hey, at least they don't throw frozen tomatoes any more

At Queen's there's a savage initiation ceremony for engineers called the Grease Pole, and I seem to have witnessed it at its worst in 1984. In a large crater in the middle of a field, a tall thoroughly greased pole was erected, and freezing water and other, um, liquids were poured in the hole. Then the frosh engineers (one of whom was a good friend from high school) were invited into the hole and asked politely to claw each other's eyes out and get to the top of the pole. (I vaguely remember there being something on top that had to be retrieved, but I could be wrong.)

The figurative cherry on this hellish sundae was the fact that there were a couple of hundred upper year engineers surrounding the hole and, as they cheered on the frosh, whipping frozen food objects into the melee. Tomatoes, oranges and apples were popular, and I recall some melons arcing into the pit.

It was about as close to a medieval experience as I'd come, until travelling to Mali last year.

Naturally, it's already occurred to you that I'm using this as a metaphor for advertising.

Now, if you're a junior, I don't share this to be patronizing. (In spite of the fact that it will probably read that way anyway.) I share it to try to demonstrate that me, along with almost everyone else I know who's senior in this business, has also been paid barely enough to survive; I know that life isn't glamorous.

Very early in my career, I had up to four roommates, rode my bike to work 12 months a year, took rolls of toilet paper from work instead of buying them, and drank in the cheapest-ass places I could find. (Grossman's being one of the few that's still around.) And I was ridiculously in debt, maxing out what little credit I could get. Whatever talent and ability I had took years to pay off.

During this time money really mattered, day in and day out. I knew how much I had in my pocket, and how much was in my bank account, because if I didn't keep track I couldn't make rent. And money did come, more slowly than I would have liked. 

I say this because if you're starting out you're likely in a similar position, and I want you to know that things will get better if you have talent and you stick it out. But the industry expects you to keep working like a maniac and learning and being positive until that money moment happens. A sense of entitlement because you know you're talented or feel like you have huge potential is a massive impediment. (I'm sorry that sounds condescending. But it is true.)

Because, unless you're an NFL draft pick or highly rated Junior A prospect, you don't get paid for your potential. You get paid because the people who sign the cheques know you can do the job.

just for a minute, let's confuse the words "consumer" and "citizen"

We forget that the vast majority of consumers don't know much about the products we're selling. They haven't read the brief, haven't done the competitive research, and often haven't even done our work the courtesy of paying attention to it. Unless they're in the market for what we're peddling, it's really hard to get their attention, let alone communicate any kind of message.

If any of you ad weasels reading this would like to get a sense of what this is like for consumers, ask yourself this: which Toronto mayoralty candidate's policies do you most support?

[Pause.]

[SFX: wind rustling leaves.]

[A TUMBLEWEED enters STAGE LEFT, rolls across stage slowly and exits STAGE RIGHT.]

None of the candidates' campaign promises or thoughts have penetrated the fog of media that surrounds us all. There have been loads of articles and interviews, but none of the candidates has differentiated themselves. None of them seems to stand for anything other than rooting out waste at City Hall, and they all go on about that. (Really, is anyone stupid enough to think that there's a billion dollars in waste in this city, other than the editors at the Sun?)

This is exactly the situation that most consumers find themselves in when it comes to all the stuff we throw at them. Apathy, uninformed opinions and suspicion greet us as marketers whenever we try to start a conversation. "Throw the bums out" is becoming a kneejerk response to a lot of things, like the financial crisis, the health care crisis, the Gulf oil spill, let alone the chronically sick, wilfully misdiagnosed and negligently tended political life of Toronto.

Personally, all the candidates elicit a collective "meh" from me, including the presumptive messiah of the Centre-Right, John Tory. I know some very smart people who are working for Rocco Rossi, but I'm unable to distinguish much what he says from the uninformed belligerence of talk radio. And I'm not an apolitical person; I vote, I read a lot, and I care about this city. If none of the candidates can connect with me, our political culture has a serious category problem.

I think we marketers all face a hell of a challenge in the years to come, too.

Now, let's go back to being crystal clear that "consumer" and "citizen" are not synonyms.

Update on Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 10:57AM by Scott

Great minds think alike. Later last night Ivor Tossell tweeted:

John Tory can't possibly be running for mayor. He doesn't have a half-baked Twitter presence.

QED.

being honest is probably a good idea

When I was in the trenches, I hated it when someone told me that my copy wasn't good enough. I really do want to please my clients and bosses, and knowing that one of them isn't happy with something I've done is a real kick in the ass. When they tell it to your face it wakes you up and makes you listen. (Or turns you right off, but that's another problem.)

As bad as that is, though, there's worse.

When someone says they love what you've done, then it turns out they didn't.

