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new way to bring good things to life

2012-01-12T13:48:00.000-05:00

Walter Isaccson’s (most enjoyable) book on Steve Jobs introduces his notion of a “reality distortion field” by which he created perceptions that didn’t jive with the way things are.

Aurasma takes the power of "reality distortion" to new levels with a phone app that animates inanimate objects, imbuing photos, books, even buildings with moving, interactive life. The app is free and works with iOS, Android and tablets. It’s made by Autonomy, an AR company that just announced that the download count broke three million.

Aurasma is the darling of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) where darlings are hard to come by this year, according to David Pogue.

Cue CPG brand managers.

But, sheesh, couldn't the geniuses who created this think of anything better to do with a $20 bill?

storyworld conference in san francisco

2011-10-31T09:56:00.000-04:00

Appropriate that Halloween, holiday for appropriation of fictional identities, is the launch day for Storyworld in San Francisco, the first conference dedicated to the art—and business—of crossplatform entertainment. This ambitious gathering is the brainchild of Alison Norrington, Doctor of Transmedia and founder of storycentralDIGITAL. I look forward to tales and insights from the trenches shared by luminaries like Jeff Gomez, Ivan Askwith, Mike Monello, Frank Rose, Liz Rosenthal and other cross-platform players from around the world.

Thank you, Alison, for citing Betty Draper in your definition of transmedia storytelling.

Steve Jobs, RiP

2011-10-05T21:35:00.004-04:00

BoingBoing just posted the statement from Apple's Board of Directors. Wired put together a video montage of his Apple announcements since 1983. The New York Times laid out a grid of the 317 patents he left behind. But the most vivid image in my mind tonight is a commencement speech he gave at Stanford, talking to 2006 grads about how to live:

I look in the mirror every morning and ask myself, If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do today? Whenever the answer’s been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

He died today at just 57 of pancreatic cancer, the cancer that's killed 34,000 people this year--including my brother-in-law whose name was Steve, too. May they rest in peace.

for post that makes an impression, spend 29 cents

2011-10-04T19:27:00.033-04:00

I received a postcard today. A handheld postcard in a 3-D mailbox. How to describe the beauty of this. The lovely heft of the paper. The sincerity of the hand-written message, ink-smeared by weather. The satisfaction of getting a message to which no response was expected--no Like or Thumbs up, no request for repost. Curious to me that this formerly common means of correspondence can be a source of wonderment today.

disgruntled designer? post error message on cube

2011-10-03T09:24:00.000-04:00

radio row, memory lane

2011-09-16T09:02:00.002-04:00

When I wrote about the history of the World Trade Center, I'd never heard of Radio Row. But Rob Buccino, pitch consultant and author of PitchSmarter, makes it come alive with his memory of it:

Thanks for the blogpost on Radio Row—it brought back a lot of memories. My father used to work there when I was growing up, and every so often on a Saturday he'd take my brother and me on the subway from where we lived way, way uptown (in Inwood) all the way to his little office at 34 Cortlandt Street. We were fascinated by the military surplus stores, the little glass circles in the sidewalk (that let light into the warehouse spaces below), the boxes of vacuum tubes (remember them?), and the shadows of the elevated West Side Highway as we'd get closer to the river. All long gone, just like the Towers that replaced them... but still alive in memories.

Thanks, Rob.

we know how they fell. but how did they rise?

2011-09-11T00:02:00.043-04:00

Hard to believe what with Tribeca real estate prices, but the World Trade Center began as an urban renewal project. It was spearheaded in 1960 by David Rockefeller who hoped to stimulate the languid economy in lower Manhattan just as his father had revived midtown’s economy in the 1930s with Rockefeller Center.

Architect's model for proposed World Trade Center on East River, 1960

The original plan was for the Trade Center to be built on the East River, near where the South Street Seaport sits today. But the Governor of New Jersey objected, resenting that New York would get the $335 million project. (Kids.)

How to get New Jersey’s necessary vote? Ridership on New Jersey’s H&M (Hudson & Manhattan) Railroad had declined over 80% after commuters started driving over new tunnels and bridges. Port Authority promised to take over the bankrupt H&M and re-site the Center on Manhattan’s West Side, more convenient for New Jersey commuters. New Jersey threw in, and PATH was born.

Radio Row, looking east along Cortlandt towards Greenwich Street, photo by Berenice Abbott, 1936

New Jersey wasn’t the only force of resistance. The neighborhood where the Trade Center was re- sited, called Radio Row, was up in arms. It was home to hundreds of small businesses and residents who filed an injunction in 1962 against Port Authority’s power to evict them. A year later, the NY Court of Appeals overturned the injunction, on grounds that the project had a “public purpose.”

Also opposed was the Museum of Natural History, citing hazards the buildings would impose on migrating birds.

After years of controversy, work on World Trade Center foundations began in 1966. Construction started in 1968. More than 1.2 million cubic yards of earth and rock were excavated to make way for the Center. The excavated was dumped in the Hudson to create 23.5 acres of land(fill) deeded to the City of New York--now Battery Park City.

The Twin Towers were completed in 1970. There were 43,600 windows. You may recall how narrow they were. They measured only 18 inches wide. Lead architect Minoru Yamasaki had a fear of heights. He thought narrow windows would make building occupants always feel secure.

the wisdom of age

2011-09-09T11:14:00.000-04:00

Usually the world's best charts can be found in the inventory of Jessica Hagy. But an awesome graph turned up in my email this morning that remarkably distills complexities I've been wrestling with lately.

10 most controversial ads in fashion history

2011-09-08T09:06:00.011-04:00

In honor of fashion week which starts in New York tomorrow, Toponlinecolleges did a lookback at ads that have fueled the industry.

In 1980, 15-year old Brooke Shields launched Calvin Klein's career by announcing to the world she was going commando. "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins." In those gentler times, this ignited public outcry against child pornography and the ensuing controversy (and sales) fueled a voracity in the industry for younger models.

Now, of course, the ads seem benign. Last year Brooke told the New York Post: "I look at these pictures now and I still am sort of shocked that they became so legendary. For me, it was just a huge job I went to after school at 3 o'clock. The one with my leg up, I just remember my arm hurting."

In 1997, creative director for Brooke's Calvin Klein campaign Sam Shahid teamed up with photographer Bruce Weber to produce another piece of fashion marketing that would inflame moral outrage: a 100 pg catalog targeted to middle schoolers with photos suggesting nudity, group sex (with dogs) and articles by "experts" advising sexual experimentation in college. It wasn't a catalog, exactly. A+F dubbed it a "magalog" and sold it in stores, ostensibly only to those over 18. (No ID required, of course.) Numerous lawsuits and boycotts ensued and they discontinued production in 2003, issuing limited editions to more tolerant European markets. The cover pictured at left was for the last issue which can be yours on ebay for $34.95.

The other 8 ads (including Sisley ad featuring models snorting white spaghetti straps) can be found in the post which inspired this one.

he's still around, people!

2011-08-25T14:02:00.011-04:00

The announcement that Steve Jobs is stepping down from Apple is sad, but isn't it creepy how everyone is talking about him like he's already dead?

image credit: the appera

a moving event

2011-08-23T23:20:00.002-04:00

Today I had the opportunity to present at Hudson Valley's 140 Characters Twitter conference which was a scintillating event. Unexpectedly seismic. A 5.8 earthquake jolted the East Coast at 1:50 PM, rattling the audience, though not the speaker before me. It was the most powerful tremor to hit the right coast in decades, yet, happily, did little damage. Although there are rumors that the Washington Monument is now listing. Here's a pic of DC damage making the rounds via J McKinley, h/t David Benardo.)

DC Earthquake Devastation

coming to a bus stop near you: motion posters

2011-08-22T22:33:00.004-04:00

Here's a new add-in for your media mix: the motion poster. Thanks to GIF technology, it's a cross between a poster and trailer. Foxsearchlight Pictures is using it to promote a film opening in October starring Mary-Kate's twin sister ~~Ashley~~ Elizabeth Olson. (Click on ad to the right to make GIF work in Blogger. Or, just imagine the girl in the M turning to you and opening her eyes.)

The studio is also making ingenious use of QR codes which few have devised ingenious use for. Instead of slapping a code onto the base of an ad, they're making it the visual and linking it to exclusive trailers that can be seen only by scanning the code. Sudden impact.

Thanks to @IanSchafer for finding it first.

forgive my wanderlust

2011-08-20T21:50:00.033-04:00

I know, I know. I've been away a lot. Thanks, if you've noticed. It's not that I haven't missed you. It's just that I'm trying to conserve downtime and focus to finish an analog project--a novel. I've been working on it for (an embarrassing number of) years. It's set in Adland, of course. With dramas and settings and characters you may recognize. (But not well enough to identify, hopefully.) I'm turning in the manuscript on September 22. After that, patient reader, I'm back to more regularly scheduled Adbroading. Thanks for saving my spot in your feed.

how to survive without a fresh air

2011-07-23T16:28:00.001-04:00

As a new Mac Book Air rolls out to roaring (sorry) reviews, those of us who bought its forerunner too recently to consider plunking down for its shiny successor, can console ourselves with remembering just how high performing our machine is even without a Thunderbolt port or an Intel Core i5 chip. Remember splicing film? And waiting for stats? How did we accomplish anything when cut and paste meant actually cutting and pasting?

Of course, it wasn't only those in our industry who would have killed for productivity made possible by what we have at our fingertips every day. A friend in the financial services industry recalls his computer-less days as a newbie and makes me grateful anew for my trusty old Air.

As the new guy in the finance department I got the job of making the books (showing financial comparisons to budget for our 5 divisions.) There were 4 charts. To make the charts we had a 2'x4' foamcore board and we drew an xy axis on it and hand pasted black tape on it to make the line and you'd add another 3" to it each month. Then the foamcore went across the street to the photoshop where they would take a photograph of it, reduce and burn a plate. Then they'd print 50 of each and send them back to me 8 1/2" x 11". When the 24 page book was done, I took it upstairs and delivered it by hand to every exec and the Board. The book, when completed had maybe 1,000 numbers in it. If even a single number was off by $1, I would have to go back upstairs retrieve all the books, disassemble them back into the collater, replace the offending page, reassemble them and take them back upstairs. That happened exactly 2 times in 3 years. I got very good at checking numbers.

for California Milk Board, PMS = Please Make it Stop

2011-07-22T12:43:00.002-04:00

By now you may have heard that the California Milk Processor Board has pulled the ~~offensive~~ er--educational campaign launched by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners due to unanticipated backlash on the back channel. The ads (see below) are based on a study which (sort of) shows that ingesting 1200 grams of calcium a day help relieve the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome. The campaign included a microsite called "Everything I Do Is Wrong" offering words "proven" to tame a species made psycho by moon cycles. (“I’m sorry I believed nothing was wrong when you said nothing was wrong.”) The site now abashedly redirects to GotDiscussion.org

According to today's New York Times, co-chairman Jeff Goodby confessed that the campaign, which basically reduces women to an irrational species hapless in the face of their hormones, was "more controversial than we expected it to be." Perhaps his surprise resulted from the fact that he wrote and art directed a similar campaign based on the same study six years ago which continued its full run despite complaints that it was sexist and offensive. "It was a different world in 2005," Mr. Goodby said. Viva the girl power of social media.

what email looked like before it was email

2011-06-21T16:49:00.000-04:00

Perhaps because I grew up with a dad who worked on the first computers, I am fascinated by the origins of our virtual existence. There's a terrific article in the New York Times that traces email back to its birth in the 1960s when two MIT grads working for the school's political science department volunteered to write code for a new idea: electronic mail. Noel Morris and Tom Van Vleck were afraid, at first, that the US Post Office would want to get involved, insisting that a stamp be destroyed for every message sent. At the time, the rule was if you included a letter inside a parcel, you were to add an extra 5 cent stamp. They asked a superior to consult with someone high up at the Post Office who laughed and said no one in the department cared about messages sent on computers.

When Noel died suddenly a few years later, his family was afraid no one would attend the funeral, believing him friendless, as he spent all of his time at keyboards. They were amazed when the funeral home was packed. How did so many know about Noel's death, they wondered? "They all communicate with computers!"

More from Tom Van Vleck's "History of Electronic Mail".

apologies for the hiatus

2011-06-21T13:50:00.008-04:00

Sometimes, it's restorative to immerse yourself in the actual three dimensional world, isn't it?

pioneer "Girl Writer" made us love Lucy

2011-04-23T13:35:00.018-04:00

I’d never heard of Madelyn Pugh Davis until this week when a friend posted a memorial tribute to “the genius behind two of my favorite TV scenes ever: Lucy and the chocolate conveyor belt scene, and Lucy and Ethel raising chickens.” (See below.) Oh! All those years I spent rushing through homework on Monday nights to catch “The Lucy Show” (remember when TV was appointment only?), it never occurred to me that a writer was behind the redhead’s comic genius. Ball, however, was always quick to attribute credit. According to Ball's daughter, Lucie Arnaz, whenever her mother was asked what she thought was the secret of her show's enduring popularity, she said: "My writers." One of them, Madelyn Pugh Davis, passed away this week at 90.

Davis always knew she wanted to be a writer. She was editor of her high school newspaper in Indianapolis and member of the school's fiction club, along with her classmate Kurt Vonnegut. She majored in journalism at Indiana University and hoped to be a foreign correspondent after graduating in 1942. She couldn’t land a job at a newspaper, and so settled (like many of us do) for advertising, writing commercials and copy for a local radio station. According to an extensive tribute to Davis in the Atlantic, her break came during World War II, as it did for many women of her generation. Her family moved to Los Angeles and she got a job as staff writer for NBC radio, and then six months later she was writing for CBS. "No one actually wanted to hire women in 1944," Davis said in her memoir. “But with so many men away at war, what else was there?"

