would it be better to call it the "work-life tightrope"?

The concept of work-life balance has become such a cliché in our culture that a reaction against the whole idea has started. The idea that it's a phase of life, partially driven by the fact that so many people are having children later in life, is an appealing one. And I suppose it's true that our addiction to technology fuels a lot of the imbalance.

But that's still a few long years to wait out until things get "better" again. So I understand why some people try to establish boundaries with their employers.

However, in practise in most organizations, the people who stake out work-life balance as a necessity have essentially said to the organization that they will go this far and no farther. And in most organizations, a senior manager's first choice is not going to be to give vital/important/urgent work to someone who has said that work is not their first priority. You become a solid but not outstanding contributor, and run the risk of marginalizing yourself from promotions and so on.

I don't know about the value of being so cut and dried, but then I also can't imagine being brave enough to do it. I've worked at agencies that have been pretty good at giving me time whenever I needed it; the trade-off was that I've generally gotten the job done whatever it took. I've shown commitment, and gotten it back.

It's important for companies and managers to cut people slack when it comes to personal stuff. Kids get sick at the drop of a hat, and no meeting is more important than that. Family emergencies, school concerts, funerals; things that you would regret not attending should be attended without guilt.

Maybe the stress of work-life imbalance is one of those contemporary afflictions that comes with life in the twenty-first century. On the other hand, giving someone flexibility, and the ability to call on that flexibility without worry for their jobs or professional status, seems to me to be a key way to alleviate some of that stress. I suppose you'd call it treating people like grown-ups.

focus only comes when you're under the microscope

I spent most of the week on the road with focus groups, with inexplicably limited ability to get wireless access; hence posting was non-existent. Sorry about that.

Focus groups are a necessary evil of the ad business. Creatives hate them as a matter of course, and believe that, when it comes to judging work, everyone is too reliant on them.

Years ago I watched a client try to get groups to pick the "best" creative out of three we'd presented for a DM package. Most of the time was spent listening to people talk about how much they hate "junk" mail and they didn't want to see any of the concepts darken their doors. Eventually, in the last five or ten minutes of each group, we pried a little evaluation out of the participants, but it was half hearted. People's reactions were so negative, the groups completely drained the client's energy for the project.

The moderator has to let people blow off steam if the groups are about a typical consumer irritant, like banks, insurance, DRTV, or yes, even "junk" mail. Once they've stated their feelings, they can begin to open up about whatever you're trying to explore.

But that process can be painful to watch, especially when it's your work that's on the table.

And yet, done right, focus groups offer something valuable. Because with a good moderator, once you filter out the expected reactions, common hatreds and inevitable dislikes, you'll hear people's genuine concerns about your category. You'll get a lot of first-hand language that you'll probably both love and hate, and knowledge that you can use to make your work better for the client over the long term.

You'll get a little dose of reality from the people you're trying to sell stuff to, and that's always good.

commenting on commenting

This Boston Globe article about commenting on blogs and forums doesn't seem to be news, covering as it does the almost inevitable vitriol and idiocy of this particular form of free expression.

Almost but not quite inevitable. And that's what's interesting to me.

As the writer points out, and as various bloggers as disparate as Joe Clark and Glenn Reynolds seem to have  found, there is a certain (and growing it seems) level of sense in rejecting the open forum that was one of the bases of what we used to call Web 2.0. Some people are opting out of the so-called democratic discourse, because of what often results: name calling, schoolyard taunting, obscenity, bickering and even personal threats. It's pointless, difficult to read and turns off readers.

When you go to general interest sites like newspapers you quickly see this happen – no shared viewpoint, no shared assumption of courtesy, and no shared respect. Bush was a Fascist. Stephen Harper is a Fascist. Obama is a Muslim-Commie-Fascist. (Surely he's won the trifecta.) You're a Fascist. And so on. The list is endless, and tedious no matter where on the spectrum you're coming from.

