all the stuff on the wall

Something about seeing all your work for a year all at once that's upsetting, gratifying and humbling.

We recently got a dump of the results of our work for the past several months. Although the timing was unavoidable for a number of reasons, I was a little miffed that we hadn't been able to get access to results before this; it seemed to me to be a missed opportunity to learn and adapt as we've been going.

But one happy accident of this situation is that everything we're doing, for good or for ill, is really apparent. The lessons are obvious, if not the trends.

It shows you undeniably what your habits are, the kinds of things you do without really thinking about them because they're so obvious; the kinds of things you really should think about. You see work that did really well; you see work that didn't really engage people, in spite of the fact that it's really well done. And the reason you know it didn't engage people is that you put it up against the hard numbers.

That's the best and worst part of direct marketing – you don't get to hide from the results. You can try to find ways of spinning the numbers, but the numbers themselves don't change. Personally the hardest thing for me to do is to not be defensive and simply accept the results, and figure out what we can do better.

Because, after all, it's not art. It's a business that involves pictures and words.

breaking news: Lot's wife and Tom Scholz tear the rear-views out of their sedans

I can't stand my work.

Hmm, maybe I should clarify. Let me say that, once it's done, all I can see in the work that I've touched is all the stuff that I'd change if only I had a little more time or foresight.

All the stuff that I've posted, for instance. Each piece filled me with dread as I was looking at it, shooting it, writing about it and posting it. Each one reverberated with choices I wish I could have back. 

And that's true for the stuff I really like, the pieces that are smart or push the edge.

The Ascenda spot for instance. As much as Ted is a good actor, as much as we got so much of what was in my head onto film, as much as I love the in-situ product benefits, I simply can't stomach the music. I have no idea what we were thinking. It's bad. It so overwhelms the spot for me that I almost think it was the track, rather than the end of the tech boom, that killed the campaign.

I'm glad I can't remember who did the track for us, because I could never work with them again. I seem to have blotted out the entire post process of that spot.

Or the Smarties box design contest microsite. It really bugs me that we didn't put a skip intro button on the flash intro. We sure as hell should have. I must have been so enamoured of the flash that I violated pretty much everything I believe about usability to force people to watch it over, and over, and over...

Sigh. I've come to accept the fact that there's always going to be something I want to fiddle with, something that's not right, or not good enough, even after it's live or on air on in mailboxes.

Doesn't make it any easier. So, I guess, don't look back. Really.

"the fall with probably kill you!"

Spent the day at the Digital Leap Conference, a joint venture of Ted Hart and Stephen Thomas Ltd., along with the Royal Conservatory of Music. Basically, how the hell do you fundraise in a world where everything you know about your donor is wrong, or out of date, or just changing hourly?

No one had a lot of answers, but a few people seemed to have a pretty good map for taking the next steps into the dark.

Scott Stratten from Unmarketing didn't say anything really revolutionary about social capital and social marketing – but hammered home the essential point that you have to actually talk with people to have a relationship with them, in a very funny and impassioned way. His constant mockery of clients who just want to "get on the Facebook" because their current marketing is failing, without having a clue what they're actually going to do, was particularly cutting.

Mark Banbury, CIO of Plan Canada, gave a very straightforward and strong overview about what Plan is doing – starting with integrating all their systems so they can get real-time reporting of everything: donors, sponsored children, revenues, the works. It's a huge accomplishment and a vital first step to a lot of good work.

Finally, Alan Clayton (of The Good Agency and others) in his oddly frenetic Scottish accent and mannerisms (or is that Scottish mannerisms and accent?) talked about marketing in 2020, ending on the point that radical transparency – the total availability of all your organization's data, research, info and numbers to the public – is already here and is only going to get even bigger. This means that consumers will be making decisions based not on your marketing or PR, but on what your leadership team actually knows. They will evaluate whether you are worthy of their donation based purely on whether you deliver the services and impacts that you say you deliver. Any problems, any hiccups, and they're gone and they're pulling a lot of friends with them.