At CBS, she teamed up with Bob Carroll in a partnership that would last 50 years. At first, they produced comedy sketches for radio, including Lucille Ball’s radio show “My Favorite Husband.” When Ball decided to launch a television series co-starring her real-life husband Desi Arnaz, Davis and Carroll and colleague Jess Oppenheimer wrote the pilot for it. The show premiered on October 15, 1951 and ran until May 6, 1957. It was ranked No. 1 in the Nielsen ratings for four of its six seasons and was never out of the top three.

Unlike much comedy of the day, the writing wasn’t just sight gags and easy one-liners. The writers had to come up with ludicrous physical predicaments for Ball to get herself into. Often, they got their ideas from phone books. One day they came across “Candy Maker” which inspired the script for one of my favorite episodes titled “Job Switching” in which Lucy and Ethel become breadwinners, working in a chocolate factory. I’m convinced the 50s episode wouldn’t have elevated housework to “real” work without influence of the “Girl Writer”, as Davis was known.

Then there was the hilarious episode where Lucy does a live commercial for a liquid vitamin supplement which turns out to consist largely of alcohol.

“I Love Lucy” was one of the first scripted TV shows to be shot on 35mm film in front of a television audience. It is said that Desi Arnaz (the co-star was also producer) was not a believer in retakes so that flubs, bloopers and prop mistakes were all left in the episodes. Which gave shows a freshness you don't find in today's sitcoms where all dialogue is rehearsed and supposedly perfect. One of show's most famous bloopers was when Desi messed up a line and blurted the F word, which he changed to "Fine" at the last, saving second.

Because the show was filmed live, laugh tracks weren’t canned, they were actual recorded reactions. One scene is said to have gotten the longest laugh in recorded television history: the one where she and Ethel hide eggs in their clothes, but the jig is up when Lucy has to dance the tango with Desi. Talk about far-fetched premises that would never fare well in concept testing.

RIP, Davis and writing based on gut instinct.

birth of earth day

2011-04-22T09:40:00.004-04:00

Earth Day was founded 41 years ago today as an environmental teach-in by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson. Inspired by campus activism of the late 1960s, he organized students across the country to devote April 22, 1970 to speaking out about pollution and ecological crises. Twenty years later, the teach-in’s coordinator Denis Hayes made Earth Day international, organizing events in 141 countries. Today, it’s designated by the United Nations as “International Mother Earth Day.” Here’s a few images from the first celebration. Remember hand-drawn balloon type with Magic Markers?

Of course, founders couldn't have predicted how many retailers would learn to enhance their own green by celebrating with enviro-tie-in promotions.

china bans ad words

2011-04-17T08:04:00.030-04:00

Advertising in China? Beware a new mandate that bans headlines which include "supreme", "royal", "luxury", "high class" and other copy "promoting hedonistic lifestyle." An official interviewed by China Daily said the legislation was enacted because many advertisers use words to make their products sound better than they are. But even if products live up to the promise, banned words can't be used in promotions. Why? Because doing so upsets low-income residents who can't afford the products. Offenders risk fines up to $4500.

Hoping bureaucrats in Washington pick up on the trend and impose fines for "Revolutionary" and "100% Free."

social media maps, 2007 vs 2010

2011-03-25T13:28:00.056-04:00

Just came across this artifact from 2007, buried in the depths of my computer. Brilliant cartography of ancient world, created by XKCD.

Online search took me to 2010 update created by Ethan Bloch of Flowtown. Fascinating to compare shifts in topographies. But is LinkedIn really still Timbuktu?

takeaways from sxsw--more learning, less swag

2011-03-16T14:54:00.037-04:00

I was momentarily disappointed this year at check-in to discover that SXSW "big bags" bulged with far fewer giveaways. (I arrived in the evening, hungry, having spent the day in sustenance-free air.) Was this year's dearth of swag due to a green effort, as organizers contend, or to the fact that recession-hit companies didn't want to pony up for thousands more note pads, snacks, energy drinks, pens and CDs? But who could blame them? There were 6000 more digital attendees this year than last, a total of 17,000 swarming the Convention Center for what felt like just as many panels. The bound roster was 330 pages and almost 3 lbs. (Callout to massage therapists attending return of digital warriors.)

Sheer volume of offerings makes it impossible to do a proper summation, but to my mind, Oliver Burkeman gets it right in The Guardian by observing that what the conference was ultimately about was the fading delineation between “real life” and “online life.” Almost all of our life (for better or worse) is now being lived in connection with crowds of others in various timezones. New ways to blur the line between the physical and virtual worlds excited a lot of SXSW chatter.

A hit at parties was Instaprint, the new location-based photo booth. (Pictured, at Club DeVille) It’s a lunch-box sized printer you can hang on the wall to turn online Instagram photos to tiny actual prints. Toting two to Austin made the Breakfast agency A-listers. Another much-talked about evernet topic was mobile tagging which makes anything clickable, according to Microsoft Tag’s director of marketing. TAGs are a color, updatable version of QR codes which, happily, were not part of badges this year, eliminating the need to awkwardly point your cellphone at someone’s chest.

What else did I learn at SXSW aside from the fact that the W is Austin's new "it" hotel? Here are notes from a couple of panels. Unfortunately, I missed the one that promoted itself with a hilarious video I just saw this morning.

Your Mom Has an Ipad

This session was about UI designing for boomers. Not unemployment insurance. User interface. Which means how user-friendly a digital experience is. The goal of UI designers is to make interacting with a machine as simple and easy as possible. Obviously we need more of them on the planet.

Boomers comprise a third of the population online, reported the gratifyingly age-agnostic 30-something presenter, John McCree, pleasantly surprising me and, no doubt, the handful of other boomers in the audience of hundreds. The trick to UI designing for boomers, he said, includes added emphasis on ease of use: embedding terminology that’s consistent (don’t use “exit” on one screen and “quit” on another.) Don’t dumb down the experience, just make it simpler to navigate. And (to this boomer, most relevant) don’t keep adding features to make a device better. Adding unwanted features, just because you can, increases only confusion and irritation in those who grew up with 2-knob televisions and non-programmable rotaries.

Barry Diller Shares Insights on All Things Media

Seeing Barry Diller on the schedule made me feel better. I knew I wouldn’t be the oldest one in the room. Conveniently, his talk was located in a Ballroom next to the Ogilvynotes table, where I was able to snag illustrated notes on panels I’d missed the day before.

At first, I wondered why I was sitting there instead of at one of the 15 sessions on simultaneous offer. “The internet is a miracle,” Diller began, waxing on about its impact on culture, as if it was 1999. But when CNN anchor Poppy Harlow nudged him into meatier territory, he was off to the races. (You don't get to be one of the world's biggest Media Magillas without learning to pivot.) He quickly reacquired attention of the audience by confiding that his wife, Diane von Furstenburg, plays Angry Birds. Here's a few of his most tweeted bon mots:

on owning a business
If you don’t have a business, you’re just out there on the town square, crying out to the crowd.

on pay per use
Premium content costs money to produce. If the person creating content receives no benefit from it beyond knowing it’s being shared, the model has no commercial prospect.

on policitians
Instead of going out and making speeches, politicians should stay home and make better laws.

is content king?
Well, if you do content, you want it to be king.

advice to startups
Get enough money to get it started. Give away as little as possible. Keep your head down. Don’t listen/talk to anybody except your audience. If it works, great. If not, you get to do it all over again.

postcards from sxsw

2011-03-13T11:30:00.044-04:00

Greetings from Austin where SXSWi campers have descended in unprecedented numbers. Hugh Forrest, director of the festival, maestro of orchestration, estimates via email there are 16,000 digital attendees this year--a increase of about 25% since 2010.

themed campuses
To accommodate surge in attendance, conference sessions are, for the first time, divided into "campuses." My session was (curiously) assigned to the Future of Journalism campus which I was dismayed to realize is 11 blocks away from Convention Center hub. I was afraid not many would make the hike but was gratified to arrive to the SRO crowd pictured. SXSWers are intrepid. Thanks to Austin Chronicle reporter Belinda Acosta for writing it up.

walking shoes
are necessary. Campus locations can be a mile apart.

truck food

Some of the best food can't be had in a restaurant, but ordered from the windows of parked lorries or airstreams with names as memorable as menu items, like Man Bites Dog and Electric Cock.

bacon

Where ever there's food, it seems, there is bacon. Even in waffles.

pedicabs
Taxis are scarce. Hotel line-ups long. People-powered transport is the fasted, most refreshing alternative to walking. No meters, though. Pedal-pushers work for tips. Going rate is $5 a head...er, derriere. Now you can even call one with your smartphone.

'pile of legos' is a foursquare location. of course

fictional TV character lands gig at real magazine

2011-03-02T12:23:00.007-05:00

Frontlines, brand fiction: Not only are TV characters writing books sold on Amazon, now they’re penning columns in national magazines. In an unprecedented media alliance, TV Land (formerly known as Nick at Nite) is partnering with Woman’s Day to introduce a column written by a fictional character in the upcoming series “Hot in Cleveland.” The character, played by Valerie Bertinelli, lands a gig as columnist for Woman’s Day. Her columns will appear in the actual magazine this summer, making the character “jump out of the show and land in the magazine” said Kim Rosenblum, executive VP at Woman’s Day. Great concept for increasing engagement with both platforms. Interesting (and heartening) that this breakout initiative is launched by entities creating content for older consumers.

Thanks to Corporate Rock for the tip

wikileaks launches product line

2011-02-23T10:32:00.008-05:00

According to the Wall Street Journal today, Wikileaks is selling t-shirts, hoodies and other branded merch on Spreadshirt.com. Yes, Wikileaks condoms and coloring books already exist, but now you can choose from officially endorsed product line including messenger bags, laptop sleeves, umbrellas and baseball caps. Spreadshirt says the collection has "better than average" sales potential. Good news for Assange whose $1.5 million advance from Random House isn't nearly enough to defray costs. Lucky for him, he's managed to infiltrate secrets of wily CPG brand managers.

social media isn't just for kids anymore

2011-02-15T15:51:00.017-05:00

A recent study by the Pew Foundation finds that while Millennials remain the most web-social generation, their elders are (slowly) catching up in networking activity. Social use of the web has quadrupled for 74+ since 2008, up from 4% to 16%. The percentage of adults on the web who watch videos has jumped to 66%. The group who most likes to rate things online is the "Silent Generation", ages 65-73. Perhaps they're most comfortable with hierarchy?

This ought to get the attention of pharmas and their agencies: searching for health info is now the third most popular online activity not just for older web surfers, but for all internet users 18 and up.

Read full report here.

tip o the hat to Ben Kunz

the art of immersion

2011-02-13T23:46:00.016-05:00

A lot of business books are so poorly written, you wish you could just jam a thumb-drive into them and download info into your brain without having to actually ingest the pages.

Happily, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the Way We Tell Stories is that rare business book you don’t want to put down, a riveting read for anyone whose business is impacted by how audiences are changing--which is to say, anyone reading this.

The author, Frank Rose, a Wired editor, is a terrific storyteller who imbues in the reader his own fascination with how “after centuries of linear storytelling, a new form of narrative is emerging by which stories are told through many media at once."

Deep Media, he calls this emerging form. Henry Jenkins (eminent thought pioneer in this territory) says transmedia. But whatever it’s named, it’s a growing phenomenon profoundly affecting our business:

The 20th Century approach to advertising…had it all wrong. For decades, ad people had assumed that consumers thought in a linear and essentially rational fashion. All a television spot had to do to arouse desire for the product was to get the viewer’s attention and make a strong case…Cognitive researchers…discovered that this isn’t what happens. People don’t passively ingest a message. Perceptions of a brand aren’t simply created by marketers; they’re “co-created” by marketers and consumers together.

The book includes behind-the-scenes adventures in the creation of some of the most interesting experiments in crossplatform narrative for both entertainment and marketing--the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Lost Experience, Dunder Mifflen Infinity, I Love Bees and many more, including (disclosure) Mad Men on Twitter, a chapter in which @BettyDraper is honored to be profiled.

It’s not officially released yet, but I got my pre-order early here.

dilemmas of millennial parenting

2011-02-10T12:26:00.011-05:00

A friend is visiting, to see his daughter who's moved to New York from a small town in New England. She's 27 and making her way in our crazy business and his visit is prompted by dismay that parental phone calls and emails go unanswered for days.

"Text her," I say. "The reponse rate is better."

He shakes his head. "My thumbs are too slow. Imagine if a new invention were announced today. A social networking tool that lets you connect instantly with someone far away. Faster and less awkward than using your thumbs. All you have to do is speak into it. You can hear a person's actual voice! The telephone," he says,"was invented a century too early."

copywriter demos creative chops on craigslist

2011-02-09T11:03:00.010-05:00

Genius. A job-seeking copywriter in Atlanta, Travis Broyles, resorted to Craigslist to promote his skills with SEO-gold headline "I Do Anything." Unfortunately, the ad's been flagged for removal but Agency Spy preserved its contents for the edification of ad grads who ought to know what they're up against. Guess Travis missed this recent appeal for "professional US copywriter" to rewrite Craigslist ads. But based on the copy sample below, Travis is worth way more than the promised $5/500 words.

My name is Travis Broyles and I will do whatever* you want me to do for less money than whoever you are paying to do it now.

Below is a list of just some of the things I can do. I do want to stress that I DO ANYTHING so email me if your requested service is not listed here.