What's interesting in the Globe article is that none of their more vicious anonymous commenters would talk about their motivations. Maybe they're embarrassed. Maybe they reject the idea that they have any need to explain the nature of their freedom.

Anonymity may have other purposes online, but for commenting it seems to only encourage the most childish and stupid behaviour.

And in focusing on that, the Globe writer almost but not quite hits the point. It seems to me that what really encourages people to be civil – or restrains them from being name-calling idiots – is the very idea of community; that they are in a place that they get some benefit from, and want to return to. Just as in your bricks and mortar neighbourhood, you wouldn't start screaming at your neighbours at the drop of a hat; life afterward would get pretty grim, and chances are you'd feel pressure (either internally or externally) to move out. Commenting works where there is community.

So when you go to Batters Box, say, there is a real neighbourhood feel to the place. I love the wildly informed and respectful conversations there; they rarely devolve into out and out insults, and it's not just the admins who point out breaches of etiquette. Ken Levine regularly encourages commenters to leave their names, and won't deal with those who don't. Even some political bloggers, like Matt Yglesias, seem to get a relatively evolved and literate species of troll, let alone a community of commenters who don't always agree but who are engaged. And that's only three fast examples that live in my bookmarks.

I don't know if losing the ability to comment anonymously is going to somehow magically solve Our Global Digital Civilty Crisis. But I do know that finding and fostering community is a hell of a lot more rewarding than ranting.

Of course, your comments are appreciated.

two people who are each worth a thousand words, and then some

photo: Ashley Jonathan ClementsToday I was poking around this little site and realized that I hadn't added Ashley Clements and Alyssa Bistonath to my blogroll, so I just fixed that.

Ashley is a photographer and communications specialist as part of World Vision International's Global Rapid Response Team. Alyssa is a freelance photographer who does a lot of work with WVC, and whom was part of our team when we shot the DRTV last fall.

Ashley regularly sees things most of us don't even know about, let alone see with our own eyes. For instance, have a look at his most recent entry, about the situation in north-west Yemen, called Returning from the Mouth of Hell. I've been impressed with his work for a while now, and I was impressed with him during a web chat he did with WVC last year.

Alyssa's got a fantastic eye and is really good at talking with people in a way which draws out their stories. We use her work in a lot of the material we do for WV, and watching her work was a real treat. She's also a very grounded, very real person.

Anyway, please drop by their places and look around.

a healthy smack upside the head

Back in the '90s I spent a couple of months in Japan (for reasons I may blog about, eventually) and it was as you'd expect a mind-opening experience. When you're trying to get to a job interview and you can't read any of the signs around you in a subway station, or when you have to rely on badly-lit photographs of "dishes" to understand what you're about to order in a restaurant, you look at the world in a different way.

I was forced to bulldoze through my natural reticence and actually engage people in order to get any answers, people with whom I usually shared about ten words of Japanese. (Limited of course by my understanding of and ability to speak only ten words of Japanese.) It's actually fun, and you'd be amazed at how much you can communicate with so few words, and some gestures.

(Proof of this comes from the fact that, even with a dozen angry non-English-speaking Japanese police, I was able to explain my way out of an, um, "incident" in front of one of the Imperial palaces in Tokyo. But as I said, that's another post.)

Another thing it did for me was give me a brutally honest perspective on my place in the world up until then. As a Canadian you naturally grow up bathed in the culture of America, aware that the favour is not reciprocated but still insistent on the centrality of North America. But what I found in Japan was more shocking, more complete.

I discovered a world that was able to function quite nicely without any awareness of hockey, Bob Rae or Mike Harris, the music scene on Queen West, the Globe and Mail, the Kids in the Hall, the New York Times, Seinfeld, SCTV or the Simpsons. What's more, they didn't want to know. They had their own culture and lives, thank you very much, and didn't have a lot of interest in the quaint practices of a few snow-bound barbarians.

