I'm honeymooning at the moment at an incredible resort called Goldeneye. Best vacation I've ever been a part of. And not just because I've agreed to spend the rest of my life with an amazing person. That's cool, too, and it will probably be the subject of a future post.

I am not a political person. That is to say, I know what I believe in, but choose to steer clear of those conversations. My frends reside in every corner of the politcal spectrum and I wouldn’t want a petty thing like principles to come between us. So I prefer to keep the conversations light:  sports, advertising, movies, the occasional celebrity mishap, food and television.

Most advertising people have a very short attention span. Typically, it’s 10-20 seconds, which means they’ll stop reading this post right about…now.

 

No, now.

 

 

Now.

 

For those of you who are still reading this and are part of our great industry, you might be interested in picking up a copy of Hegarty on Advertising: Turning Intelligence into Magic, written by Sir John Hegarty himself. Funny, right? With deficient attention spans, so few advertising people will take the time to read a whole book, much less write one. And he’s an art director, no less.

Sir John doesn’t expose his formula for “turning intelligence into magic” as much as he tells the story of a former printmaker turned advertising phenom of the seventies, eighties and nineties and founder of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the UK-based global ad boutique. Frankly, I don’t think he possesses a secret formula beyond great taste, hard work and extreme confidence. Maybe that, combined with being John Hegarty, is all it takes to become a legend in his business.

I was a young copywriter at Leo Burnett in Chicago when LBCo. bought a stake in BBH. But it wasn’t a controlling interest, mind you. Hegarty is quick to let the reader know that the employees of BBH still held the 51%. But BBH needed the cash to help enable their ever-so-delicate global expansion. Not to mention, they gained a powerful media partner in Starcom. Since then, I’ve had a healthy curiosity for the man and his work.

A few years later, I visited London to shop my portfolio around town with an art director friend of mine. We visited Leo Burnett, Saatchi & Saatchi, TBWA, Mother and few other places. BBH was our final stop and by far the most difficult place to secure and audience. When we finally got in, we could tell it was a special place to work. It wasn’t particularly steeped in history and the building wasn’t shaped like a giant pair of binoculars or anything like that. But the people who worked knew they worked at the best place in town, if not the world (be it true or not).

After reading this book, I can see why they felt that way. The attitude was pretty much warranted. After all, BBH built its fame on sturdy foundation of intense work for Levi’s, Audi, Johnny Walker, Axe and British Airways, to name a few. Chances are, something they did is on your Top Ten of All Time list.

The most amazing thing is the role that John Hegarty played in the genesis of agencies that don't even have his name on the door. He was in on the ground floor as a founding member of both Saatchi & Saatchi and TBWA. Having launched or helped launch three of the most prestigious agency networks is by far the most impressive pedigree I can imagine. Impressive, to say the least.

Back to the book and my humble takeaway. It’s an easy read for anybody who loves advertising. It even has big pictures and pull quotes, just like a magazine. John waxes on as if you’re sitting next to him at a table in Cannes, silently tying one on and listening to his anecdotes to which you think to yourself, “you’ve got to be shitting me,” wide-eyed, spitting your champagne back in the flute. His stories are truly remarkable and his storytelling skills are probably as keen as you imagine. In short, without giving anything away, Hegarty was fearless before Bogusky was alive.

“When the world zigs, zag.”

 

Criticisms? Not many. His snobbery towards the U.S., both to its agencies and its people, is a little annoying at times although it isn’t at all unexpected. He gives New York City a lot of credit for being a creative hub and credits that to its not really being part of the United States. I’ve heard this same "separatation theory" from other Europeans, South Americans, Aussies and Asians about New York, Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco and Los Angeles. To that I say, “No. They’re amazing places because they’re in the United States.” But I digress.

If you know me, then ask to borrow my copy of Hegarty on Advertising. I’ll most likely tell you no because I like the way the bright orange cover looks on my bookshelf. I’ll then tell you that it’s available on amazon.com, a somewhat successful online retailer, for $19.77. Proceeds from each sale go to Thames & Hudson Press and the stripe-lined pockets of Sir John Hegarty’s Paul Smith pants. Your GBPs will indirectly benefit the development of Hegarty Chamans, his fledgling vineyard and winery in the Languedoc.

A winery in France? Yep. Hearing that temporarily quells the temptation to quit this godforsaken business, doesn’t it? And for those of you who don't need the promise of winemaking to keep at it day after day, this book should serve as some inspiration for when you start to question your gut.

 

 

 

This terrible economy with its plummeting home values has given birth to a new generation of DIYers. Why hire the guy with the 800-number on the side of his truck when you can buy a 10-piece screw-driving box set and do it yourself? This approach has been beaten to death by Lowe’s and Home Depot for years (Let’s Build Something Together and More Saving, More Doing, That’s the Power of the Home Depot). Needless to say, if everybody’s saying the same thing, nobody’s really saying anything at all.

This past week, I saw a refreshing commercial for Stihl out of Whybin/TBWA Sydney. It wasn’t the production value or the knock-you-off-your-chair payoff that inspired this post. Rather, it was the strategy.

The pragmatic benefit for owning and buying power tools is to save money by making improvements yourself and thereby increasing the value of your home. The emotional benefit, which “Get Real” focuses on, is pulling yourself away from your computer and doing something tangible. As a creative, I almost always prefer the emotional. The pragmatic can sometimes lead to a clever execution but the emotional has the power to build a brand.

As I type this, there’s an eight-foot by five-foot framed map leaning up against my living room wall that I’ve been meaning to hang for two months. I’m looking at it right now. The project requires the use of drywall anchors and hanging devices that I don’t own. So instead of doing something about it, I choose to sit here pecking away at this keyboard, endlessly managing my digital affairs. Hour by hour, I become less and less human-ish.