Things I Will Do For $5:
Stare at you for 5 minutes
Give a hug to the person of your choosing
Call you on the phone and seem genuinely interested for 10 minutes
Draw your face on a balloon
Sing Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week” from memory to the best of my ability
6 minutes of copywriting

Things I Will Do For $10:
Write your new theme song
Perform your new theme song on your voicemail
Spin until I throw up or you lose interest
Rename your Pokémon
Host a conference call with you and a person that you’ve always thought was cool but never really got the chance to hang out with, you know?
12 minutes of copywriting

Things I Will Do For $50:
Break-up with your boyfriend or girlfriend
Help you quit smoking (I’ll call you every day for a month and yell “HEY DON’T SMOKE”)
Tell the person you like that you think they’re cute and what if you had sex together?
Try my best to fly in a public place for an hour
Make you a really great profile picture
1 hour of copywriting

Things I Will Do For $100:
Tell your kids which one is actually your favorite, and what the others could do to improve their standings
Fight someone much smaller or girl than me
Email you a list of 250 things I like about you (need access to any and all social network accounts)
Clean most of your house and apologize for the things I didn’t
Deliver 5 fully cooked DiGiorno pizzas right to your door (5 mile radius from my home)
2 hours of copywriting

Things I Will Do For $1,000:
Host an event (will not host anything racially insensitive, i.e. human being auction)
Give a PowerPoint presentation on team building to your business and/or extended family
Rename your children
Build you a cardboard car and make vroom-vroom sounds while you drive it
Star treatment for a month (I’ll hide in bushes and take pictures of you)
20 hours of copywriting

Things I Will Do For $100,000:
Yell your name every time I wake up for the rest of my life
Change my political and spiritual leanings
Screen all your phone calls for five years
Recreate the best day of your life (or worst, whatevs)
84 straight days of copywriting *BEST VALUE*

If interested, email me at travis.broyles@gmail.com.

*Prices and tasks are subject to negotiation. I will not murder or steal or perform a legendary murdersteal. No rapes, and the sex has to be unrelated to the payment, like “Oh, after you’re done cutting those trees down, do you want some lemonade?” but the lemonade means sex, mostly.

why Groupon's "apology" doesn't work, either

2011-02-08T10:27:00.024-05:00

The Wall Street Journal published a piece today on Groupon’s “non-apology apology” issued yesterday by CEO Andrew Mason. In a blog post, Mason defended the commercials to the backchannel, saying they were meant to make fun of Groupon by “highlighting the often trivial nature of stuff on Groupon when juxtaposed against bigger world issues."

Great concept. Unfortunately, not the one that was executed.

Humor is the hardest thing to pull off in broadcast advertising, because unlike in social media where you’re talking to a narrowed audience, in broadcast you’re reaching out to millions whose funny bones aren’t all in the same location.

Groupon’s spots are only funny (sort of) if you know that the company’s heritage is philanthropy. But even minimal research would have suggested that most of the 111 million viewers they spent $3M to address wouldn’t have a clue about this.

Guess Mason missed that Ad 101 class where curriculum includes the infamous ad conveying the state of mind of consumers:

I don't know who you are.
I don't know your company.
I don't know your company's product.
I don't know what your company stands for.
I don't know your company's reputation.
Now--what was it you wanted to sell me?

the spot Groupon could've run instead

2011-02-06T23:56:00.004-05:00

According to BrandBowl (at least at this hour) the two top Superbowl spots are my own choices: Chrysler's "Imported from Detroit" (proof that copywriting still matters) and Volkswagen's "Little Darth Vader" (proof of the storytelling power of visuals.)

We diverge in choices for last place, however. Tweeters gave that to Suzuki, but my pick (and I've got company) is Groupon which (surprisingly) aired spots that were even more offensive than Go Daddy's typically gratuitous use of GURLs. What made Groupons spots appalling was the cultural cluelessness in exploiting oppressed peoples and endangered rainforests to make sophomoric jokes about saving money.

Apparently, they were only kidding. Their site suggests that they donate to the very causes they belittled. But do they really expect disenfranchised consumers inundated with ad messages to go trawling the web in search of their good deeds?

I understand that the brand was under pressure to come up with creative in very little time. But why didn't they run with something like this simple but memorable spot they already had. Youtube says it was rejected. By whom? Calling Bogusky.

ads are already playing off in the Brand Bowl

2011-02-05T19:09:00.012-05:00

Update: Ad Age just posted a playlist of spots, including agency, airtime and content here.

If, like me, you watch the SuperBowl for the commercials, you’ll love BrandBowl, a website that broadcasts real-time scores of how spots are doing according to viewers.

It works by aggregating comments about commercials and analyzing them via the magic of metrics. Doritos and Google came out on top last year, when the site was first launched by Mullen (Zappos ad agency) with social measurement leader Radian 6.

Any twitter post hashtagged #brandbowl is included. But you don’t have to have a twitter account to play. Just go to Brandbowl on your computer or mobile and join the cheering or hissing crowds. Players are already facing off, thanks to pre-releases on youtube. Volkswagen's in the lead with its pint-size Darth Vader. It’s like sharing a sofa with thousands of ad fans you don’t have to feed.

Kenneth Cole explains it all to you

2011-02-03T19:55:00.026-05:00

I don't tweeter. But in the Town Car on the way to office this morning I think of something real funny to say--KC

I find out people don't have a sense of humor like they did in the 80s. Sheesh!--KC

Good thing is, I learned how to Facebook today! --KC

What I frankly don't get is why lawyers are all up my a**, but they can't send a simple cease and desist to this guy--KC

the most important story you tell is your own

2011-02-03T13:27:00.021-05:00

Last night, a couple hundred social content enthusiasts, defying the wrath of winter, gathered at Columbus Circle to attend a Future of Storytelling meetup organized by Jeff Pulver, creator of 140 Character conferences. Much talk was on the future of narrative, but co-host Michael Margolis demonstrated its present-day importance by citing the role of storytelling in crafting a bio. He observed that many of us skilled in communicating the stories of others fall down on the job when promoting ourselves. Particularly true if we're in the throes of reinvention. And, these days, who isn’t?.

Because social media is the new meet and greet, everyone needs a short bio these days. And bio-writing is about making choices, he said. A bio isn’t a laundry list. All of us have countless stories we COULD tell, but which narratives will most help us achieve what we’re after?

5 rules of engagement:

1. Think about the “character” you want to portray. What is your origin? Who were your parents? What have you studied and what forces shaped you?

2. Define your work, so people know what it is.

3. Give a glimpse of past experiences that led you to want to do this work.

4. Provide external validators. These days, character trumps credentials but outside validators are still essential, especially if you’re pursuing work that hasn’t been done before.

5. Make yourself sound human. What are your passions, your peeves, what do you geek out on?

And—make it short. An attendee who licenses TedX conferences complained of too-long missives from prospective candidates. She said she dismissed pages-long emails, assuming that if people can’t present themselves concisely in writing, they won’t be able to do it onstage.

Examples of bios that stand out by following the 5 rules? Margolis cited (irrefutably) that of local-wine-monger-turned-global-marketing-guru Gary Vaynerchuck:

Gary Vaynerchuk is a New York Times bestselling author and American businessman who was born in Belarus and immigrated to the United States as a young child. Gary’s entrepreneurial instincts took over at a young age, when he owned a franchise of neighborhood lemonade stands and made $1,000 a weekend selling baseball cards. Much to his dismay, his father Sasha pulled Gary into the family business, a local liquor store called Shopper’s Discount Liquors. Before long, Gary recognized that consumers collected rare wines just like people collected baseball cards, and he was off to the races.

Now, off to rewrite.

on long intermissions

2011-02-02T11:57:00.005-05:00

When I first started blogging in 2007, I updated posts at least once a day. I couldn’t wait to report an observance in daily comings and goings or share a find from the net. Hitting “Post” made me feel connected, gave me an instant dopoamine hit.

And then there came Twitter. Where one can show and tell in just 140 characters. Same dopamine hit, a lot less commitment. To forbearing readers who’ve called me out on long absences, I apologize for what must sometimes seem like neglect. I do mean to do better. But you don’t have to tweet to also follow me here.

in other news, australia invaded new zealand today

2011-01-15T22:13:00.005-05:00

And took it before lunchtime. To celebrate, the whole country is getting Monday off, just like us!

how to succeed in business even if you're a working mom

2011-01-14T11:07:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Jeff Kwiatek for pointing out in the comments yesterday that a dearth of women at the top afflicts not only creative professions. He sent a link to this TED talk by Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg who offers insights on why so few women get to the C-Suite. One problem she says is that women systematically underestimate their own abilities. Men tend to attribute their success to themselves, while women attribute it to external factors. And, like it or not, people believe what they hear.

Sandberg offers three powerful pieces of advice to women who want to go for the corner office:

1. Sit at the table (Belly up, ad broads)
2. Make your spouse a real partner. (We've made more progress at work than we have at home.)
3. Don't leave before you leave. Meaning, don't ratchet down your performance before you have to, such as in preparation for maternity leave. Some women stop raising their hands for career-making assignments long before they have to. Leave when you leave, not before. That way, you'll have more to come back to.

The remark that resonated most for me was her acknowledgement that no matter what your choices, life won't be perfect. “I know no women, whether they’re staying home or in the workforce, who don’t feel guilty sometimes,” she said, adding how hard it had been for her to drop her 3 year old off in daycare that day. Yeah. Even all these years later, I can relate.

one show, one body type

2011-01-12T22:49:00.011-05:00

Frank Rose did an excellent roundup and analysis of the One Club's fun fling at MOMA last night celebrating their picks for best of the Digital Decade. So I won't try to reiterate here. I'd just like to add that my own observation was how very few women mounted the stage. Most acceptances were from teams in skinny ties and dark suits, like those shown here for BMW's The Hire. (9 out of 10 on stage, interestingly, no longer work at the agency, Fallon.)

I have no beef with the many talented guys who gathered last night to accept their due. But I suspect that consumers might be better served if the ad world was led by more than a smattering of creatives like Nancy Vonk and Janet Kestin of Ogilvy/Toronto, who were among the few females honored, for Dove's Evolution.

Why do so many fewer women than men manage to prevail in creative fields like Adland? I'm convinced it's not just that guys want to play with their kind. It's that often women's drive gets deflected before the game is over. Their priorities shift, their goals are realigned by lifechanging events such as having a child (or trying to), their focus is splintered by encroaching demands inherent in juggling a worklife and life. I'm a perfect example of this. Twenty-four years ago, the then-hot shop Scali, McCabe, Sloves granted me a generous six month maternity leave. But a baby proved the toughest boss I'd ever had, and to preserve flexibility in meeting her needs, I went back as a freelancer.

Times have changed, happily, in that men are assuming more active roles in bringing up baby. (See alpha dads.) Being relieved of 100% responsibility for raising a family is essential if women are to achieve workplace success. But what's also essential is that they manage not to relinquish the drive and passion that launched them as interns.

There's a lot of talk lately about the necessities and benefits of cross-pollinating disparate brains around conference room tables. Yet, too often, the brains are of homogenous gender. Attendance at the table requires time and exertion and acknowledgement that it's important to be there. Belly up, ad broads. Yes, we can.

verbatims heard only by delusional clients

2011-01-12T21:13:00.000-05:00

There's a new meme making the rounds today titled "Things Real People Don't Say in Advertising." Next time clients ask for a viral microsite, send them the link to this hilarious tumblr by a copywriter at GMMB in DC. Site now open for submissions. You know you've got 'em.

spied it first on Agency Spy

CES=Creative Evolution Surging

2011-01-12T10:42:00.021-05:00

I didn’t go to CES (Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas) last week, but seems I didn’t have to, as it’s possible to learn as much (or more) from hashtags and blogs as it is by schlepping out to a conference. Years ago, CES was for geeks only—you didn’t have to grok the latest in television technology to come up with a great commercial for it. But now that technology is part the creative process itself—could W+K have done Nike Livestrong without some awareness of advances in the field of robotics?—recent shows have been drawing increased attention from marketing and creative communities.

One of the most valuable writeups I’ve found on CES 2011 cites trends and implications for marketers. (Tip o' the pillbox to BBH.) The observation most interesting to me, was that “A number of devices allowed consumers to simply move a single experience across phone, TV, or tablet.” The implications of this are cosmic. Because when technology makes seamless “experience shifting” possible, it means that consumers will expect content to seamlessly migrate too. Which ain’t just a matter of resizing screens. (Remember when TV first came out and ad agencies simply made up screen cards of print ads?) Brands will have to be able to provide content that isn’t just “media agnostic” but suited to and crafted for multiple platforms. They'll expect a brand story they see on TV to translate into an experience that makes sense on mobile, that rings bells and whistles of the tablet they're reading on the way to work. Yes, that evolution is in the nascent stage, but, as the writers of the report observe, smart brands will experiment with development now while audiences are still small and forgiving.

back to the future at MIT

2011-01-11T08:27:00.007-05:00

Oh, the wealth of gizmos that geeks at MIT have bestowed on the world: radar, Technicolor, stair-climbing wheelchairs, even a battery powered by a virus. See displays of new and once-new technologies created at MIT since the school was instituted (days before the Civil War broke out) in their just-opened exhibition “MIT 150.” You don't have to be in Cambridge to visit. The exhibition’s website lets you browse artifacts like Spacewar!, the first video game created in 1961 on a DEC computer. And Lantern slides, an ancestor of PowerPoint, in which black and white transparencies are inserted into glass “sandwiches.” I suspect it was good news for our forefathers that lantern slides were heavy and had to be toted in wooden boxes—must have kept presentations mercifully short. More on the show from Daniel Grant in today's WSJ.

kid builds company out of erector set

2011-01-10T09:28:00.021-05:00

Don't you just love how the Wall Street Journal has shrugged off its green-eyeshade image and embraced the world north of Maiden Lane? Today's front page features a story on the (remember?) Brannock foot-measurer which is being knocked off in (surprise) China. There's a quote from someone with a job I didn't know existed--shoe historian. And an interesting tale of how the company began: Charles Brannock was the son of a shoe salesman who began developing the contraption while still a student at Syracuse University. He applied for a patent with a prototype made out of erector-set pieces. Business took off during World War II when the government contracted a version that measured both feet at once, which sped up the process of distributing footwear to soldiers. Seems like great fodder for erector-set's agency. See what you learn reading stuff besides trades?

santa brand guidelines

2010-12-24T08:09:00.010-05:00

You'll never write brand standards with a straight face again. Read Santa Brand Guidelines here or, visual learners can watch the youtube version below. Gems include:

The first three letters represent South and North. We are headquartered in the North, but our reach is global.