The perspective was breathtaking. Everything I knew in the world made up only an extremely tiny part of Japanese consciousness. (I happened to be back in Tokyo when Pierre Trudeau died; that made the news. I'm sure the G8/G20 summit will too, but there won't be a lot about the people holding it.)

Contrary to the cliché, the world is a big place. And while there are of course a lot of human realities that we all share, a lot of stuff doesn't travel with you when you get off the plane. Language is an obvious one; culture is another that's not so obvious. Know what jokes, books, movies, music and social issues to talk about in rural Mali? Me neither.

This kind of culture shock is a real slap in the face, but it's healthy for you. You stop asserting things that you discover are only true back in that tiny part of the world you came from.

Instead, you find yourself asking a lot of questions, and listening more. And that is always good.

it's strictly business

Marketers, especially creatives, like to complain when their clients don't understand the difficulty we have in understanding and solving the marketing issues those same clients pay us to deal with.

"Why don't clients understand that they need to offer something unique to consumers?" we wail. "Why can't they tell us what their USP is? Why can't they tell us something really meaty about their customers, something we can hang our hats on? Don't they get it?"

And we do the best we can, and later unleash our complaints over that second pint, and maybe a third.

It's taken a long time for me to realize that clients aren't coming to agencies with marketing problems. It would be nice if they did, so convenient for us, and probably set us up to win all kinds of awards for cool, unique and oh so creative work. But they don't, because most clients don't have marketing problems.

They have business problems.

They have sales that stink and need to be boosted, or new products to launch against competitors with better products, or whatever other non-ideal circumstances you can think of. (And if you're reading this blog, chances are you've got as many stories of non-ideal circumstances as I do.) Marketing is only a means to an end. The copy and layout are only ends. The concept is only an end.

The challenge of writing a good brief is to ensure that in articulating a marketing problem, it does so in a way that addresses the underlying business problem. The creative challenge, after you've come up with a bunch of ideas that meet the brief, is to think about those concepts in the context of the business problem – and sell them that way to the client.

I know that creatives especially can't function that way every day, as part of their internal process; they need to be focused on ideas and images and words.

But Michael Corleone was onto something when he told Sonny that it wasn't personal. Some business awareness would leaven every creative's work, their client relationships, and their understanding of what it is they really do. Besides, it is after all what we do is all about.

"we've arrived and to prove it we're here"

My grandfather (click on the link and scroll down to the picture, fifth row, far left) was a math teacher, headmaster, and serious polymath geek, if you'd call anyone who was born in 1899 a geek. He was just someone who was interested in math, in science, in history... in why. And someone who had a very academic sense of humour.

Whenever we drove somewhere and parked the car, invariably the first line out of his mouth was the above line. It's a mathematician's joke, a goofy assertion and a goofy proof. It's dumb, but I love it. It's a silly way of focusing me on the here and now.

Because really, where else are you?

In the marketing world, another metaphor that's to the point is "the grass is always greener." After two or three years, people begin to think about moving on. They hate their client, or their boss, or their co-workers, or whatever, and they start to look around and they go...

And the inevitable lunch-bag let down happens. They discover the exact same issues, the same hatreds, the same problems, in the new place, only much more quickly this time. 

And maybe they move again. And slowly, at least some of folks begin to discover that everywhere they go, they face the same issues and people and problems. And they realize that the only thing that matters is how they deal with those things.

As a manager, it sounds self-serving and condescending and faux philosophical for me to say, but damn it, it's true.

Your presence, your attention and your attitude is what makes the difference. No matter where you are, it's up to you to make something happen.

"We've arrived and to prove it we're here." As my grandfather said, it's all about presence in the here and now.

Or, to put it even better, in the immortal words of everyone's favourite philosopher-physicist-rockstar, "Wherever you go, there you are."

a brave new world

For my birthday I got a lovely, practical and exciting present – a Canon Speedlite 580 EXII flash. I can only imagine how it's going to open up my potential for shooting.

