan Coen, kickass copywriter

Coen Brother Ethan, it turns out, is not just a stupidly great screenwriter, but a poet as well. And, being the ironic, self-aware dude he is, he refused to read his work aloud. So Bill Macy read for him. You can hear it in its entirety here. But here is the title and repeating lyric:

"The Drunken Driver has the right of way."

Tell me that isn't the best headline for any safety-themed car ad ever written.

Here's to you, Mr. Bounce-it-by-Billingsley!

I’ve got a new campaign that’s flapping its wings furiously, trying to get off the ground, and if it succeeds, it will be because of a client.

We bitch about clients when they kill or maim good work. But we forget what a Herculean task they have if they actually embrace our vision. The layers. The “stakeholders.” The politics. The bean-counters. The lawyers. The processes. The sheer inertial mass of a huge organization that needs to be overcome.

And there, slogging through it with our precious idea in his hand, is our client, in his soul-crushing, Orwellian office park with little more to help him than his belief in our idea and his own sheer tenacity.

How often does it happen? Not very. Then again, how often do we do work that justifies his thankless journey?







"I think it needs kids or animals."

Speechless.

I’ve gone dark for a few weeks. Never a good blog-viewership move.

Why? I’m speechless.

Here are some things I’m speechless about:

Ad Age asking Julie Roehm to be on an expert panel.

Twitter.

The SpongeBob square bootie thing for Burger King.

Bank of America corporate advertising.

Republican “Tea Parties.”

The Celebrex :60 legal disclaimer spot.

When the bile rises high enough in the gorge, words can no longer escape.

Guaranteed 32% less bad.

One theory about this week's nice spike in the stock market is that it was driven by news that shit isn't as bad as it could be. Here's a quote from today's New York Times:

"General Electric, the blue-chip corporation, was stripped of its triple-A credit rating, an emblem of business prowess it proudly held since 1956. But its rating fell just one notch, less than some analysts predicted. Shares of G.E. soared 13 percent...
Less bad was good enough."

Maybe in these diminished times, diminished claims have their place. Think about all those DTC fair-balance warnings...we could make some kickass claims out of those:

"Shown to be 24% less likely to cause blindness, insanity or death than other cholesterol reducers."

The coal lobby's "Clean Coal" ads, which the Coen brothers savagely and appropriately turned upside down (thanks for the tipoff, American Copywriter dudes) can escape further ridicule with the truth:

"Burning coal causes less dirty, polluting smoke than burning dung or discarded tires."