tapping into the collective conscious

I punctuated a fairly boring day at the ol’ ad agency by reading some consumer complaints about an ad campaign we just launched. Quick sidebar: the best of the bunch was “I hate these ads so much I am going to come to your office and cockpunch your ad department.” With things like that, I realize that I don’t take life too seriously after all. At least not in comparison to the rest of America.

While sharing some of the funnier consumer complaints with a buddy, we decided to try and figure out if people really hated the campaign or if the complaints were just the usual crazies.

Not really knowing how to go about it in the ten minutes we wanted to spend on actual research, we asked Google.

Because Google knows. Google always knows.

Google pointed us to a pretty cool little technology piece called Trendsmap. Little more than a Google Map mashed up with Twitter trends, the simple app-like thingie (its official name) allows you to see trends across the country regularly updated throughout the day.

So what is going on in America today?
- People don’t actually seem to hate my new ad campaign
- The Dodgers and Yankees have a lot of fans
- Americans don’t know shit about “proper football” and sound like jackasses when they try to use Britishisms
- An alarming number of people are interested in a pumpkin avatar
- It’s rainy in Missouri
- Breasts are always popular (and rightly so)

advertising fml

A vice, as far as vices I am publicly willing to admit to, that I have is daily checking of the website FML. Because when things start to go bad, it’s awfully nice to know that it could be worse.

Advertising seemed like the perfect profession to have a dedicated version of the site. With all of the things that could go wrong and f someone’s life coupled with the expressive nature of ad folk, I am frankly surprised that it hasn’t been started yet. In fact, during my blogging hiatus I often thought of starting just a website.

But then work was so busy I never had time. FML.

an improbably bad presentation

A very strange day at the Official Ad Agency of the Daily Biz today…a very strange day. One of those days where you walk in and your boss in a bad to volubly bad mood, your producer is in a volubly bad mood to such a bad mood she’s not even talking and the intern is hungover because they actually have a social life (whereas mine was given up to the golden god of advertising long ago).

That’s not the strange part.

Cranky ad people aren’t that unusual (I think that it’s because most people’s pants are too tight – not only is it demonstrably true by looking around you that most ad people wear pants that are too tight, tight pants make people irritable. That is a fact). What made the day strange is all the intrigue…a potential double-agent, a rollercoaster of emotion, no donuts or coffee for a morning meeting…

Let me set the scene.

Presentation of work to client. Main team is at the mothership, but one team member with a particularly close relationship with the client but not necessarily with the rest of the team (didn’t quite see eye-to-eye on what we were presenting) is at the client’s home base.

Presentation begins. Client is clearly distracted. Our team member is clearly the distractor.

Presentation continues. Isn’t going well. Is cut off early. Resumes a short time later. Shit show in full Barnum & Bailey glory. Drama onboard the mothership. Lots of putting the phone on mute and dropping f-bombs. At our own team member. Who people can assume is undermining us.

Presentation ends. Client makes immediate decisions. Decisions made are exactly what the account team guessed would happen and are in line with what the team would agree to.

Entire team walks out of the room with a bad taste in their mouth.

The clock strikes 9:30.

The day didn’t get any better.

the parker challenge nine months later

I so totally got called out it’s like I was pwned in a virtual call-out-a-palooza or something.

And it hurt. Because that’s what being pwned does to a person.

It hurts them.

It particularly hurt because I got called out in a post over at Tribble Ad Agency and that post was from the end of January. That’s right. Some nine months ago.

And in said post, I was tagged to write seven facts about myself if, to quote the author, “he could ever get me to post again.” It’s the Parker Challenge. And I was totally a part of it. Ish.

It may be late, but if we call the pub for an extension and push print production hard enough, I have no doubt that they’ll be able to fit my revised copy into a keyline, get final client approval and ship it out before it all goes to press. Seriously. I do it all the time and it’s always worked.

Though I do admit that this is a record for tardiness.

1. I would rather be no other place in the entire world in June than in Minneapolis.

2. I think that social media shiny baubles like Twitter, Facebook, etc are tactics, not a strategy.

3. I have reprints of the first print ads that I ever did framed and hung up on a wall. They are only six years old but feel as outdated Kerri Martin.

4. Bob Garfield remains among the most self-important blowhards I have had the pleasure of disliking. If it is true that you can judge a man by his enemies, he just went up in my estimation.

5. I may have told one person about my secret identity…and I shouldn’t have. She, possibly in cahoots with her friends, continually comment negatively on my blog. It’s kind of sad. But then again, blogging about advertising is also kind of sad, making it difficult to determine who wins this round.