I've been purposely keeping things simple with my dSLR, starting out with a used xti and the cheaptastic 50mm 1.8 lens, and only adding when I get a sense of how to use what I already have. The 1.8 helped me understand composing, instead of relying on zoom to frame things, by forcing me to engage with my subject and move around to get my shot. And it's really helping my understanding of aperture. (For instance, I'm not quite sure why I was shooting wide open that day, what with the blistering sun and all; wouldn't do that quite as aggressively again.)

Anyway, I really like shooting in natural light, but I'm really looking forward to weeks of messing around with what this flash will do. It's the only way to learn, isn't it?

every new iPhone user leaves someone else farther behind

I know people are salivating about today's iPhone 4 announcement, and that's great for those who see technology as fashion; people who are burning to trade up to the latest and greatest. A lot of people in our business would claim membership in this club, and this is probably a good thing professionally.

But it's also slightly misleading.

Because there are a lot of people around like the senior communications professional who was leading a team getting ready for a presentation, in the potential client's building. When there was a problem getting a wireless connection – vital because much of the deck contained links – this senior person asked, "Do the windows in here open?"

The minions were nonplussed at this non sequitur, but one of them dignified it with, "I don't know, why?"

"Well," he replied, "then we could hold the cables out the window to get better wireless reception."

There are early adopters who are passionate and knowledgeable about technology; we work with them, and we may in fact be them. But don't confuse them with your consumer (or your co-workers or bosses) unless that info is specifically in the brief.

Most people use the Internet like they use cars or microwaves – they know just enough about the technology to do the stuff they need, and no more. Because, basically, most people just don't give a shit about technology. They have better things to do with their lives.

the toughest creative challenge there is

I know what you're going to say when I tell you what I think the hardest job in this business is. (And what you say *is* going to be bad.) But I've thought a lot about this over the years and time and again the truth of this seems to bear out.

I think the toughest thing to do well in this business is the outer envelope (OE) of a direct mail (DM) piece.

I know, I hear you.

"Scott, you're fucking crazy. An OE is the hardest thing a creative can do?!?"

But wait a sec – think about it.

With TV spots and banner ads, you're likely seeing them in the middle of a show or a site who's content you're actually interested in. More than merely knowing something about the person's vague prediliction for the content environment, you know that they're probably more or less enjoying it. There's an expectation of entertainment or engagement both from the content the audience is there to get, and from the ads (TV or banner) that you're serving up.

And you're probably sitting down as you experience each one, on either a couch or an office chair; you're physically comfortable.

On radio, whether you're in the car or at home, it's a similar experience. You're listening to a station whose music or talk you probably already like, and the audience is predisposed to liking you, or at least not immediately punching one of the other station presets.

Billboards don't get the same help from their environment, and they have to work in no more than 3 seconds, but again at least you're relatively comfortable while looking at one.

With a DM package, you don't get any of that help.

When your target audience member is grabbing their mail, they've just got home from work. Maybe they're  a little pissed off, or just exhausted, either from their day or from the commute. (Hey, I'm just trying to paint a typical picture of what happens when people first get in the door.) They may still have a computer bag or purse in their hands, and they're juggling keys and maybe a shopping bag too. They're desperate to get their coat and shoes off, and as they approach the kitchen counter with a fistful of other mail like credit card applications and bills (which really get them in a positive mood)... that's the moment when they may first see the OE of your package.

It better be damn strong.

Your OE has to reach through all that psychic crap and say something to the person holding it, in less than 3 seconds, because the person holding it is likely standing very near something called a garbage can or recycling bin. Months of work can disappear in the blink of an eye.

The creative, the offer, the spelling of the person's name... and the recipient's experience of the brand... they all have to work magic together for that second or two, just to have a hope of being opened, and engaged with, and just maybe responded to.

That, my friends, is a hell of a challenge.