liberty mutual dredges up the paul tilley story

Just when you thought that Paul Tilley and the “Chicago Incident” had moved on, along comes a corporation (a month later!) trying to use Tilley’s death and the ensuing kerfuffle to its advantage. Disgusting.

And even worse because they do it under the guise of “responsibility.”

Liberty Mutual has a website that showcases how they are super-duper responsible in the world around them. To quote from their site:

We believe that the more people think and talk about responsibility, and even debate what it means, the more it can affect how we live our daily lives.

This is airy nonsense, especially because this talking about responsibility includes dredging up a man’s death a month after it happened (and was covered in the New York Times, you couldn’t miss it) and using it on your corporate site as a way to drive traffic and interest in your sales-driving project.Liberty Mutual’s desperate cry for relevance and eyeballs is simple transparent greed wrapped in righteous language about responsibility.

Responsibility is leaving the man alone. Responsibility is not using a man’s death to sell things. Responsibility is not blaming blog/bloggers for a death just so you can drive traffic to your website.

And perhaps, in this small way, together, we can make the world just a little better.

The world would be a little better if this site apologized publicly and just let it die. There is no excuse for a company to use this situation for their own financial benefit.

Unless they were being irresponsible, of course.

My thoughts on Mr Tilley’s tragic end are here and they haven’t changed. Nor has my position on those who would try to pin his death on a simple blog post.

To quote Tribble Ad Agency, who broke the story, on the subject: ” It’s wrong to blame a news outlet for what happens by reporting the news – it sets a bad precedent .. next time something happens that deserves to be reporting, we will have all the news outlets sweep it under a rug. From now on only happy news is allowed to be reported.”

ad blogs are everything that is wrong with the universe ever

I haven’t posted much recently about Bob Garfield because this isn’t a Bob Garfield blog, it’s an advertising blog that has occasionally reserved a scathing assessment for the bearded one…but when AdPulp’s mild-mannered David Burn started in on Bob Garfield, I knew that I could hide behind the mountain of briefs and unfinished projects no longer.

Yep, it’s time to look at Bob’s recent article and bash it:

Lost Souls?

Trying to Explain the Difference Between Commentary and Vandalism

Whenever Bob starts to talk about other peoples’ souls, he is really talking about how upset he is that other people, specifically bloggers, disagree with him.

Why do people kill themselves? Schizophrenia. Depression. Despair. Agony. Shame. Who can say?

Nobody can say, but I know that Bob is going to try.

I didn’t know Paul Tilley, the DDB creative executive who committed suicide a week ago, and I would never presume to divine what was going on in his life, much less his head, when he jumped from a Chicago hotel room to his death. But I do know this: In his last days, whatever else was tormenting him, he was also under professional and personal attack from persons unknown — most of them, presumably, subordinates — who used the shield of internet anonymity to mercilessly disparage him.

I called it. Did you see that? I totally called it.

Bob thinks that blogs were either the cause or, in some, way correlated to Paul Tilley’s suicide.

A quick thought directed to you, Bob: maybe you could just leave Paul Tilley to rest in peace and not use him to further your anti-blog agenda. It is really unseemly to do something like this. Soulless, in fact

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Skipping down past some trite phrases and adjective-laded invective against bloggers that is just too tiresome to comment on, but you can read here if you like, we get to:
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Once again, I have no insight into what motivated Paul Tilley to take his own life; correlation is not causation.

Correlation may not be causation, but there is a reason that attorneys correlate events to try to prove guilt…and there is clearly a reason that you try to correlate blog posts with Paul Tilley’s death.

Hmm, I wonder what that reason would be?

Suicide is a dark, desperate, often unknowable act, and those who believe the man was essentially blogged to death believe so knowing virtually nothing about his non-professional life, much less his inner one.

After drawing a line between blog posts and Paul Tilley’s death Bob, like a lawyer withdrawing a question after a sustained objection, has already done his damage and now pretends that he never got his hands dirty.