Santa backwards is antas, which is Lithuanian for chimney.

A brand is like a sack on a sleigh of belief.

Crafted by the genies at Quietroom, a company that helps other companies talk as if they are human. Language-lubbers will geek out on their hilarious holiday card.

the digital story of christmas: a social media parable

2010-12-19T11:58:00.009-05:00

You know how hard it is to sell social media to brand managers still living in 1.0. How to explain that creative is now as much about context as it is about content? This is the best way I've seen to show non-believers how social media works. It's a miracle what Galileeans managed to pull off 2000 analog years ago, isn't it?

A Christmas gift to us all from Garden Broad

if there's a google doc in the house

2010-12-16T00:05:00.000-05:00

maybe I won't have to learn Keynote after all.

i hope this gets to you

2010-12-03T07:54:00.006-05:00

Sorry to have to miss Part Two of Boulder Digital Works conference today. But glad they're streaming it so I (and you) don't have to miss out on the percolations. Yesterday Michael Tabtabai (Saatchi, LA) screened a mesmerizing video I haven't been able to remove from my head. See his presentation including other fun artifacts here.

miracle on 29th street: adland gets digital

2010-12-02T22:15:00.003-05:00

It was 8:30 am and I arrived to the Boulder Digital Works conference at the Art Director's Club on W 29th a bit bleary-eyed. But encountering a slide from organizer (uh, experience-architect) Edward Boches woke me right up: Coding is more prized than copywriting. This, in essence, encapsulates how the shift in the advertising business has affected me and legions of fellow creatives. Used to be copywriters and art directors felt our key-tapping, marker-wielding fingers held the power to instigate massive shifts in consumer behavior--but now that power is shared (lion-shared) by those who are conversant in a language that's binary.

Faris Yakob (MDC's eminent Digital Philosopher) opened his talk with a request for show of hands from anyone who knew how to code--few arms went up. Following was a collective groan of frustration from survivors in an industry that for decades was a haven for the liberal-arts-minded. If only, instead of that seminar on Virginia Woolf we'd had the foresight to take a class in the computer lab! No one told us that geeks would inherit the earth, or at least the most profitable part of it. (See entire preso/performance--complete with juggling--here.)

Making Digital Work is a two day conference for agency and client partners looking to learn from some of the smartest minds in the digital business--emphasis on business. You know how digital conferences can be full of hot air, with "ninjas" waxing eloquent on mindsets and theoreticals? This isn't just a think-tank, it's a practical approach to how digital is propelling viable business models. Matt Howell, President of Modernista, described how losing Cadillac sparked an agency reboot which enabled the shop to evolve from making messages to building platforms. Chloe Gottlieb, ECD R/GA shared their formula for success in new(ish) creative collaborations: visual designer + copywriter + interaction designer + creative technologist. Saatchi's Michael Tabtabai showed inspiring examples of "stuff that doesn't suck" and Tim Malbon, Founder of Made By Many, led us in attempt to make stuff ourselves.

However. "We're not in the business of making cool stuff," Faris reminds us. "We're in the business of making money by influencing behavior." Good wake up call for us creatives. A title that applies to anyone working at an agency still in business today.

Making Digital Work, Introduction to the Workshop

View more presentations from edward boches.

evolution of Dove's Evolution

2010-12-01T18:34:00.009-05:00

One piece I'm glad to see included in The One Show's "10 Best of the Digital Decade" is Dove's Evolution which some mistakenly believe was a TV spot that never aired. Actually, it's claimed to be the first branded viral video, posted on October 6, 2006. Within a month, it got 1.7 million views (big numbers in those days) and brought the highest-ever traffic spike to its website, three times more than Dove's Super Bowl spot and attendant publicity achieved, according to Ad Age. So I guess O+M Toronto is to blame for the ensuing onslaught of irksome client requests for a viral.

Years ago, I wondered if the creative team took inspiration from an old spot for Maybelline, but according to this interesting (if long-winded) discussion with Ogilvy folks about the campaign, it seems the concept evolved from an educational video the agency made in 2004 to expose students to the hype behind fashion.

unique gift idea: a retro trademark

2010-11-30T12:40:00.009-05:00

Meister Brau. Handi-Wrap. Shower Mate. These and other gone-but-not-forgotten brand names can be yours if you show up at the Waldorf on Wed, December 8 where 150 classic trademarks are being auctioned off. Full list of brands on the block here include legendary publishing titles like Collier's and Saturday Review. Top bidder gets right to domain name, of course. Perfect for that special someone who has everything.

media went social 47 years ago today

2010-11-22T11:13:00.006-05:00

On November 22, 1963 there were no cellphones, no Twitter, no Facebook, yet within hours the whole country knew that the president had been shot. If you're a Boomer, you'll never forget where you were when you heard. I learned it from my arithmetic teacher, a nun. I'd never seen a nun cry before. Schools closed early. Office workers streamed home. The next day was declared a national day of mourning. The country stayed riveted to screens and because there was only three channels, we all took in pretty much the same thing. Almost as shocking as the event itself was the fact that Walter Cronkite broke down while reporting it. (around 5:25 in the tape.) Two days later, we were traumatized en masse again when Lee Harvey Oswald was himself shot dead on live television.

economy lesson for right-brain creatives

2010-11-13T17:57:00.003-05:00

A college kid illustrates power of the demo.

Mr. Peanut breaks 94-year silence today

2010-11-09T07:16:00.013-05:00

In 1906, 19-year old Italian immigrant Amedo Obici started selling roasted peanuts in sealed packages to the residents of Wilkes-Barre, PA. Ten years later, he staged a contest for a company logo and the $5 prize went to a 14-year old boy who won for his drawing of a Peanut Man. Obici added spats, top hat and monocle in an attempt to expand the market for peanuts by making the snack seem more upscale. (At the time, peanuts were a nosh of the poor; on plantations, they'd been a staple reserved for slaves which is why "peanut gallery" came into the lexicon to refer to the cheapest seats in a theater.)

94 years later, Mr. Peanut acquires a gray flannel suit and a voice. (The voice of Robert Downey, Jr.) He speaks for the first time today in a spot debuting on his Facebook page where you can follow Planters' evolution through the century, including a handsomely illustrated 1920's poster that touts it as "The Nickel Lunch." Creative by Being, NY-- a spin-off from TBWA Worldwide to avoid conflict with another snack foods client, Mars.

honk if you're human

2010-11-04T16:52:00.008-04:00

I've been a huge fan of stop-motion animation ever since Sundays with Davey and Goliath. If you are too, you'll love this in-camera, in-sequence, insanely awesome spot for BBC. Written, ironically, by Three Monkeys. On-set tales of production here.

Client: BBC Worldwide
Agency: Three Drunk Monkeys, Sydney, Australia
Production Company: Grandchildren

(Thanks Dear Personal Grocer for the find)

you've come a long way, Barbie

2010-10-30T12:52:00.008-04:00

I was on the launch team of the first Take Our Daughters to Work Day in 1993, conspiring with Nell Merlino and Ms. Foundation for Women to help girls see themselves (and be seen) in roles they may not have imagined. One role we never imagined back then is sponsorship from the makers of Barbie, who'd just been convinced to stop programming her to say "Math is tough!" You've come a long way, Barbie. From fashion model with "purse and gloves and hats and all the gadgets gals adore" to role-model for 125 careers, a transformation artfully portrayed in latest commercial cleverly aimed at Barbie gatekeepers--Moms. Here's a link. Now if only we could evolve those pinup proportions.

(Found this gem on Metal Potential)

fake campaign airs real issues

2010-10-27T15:26:00.009-04:00

And speaking of fake political ads, AARP goes further by running a faux campaign for a fictional candidate. Why? To refocus voters on actual issues and promote a nifty voter guide on its website which identifies candidate stands on matters important to seniors, allowing voters to print out ballots they can take to the polls.

AARP mocks the ludicrousness of extreme-attack ads with one of their own so real you might not realize at first that Jack Phillips isn't actually running for Congress. Video opens with talking-head slurs that in other election seasons might sound preposterous: "She wants to repeal the Declaration of Independence!" and "Even her own mother won't vote for her!" In present climate, however, claims come off as par for the Congressional course, so it's only when candidate walks off the set, taking banner ad with him (a la Tipp-Ex reveal) that you know for sure the ad is a fake. Of course, nowadays even fake candidates have presence on Facebook and Twitter. No doubt clever campaigners at agency M + R Strategic Services are seeking account verification.

if only real political ads were this engaging

2010-10-20T15:02:00.009-04:00

Nice break from barrage of cookie-cutter political plugs, this Gilbert & Sullivan parody will make you LOL no matter what your affiliation. Created, directed and produced by LA based actor and filmmaker Ron Butler. And speaking of political creative, NYT's ad columnist Stuart Elliot just wondered on twitter if it's true that Rand Paul Senate campaign is using a jingle "Oh, there's something about an Aqua Buddha man."

spoof scoop thanks to Deep Throat DearPersonalGrocer

Gatz takes new approach to form as old as the Parthenon

2010-10-12T14:52:00.014-04:00

Sometimes it's good to be humbled by the reminder that no matter how creative we are, what we're creating isn't art, even if it's anointed by discerning Google Labs curators. But art can be key to rejiggering our brains when we're striving for creative that hasn't been done before.

Last night, I saw Gatz at the Public Theater, a production by the unassumingly-named Elevator Repair Service company. It's a transforming, truly mind-blowing experience, though its outright description might give you pause. It's a 6 hour stage production in which the only dialogue is the reading word-for-word of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. What makes the play genius is-- it's not a retelling of the classic, it's an enactment of it.

The setting is an office as dated and shabby as Dunder Mifflin. A worker wanders in, sits down at his desk, turns on his vintage hulk of a computer. It won't work. And suddenly, he doesn't know what to do with himself. In the clutter on his desk, he finds an old copy of The Great Gatsby. Out of boredom, he starts to read it aloud. At first, his coworkers hardly notice, then as time and pages go by, they do notice and are transformed by and into the characters, delivering lines while seemingly going about their business. (What business that is, is happily never made clear.)

The experience resonates on many levels--it's the soothing enjoyment of being read to, combined with the drama of talented actors bringing to life text on a stage, combined with entertainment of improv--the props actors use are office objects at hand, which adds to the ingenuity of the production. "Daisy" brushes her hair with a burnisher, Tom's lover's dog is an old ragdoll--no attempt is made to produce objects that align with book references. The setting is a character in itself, a screamingly pre-millennial showcase of artifacts from our recent, yet almost forgotten workplace past: enormous green-screen monitors, calculators, motivational posters including a guide to secretarial posture.

The play's title comes from Gatsby's "real" name which was James Gatz, the reading employee (and we) discover on page six. A ticket buys you about 6 hours of performance, mercifully (for all concerned) interrupted by a dinner break and two short intermissions. (The show is sold out, but there are wait lists.) The entire experience lasts about 8 hours, the most rewarding day you'll ever spend at an office.

It's a great reminder that old media can be new again, even a form that's been around since the Parthenon.

the twepisode: what TV can't show, takes place on twitter

2010-10-07T10:59:00.024-04:00

If you're a Mad Men fan, you may have been disappointed to realize we weren't going to see Don take Sally to the Beatles. It was a pretty sure bet that even Matt Weiner couldn't have resurrected Shea Stadium or put the call out for 55,000 extras. So for fun and education, we took it to the twitterverse this weekend. We created a hashtag #mmbeatles to make tweets easy to follow. And linked tweets to vintage photos and footage to provide a visual dimension. We set up an account for Shea (@Shea1965) to be the spokes-stadium. Momentum was added by other tweeters who got into the act, including Mad Men on Twitter new to this season, like, um, Don's liver. It's the first time a historical event was live-tweeted by fictional characters.

Here's a moviola of excerpts, with linked images and video. Check out the full stream while it's still up at #mmbeatles. Thanks to twitter Maddicts who participated, whose improv talent made it happen.

I launched this crazy experiment not only because I'm a Mad Men ~~fan~~ addict, but because I'm fascinated by the current proliferation of new ways and places to extend and dimensionalize story. Perhaps there's potential for television shows to increase viewer involvment by "staging" unfilmed scenes on twitter. Could we have stumbled upon a new form of entertainment? In which what television can't show is played out on twitter? The twepisode. Stay twuned.

the first 20,000 years of advertising

2010-10-04T09:37:00.013-04:00

I was sorry to miss Ad Week hoopla in New York but was honored by an invitation to go down to Durham and talk advertising to students at Duke. The class I infiltrated is one of the most popular on campus, taught by Professor George Grody, who teaches kids by treating them like mentees, using skills he developed as a longtime exec at Procter and Gamble. As evidenced by off-the-chart scores in the appalling but indispensable Rate My Professor his approach seems to be working.

The class (with its own foursquare location, of course) was an impressive gathering of savvy, articulate students who made me feel better about our industry's future. Here's a little presentation I gave on advertising, past and present. In researching it, I discovered a fun fact: Shakespeare started out as a copywriter writing jingles for his father's glove shop. In those days, guys sent gloves to ladies they were courting and tucked a personal message inside. John Shakespeare's shop was distinguished by having an in-house writer who would, free of charge, ghost a message. One of them survives: "The gift is small. The will is all. Alexander Aspinall." Copywriters, take heart. That banner copy could be just the beginning.