Ultimately technology and marketing are only going to get more closely intertwined in the years ahead. (Gee! What an insight, McKay!) To paraphrase Clayton in his finale, we're all going to have to know everything about everything, be incredibly curious about everything else, and be impassioned about it all.

he's very unhappy with your campaign – in fact he's shot himself

In lieu of actual content, I offer you the fine work of S. Frog, copywriter – Conquistador Instant Leprosy.

"it's people!"

Via the folks at Signal vs Noise, this great post by Paula Scher about brand design and identity seems enormously relevant to anyone in them there creative industries:

Another thing they don’t teach you in design school is what you get paid for... Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual egos, expectations, tastes, and aspirations of various individuals in an organization or corporation, against business needs, and constraints of the marketplace... The complicated process is worth money. That’s what clients pay for. The process, usually a series of endless presentations and refinements, persuasions and proofs, results, hopefully, in an accepted identity design.

Change the word "designer" to art director, writer, creative director or information architect and that paragraph still reflects a real truth.

People will approve whatever you do. People will criticize whatever you do. People will build whatever you do. With people having such an important role in what you do, having some ability to persuade them to do things will be more than a little handy.

I worked with one art director who was brilliant, whose work was uncompromising. Clients loved it and him in the first presentation. But then things tended to happen: other points of view, unanticipated factors, simple ignorance, Whenever there was a bump like this in the process, he couldn't deal with it. He was invariably right about who was wrong and what should be done to solve it. But in his passion and zeal he couldn't make anyone else see his point of view, or worse, do anything about it. They thought he was a whiner, an asshole, or worse. In the past he'd been advised before to tone down his passion, or some such crap, which of course was impossible. His passion defined him, made his work what it was. The only advice I could think of for him was to stop being right – to stop simply asserting what he believed – and to start thinking about how to get other people to do what he wanted. I don't know if it changed him in any kind of deep, dark, fundamental way, but working with him got a little easier, and his work didn't suffer.

Clients quickly get leery of creatives who fall back on craft explanations for things, or who get defensive, or who clam up when things don't go their way. 

I guess thinking like this is political, and smacks of compromise and serial failure. But it's also respectful of everyone else you work with, and of yourself and your work. Because in order to sell your work through round after round of changes, you need to keep being at the table. You can only persuade people that what you want to do is what they want to do, if you're actually there talking to them.

"I'll join you two ladies later... into one big lady."

Back when radio actually mattered to pretty much everyone, and you could at least pretend that deejays were allowed to not mindlessly play the same corporate-generated list of 45s hour after hour, there was a show on CBS called WKRP in Cincinnati. And I think it ruined me for any work other than advertising.

The show was about a bottom feeder AM station in a no-longer large market. New program director Andy Travis is hired to "turn things around." What he finds are a breathtakingly incompetent general manager whose mother owns the station, a sales manager who's a used car salesman's worst nightmare, a news director whose version of Eyewitness Weather is to look out the window and witness the weather, a shell of a morning man fired from L.A.'s hottest morning show a decade before for saying "booger" on air, and a receptionist who is the station's highest paid employee.

Travis' first act is to change the format. In a moment, washed-up Johnny Caravella transforms himself into Dr. Johnny Fever as he grabs the mike and, feeling blood pumping through his heart for the first time in ages, plays honest to god rock and roll music over the airwaves.

Hilarity ensues. Or rather, ensued. For four amazing years, until CBS cancelled it after playing shuffleboard with its schedule and being amazed that viewers could no longer find it. Witness these lines, signifiers of gold:

As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly. We're the scum of the earth. This tape is where my walls would be. Ch-eye ch-eye rodrigweez. Speed kills, Del. I don't think God likes trailer parks. In the spirit of Christmas, we went out and killed a tree for you. Red wigglers, the Cadillac of worms – we're hooked! I love you and I want you to be a golf pro. Look what I'm doing with teenage boys! Herb, I was once a man. Mrs. Carlson, I think you're full of crud.

And the title of this post, which has to be as old as vaudeville (or, I'm sure in some sort of Latin equivalent, Plautus) but still.