6. Betty Draper is totally on my list.

7. If you want to order me a drink at the bar, please make it a vodka on the rocks with three olives.

Since I am so late to the game, I’m not going to tag any other bloggers…at least not for the next nine months until I get around to it.

facebook makes me crotchety

I did the Twitter thing for a little while, but found it clunky and un-portable…which may be an indictment of my own tech savvy, sure, but I also found that I wasn’t missing a whole lot because of the news feed feature in Facebook and the way that people have been using it. Which is just like Twitter.

I find that both a relief and an annoyance.

It is a relief, somewhat obviously, because it means that I don’t have to use Twitter anymore. I get almost the exact same information, but only have to use one application. And, as an added bonus, all side conversations tend to happen as comments on wall posts so I can quickly read the whole conversation as a single unit instead of having it dispersed across my Twitter feed.

Convenience for a lazy man. It’s a concept I can get behind.

It is an annoyance because most of what people deem important enough to Tweet or wall post about is either boring or pathetically self-aggrandizing.

For example, if you are really having a great time doing all of these fun things, do you really need to post about how you are having a great time doing all of these fun things? Just like you never hear someone say “I went to Harvard, it’s a really good school” because it is obvious that Harvard is a good school, if you feel the need to talk about how much fun you are having while doing whatever activity you are doing, you’re selling too hard. The fun should be obvious. And if it isn’t and you’re trying to convince me that it is, it falls flat in a sad, “I wish you were confident enough in yourself not to try to prove how cool you are in a public forum” kind of way.

Primarily disappointing is how many people write posts like this.

Posts like “got so drunk last night and it was awesome” or “girls nights rock, so glad I went out.” They are both unoriginal and cloying attempts to prove to people who may be following your posts that you are not a complete loser.

Except by saying, in not so many words, “I am not a complete loser”…well, you’ve just proved you are.

But at least the annoyance is all in one place now. It would be worse if I had to switch applications for the same drivel.

he’s the ecd, not jesus

There is nothing wrong with the Cult of Creativity that pervades ad agencies. I don’t say this self-servingly either, the fact of the matter is that creativity is each agency’s product and it would be strange if it weren’t celebrated. The Cult of Creativity is nice because, especially for the creatives stuck working late trying, again and again, to re-write a headline about XXXX, the adulation at the end of the tunnel (and, if it’s a good shop, the adulation in the tunnel…yes, sex jokes are hacky) makes it worth it.

Egos are a big driver of hard workers.

All that said, sometimes it all goes a little too far.

Like at Official Most-Favored Agency of the Daily Biz, Y&R, where the obsequiousness toward and belief in the amazingness of their ECDs has reached messianic proportions. Seriously. Barack Obama would be jealous of such fervent and unquestioning support.

There is a very nice young woman in the employ of Y&R New York who lived in my old apartment building (I moved and therefore feel like I can start to talk more about my life in ‘the city.’). I met her one day in the stairwell of the classic New York five-floor walkup as she despairingly considered her bags of groceries and the unhappy thought of walking up the stairs with them. I helped her out. I’m that kind of guy.

She and I grab a drink every so often and one time I even joined her at a Y&R happy hour (I justified it by calling it research and considering that there was at least the off chance that I could take home a drunk ad chick)…and it was at said happy hour that I realized that she was not the only one who regarded each and every ECD (that title is like VP at a bank, just thrown around at old-line agencies like Y&R) at the agency to be brimming with brilliance and cloaked in creativity.

It got so bad that I considered taking a vial of water, labeling it “water used in XXXX’s shower” and selling it on eBay.

It would be marginally sacreligious because of the obvious parallels with actual holy water, but these Y&R people pretty much consider that shit divine so why not? I might even make some money off of it.

keep your powder dry

The primary problem with two hour meetings, besides the fact that I get extremely uncomfortable sitting in a chair that long and end up squirming and then making sounds that sound like they may be farts because I am squirming (and then, because I want to replicate that sound I end up trying to replicate the sound which only makes the farting sounds louder and makes people look at me), is that I get nothing else done.

That nothing else includes blogging.

Of course, the reason for the two hour meetings is the wrangling over the direction of the brand that we are working on. Everyone has an opinion, of course, and getting your opinion to win out as the agency recommend is a long, painstaking process of many little battles of which it is important to win enough that your idea is alive at the end, where you can sink your entire advertising capital in to fighting for it.

Of course, that means that you need advertising capital left to fight for it.

So, unlike the crazy planner who was busy fighting over specific wording of a platform that may not even make final consideration by the agency, it’s best to keep your powder dry.

Keep that in mind, my friends. Keep your powder dry.

rewarding campbell-ewald

So…say you work at Campbell-Ewald. You’re feeling a little down after a year in which you’re lost basically all of your clients and the ones that remain, like GM brand Chevrolet, are drastically cutting their budgets because, well, they can’t sell a damn thing.