The First 20,000 Years of Advertising

View more presentations from Helen Klein Ross.

museum of advertising history

2010-10-01T13:35:00.016-04:00

Hey, today is Follow a Library day on twitter (who knew?) The library I'm following is no ordinary library. It's a little-known treasure trove within Duke University's Rare Books Library, home to the largest collection of ad artifacts in the world.

The Center's director Jacqueline Reid kindly led Ad Age podcaster Bob "Beancast" Knorpp and me on a tour this week and we were both amazed by breadth and depth of the collection. (Bob was so impressed, he did an impromptu podcast, available here with a timelier post of his thoughts.)

The John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History contains 2 miles of shelving on which are stored reels for nearly 8800 commercials dating back to the 50s, print ads, billboards, radio tapes and even the paper trails leading up to their production: call reports, strategy statements, research, even media plans. Artifacts aren't only saved, they're preserved: indexed and organized so they're easily retrievable, a far better system than keeping agency materials in storage houses. The Center began when JWT donated its archives in 1992. Since then other agencies have followed and the Center still accepts materials from ad agencies seeking the best way to preserve their collections.

We were treated to an incredible array of adifacts redolent of 60s culture and values, including a 1968 billboard "Beautify America, Get a Haircut", a print ad for Topper Toys which promised that your daughter won't turn into a hippie if you'll buy her an Easy Bake Oven and a newspaper article announcing LBJ's decision to employ the "new glamor girl of the ad industry", "pretty" Mary Wells to polish his image.

Equally fascinating were ad-related items like a DeBeers memo dated 1961 titled "Sportswear and Its Effect on the Precious Jewelry Market" in which a researcher deplored the cultural shift to more casual fashions: Women don't wear diamonds with tweeds! Diamond Industry in a Panic!

Focus group materials for Ballantine beer: Among posters portraying a woman wearing a hat, which do you prefer: women wearing large hats, or women wearing small hats?

A 1963 in-house pamphlet from JWT titled, "Advertising, A Career for Women" encouraged women to become copywriters, after putting in time as a secretary, of course. Could Mad Men's representation of Peggy Olson as lone copywriter be skewed? The Center's director thinks so. She claims, "The role of women in advertising agencies historically has been stronger than has been shown in Mad Men." She offers photo proof in this video. See what you think.

are we getting dumber?

2010-09-26T13:48:00.012-04:00

Imagine a brand using a literary critic as spokesperson today in a world where consumers are told to get stupid. This hilarious 1998 Yellow Pages campaign was launched by Richmond-based Martin Agency which opened an office in Denver to work on the newly-won $33 million business. Concept: Yellow Pages as epic work encompassing the culture and begetting inspiration. Campaign was multi-platformance, including not only TV and radio but video with SNL's John Lovitz as "the man who wrote the Yellow Pages." It might have gone viral if youtube had existed in the era of Nintendo. Kinda makes me wish Google hadn't come along. Thanks to Slap!media for the find.

have traditional ad creatives exceeded their sell-by dates?

2010-09-24T11:19:00.021-04:00

Ana Andjelic wrote a provocative post this week on a topic that's got Adland's knickers in a twist, a piece so provocative, she's incited no less than seven comments from one irate Mad Man. Her thesis is that traditional advertising creativity is being marginalized.

"The 'kick-ass' creative director and what he/she does is no longer culturally relevant as it used to be. Today's creativity is way more collective, iterative, and yes, humble. To deliver it, creatives got to move away from "I have an idea, and it's brilliant" MO: the artistry today is in creating environments where collective creativity can flourish."

Ana postulates that the trend of traditional ad creatives leaving motherships to start up new enterprises has nothing to do with producing new agency models, everything to do with renegades from BDAs (hi George) setting out to replicate old models that let them continue to do what made them a success in the first place.

I agree with Ana that traditional advertising is itself being marginalized. (Oh, for the days that Harry Crane enjoyed, when all a brand had to do was buy 60 seconds on 3 networks to hit a stationary target of 85% of the country's consumers.)

But the creativity behind traditional advertising? Here to stay, I hope. Because non-linear marketing brains capable of producing great TV and print can be essential contributors to greatness in a multi-platform arena. At least three examples of recent digital goodness--Old Spice, Tipp-Ex and Pepsi Refresh--are products of creatives at traditional ad agencies.

True, breakthrough creative isn't a headline anymore. (Headline: just the sound of the word in your mouth feels ancient, doesn't it?) And creating content for old media and new(ish) media require different ways of thinking. To do a great print ad, you don't have to know how the ad is printed, but you can't do great digital without understanding at least some of the technology behind it. To their credit, plenty of traditional ad types have taken time to explore the space and find that creative (and collaborative) skills they've relied on for years are valuable in coming up with new content, complete with moving parts.

Perhaps some of the problem lies in traditional Adland's limited use of the label "creative". The longheld convention of titling one department "creative", implying that those in other departments aren't, has understandably pissed off "non-creatives" for years. Post-millennial shops like Big Spaceship have done away with the nomenclature entirely, eliminating creative from all titles because "everyone is."

Of course, creative thinking is essential to campaign success no matter which part of a campaign you're contributing to. And as Ana points out, there's artistry in creating environments where collective creativity can flourish. But it's not the same skill as coming up with concepts for brands year after year, noise-making ideas that are on strategy, on deadline and executable within budget. So, Ana, please don't toss out all of us traditional creatives just yet!

wacky idea in toy marketing: dysfunctional stuffed animals

2010-09-21T16:14:00.011-04:00

Speaking of brand fiction via plush toys, a German toy company has created a fictional asylum where animals go to work out their issues. A mentally ill plush patient can be yours for $38, complete with medical history, referral letter and treatment plan. (Healthcare plan not included.) Choose from an entire line of mental ailments. There's Dub the Turtle who's depressed by the fast life. Delusional Dolly, a sheep who cross-dresses in wolf's clothing. Kroko the paranoid crocodile. And more! The company's founder says: "It started as a bit of a joke with my girlfriend, who has lots of soft toys, and then we thought there could be something in the idea. Children and grownups like their vulnerability and find something in them that gives them a great sense of comfort in helping to heal them." Guess it worked for Eeyore. Heard about this from cwazy wabbits at Adfreak.

imagineering brand fiction

2010-09-20T09:11:00.008-04:00

A few years ago, with no special promotion, a simple plush bear began selling out at Tokyo DisneySea. Disney saw opportunity to push sales further. They gave the bear a name: Duffy. They gave him a backstory: Minnie sewed the bear for Mickey to keep him company on a trip. They introduced a line of accessories and made him a walk-about mascot and soon Duffy was accounting for 40 percent of the resort's merchandise sales.

"Doing the reverse, where a character comes from a piece of merchandise and then becomes a piece of entertainment, is truly a first for us," said Disney's Manager of (kid you not) Merchandise Synergy.

Now the bear is coming to California. But will a stuffed animal with a Mickey Mouse silhouette birthmark on his back be the hit in the US that it is in Japan?

According to the NYTimes, Duffy's success in in Tokyo is due in large part to fandom among "Japan's office ladies, the unmarried 20 and 30-somethings who helped turn Hello Kitty into a pop culture staple." Disney may find this fandom a phenomenon unique to Japanese culture, as did Re-ment, the miniatures-purveyor that, based on enormous popularity for their merch in Japan, opened up a now-shuttered office in California.

Still, smart move by clever imagineers to move a brand by inventing a story for it. Maybe Sprint should come up with backstory for the Palm Pre.

RIP Gene Case who started an agency the Mad Men way

2010-09-19T10:10:00.037-04:00

Mourning original Mad Man Gene Case, a founder of Jordan McGrath Case & Partners where I did a stint on Bounty paper towels aeons ago. Little known fact (at least to me): The shop was launched originally as Case and Krone. Gene Case's launch partner was art director legend Helmut Krone, who in 1969, was already a name on Madison Avenue, celebrated for Volkswagen's Think Small and other campaigns Don Draper envies.

Case met Krone at Doyle, Dane Bernbach where Case, a copywriter, was assigned to LBJ's campaign against Senator Goldwater. There, Case worked on the famous Daisy commercial , still considered the most effective political spot that ever ran on TV. He left DDB to join Jack Tinker & Partners, a noble experiment in creativity established by Interpublic under Marion Harper--its sole function was creative exploration and development. (Mary Wells was another DDB writer turned Tinkerer.) But Case stayed in touch with Krone and their frequent lunches tipped off rumors they were starting an agency.

When Case teamed up with Krone, he was just 31, one of the youngest founders of a start-up then. Because it was 1969, Ad Age made it a point of record that he was also one with the longest hair. No Don Draperly Brilcreem look for Gene Case. But, a la Mad Men, he and Krone set up shop in a hotel, taking a 7th floor suite at the Plaza. A week later, they brought in Pat McGrath, an account man from Benton & Bowles, who figured out the business end of things: McGrath put up $5,000 and loaned Case an additional $5,000, bringing the start-up capital total to $15,000. (This was when $5000 meant something: the average house cost $4600) The partners agreed to take $2,500 a month each, though no one took anything for the first five months.

After a month, the new agency moved across the street to 4 West 58th St where its modest $2 million of business included Carey Limousine, Cybernetics Inc. and Nestle Decaf coffee. After a lean couple of years, they won Mennen Skin Bracer, an $1.8 million account from J. Walter Thompson and created the series of commercials Case became most famous for: "Thanks. I needed that" a mnemonic that went viral before there was viral: men would be slapped across the face or slap themselves, as demonstrated by a still-slim John Goodman in the best (sorry) copy of this spot from the 70s I could find, posted below.

But the success of Mennen couldn't heal a growing rift between Case and Krone who displayed not only creative differences, but disparities in work habits. According to a 1994 Ad Age interview with McGrath, Krone would arrive mid-morning, have coffee, read the papers, have lunch and by the time "his furnaces were fully stoked, Case, whose day began promptly at 9 a.m, would be getting ready to go home." In 1972, Krone high-tailed it back to Doyle, Dane, Bernbach where he stayed until retiring in 1988.

Case's agency thrived due to packaged goods clients, but his heart was always in politics. He did a print campaign that helped Nelson Rockefeller win a third term as governor. And in 2002, at the age of 65, he founded a shop called The Avenging Angels, an advocacy ad agency to create campaigns for liberal causes.

Like Don Draper, he was always the consummate pitchman. "He was without a doubt the best presenter of advertising who ever lived," McGrath is quoted in today's Times. "Clients were sometimes unhappy because the ads weren't as good as the presentation." Um. Like this one?:

sorry for hiatus. writing for food.

2010-09-13T09:50:00.005-04:00

SXSW panel shopping? 13, er, 14 items in my cart

2010-08-22T19:17:00.077-04:00

If you're like me, you're inundated with tweets, emails, Facebook messages and spamblasts soliciting your vote on proposed SXSW panels. No wonder. Public "thumbs-up" and comments count for 30 percent of the decision-making process. (Sort of like hinging a college admission on the dubious qualifier of how many letters of recommendation a candidate drums up.) Over 2300 panels were proposed this year. Your two cents counts in deciding which ones are chosen. How to shop through them if you're not a bot? You could start with the ones I'm buying, listed in no particular order:

1. Tweeting On Weekends: Are We Becoming Socially Anti-Social?
As technology allows us to share every moment instantaneously online, are we missing out on what is right in front of us? Posing this question (and presumably answering it) is Ogilvy's Rohit Bhargava, author of the new marketing book, Personality Not Included and writer of Influential Marketing blog.

Recommended For: anyone who's ever been grappled with the question of text-iquette or gotten the stink-eye for tweeting under the table

Vote and/or comment here.

2. Ad Agencies Need a New Mindset to Survive
Will the ad agency survive now that the reins of media have transferred from a few professionals to 2 billion individuals? If so, it will have to revamp its entire way of thinking. How? Find out from Edward Boches, CCO, Mullen who's organizing a panel including Rob Schwartz, CCO, TBWA\CHIAT\DAY, John Winsor, Founder & CEO of Victors & Spoils and Ben Malbon, co-founder of BBH Labs.

Recommended For: marketers, branders, anybody with a job in adland, or looking for one. Great networking possibilities.

Vote and/or comment here.

3. Ladies Claim Digital Strategy is the New Creativity
What makes this panel interesting to me isn't only its topic (what the heck constitutes creativity now?) but the fact that the panelists are all of the female persuasion. Which may be a first at this testosteroned geekfest. Organizer is Ana Andjelic, i [love] marketing blogger and contributor to AdAge. Panelists include former BBH Chairman Cindy Gallop known for her irreverance onstage and off, who I once saw flabbergast into silence a (mostly male) audience by holding up⎯and explaining⎯ a new kind of dildo.

Recommended For: creatives, strategists, planners, social media pundits. With ovaries and without.

Vote and/or comment here.

4. I'm So Productive, I Never Get Anything Done
Hoping that, for my own state of productivity, this one makes it. David Carr, digiculture columnist for New York Times, promises to shed light on a question that hobbles more of us every day: how to get things done when you're busy doing myriad other things. Like, um, writing blog posts. He produced a book. So maybe he knows.

Recommended For: anybody with a to-do list and easy access to interwebs

Vote and/or comment here.

5. Why Doesn't This TV Have a Pause Button?
Kids are growing up in a world where connectivity is as taken for granted as air. How will this affect the future of media? Spatial relationships? Multi-tasking? Panel features experts on this topic⎯kids. Moderated by Alan Wolk of KickApps, writer of acclaimed blog ToadStool⎯and dad.

Recommended For: Anyone who plans to be around in the future.