Anyway, WKRP portrayed a wonderfully chaotic but subtly ordered workplace. Huge leeway was granted to the deejays, and they took it all and way, way more. Huge leeway was granted to station management, and they muddled through things in ways far worse than anyone could possibly foresee. Somehow Andy, Jennifer the receptionist (who evolved into the very opposite of a dumb blonde) and Bailey the producer kept things from falling apart, while being human and understanding. Outward forms of obedience and compliance were barely paid lipservice, and were usually viciously mocked – as was anything that impaired the deejays' or station's ability to make a unique connection with the audience. The point of everything was to communicate. Um, is my reason for this post showing?

I loved WKRP.

Problem was, as I discovered over the next several years, was that most workplaces don't operate on anything like those principles. Unhappy employment experiences ensue.

So once I finally fell into an agency, you can imagine my slowly dissolving disbelief at finding a place that, although imperfect, actually shared at least some of those anarchic values. A place that understood that everyone on its payroll will not be the same. A place where making a unique connection with the audience is what really matters.

plug that metaphor

I've always been a little suspect of metaphors concerning creativity. Much like Sir Bedevere in The Holy Grail ("and that, my lord, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped") you can too easily find yourself making grandiose statements that aren't tethered to reality, or like anti-evolution creationists, ignoring facts that don't fit your particular grandiosity.

Still, although I can't speak to any theories of creativity or neurology or how the consciousness works, after days and weeks of cranking out ideas and designs and copy and meetings and presentations, at some point you really kind of do need to recharge.

The empty/refill metaphor feels real to me, and I suspect to every creative I've worked with. Because I think we've all been there; feeling listless before you start the job, unable to get excited about anything concerning what you have to do. That's not a good place to be, and you have to do something to change it.

How do I recharge? As you can tell from this little site, photography has become a hobby over the last year. I don't want to say anything in a photograph, I just want to take a picture that makes me want to look at it again. That's an enormously liberating thing when everything you do every day has to have a meaning or ladder back to a strategy.

Two things I don't do enough of are reading (ancient and WW II history mostly) and get to the AGO, where there's generally a good mix of the familiar and the new. (Yeah, I know it's not the Uffizi, but it serves its purpose.)

The only thing I can generalize about is that I think you actively have to do something to recharge; sitting in front of a TV or a computer simply isn't engaging enough, and probably isn't even really relaxing. The best thing you can do may be whatever engages your creativity in a totally different way, and takes you farthest away from whatever you're used to; it may also be the most relaxing thing.

I'm interested in what you the readers of this thing do to recharge, or to revivify whatever creative metaphor you subscribe to. Please share, anonymously if you prefer.

Hamilton's television renaissance?

Yesterday's post about the culture of broadcast which mentioned CHCH reminded me of the "glory days" of Hamilton's Channel 11.

While the bulk of the shows I remember included wrestling, roller derby and the Hilarious House of Frightenstein, the one I watched compulsively through the '70s and early '80s was Party Game. For what was essentially televised charades, featuring only the cheapest Canadian celebrities, it was remarkably entertaining.

A "home" team of Dinah Christie, Billy Van and "Captain" Jack Duffy competed against a team of guests, with each person having two minutes to get their phrase across successfully. It's simple fun, but it manages to be genuinely fun to watch.

What really made the show for me were the opening and close. The open would have a short "bit" from the home team, then go into the introduction by host Bill Walker. But as Walker stood on the set between the two couches, the home team would be wandering around, in front of camera but not really acting like it, slowly assembling on their couch. It's random and low budget, but it allows the show to use the real improv talents of Van and the others on the home team in a unique way, as you'll see in this example. And the close was not much different, with everyone simply gathering on the set talking, flirting, drinking...