But it is easy to see why his suicide has triggered such a backlash, with ad blogs at pains to account for their treatment of the man. I surely can’t but wonder whether the vicious public assaults on his competence and character — assaults destined for digital immortality — did not pain his tortured self at least as much as such things have pained me.

The vanity and self-absorption it must take for a person like you, a mere critic, to compare yourself to the Executive Creative Director of DDB Chicago, and that you have tried to compare the pain that a man who committed suicide felt with your own hurt feelings…it is utterly dumbfounding.

There are not words for how sad a person you are.

The ad bloggers (after, of course, offering gushing condolences to the grieving family) have been quick to dismiss such connections as asinine — and maybe they’re right.

I am among those bloggers who has dismissed such connections as asinine…because they are, not to mention that the belittle the life of a man. As for those bloggers that commented on Mr Tilley and then offered condolences to the family, maybe they meant the gushing condolences because as humans, they were able to understand the pain that Mr Tilley’s family must have been feeling no matter what they may have felt about Mr Tilley’s business practices.

But the bloggers are still evil, right?

But as Tilley’s worst detractors continue to use these blogs to posthumously slime the departed, the lords of the flies could do worse than to think about the loss of the human soul.

After an entire article bashing bloggers and correlating their posts with a man’s suicide in a limp attempt to further his anti-blog agenda, Bob finishes up by actually blaming the commenters on blogs, internal consistency of what he is saying be damned.

The good news: we’re all off the hook!

The bad news: we’re still soulless, evil bastards who ruin people’s lives and by the way need to control the comments section better.

It could be worse.

morality in a new media

There have been a lot of recent articles (Google “Agency Spy + Paul Tilley”) about advertising blogs and discussion of whether or not they are good or bad. Most journalists, as you would expect, played up the negatives. However, on the whole, the top-drawer blogs aren’t bad (and certainly aren’t immoral), especially when they keep any personal criticisms to public figures. Public figures, whether they be politicians, sports stars, businessmen or even advertising executives, are open to public scrutiny, criticism and attendant commentary. They do things that matter, and whenever people in power are doing things that matter, transparency is a good thing.

Transparency keeps people honest, rewards those who are at the top of the heap with recognition and praise and criticizes those who do criticizable things.

The internet has empowered a new form of transparency through commentary in the form of anonymous blogs and anonymous comments on those blogs.

Though most of the scoops and commentary are materially no different than the leaks that might uncover Congressional corruption or a brand asking agencies for work behind the back of its agency of record, the blog platform allows them to go directly to readers with the truth.

It also lets anonymous posters go directly to readers with opinion.

I can understand, because it is obvious, that nobody enjoys being railed against on advertising blogs. And perhaps it makes it worse not to know who is railing against you.

But public figures get railed against, especially when they do things that are criticizable.

This is not a post about Paul Tilley (it is time to stop the conceited act of presuming what did or did not affect him before his death and to let the man rest in peace). This is a post about the moral demands on bloggers when the post and allow comments on their blogs.

The first demand is that bloggers only target public figures.

Were a blog to post negatively about someone like Alex Bogusky, it is unlikely to be particularly affected (though, like Bob Garfield, his feelings might be hurt and, if he did something dumb, he would likely be embarrassed) either by the post or the fact that it lives, cached, in the online world for a long time to come. Bogusky has achieved much and his work stands for itself. His position is secure. He is a public figure and criticism of public figures is fair.

A Junior Art Director, on the other hand, is not so lucky as to have an impressive body of work logged and a negative post about that person, whatever the truth or motivation behind that, could be career damaging and reputation ruining.

Hand in hand with that, it is incumbent upon bloggers – your favorite blogger included – to manage the comments section the same way they would manage their posts.