Vote and/or comment here.

6. Genius Steals: Remix Culture IS Culture
According to Faris Yakob, MDC Partners, the only way to achieve new is to remix the old. In fact, he says, recombinant processes are the only source of novelty, from sexual reproduction to idea creation to technology. Faris is a thoughtful and riveting presenter, more fun than you'd think a guy with a doctorate from Oxford would be, and I look forward to the originality with which he's sure to support his assertion that Originality is a Myth.

Recommended For: writers, strategists, creatives, thinkers, content creators

Vote and/or comment here.

7. Community Thunderdome--Branded vs Unbranded, You Decide
This panel was given last year and I was going to blow it off. It was on the last day I was there, it was early and I was exhausted. But it turned out to be one of the best I attended. Ostensibly, its subject is serious: how can brands harness crowds and collaborate with communities to find meaning within culture and market products? But more compellingly⎯it's a lot of fun. Sitting back and watching fantastic collection of entertainments compiled by Bud Caddell (creator of Bucket Brigade publishing project) and Mike Arauz (Undercurrent) provides much needed respite from talking heads.

Recommended For: anyone afloat in the information-overload that is SXSWi

Vote and/or comment here.

8. Keds. The Original Sneaker, Relaunched
What's great about SXSW is how many ideas are discussed, how many assumptions challenged. But sometimes you need a break from the headiness, to sink your teeth into a meaty case study. Darren Paul tells the story of how his interactive shop Night Agency succeeded in making a century-old brand relavent again. The tale isn't just about creativity. It's about strategies for aligning the forces of three brands with seemingly little in common⎯Bloomingdales, Keds and the Whitney Museum.

Recommended For: marketers, branders, advertisers, anybody with something to sell

Vote and/or comment here.

9. Better Crowdsourcing: Lessons Learned from the 3six5 Project
One of the most innovative crowd-fueled ideas I know: diary of a year as told from 365 points of view. Imagine having to rally, coach, edit and proofread a different writer every day. (Disclosure: I am honored to be one of those writers.) Take a peek into amazing collective consciousness created so far. I look forward to hearing behind-the-scenes stories and learning from the3six5 creators Len Kendall and Daniel Honigman as they talk about mistakes and revelations.

Recommended For: content creators, nonfiction writers, publishers, digital strategists, rabble-rousers

Vote and/or comment here.

10. Futureproof Publishing: Interactivity, Magazines, Journalism and Augmented Reality
Does the internet need to kill journalism and quality publishing or might it be what saves the industry by creating a new kind of interactive magazine? As an industry that survives on marketing dollars, how can interactivity make the publishing industry more attractive to marketers? These and other questions impacting the future of publishing will be explored in a panel moderated by Benjamin Palmer, co-founder of The Barbarian Group which has recently made interesting forays into futureproofing corporate communication.

Recommended For: writers, publishers, journalists, digital strategists, content creators, storymakers

Vote and/or comment here.

11. Interactive Narratives: Creating the Future of Literature
Oh, yea. The emerging field of creating new narratives is a topic in which I am very interested. Razorfish's Andrew Lewellen is putting together a panel of experts to explore how technologies like augmented reality, transmedia storytelling and interactive stories offer new ways for narratives to be created and experienced. What's more, he promises insights into how writers and developers can work together to go so far as to create new forms of literature.

Recommended For: writers, AR creatives, transmedia tellers, content creators, creative technologists, readers of all persuasions

Vote and/or comment here

12. Transmedia Artists Guild: New Media Needs New Representation
And who'll represent the interest of players emerging onto this new field? At SXSW last year, a group of transmedia, ARG and net-native story designers formed a new advocacy organization, representing individual producers and artists working in this still-hazily-defined world: the Transmedia Artists Guild. TAG seeks to fulfill needs that are currently overlooked by established creative guilds and advocacy organizations. What is it and how can it transform your career? Panel organized by Jay Bushman, with whom I shared a fun panel at Digital Hollywood, so I can vouch for his entertainment skills.

Recommended For: writers and creators of fictional worlds that spin off from the page or screen where they first combusted

Vote and/or comment here

13. Saying It Short: Writing Workshop with @BettyDraper
Yup, this is my own session. (If you can't sell yourself, how can you hope to sell anything else?) It's on a topic I hope interests others as much as it does me: how our definition of good writing is evolving in an age ruled by search engines and character counts. I'll take what I've learned winning writing awards in three areas (advertising, social media, litworld), pull out teaching chops (one student went on to become Lady Gaga) and, with the help of like-minded others (you!), put on a show that's interactive, informative, learning-based entertainment.

Recommended For: anyone writing today, which is to say pretty much everyone

Vote and/or comment here.

Let me know if I've missed any unadvertised specials. Shopping ends Friday, 11:59 CDT, geektime. Your two cents matters even if you can't be at the conference. SXSW releases podcasts of presentations, so you don't have to miss them even if you don't make the digipalooza in person.

UPDATE: How, in my original post, did I omit the timely Is Facebook Skynet? which explores the all-too-real possibility that as in Terminator (remember?) the platform is growing progressively smart enough to annhiliate the whole human race. (Already, it's terminated life as we knew it.) Panel led by Ian Schafer, CEO of Mad Men agency Deep Focus, who is touting it with Draperly genius: a trailer.

Recommended For: 500 million Facebook players and marketers who love them

Vote and/or comment here.

does writing still matter?

2010-08-19T22:43:00.015-04:00

In this age of character counts and SEO metrics, are keywords now more important than words? Should writers write to captivate people or search engines? But as Copyblogger points out, "It’s people who use search engines--not some other life form." In fact, the latest SEO strategies aren't about keywords, they're about creating content so compelling others want to share it. And it's hard to make content compelling without knowing how to write well.

What's losing relevance is the way you learned how to write in third grade. The grammar that worked for Proust "dznt always matter, unless u r anal," observes Ann Handley of Marketing Profs. (She goes on to make the case for general use of good grammar, however, because "as a business leader, colleague and boss, it’s important for you to communicate clearly.")

Of course, writing for screen has its own rules of grammar which you must abide by or come off sounding stupid or pompous or careless or clueless. Remember Oprah's first tweet in all-caps?

New media is expanding our definition of good writing and putting new value on the mastery of saying it short. Brevity is becoming a key to success not only in the world of commerce. Poems are being created on twitter. Novelists are publishing stories in six words. (Longed for him. Got him. Shit. —Margaret Atwood) Literary gatekeepers are finally giving the nod to flash fiction writers like Lydia Davis.

This new emphasis on short-form has implications for writers of all persuasions, in both new and old media. It's a topic that fascinates me, and one I hope to explore in a session I've proposed for the upcoming SXSW conference: Saying It Short: Writing Workshop with @BettyDraper. Check it out here. I'd vastly appreciate your comment and/or thumbs up whether or not you can come to the conference. Tx. I mean Thanks!

home sweet homepage

2010-08-17T18:11:00.014-04:00

I'm baaaaaaaack to the blogosphere after weeks of gadding about China, but as you know if you were kind enough to keep up with me in abstentia, I didn't disconnect altogether but remained helplessly tethered to email and twitter and facebook and tumblr.

The New York Times did an article recently about five scientists who took to the wilderness to escape the relentless bombardment of digital stimulation; in other words, to think. “There’s a real mental freedom in knowing no one or nothing can interrupt you,” observed one.

I thought China might provide that same opportunity; I'd heard twitter, blogs, gmail, facebook were firewalled. But vaulting the wall turned out to be as easy as logging into WiTopia. And once over the wall, I found myself powerless to resist partaking in virtual pleasures.

Ironically, the daughter I was travelling with is digital-averse⎯suitably agile on email and facebook, but she dislikes having to use them, preferring to communicate face to face or via printed-on-actual-dimensional paper. Which made for recurrence of an improbable late-night scenario: baby boomer hunched over a desktop, tap-tap-tapping on keyboard while millennial, engrossed in pages of hand-held literary tome, looks up now and then, asking when she'll desist.

welcome to china

2010-08-02T13:20:00.007-04:00

Rate your customs inspector at PVG airport: Greatly Satisified? Satisfied? Basically satisfied? or Not Satisfied? Imagine if TSA instituted this.

I'm blogging long distance for a couple of weeks from Shanghai. So posts might be even more sporadic than usual.

Sinophile friends can follow me on my tumblr.

Jantzen was right--Don's creative was lame

2010-07-30T16:09:00.019-04:00

[OK, I think I've waited long enough to post after Sunday's season premiere of AMC's Mad Men so this won't be a spoiler.]

As you may know, I'm a huge Mad Men fan, but. Am I the only one who found Don's creative pitch to Jantzen as lame as a one-legged reporter? "So well built, we can't show you the second floor" Really? They're turning Don into a Catskills routine? C'mon folks! It's 1964! It's a creative revolution on Madison Ave! Down the street from Time/Life, DDB was winning awards for Alka Seltzer spots with Gene Wilder, running politically incorrect (even then) print ads for Jewish Rye and coming up with auto ads so inspired that an ugly little excuse for a car from enemy territory (consigned by Hitler himself!) started flying out the doors of factories in Germany. In November 1964, a man was elected president due in part to the TV creative of a copywriter (Tony Schwartz) whose spot ran only once, but remains one of the most controversial (and persuasive) political commercials ever made.

Given opportunities for creative cross-pollination with leading madmen of his era, wouldn't a hotshot lauded for talent come up with something more intriguing than a raunchy oneliner? I know show writers meant it to be metaphor for the new agency, but the concept should also have worked as an ad. Marty Puris was willing to do an intersticial for BMW; why didn't they ask him to help brainstorm on Jantzen. He could have told them that no shop in the history of start-ups has pitched a new prospect with a single, one-page print ad. Then again, given that the mustachioed gun-toter pictured right was the actual print ad Jantzen was running in 1963, perhaps writers can't be blamed for assuming anything they came up with would be an improvement.

can writers save publishing?

2010-07-30T10:18:00.024-04:00

One of the best panels I attended at SXSW last year was on the future of publishing where I was happy to hear that yes, there is one⎯ if old models give way to new, creative approaches. Recently I've come into contact with three authors taking unconventional approaches to the age-old business of transforming dead trees into handheld content. Interestingly, all concepts involve crowd sourcing, that model antithetical to revered image of lone writer scratching away in a garret.

Crowdsourcing Cover Art. Crowdsourcing content isn't a new concept, actually. The book that's been a bible of sorts for getting into the ad business has been crowdsourced from creatives since the 80s. (Proud to say recent update includes an essay from AdBroad.) The author/curator is Maxine Paetro, who was manager of creative talent at some of the best agencies in New York before she segued into writing bestselling thrillers. But crowdsourcing cover art? For recently edited update now available for pre-order, her publisher offered three design choices , none of which Paetro felt was quite right. So she dreamed up a contest and sent out word to art and design schools, offering a bit of cash and the chance to be published. She received hundreds of Flickr entries from around the world, so many of which were good, she had a hard time deciding which she liked best.

Crowdsourcing an Advance, a Title, an Editorial Board. Strategy Director Bud Caddell recently launched a project on Kickstarter, to develop and publish a book that is an evaluation of how everything in the attention economy actually works, and how to profit by it. The genius of his idea was this: instead of circulating a proposal among agents, waiting for interest, then waiting for an agent to strongarm a publisher into shelling out an advance, Bud approached book writing as if he were setting up a nonprofit: he sent out word to people passionate about the same subject he was and wrote them a proposal, promising them an opportunity to help make a difference. Within a month, he enlisted not only 103 board members (including, full disclosure, myself) but over $18K which allows him, five weeks from the day he put out the book concept, to be travelling around the country doing interviews for it. Further brilliance of writing a book this way? You've got a built-in community of amenable readers, editors and fact-checkers, which relieves friends and loved ones of these onerous duties.

The Dickensian Approach: Blogging Installments Euro RSCG Chicago Chairman/CCO Steffan Postaer, discouraged by the bleak house that publishing is these days, is releasing his third novel a la Dickens whose books were first published serially in magazines. Postaer is blogging a romantic comedy chapter by chapter via blog posts, an approach that gives him the benefit of further dimensionalizing the story world with visuals. He's also staging a contest for cover art. Ironically, the winner will receive what many in publishing are fiercely resisting: an ipad.

Hopefully, many more writers are transforming old world publishing models out there. Aren't they?

you knew it was coming⎯product placement in Farmville

2010-07-15T22:27:00.014-04:00

Next week, for the first time, you can plant a real crop on your pretend farm. According to the NYTimes, Cascadian Farm, a subsidiary of General Mills, is offering Farmville players a branded blueberry crop that can be "harvested faster" and "bring a bigger cash return." Marketers are hoping to incent real-world buying of Cascadian Farm's 75 organic products by seeding awareness of the brand in FarmVille’s audience: of 20 million who farm daily, 60% are female, 20-40 yrs. old.

It's the company's first venture into social media. More evidence of ad dollars trending social: before this campaign, the company relied mainly on promoting via print ads in lifestyle magazines like Real Simple and sampling at community events like 5K races.

Cascadian isn't the first General Mills brand to partner with Zynga, growers of Farmvillle. In May, Green Giant Fresh subsidiary placed a coded sticker on broccoli, celery and other fresh (really?) products sold at 4,000 Target stores across the country. Each sticker was redeemable at TheGiant.com for five free “farm cash” units, the currency players use for FarmVille projects. In five weeks, $100,000 worth of the units were redeemed online by customers, who cashed in an average of two coupons each.

The Cascadian Farm promo is scheduled to run for only a week. Future direction will be determined after assessing FarmVille results, which will be measured by not only Web activity like hits to its blog but by call-ins to a real-world 800 number.