Canadian programming has never been more low budget (with the egregious and unwatchable exception of The Trouble with Tracy). They got relatively low-budget local talent – very good talent, nonetheless – and let them run free. I'm guessing they had no choice; time and money enough for one take only, so have a couple of cameras running, and accept whatever minor chaos you get. But it works. The Party Game producers were able to acknowledge their obvious weaknesses while discovering some strengths they could celebrate. It's something to not just enjoy, but admire.

you mean, broadcast TV isn't the only way to receive this so-called "video" in the comfort of your own home?

Sitting here trying unsuccessfully to focus on work, and I've just realized that You Only Live Twice is on what used to be CHCH, Hamilton's local channel 11, but which now seems to be some wacky movie channel that shows a lot of old movies using really old, unrestored prints with old school pan-and-scan. (Unlike certain other channels.)

Regardless, after seeing this in the Rogers listings, I hit "11" on the remote (which I still occasionally call a converter) and settle in to watch. Why? Because I guess I still appreciate the value of being a passive consumer of content – a viewer.

I don't download any shows, or buy anything other than music off iTunes; I don't have a PVR; I don't often use Rogers on Demand; I don't have a lot of DVDs sitting around. I seem to prefer being dependent on the timing and selections of the once proud species known as network programmers. Which is idiotic, in a way; I hate being dictated to in other similar contexts, such as music. I'm a notorious radio station/CD/iPod flipper in the car.

What makes this even more bizarre is that one of the few DVDs I actually own is You Only Live Twice; I can see this movie anytime, with far better picture and sound, widescreen.

And yet here I am. I know it's part habit, part laziness. But there are two other factors here:

1) Broadcast TV is, or was, a shared experience. The first time You Only Live Twice aired on ABC, in the mid '70s, it was like all the Bond movies a huge ratings generator; millions watched, and for lots of us it was our first exposure to Bond movies. We all talked about it the next day. Just as later we talked about MASH, or WKRP, or hell, the Star Wars Christmas special. You watched, all at the same time, or you didn't share the experience, because there were no VCRs, no playback, no rentals, no nothing. Now, the only comparable experience is truly a massive event, like the Olympic gold medal hockey game, or September 11th.

2) It's also lack of commitment; if I actually put a DVD on, I commit myself to watching it. I'm doing something active. But with broadcast TV, I retain my distance and passivity. I pay only as much attention as I want. So I can do other things, like, say, write a blog post.

Yes, I know it makes no sense. But it's how I am, and I suspect there are a lot of us out there – holdovers, weird analog/digital cyborgs. People who still use phones primarily for calling other people. People who, when it comes to sitting in front of the TV, still ask, "What's on?"

And by the way, for having "taken a first in Oriental languages at Cambridge," Bond's Japanese is hilarious, truly bad.

my last damn post about briefs (for at least a while)

As much as every agency obsesses about their briefing document, there's really so much more to it than the words written on whatever Word template you're using.

For all the intelligence, thought and labour that can go into creating the briefing document, we all have to remember that there's a human being on the other end of that doc: one who may not realize how clever you've been, or who may not understand that your efforts are supposed to inspire them to write a great brief, or who hasn't been trained in dealing with the doc, let alone the art of writing a great brief.

Thanks to my freelance era, I've worked with many of the agencies in Toronto. I've found that most agencies have similar anxieties around the subject of their culture – we all want to be different and special, after all – and have created by and large similar processes and documents to articulate it.

So, another way of looking at the briefing document is as a vehicle for capturing a snapshot of an advertising culture as it begins a particular job. And as much as that culture can live across an entire agency, it's much more likely, in my experience, to be embodied within an individual team. If your account director and creative director are committed to the work, they will be committed to the brief, and that's a crucial starting point. But similarly throughout the team, everyone has to understand the commitment – that great creative starts only with a brief that inspires that process to happen.

What matters is the vision of the person writing the brief.

What matters is the advice, patience and discipline of the people approving the brief.

What matters is the questioning of it – and subsequent faithfulness to it – by the team you're briefing.

What matters is the dedication of everyone to the idea that the brief is foundation upon which everything is built, the roadmap for the journey you're about to embark on. If it changes, everything which follows is open for change.

Which I guess is the long-winded way of saying, again, that people matter most.