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.

a real life ad. mostly.

I had occasion to drive downtown for three days in a row last week, each time parking in the same parking garage. And each time I drove past an absolutely filthy dirty Subaru.

The first day it was just dirty.

The second day, someone had written “wash me” on it. It was like the commercial (by Carmichael Lynch):

And then on the third day, as you would expect when you really think about it, someone drew a big penis in the dirt on the back window.

They must have cut that in edit.

intra-agency politics…do they matter?

The headline to this post sounds a fair bit ridiculous and completely out of place on this blog. The post is better than the headline, I promise. And there is no attempt to give actual advice, either.

The question springs from a situation that recently arose here at the Official Agency of Biz. As the financial picture for the agency worsened earlier this year, it looked like layoffs were imminent…a friend of mine, who was a fine worker but perhaps not the best at their position in the agency, was very concerned that she was on the chopping block.

To ruin the ending, she was.

A lower middle level worker who had been at the agency approaching five years – making her the agency equivalent of a car with 300,000 miles on the odometer (and not in any sexual way, though that could be a follow-up post…) – and having seen a lot of changes, including a wholesale change in the agency’s executive leadership and in her account’s leadership, she was continually worried that she was “old school” and “didn’t have any political cover.” And because of those reasons, she thought, she was certain for the chop.

It was an interesting redirection on the “last in, first out” theme.

And an especially interesting stance considering that there were more than a few hires at her level who were very new (under a year) and had been hired by the old executive team.

Apparently, her specific lack of internal political allies was going to mean the end of her time at the Official Agency of Biz.

Of course, she was laid off in the end. And the other more recently hired people were not.

So did it have to do with the fact that she had no political cover? Or was it simply because she wasn’t fully funded by agency accounts and wasn’t good enough to push another person at her level off of their account and into unemployment?

Not having been included in any of the decision-making process it is impossible to tell…but if I were to take a guess, and if I weren’t what would be the point of all the finely crafted build-up, but at the lower middle levels how do politics really matter?

I can certainly see how boardroom and holding company politics can determine who makes it to the C-level suites, but it is a real leap to think that there is much beyond performance and luck that is going into the layoff decision of someone at the lower levels. Sure, had she been on a different account that could have fully funded her position, perhaps she wouldn’t have been let go. Perhaps she was equal in terms of performance with someone with her job title on another account and she would have kept her job if her luck was better.

But was it because she had no political air cover?

Hardly. It was a fatal mix of lack of billability, performance compared to peers and simple bad luck. The balance of which is probably most clear to those who did her performance review (and is something that I don’t pretend to know).

A bummer, but hardly because she was “too old school” or “didn’t have anyone senior who had her back.”

Not that I wouldn’t try my hardest to make sure I have senior level support…

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.