My guess is, faux farmers will soon be greening their acres with Deere tractors, Sears harvesters and Monsanto weed wranglers as Farmville enters its Second Life.

adland redeems itself with campaign you wish your campaign could smell like

2010-07-15T14:37:00.014-04:00

For readers who aren't twitterholics like me, you may have missed the latest extension of the brilliant Old Spice campaign. I'm not talking about Man on Horse now swandiving off a waterfall, but about his masterful rocking of the social mediasphere. Sure, lots of brands use social media to engage with consumers, but Old Spice made major waves this week by delivering personalized messages to individual fans via youtube.

In a move that seems destined to reshape the way brands interact with consumers, W + K creatives (CD Jason Bagley, digital strategist Josh Millrod, interactive producer Ann-Marie Harbour) holed up in a studio with spokehunk Isaiah Mustafa, writing, recording, editing and producing video responses to tweets and comments in quick succession, posting almost 200 "commercials" in the course of 2 days. What makes the work genius isn't only the concept but executions: spot-on writing and Mustafah's flawless deliveries ensure the spots are entertainment even if they're not directed at you.

Some of the first videos were addressed to Twitter magillas including Ashton Kutcher, Biz Stone, Ellen Degeneres and George Stephaopolous-- Mustafah answers his question about how Obama can attract women voters.

But plenty of responses went out to non-celebs; one of the most memorable was to a tweeter who asked Mustafah to propose to his girlfriend.

Apparently, it worked. @JSBeal's twitter profile is now "Happily Engaged." Then, the campaign extended even to voicemail.

As of this writing, creative content on the Old Spice channel has elicited over 61 million uploads and almost 16,000 comments. (Recent response videos viewed over 11 million times, stats graphed by interested party here.) Will sm success translate into Old Spice sales? Yet to see. Just because it's digital doesn't mean it's direct response. As with any branding campaign, time is required to assess true impact. But I trust an effort that breaks through doldrums of summer to jazz so many consumers and press. (Although I agree with writer for UK Telegraph--sales numbers might be better if scent was a bit less, um, potent than its marketing.)

What most impresses me are two things:

1. Viral campaign wasn't "crowdsourced", but curated and crafted by those who knew not only how to elicit feedback from irascible internet audience, but how to ensure feedback was mostly positive (and civil)---not always the case when brands venture into social media. (Hi, Nestle!)

2. The campaign that is being hailed as groundbreaking use of digital was created by a traditional ad agency. Ironically, launch coincides with the revival of MadMen. Who says all Adland is Lost in last century?

Thanks, W+K for giving pundits on social media circuits something to deconstruct besides Subservient Chicken.

greetings from writers camp

2010-07-07T19:35:00.008-04:00

Posting this from New York State Summer Writers Institute in Saratoga where I come every summer to work on my writing that isn't for sale. (Or more accurately, my writing for which buyers aren't clamoring.) It's a gathering of writers from all over the world, started in the 80s by William Kennedy (Ironweed) and now run by editors of legendary litmag Salmagundi. Every day there are classes and seminars with writers I admire. Every night, writers take turns sharing their work, much of which is new and not yet in publication. A few years ago, I had the breathtaking experience of hearing Marilynne Robinson read the opening chapter of her then forthcoming novel, Gilead. (Readings are open to all, check out impressive lineup if you're in the area.)

Last night was a double-header by Allan Gurganus (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All) and by one of my favorite poets: Franz Wright. Here is Franz (left) (ha) at the after-party, with another of my favorite poets: Frank Bidart. If you don't know their work, treat yourself to the pleasure. Even people who aren't poetry fans are taken in by Bidart's "Old Man at the Wheel". (If you like it, you'll love the rest of the book.) Wright has garnished many distinctions, including the distinction of publishing the first dot com poem, at the turn of the century when most people thinking about dot coms weren't poets.

Address Search

And you will find me
any night
now, try
at the motherless sky.
com

How dare you
interrupt
me.com

I'm sorry
I was ever born.com

No doubt
you can always find
me any
time, any
where

in the damned world

--Franz Wright
The New Yorker, June 5, 2000

happy fourth

2010-07-04T15:31:00.002-04:00

father's day

2010-06-20T09:30:00.004-04:00

It may be a Hallmark creation, but it's also an opportunity and reminder to say thanks to a man who did so much for your thankless, earlier self. So, thanks to my dad who, when he wasn't building computers the size of a house, took time to teach us fun things like Morse Code and imbue countless skills that have proved mighty useful later in life. Here he is talking man-to-man with my brother (now a father of four) who is nattily attired for church in his Eton suit. Whatever happened to shoe stirrups that keep kids' pant legs from riding up? Oh, those sixties. What a dapper decade to be a dad in.

bloomsday, ipad and modern suppressors of vice

2010-06-16T16:39:00.024-04:00

Say "Bloomsday" now and people will likely think you're talking gardens, but for years June 16 was celebrated by English speakers worldwide to commemorate the life of Irish writer James Joyce, author of Ulysses, a novel in which all events take place on this day in 1904. (Poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes chose the date to be married.) In Dublin, where the novel is set, the day is still celebrated with Ulysses readings and dramatizations, pub crawls and general merriment. But here in the US, Bloomsday is being celebrated for a different reason: It's the day Apple reversed its decision to censor "Ulysses Seen", a graphic novel adaptation of the masterwork for the ipad, which included a nude illustration. "We made a mistake," an Apple spokesperson said, apparently unaware that the book had encountered similar resistence when first published without pictures. In 1921, due to a campaign by New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the book was declared obscene and banned by U.S Postal Authorities. In December 1933, the Supreme Court ruled that the work was not pornographic and therefore could not be obscene. Perhaps Supreme Court judges should be involved in new media adaptation. Or maybe it's a job for unemployable MFA Fiction grads.

this is the band kids are crazy about?

2010-06-11T13:59:00.012-04:00

If you've got kids under 12, you probably know about this, but I was perplexed by a sign in our neighborhood that seemed to indicate a shortage of ubiquitous office supplies. My sister, the mom of two kidlets, informed me of the latest tween craze: braceleting your wrists with as many colored rubber bands as possible, Nefertiti style. There's a "designer" band called SillyBandz but I guess kids in our neighborhood settle for off-brand. I mean band. Benign as fad sounds, it's been banned from some schools. Lucky for recession-hit parents the craze is so economical.

is Goodby responsible for killing Chevy?

2010-06-10T10:28:00.019-04:00

Slow news day when story about a company wanting to change its branding hits the front page of New York Times. Or is it clever placement for a whip-smart campaign using ~~free~~ earned media, as Rohit Bhargava suggests it could be?

According to an internal memo leaked to the Times, Chevrolet wants you to stop calling it "Chevy." The memo was from GM to employees at Detroit headquarters: "We ask that whether you're talking to a dealer...or speaking with friends and family, that you communicate our brand as Chevrolet." "Swear jars" have been placed in hallways, and employees who let "Chevy" slip are expected to contribute a quarter. But, wait. Isn't Chevy one of the world's best-known product monikers, and longest lived? And isn't the trend away from proper brand names, to be more consumer-friendly and casual a la FedEx, KFC and The Shack? A GM spokesman who confirmed the memo linked the change to the recent switch from long-time ad agency Campbell-Ewald to Goodby, Silverstein (after a brief stopover at Publicis USA.) Could it be that smart cookies at Goodby "leaked" memo themselves, landing astonishingly good media coverage and generating heated convos about a brand that's been in the doldrums for years? They don't give out those Clio Lifetime Achievements for nothing.

UPDATE: Steve Hall of AdRants reports that GM has released a clarification that states the brand will not, in fact, urge people to discontinue the use of the word Chevy: We deeply appreciate the emotional connections that millions of people have for Chevrolet and its products. Pretty much plays out the way Bhargava predicted.

UPDATED UPDATE: The august Gray Lady devoted a Sunday (best-placement) editorial to Chevrolet vs. Chevy, ending with "foreigners will learn to love 'Chevy' the way Americans have ever since the company was founded in 1911." This is from a New York Times reporter? Or GM annual report?

hey, baby, now you can blow catcallers away

2010-06-09T18:06:00.015-04:00

Last time I did jury duty it was for a street harassment case which I couldn't believe had come to trial. A young woman going to work at 7 am was walking up from the subway and as she passed a man coming down stairs, he leered at her, complimented her breasts, then reached out and grabbed them. It was summer. She was wearing a lowcut, summery dress. And fashionably high heels which didn't stop her from running after him, and screaming for a cop to do the same. Her moxie impressed me. If it had been me on those stairs, I would probably have collected myself and simply continued on the way to work, blaming the incident on my choice of attire. But the young woman in court asserted herself and as a result, the groper was jailed, which meant he wouldn't be harrassing women on subways for a while, or in public restrooms either, where it turns out he liked to lurk in closed stalls, a habit he cheerfully told us about when his lawyer made the mistake of putting him on the stand.

Another victim of street harassment reacted by creating a video game. Suyin Looui got the idea for "Hey Baby" after a guy on the subway came on to her, invoking a racial epithet. (What is it about undergrounds that breeds misbehavior?) "Hey Baby" is a new web game that takes aim at catcallers by arming players with weapons--and permission-- to blow them away. Only men can be killed. And only after they say something first. Their words can be benign as "God bless you" or overtly offensive. The player chooses to respond with "Thanks, have a great day" or by shooting, turning the man into a tombstone engraved with his last words.

A trailer for the game is on youtube. The first comment is "I find this game offensive" and I was surprised to discover that what offended the commenter wasn't that if a man says "Hey, Beautiful" that is license to kill him, but the fact that the weapons weren't real-looking enough. "What is this, 1998? Put some more work into those graphics, people! The gunfire should be louder. Why does the flamethrower not even make any sound?"

Seth Schiesel reviewed the game for the New York Times and was prepared to dislike it. "At first I found myself somewhat offended...a video game in which you play a man who can shoot only women would be culturally unthinkable, no matter the circumstances." But as he played on, it gave him "a visceral appreciation for what many women go through as part of their day-to-day lives" realizing that, "The men cannot actually hurt you, but no matter what you do, they keep on coming, forever."

That realization, according to its maker, an artist, is the point of the game.

vintage magazine

2010-06-04T14:07:00.014-04:00

When was the last time a thing of beauty landed in your real-world mailbox? Mine is usually crammed unattractively with solicitations and bills I can't obliterate into paperlessness without risking late charges. But recently it was graced by Vintage Magazine.

Vintage is based on the short-lived but legendary Flair Magazine which wowed discerning readers from 1950-1951, featuring die-cut covers, fabulous foldouts and illustrations, and contributions from the likes of Salvador Dali and Tennessee Williams. The New York Times called it "one of the most extravagant and innovative magazines ever published."

Publisher Ivy Baer Sherman was introduced to Flair at a 2003 retrospective of the magazine and was inspired to create a publication equally extraordinary. Premiere issue of Vintage is a cool-hunter collectible printed on multiple card stocks and bound with red ribbon. Articles include illustrated letters from artist Judith Oksner to her parents when she was a student in Paris in the days before email; long lost recipes from a 60 year old collection; the story of record albums told on pages die-cut to resemble jackets for "45's"; and a fascinating take on the Barbie phenomenon by Adweek's ad critic (and arbiter of pop culture) Barbara Lippert who found out that the doll was modeled on German streetwalkers and originally marketed as a "teen grooming aid."

Sherman calls the bi-annual "a multi-textured foray through history and out into the present." I call it well worth $20. Premiere issue sold out. Subscribe to get on the list for le deuxieme, due this month.

McDonald's serves gays. But only the French are supposed to know

2010-06-03T18:13:00.013-04:00

Que sera, sera. McDonald's serves customers with disregard for their sexual preference. This BETC Euro RSCG spot runs only in France because it would presumably risk giving Americans heart attacks. Wait. Doesn't the fat, salt and sugar they sell already do that?

thanks to MFO who found it on AdFreak

guinness record of branded content

2010-06-02T12:12:00.013-04:00

In 1951, when corporate off-sites took place in settings more luxe than chain hotel ballrooms, a dispute took place between Sir Hugh Beaver, managing director of Guinness Brewery in Dublin (are all CEO's over there knighted?) and a guest at a shooting party at his estate in County Wexford. The dispute centered on which was the fastest Eurpean game bird. No reference book gave a definitive answer.

The royal director decided to publish a volume of facts, intended to be sold to bartenders who could use it to settle pub arguments. The first Guinness Book of Records was published in August, 1955 with a plastic cover to protect it from beer stains. Despite skepticism from retailers, the volume became an instant hit. It reached bestseller status by Christmas the same year. Over a hundred million copies have been published worldwide in 25 languages. Over 3 million are still sold every year, the best-selling book under copyright of all time.

Times being what they are, listings are also available digitally. A website tells you how to compete for your own. But note that one of the original categories is no longer cited: "Uncontrolled Drinking." Current editor in chief, Craig Glenday, told the New York Times: “We’re not going to encourage that sort of thing today. That’s how people get hurt.”

Hats off to Sir Beaver and his prescient marketing move. But is it truly successful as branded content? Do consumers associate the purveyor of brew with best known arbiter of facts and factoids? I didn't until reminded of association by New York Times article. And Alan Wolk of the Toadstool blog observes that book's popularity is highest with kids too young to (legally) be target for Guinness. Still, selling millions of book objects these days is a feat to be marvelled at.

memories of mothering before it was a verb

2010-05-31T10:44:00.021-04:00

Work has always been important to me. Here I am at age three, helping my mother and grandmother do dishes. We are also packing provisions for a road trip. See slices of white bread already mayonaisse-d, on wax paper? My dad's parents lived in Atlanta and my parents, sister and I had driven to visit them from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. That trip, and the one to my mother's folks in Chicago were the only vacations my parents indulged in for years. We never stopped along the way, to "squander money" at roadside restaurants. My mother packed whatever we needed in a cooler. If we were making good time, we'd stop at a rest area where my mother would shake out a freshly ironed floral cloth to cover a picnic table. More often, we'd make do with meals in the barreling car, even though this inevitably meant one of us kids would get carsick, which my engineer father considered a small price to pay for making good time.