They may say great, super, bang on. Or they may quietly smile and nod. Either way, the bad thing is that they don't communicate what they really think and feel about the work until later, when it comes as a shock and causes a lot more lingering ugliness than is necessary. And it's critical that the news that your work is off-track come face to face -- it has real impact that way, and there's all kinds of facial and physical nuances that get conveyed as well.

I've heard of clients who just wanted to be nice to the creatives, who didn't want to be mean. But they ended up frustrating the teams involved, and tended not to be satisfied with the work they ended up with.

I know of bosses who just couldn't be open, who would take the work away and fiddle themselves, thinking it was quicker. But they ended up with pissed off team who left.

I know of a suit who wouldn't be open with creatives, but who would complain about their work to the client. But for some reason that person ended up jumping from agency to agency every 14 to 18 months...

Client or agency, you owe it to yourself to be honest with your partners. And that's what we are. Or at least, what we can be.

the decider

The first time I got promoted to creative director, I was immensely satisfied (some might say smugly, but I can't comment) at the natural evolution of things; this was the next step of my career, and I was ready for it. I was heading up an existing team on an established account, in a category where I had previous work experience. There was plenty of support for me. Easy peasy, right?

Well, I can't say it was terrible. But the big change from being a plain old writer, what I wasn't expecting, what floored me, was that people were constantly demanding answers. My team, suits, clients – they just never stopped wanting to know things.

Things to which only one person could have the answer.

Me.

It was exhausting and overwhelming. Nothing prepares you for the fact that you can't defer to anyone else. You can't hide. You can't kick decisions up to the Executive CD, because that's what he/she has hired you to take care of.

What's worse, you have to care about your answers. You're making decisions that affect people and their work and their jobs. You have to care, even when you don't want to. That takes energy too. Energy that you used to put into brainstorming and writing. So you learn (eventually) that you can't work on as many projects, and you can't take on anything too big or juicy, not without all the other jobs on the account suffering.

After about a year, I got sick of all that stuff taking over my life. I went freelance.

When I returned to a CD gig, I knew what I was getting into. I finally enjoyed the pressure and responsibility, the team building, all the little things you have to do to help creative teams achieve great work.

Like providing answers.

All of which is just a long preamble to this 2-part article on Design Taxi is all about what makes a good creative director. And a good reminder, for those of us in the trade, of what we have to live up to.

(And look, not a single goddamn mention of Don Draper.)

oh yeah, that's why I do this job

Had an internal presentation today for a fairly major project with high expectations, and had those expectations exceeded.

Seeing really good, smart and inspired work that will both elate and scare clients is just an insanely fun experience. It lights up the rest of your day, and reminds you of the power of creative. Yeah, the brief is key, and execution is also vital, but at heart, what gets people excited (clients and consumers) is a concept that's alive and fresh and fun – and bang on target.

It's easy to get caught up in so much unimportant crap from day to day. Being reconnected with the real potential of this jobs is almost as good as a vacation.

Good times indeed.

wow, there's a lot of suckage out there

Having just got back from a week of lacking civilized things like Twitter, Chatroulette and the Slap Chop, it's literally overwhelming how much content is being hurled at the folks who reside in civilization every moment.

I've returned to the inevitable 300 new emails (a low total due to the out of office notification) and out of habit threw the TV on. The lack of importance, relevance or, well, meaning in what I saw was astonishing. Assorted teen stupidity, assorted housewife stupidity, assorted stupidity from cultures all over the world, interrupted by infomercials for pointless kitchen products and get-rich-quick schemes. It really struck me that there's a lot of things being put on air just to fill up time, or to aid in the marketing of other things. And that's just not good programming. (Or smart marketing.)

The repetition of all this crap is depressing. As the number of channels grows, the number of content providers seems to shrink, as do the budgets for producing shows. So the same homogenized content shows up across several apparently unrelated channels. And every network operates the same way.

And given that we caught a lot of radio on the way home, it's depressing that radio, with its far lower operating budgets, also finds the need to repeat playlists and on-air talent from station to station, and community to community.

The internet (for now) offers us more voices, more independence of thought. As traditional media cower from unique voices and do anything to maximize dollars, we readers and citizens and consumers must turn to the only medium that offers insight, and allow us a measure of control.

if it's a race Douglas MacArthur wants, it's a race he'll get

It is the time of vacation. It is the time without internet or blackberry. It is the time without you, Gentle Readers, and you without me.

I shall return... in a week.

Take that, MacArthur. 

"you gotta play this game with fear and arrogance"

What makes Bull Durham such a good movie for me, let alone maybe the best sports movies ever made (sorry, Bill, I don't care what Tim Robbins looks like pitching), is that it's about failure. And there aren't very many movies that deal with that.