Put down your laptops and slowly step away. Grab your belt sander or dust off those garden shears and get your hands dirty. Forget about the value of your home. It’s time to remind yourself what it feels like to be a living, breathing, blood-filled person. An inspiring (and responsible) message from Stihl.

In our industry, having Writer in your title doesn't necessarily mean you can write. Has anybody else noticed this?

Some non-writerly writers are sometimes just great idea people who have been given the title of Writer for lack of anything else to call them. Ideas are obviously critical to everything we do, but Writer is not a default title. At the very least, a Writer should know the difference between their, they're and there. You'd be surprised at how many don't. (People, there's nothing wrong with giving somebody the simple badge of Creative.)

Ad schools don't really teach the skill in their curriculum, because, like speed, you can't teach writing. We learn to write at an early age. From there, you either have it or you don't. Improvement comes only by way of complete word immersion: exposing yourself to great writing, promotional and otherwise.

We're spending more and more time exhaustively searching for something for people to engage with. This content often consists of vids, tricks, wonks and pics leaving the words on the page to seem like an afterthought either because the person writing them didn't know how or didn't care to make them interesting. Which is fine, right? After all, when it comes to copy, good enough seems to be the industry standard for copy longer than three sentences.

So, what is good writing? That's like trying to describe what fun feels like. Instead, I'm going to show you my favorite copywriting ever in the history of me reading things. It's a mid-nineties print campaign, yes, printed on pulp, by a writer by the name of Doug Adkins, the Adkins of Hunt Adkins. The campaign is for a production company in Minneapolis. In spite of never having used their services, I've read their long copy countless times in the pages of my dog-eared and coffee-and-beer-stained-college-era-CA-annual. If copy was still this good, I would never close my laptop or put down my iPad.

Thank you, Mr. Adkins. 

Over the weekend, I witnessed some discussion on various boards over whether or not The Wilderness Downtown, the Google/Radical/B-Reel collaboration, should have been eligible to compete for a lion at Cannes. If you didn’t already know, The Wilderness Downtown didn’t just compete, it won the whole damn category, taking home a Cyber Grand Prix.

One angry message board poster asserted that this project was a music video, an art piece, and shouldn’t have been in the same field of competition as efforts that were built by agencies for “real” brands.

True, it is a music video, but one that demonstrates a point of the difference of something we use more often than toilet tissue or beer – a web browser. The Wilderness Downtown was a project spearheaded by Google and Chris Milk to showcase the capabilities of Google Chrome and HTML5. Last I checked Google was a real brand, a rather big and important one at that.

Maybe it was the absence of an agency or the lack of any sort of promotional language that made The Wilderness Downtown seem like less of an ad. Or maybe it was involvement of Arcade Fire that made the project cool beyond fairness.

True, it’s cool, almost unfairly so. You may have just gotten a brief for deodorant or glass cleaner and wonder how you’re supposed to live up to this new creative standard. Thing is, the business has always been this way. Creatives in places like Portland have always had better assignments than creatives in, say, Chicago. Is the Google and Chris Milk collaboration a better gig than being an agency art director on dishwashing detergent? Probably. But, as they say in Cannes, c’est la vie.

To say this this should be a “wake up call” to our industry would be cliché because there seems to be a new one each week. But there are a number of great lessons to be had. For instance, you don’t need a dozens of teams and traditional client-agency process to make something like this, just a handful of talented people who share a vision. Also, if you show viewers how well something works you don’t have to tell them in the end with words. And when you make something that’s personally meaningful and insufferably cool, people will engage.

So, what is it? An ad? An act? Art piece? Media object? I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's an experience that demonstrates a product. And not only does it belong in our industry competitions, it should be considered the new industry standard.

 

 

 

 

Little is known about the space pop super group/person/machine that is Valotihkuu. A simple search reveals nothing of who they are or where they came from, which is fine. The name, Valotihkuu, and the amazing DIY video for “Bedroom Pop” are more interesting than their music. The song is little more than a “crunked version of Madonna’s ‘Lucky Star,’” as @phonetical so eloquently described it.

While we may never know the meaning behind the name Valotihkuu, the video is a little easier to parse. We have mid-80’s humans using technology that, according to Moore’s Law, marks the dawn of the Integrated Circuit Era. According to Ray Kurzweil, this exponential growth in calculations per second will lead to a “Singularity” in which artificial intelligence passes human intelligence. But that’s just the theory of a man who collects porcelain cats. Which is fine. Who am I to judge? After all, I wrote a book about cats.

Back to Valotihkuu and the “Bedroom Pop” video. When watching this for the first time, I kept wanting to see the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey appear in the vignettes. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? Humans using DOS and VCRs could mark another evolutionary leap for humans – not unlike the early hominids using bones as weapons.

Arthur C. Clarke’s novel identifies the monolith as, “a tool created by an alien race that has been through many stages of evolution, moving from organic forms, through biomechanics, and finally has achieved a state of pure energy. These aliens travel the cosmos assisting lesser species to take evolutionary steps.” (link)

To visualize this, I set the first monolith scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey against Valotihkuu’s “Bedroom Pop” and it seemed eerily appropriate. Watch:

But what if Kerzweil’s theory came true and Clarke’s little piece of science fiction is no longer fiction? What if the singularity already happened and humans have already achieved a state of pure energy? What if the “Bedroom Pop” video is the monolith? Perhaps “Bedroom Pop” was created by a hyper-developed being (named Valotihkuu) and posted on YouTube from the future to inform us that we’ve taken the next step in the inevitable evolutionary process. Something to think about as we peck away at these machines that will someday peck away at us.

I’m going to stop drinking coffee now.