I'm struck by how dressed up my mom and grandma are to do housework. Perhaps it was a Sunday and we'd been to church that morning. But I recall my mother looking well groomed just about every day, even when there were eight of us kids to take care of. I get tired just thinking about how much work that must have been: finding stockings that matched (no pantyhose then), making sure seams were straight, pulling on heavy foundations, ironing dresses, even aprons. (Not much was dry cleaned. My mother ironed even my father's shirts.)

Dress-wise, my mother had a lot in common with Betty Draper which I guess is one reason I chose to play that character on Twitter. But the resemblance stopped at appearance, luckily for me and my siblings. (Although I do recall hearing that "Only boring people are bored.") She liked to keep up with fashions, but didn't want to shell out for department store prices. She sewed her own clothes and ours. She took us on shopping trips in which we wouldn't buy anything; they were scouting trips for latest trends. I recall a few bouts of embarrassment when she'd pull out a tape measure and surreptitiously place it against outfits on mannequins. But I was always pleased to put on a perfectly fitted new dress with smart buttons and stylish collar. She still dresses well, though she doesn't sew anymore. She keeps a figure that can fit into petites at Talbots.

Unlike Betty, my mother enjoyed being a stay at home mom. She'd gone to Chicago Teacher's College because she liked working with children. But she was always encouraging of my sisters and me to pursue passions that would lead to other kinds of work, too.

My mother and many of her generation wouldn't call themselves feminists. But their quiet work and steady support gave their daughters confidence to claim a stake in the workplace. And paved the way for their granddaughters to consider that stake an inalienable right. This Memorial Day, I'd like to acknowledge them.

my father's day, and mine on The3Six5 project

2010-05-30T09:55:00.012-04:00

Thanks to Len Kendall and friends for giving me a page in The3Six5, their remarkable crowd-sourced diary. I wrote a tribute to my father, a pioneer of computers, who is as sharp today as he was fiddling with the console of a house-size computer. And to his son, my brother, who shared our dad's passion for how things worked. It's here, preceded by 148 interesting stories. Enjoy.

Day #149 of The3Six5 project

2010-05-29T08:36:00.013-04:00

What if your blog had a lifecycle, say, of exactly one year? And what if you got others to write it for you? 365 different writers, one for each day? At the end, you'd have a fascinating collage, a snapshot of a year reflecting ranging perspectives. This is the brainchild of Len Kendall and Daniel Honigman who launched The3Six5 Project on January 1. It's a crowd-sourced diary that has already generated attention from press and blogs and an approach from a publisher. So far, they've compiled a wealth of interesting pieces. Bob Knorpp (The Beancast) shared a moving story about what it's like to have lost a hand. Bill Green (AdVerve) posted an eerie photo of a TV on a sidewalk and speculated about a world without Super Bowl Sunday. George Parker (AdScam) recalled (without nary a cuss) his life as a Mad Man when talk was face-to-face and people left offices behind when they went on vacation. Ann Curry, Edward Boches, Alex Bogusky and a great host of others are lined up for later. (Calendar here.) I'm honored to be included. Today is my day. 365 words. 9 PM deadline. Topic suggestions welcome.

the business world is no place for ladies

2010-05-28T19:50:00.022-04:00

I took my millennial daughter to the Clio Awards last night, which was a splendid affair. Non-recessionary menu (quail eggs and tartar), flowing bar, great work, fun crowd. She still can't get over having been in the same room with Pharrell Williams. But, perhaps because I was seeing things through her eyes, I couldn't help noting how lopsided the awards acceptances were. Virtually all who took the stage to receive them were men. What bothered me more than this was--my daughter didn't notice.

How acclimated we all are to the role of women applauding others. Barbara Lippert (Adweek) and Penny Baldwin (Yahoo) did a swell job presenting well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Awards to Rich Silverstein and Jeff Goodby. But only two women were lauded as winners themselves. The first approached the stage accompanied by a male teammate. She hung in the shadows as he delivered a few words, then he gestured for her step up to the mic. But she was as hesitant to comply as if he'd asked her to give it a blow job. She kept her distance, leaned forward and said only, "Thank you." Later, another woman was honored, but instead of accepting her due, she apologized for it. "I don't want to take up your time. Enjoy your evening," she said, hurrying away.

It's true that the world isn't fair, that the playing field is tilted, that the world's default setting still seems to be Male. Clio jury committees average 9 men to 1 woman. But women tend to worsen the odds by refusing to get comfortable with putting themselves forward. By adhering to vestigial mandates to act like a "lady."

In the lobby, while waiting for the awards ceremony to begin, I met a young guy who'd flown in from Stockholm. "Guess that means you've won something," I said. "A Silver," he nodded. "But I feel a bit sad. They won't let me on stage to accept it." Unfortunately for him, there were too many Clios and not enough time to publicly award them. I asked to take his picture and said I would blog him. His name is Carl Jannerfeldt. He was a copywriter at now-defunct Farfar. He and his team won for building the World's Biggest Signpost. And because he was forthright about his achievement, I know about him and now so do you.

there's more to Clios than statuettes

2010-05-27T09:58:00.004-04:00

The Clios aren't only about awards, they're also a two day conference that connects you to insights from movers and thinkers in advertising and digital space. Like Cindy Gallop, former chairperson of BBH, who, after getting audience attention by pulling a jewel-encrusted sex toy out of her bag, leaned into the audience and challenged, "I say this without rancor. But, Guys: Just think: what would it be like to live in a world where the default setting was always for the opposite sex?" (Audience: silence.) In less confrontational but equally interesting presos, Sam Cannon (Organic) and Tom Christmann (JWT) mused on how innovation influences pop culture while Faris Yakob (MDC), Benjamin Palmer (Barbarian) and Michael Lebowitz (Big Spaceship) shared the coolest stuff they've seen on the interwebz. Faris' complete collection here. My favorite is the Towel-Folding Robot, below. One mantra from the morning was Lebowitz's "Failure is cool because it means you've tried something" which I shared at dinner with my millennial daughter who promptly looked up from her vegan plate to declare "That's what they used to tell us in preschool."

Oh, yes! The awards. Last night's ceremony was for Print and TV/Cinema/Digital. Congrats to the winners, listed here. Panels continue today at sleek, just-opened Trump Soho. Tonight, Interactive and Innovative awarded at nearby Skylight Soho.

there goes the manicure

2010-05-22T13:30:00.001-04:00

end of an Empire

2010-05-18T17:10:00.014-04:00

On my way to a benefit last night in Chelsea , I happened by the Empire Diner and was distraught to see a closed sign in the window. The Empire Diner! Another icon of Olde New York Dinery gone. Lost its lease, said its blog. (Yes, it had a blog! But social media savvy doesn't always pay the rent, as many are dismayed to learn.) For thirty years, the Empire's chrome and black interior, marquee lights, flashing "EAT" sign and stainless Empire State building silhouette presided over the corner of 22nd and 10th, a landmark in pre-Rennaissance Chelsea before machine shops, gas stations and auto parts stores morphed into art galleries tony enough to be event sites for benefits. Will the historic eatery turn up in another time zone, as did the nearby Cheyenne (now in Alabama) or Soho's Moondance (Wyoming)? Surely New Yorkers aren't the only diners capable of properly appreciating Empire Chili Sundae. Until then, memorial T-Shirts are available.

work that sustains

2010-05-17T13:50:00.002-04:00

We all have work, if we're lucky. But for most of us, work doesn't require rolling out of bed before dawn seven days a week to toil outside in all kinds of weather. And fretting about weather because, if not correctly predicted, it could wipe out months, even years worth of effort.

My great uncle was a farmer. Patriarch of a smalltown Illinois corn-growing family, who inculcated in my father respect for hard work and knowing how to drive as soon as your feet could touch pedals. Was it the fresh air? The farm food? The potent homemade moonshine? My uncle lived to be 104, outliving his 102 year old wife by two years. When I went to pay my respects last week, I saw, next to him in the coffin, two husks of his cross-bred specialty corn. How many of us do work we'd want to take with us?

before grande there was regular and everyone drank from the same cup

2010-04-30T13:38:00.036-04:00

Why you should never ask me for stock advice: Twenty years ago, when Starbucks announced they were on their way to New York, I predicted a fail, sure that New Yorkers were waaaay too savvy to pay premium for coffee when they could get fine brew in this cup for a mere fifty cents. In 1994, when the first Starbucks opened on Broadway, 500 million Greek coffee cups sold each year. A decade later, that number was down more than half, to 200 million. (And my tipster friends in Seattle were laughing all the way to the bank.)

The creator of the 57-year old cup was Holocaust survivor Leslie Buck (born Büch), a paper-cup salesman attempting to break into the New York diner market in 1963. Noting that most owners of diners were Greek, he concocted a design based on the image of the Greek vase known as an amphora. The cup soon became ubiquitous on the streets of New York, standard-issue at diners, coffeeshops, lunchtrucks and coffee carts, a requisite item not only for coffee-toters, but for propmasters for TV shows and films set in the city.

Buck passed away Monday, but died knowing that his Anthora (the altered name, due to his Eastern European accent) survives, albeit too often in the hand of the person next to you on the subway, who you hope keeps it upright as the train takes a curve.

defining His and Hers in digital space

2010-04-29T17:26:00.040-04:00

A recent article in Forbes reports that users of Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are predominantly women while men are heavier users of YouTube and LinkedIn. "Facebook, the largest social networking tool in the world, is dominated by women," it says. Then the piece goes on to explain that women use social media to "make connections and share items from their personal lives, men use them as means to gather information and increase their status."

I read the article a few times, searching for evidence upon which to base this conclusion which implies something I've heard a few times before: that women's use of social media is family-oriented and frivolous, while men's use of it is to get ahead in the world.

I could find no real evidence in the article to support the statement, which, curiously, the writer seems to have based upon:

1. A recent joint study from BlogHer and iVillage which reports that 75% of women use online communities to stay up to date with family and friends...and that 68% of them use them "to connect with others like me." But can't those statistics apply to the same women? And isn't "connecting with others like me" what men do when they use social media to gather information?

2. Berkeley Professor Lorrie Thomas says men use social media as an "interactive Rolodex" storing contact info for future use. But the same could be said of women users, the majority of whom use online communities for connections.

3. Jodi Kahn, the head of iVillage, says women want to learn about real people experiencing similar conflicts. (Don't men seek the same thing?) The conflict she unfortunately chooses to use as example is "potty-training." "If I'm a mom who is about to start potty training," she says," it's important to me to hear how other real moms are doing it." But no study shows that women talk mostly about potty training online, or even the broader topic of parenting techniques. Kahn might have just as easily wondered, "If I'm a woman juggling motherhood and management, it's important to me to hear how other real women are doing it."

5. Sherry Perlmutter Bowen, a gender and communication professor at Villanova University, says she's seeing men use social media to gather information and boost their influence. But as commenter to a response post on Jezebel noted, aren't these just less girly terms for "gossip" and "making social connections?"

Interestingly, another source interviewed for the article, Elisa Camahort Page, cofounder and chief operating officer of BlogHer, observes that "both men and women report that their most common blog topic is 'my life.' " The writer, however, finds this observation "surprising."

I'm not trying to argue that there are no differences in the way men and women approach social media. I'm just saying we need to be careful about how we define differences and assign norms, or risk perpetuating biases that have long created problems in the IRL world. Irin Carmon, who wrote a balanced response piece to Forbes on Jezebel, notes that online "there may be a chance to build a culture from scratch, but so far the Internet often simply perpetuates the [culture] we already have."

UPDATE
The writer of the Forbes piece responds in the comments. To save you the jump, here it is:

I am the writer, Jenna Goudreau, on this ForbesWoman.com piece and am pleased to see an active discussion on its contents. I’d have to disagree with this writer’s assessment that the article was meant to prove that “women’s use of social media is family-oriented and frivolous.” Rather, as the many experts in the piece confirmed, many more women than men are using social media to connect with others on a more personal level. That might mean that they are online discussing their families, and it may mean they’re online discussing their careers. The point, here, is that they are discussing more in general. I don’t believe that makes the group inferior, or that it’s true for all women or all men. It’s a pattern online that may reflect a gendered pattern offline.

cover letter train wreck

2010-04-29T10:15:00.013-04:00

I've posted on clueless cover letters before, but here's a disaster of epic proportions. Writer's in for a shock when Mom and Dad stop paying the bills.

via Len Kendall

on the internet no one knows you're an ad

2010-04-28T21:42:00.025-04:00

No wonder we have to spend government funds to alert our kids to advertising's ubiquitousness. Imagine how many Facebook readers mistake this landing page for a news site, as I did for a moment, until noting links to "the most credible and trustworthy supplier on the market." And mice type citing "Advertorial." (Just try to find it, Waldo.)

The "expose" states that the amazing concoction helped a News 7 reporter lose 25 lbs. Hilariously, that's not all it reduced. Elsewhere in the piece, she works for News 6.

When will DDMAC discover the interwebs?

from actual conversations in real life

2010-04-26T22:01:00.006-04:00

Upon paying too much for a suit for a one-time event, a friend says, "Oh, well. Now I have something to wear to my funeral. Although after the ceremony, I'd like to be redressed in fuzzy PJs and socks."

I tell her to pack a bag and I'll ride with the casket. Unless I precede her.

"I hope I'll precede YOU!" she says, emphatically. Which is sweet, I think, until she adds, "Because I think you'll say something really great at my service and I am sorry I'm gonna miss it!"