In most movies, the protagonists tend to win at something in the end. And yes, Crash Davis and Annie end up together, but as much as both of them are driven by desire, they're both haunted by their fear of aging and the future. She's still teaching part time, and he'll become a manager at Visalia, and maybe he'll have a shot in the bigs as a manager.

But it's punk-ass Nuke Laloosh who ends up with what everyone wants – the major league career, the success, a life in The Show.

When Crash gets the "this is the toughest job a manager has" speech, your heart fails as you watch his life instantly constrict. This man is good at what he does, has a certain competence and a certain reputation, but the time comes and he can no longer do his job. His life is gone. What's next? What purpose can he grasp?

It's a movie about "meaningless" records like the most home runs ever hit in the minor leagues. It's a movie for the vast majority of us who claw our way to the middle. It's a movie for grown ups who know that the ladder can be kicked out from underneath them. It's about the fear and arrogance we all bring to our jobs every day, aware that we can't be weak but knowing we need to be wary and watchful of everything around us.

Maybe baseball "will repair our losses and be a blessing to us" but the movie is about people who love something more than it loves them. And that's hard.

You could look it up.

virtually all of us decide to value stuff that's not real

Perhaps I'm a little slow, so forgive me if you've seen this thought elsewhere, but over the past few days it's occurred to me that a lot of the recent and current hand-wringing about virtual friends and virtual living and, well, virtual everything, is a tad overblown.

And the reason I began to think so was a random thought about my own life growing up, because I had a lot of very powerful and formative experiences that were entirely virtual. Only the technology used to deliver those experiences was different than that of today... a tad more analog.

My virtual experiences were delivered by movies, TV and books.

Hawkeye and Trapper John weren't real, but I began to ape their jokes. Johnny Fever wasn't real, but he taught me that there was another way to deal with authority. Luke Skywalker wasn't real, but (spoiler alert for the very slow) I shared his devastation at the death of Obi-Wan. Julius Caesar hasn't been real for about 2000 years, but Isaac Asimov's book about the Roman Republic brought him to life for me.

I mean, what kind of existence did radio stars of the 1940s have to their audiences, other than as virtual presences in millions of families' living rooms? What kind of existence does Tom Cruise or Angelina Jolie have to you and me, other than as lights on a movie screen, blurry images on TMZ, or names in Pink is the New Blog? They have no relation to our physical everyday lives, and yet they seem to have meaning or value to us.

It's not computers or the Internet that are fostering virtual living. It's our technology, period. For thousands of years that technology was writing and painting – both weird biological/mechanical hybrids – but even before that, as soon as some Greek poet sat down and began to figure out in his head rhymes and lines about some warriors names Achilles and Hector, we began to live virtually. Language allowed us to live slightly outside of the "real" reality, and share other "made up" realities. And really, how different is that from a game of Dungeons and Dragons?

I'm not saying that Facebook and World of Warcraft are on par with the Iliad. But the realization that we've been doing this to ourselves for the past several thousand years suddenly makes me a lot more circumspect about judging the effects of technology, or thinking that the good old days are somehow manifestly different from today.

That's all.

just slightly behind the curve

Today's Globe contained a feature by their marketing reporter, Simon Houpt, about how there's no longer a difference between traditional awareness advertising and digital. He uses as proof the recently wrapped up Cannes show and the fact that the Old Spice spot won the film category, but in fact gained real traction through Youtube. The world is digital, and digital is the world.

And I suppose that's true, but it's been such an obvious conclusion for so long that we didn't really need to hear it again.

The interesting stuff is what he lightly skips over at the end. Unlike the amusing but very traditional Old Spice spot, the Nike Chalkbot and Twelpforce campaigns were all about brands engaging with consumers. Instead of passive viewing, they provide meaningful experiences. The Chalkbot allowed people to tweet in messages of support to Lance Armstrong during his comeback and have those messages painted onto the route of the Tour de France; Twelpforce had Best Buy employees competing against each other to answer more consumer questions on Twitter. Both great ideas, but they're more than that.

They're the new paradigm of all advertising – not just digital. Supplying passive spots or ads that merely push messages at people allows them to turn off (think of the last ten years of hand-wringing about the declining efficacy of TV spots) and five seconds later they may remember the creative if it's "great" but have no idea what company the ad's for.

So, sorry Simon, it's not that digital media has trumped traditional media, or it's on par with it, or whatever. The news is that the challenge of marketing is now about creating experiences and persuading people to enter in to those experiences. Giving people something of value, something helpful like Twelpforce, or something meaningful like the Chalkbot, is a far more powerful way of communicating with consumers, especially in a world where people are overloaded with messages. Sure, digital is the main vehicle for delivering those engaging experiences, but it's not the only one.

And it's a far bigger, more complicated and more rewarding task than creating a minute or two of funny video.

Not that the Old Spice spot isn't funny; it's just that, despite all the CGI, it's old.