All of your friends are feeling bad for you because you live in Michigan, a state mired in economic trouble that is (and has been for years) worse than the rest of the country.

And of course you’re out of Detroit, Michigan…that poor city has been kicked so many times it’s tender enough to be served as a main course at Perry St.

Perry St is my favorite steakhouse.

It also has good pork chops.

Anyway, all is not lost if you still have a job at Campbell-Ewald! That’s right, my friends, despite the shocking year that the agency has had, the good folks steering the ship from rock to rock have decided that the best thing to do is reward everyone by giving them the week between Christmas and New Year’s off.

Though I did for a minute consider that perhaps IPG would just close the agency once everyone left for the holidays, I don’t think that Roth & Co are that devious. Perhaps they are that heartless. You’ll have to ask someone at an IPG agency to confirm.

Anyway, go on Campbell-Ewald and enjoy your break.

You deserve it. Ish.

a republican in advertising. seriously.

I have a friend who works in an ad agency…and he is a Republican.

Shock, horror.

I have spoken to him a number of times about how he feels about it, usually after a department head sends out a virulently partisan pro-Obama email to the whole department or people get paid time off to go to an Obama rally or whatever the case may be on the day.

As another example, this morning he sent me an instant message:

Him: Dude – just had an all-agency meeting turn into an Obama rally led by the CEO complete with ripping on Republicans for hating “real change”, poor people, minorities, and fun.

Me: I just had a sadistic hitting contest between me and my art director partner with rulers and our ECD standing by cheering us on.

Him: It’s like nobody thinks that there is someone in the agency that might disagree with them.

Me: Or they don’t care.

Him: No, I think they don’t even consider it. Some of them may not have ever knowingly met and conversed with a Republican.

Political aspect of the conversation aside, it makes you wonder…after all, we in advertising are supposed to know the people that we are selling to. We don’t have to be them, obviously, but we need to understand them, know what makes them tick, empathize with them to the point that we can understand them emotional hook that connects them to the brands that we are advertising for. How can we do that if we live in our hipster Manhattan (and Austin and Portland and Boston and Minneapolis…is it any surprise based on these cities that everyone in advertising is a Democrat?) worlds and disdain the rest of America that isn’t us?

Think about it honestly for a second…and yes, most people in advertising actively disdain the Wal*Mart shopping, flyover country living, openly religious people that buy most of the stuff that we sell. Just think about any briefing you have been in, think about that point where the planner starts talking about the target, and think about all of the cracks about said target that you know are coming.

Shame on them for not being upper class urban hipsters!

When I started at Fallon back in the day, Pat Fallon told me that to be good I had to be open-minded in the truest sense of the word.

He said that if I didn’t do things that were otherwise foreign to me, from things as read meat middle America like going to the state fair to things as avant-garde bohemian like seeing an experimental dance show in an offbeat converted warehouse in Northeast Minneapolis, then I wouldn’t have a chance in hell of doing good work. Experience, he said, comes from doing things with open-minded wonder, not from reading about it in the paper or making guesses based on responses to canned questions from a 10 person focus group.

Republican or Democrat, it really doesn’t matter (that whole thing was but a launching pad into a diatribe about the sad lack of wonder and interest in the world that most in advertising have)…what does matter to the good advertiser is being able to understand people who aren’t you.

And that means that you have to force yourself to engage with, interact with and even respect the decisions of other Americans whose lifestyle may baffle, surprise or shock you…because you’ll notice that yours does the same to them, they don’t care about your ivory tower or think your tight hipster jeans are cool, and that they will freely give you insights into how to sell to them.

How can you emotionally reach people through the limited tools of advertising if you have never bothered to actually talk to the people you are selling to?

You can’t.

Oh, and by the way, it’s tacky to get political to a captive audience that not only has to listen to you but has to pretend to be all into what you’re saying because you’re the boss. Grow up.

difficult client stops being difficult

The funny thing about working with a difficult client is that when things go well with something like a presentation of creative and you don’t get proverbially reamed out…you feel like maybe you didn’t do your job. That maybe the concepts were bland or something. That maybe it’s worse when they don’t care enough to be an asshole.

I never deliver 31 flavors of vanilla advertising.

But goddammit after presenting work and not getting bitched out in any way, shape or form I don’t think to myself, “self, you cracked the code and sold work that was creative and the client loved.” Instead I think to myself, “self, this client is a cockmonkey who is always upset when you present good work…maybe you didn’t do good stuff this time around.”

And that, my friends, is this week’s reason why I secretly hate advertising.