Bloggers are not journalists. But they do have the same demands of integrity. Will I suddenly start writing under a by-line? No. It is unlikely that I would be able to blog freely and interestingly if I had to worry about what potential clients or employers might think, not to mention my own employer. It is even less likely that I would be able to support myself as a full-time blogger, and I wouldn’t want to anyway because I love what I do.

My integrity as a writer is not jeopardized by my not using my name. I cite and link to facts where relevant, explicitly say what is rumor and what is not, give my opinion is as engagingly as I can and otherwise try to be as fair as possible in all that I say. If you have an issue, you can comment or e-mail. When I comment on people, they either don’t get named or they are public figures. Oh, and if I say things that aren’t true or am grossly unfair, this blog’s credibility is hurt and people stop reading. Just like a journalist (except, strangely, for former Enron advisor Paul Krugman).

Maybe all of this is morality in a new media, maybe it’s not. But it is the operating procedure on this blog and working off of those principles lets me sleep soundly at night.

paul tilley dead of apparent suicide

Paul Tilley, ECD of DDB in Chicago, is reported dead at age 40 of an apparent suicide. Tilley apparently jumped from the roof of Chicago’s Fairmont Hotel at around 6:25pm on Friday night and, though Chicago authorities have not yet identified the cause of death as suicide, the word on the street is that it was.

The thoughts of the Daily (Ad) Biz go out to Mr Tilley’s family, with special thoughts and prayers to his wife and two daughters. Any premature death is a tragedy, especially an apparent suicide and particularly in this case as it robs a family of its husband and father.

The Daily (Ad) Biz did not know and has not posted about Mr Tilley, but a death like this of a man so high up in the industry will surely open the door to condemnation of any number of assumed reasons behind his death, even though suicide, by its very nature, is an unreasonable act. We cannot know what drove him to jump on Friday, but we can do our best to direct the inevitable inquisition into the right direction.

Agency Spy, who has posted about Mr Tilley recently, is dealing with commenters who would pin some, if not all, of the blame on those blog postings. This is asinine and dangerously misguided.

This isn’t about blogs. This is about the personal demons and struggles of one man.

Blogs bring transparency to the industry and, while that is not always pleasant to those who would prefer to operate without it, it is, on the whole, a good thing. Those intra-agency e-mails that make it out onto the blogosphere are nothing more than the leaks from government agencies that you might read about in the papers that give citizens an idea of what is really going on in their country. Having a mechanism for uncovering the politics and bad work environments and other issues of the industry only helps those who are in it. Information is a good thing.

Of course, blogs can be deliciously nasty and it is understandable that those who are on the receiving end of a negative post may not like either the post or the fact that it often comes from an anonymous blogger. But most of the people featured by name, for good or for bad reasons, in blog posts are at the top of the industry heap. The Maurice Levy’s, the David Droga’s, the Bob Garfield’s and, yes, the Paul Tilley’s have made it in the industry to the point that they are public figures. Criticism dogs public figures when they do criticizable things.

And if the criticism from those anonymous bloggers is unfair, the comments section is there to let said bloggers know about it.

One needs only to look at the posts about Kansas City agency VML to see how the comments section allows those who disagree with a post to give their opinion and to level the playing field. Blogs are a conversation, a two-way street and when engaged correctly they are a great tool for the industry (even with the acid tongue of some bloggers).

The death of Paul Tilley is a tragedy. But it is not a tragedy that involves blogs like AdScam or Agency Spy or any other that comments on the public figures in the ad industry. Mr Tilley did criticizable things and was criticizes for them. Sort of like politicians are. And sports stars. And business leaders. And other public figures.

Criticism happens. To blame Mr Tilley’s death on mere criticism is to demean the man and his character and to give too much power to blogs that, while not un-influential in their way, certainly do not have the power to drive a man to his death.

The focus of the questions surrounding this terrible situation should be firmly about Paul and his family; namely, what can we as an industry do to help them through this and what can we do as an industry to give support to people like Paul who are in high-pressure environments and struggling under the strain.