Money is the root.

           George Santayana, in his book "Character and Opinion in the United States", said this about our apparent love of money:

            "The American talks about money, because that is the symbol and measure he has at hand for success, intelligence, and power; but as to money itself he makes, loses, spends, and gives it away with a very light heart."

            I believe he's right. Why else would we be so happy to part with our money for shoes with red soles, or $98 for a t-shirt that says "Prada" on a small label inside. Obviously there are things more important than money.

            Every time we pull out our smart phones to check Facebook before we go home, we're voting for social connection rather than money. When we buy a Grande Macchiato and slowly sip it with our Maple Oat Scone, we've decided that being there is more important than the money.

           For the most part, we in this country have our needs pretty well attended to. We spend our money on experiences and other benefits.

           In marketing, the sense of that often escapes us. We tend to sell our age-defying makeup perhaps a bit too hard, and often other things not hard enough. When we spend a lot of money to buy a top-shelf vodka or tequila, are we really buying vodka or tequila? Or are we, to some extent, buying a badge to let everyone know who we are and what we value?

           We all say "money isn't everything" but we worry about money constantly. And when we get it, we don't always bank it. We often reward ourselves or make ourselves prettier, or let people know that we know what's best.

            When we go to Las Vegas, we come back with clothes and accessories we'll never wear at home. Our "Welcome to San Diego" pillows will never hit the living room couch.

            The psychology of persuasion is fascinating. Marketers who understand it have a chance of becoming rich and famous.

Working for a living

          When we were both starting out in advertising, I asked my art-director friend Ross what he liked about the work. He said "I get to wear a clean white shirt every day". That was a luxury his dad never had.

           Almost every day I think about how lucky we are. While some people are working deep in a mine, I'm chatting at the coffee machine. While some people are putting doors on cars, I'm critiquing television commercials. While some people are ironing clothes, or drilling teeth, or drilling for oil, I'm writing words on paper.

          I'm grateful. Doing advertising and marketing, and teaching skills that students will use the rest of their lives, are wonderful ways to spend the day.

          I have to admit, when someone asks you what you did at work, it can be embarrassing. "I drew little pictures on paper."  "I came up with a headline at lunch." "We talked about why some men hate to go clothes shopping." It almost sounds like we didn't do anything that kids don't do --- we  played around with words and pictures and talked about stuff.

          But that's how creativity works. The demand on creative people to come up with something new every day can be a horrible burden if you let it. But if you just live with it, go with it, dive right in, it can be an enlightening experience. You'll even surprise yourself with what you come up with.

          When someone on "Mad Men" says copywriting is hard work, don't laugh. There is plenty of heavy lifting, but it's all in your head.

          One day Ross' father came in to visit him at the office. He asked Ross what he was doing. Ross said, "I'm drawing some people driving down a highway". His father said, "You're drawing at work? Don't let your boss find out!"

          It's wonderful to have a boss who encourages it.

Ads for the great outdoors.

         Advertising is, ultimately, persuasion. It's not information, it's not news, it's not entertainment. Although all of those can be put to use if they help persuade.

         One of the biggest challenges, literally and figuratively, is the category called "outdoor". The big billboards we see on the highways and boulevards, the painted walls on the sides of buildings, and the smaller boards we see near supermarkets and on city streets.

         There used to be two types: paints and posters. Now most are actually huge computer print-outs, stretched between the frames.

          The first thing to keep in mind is that most billboards are see from cars driving by at 50 miles an hours or so. They have to be very simple. The Outdoor Advertising Bureau suggests using seven or eight words. The good news is that most people drive the same route every day, so they see your board often.

          Outdoor is often called the "reminder medium", because it's hard to introduce a new product so simply. The car companies use outdoor to show their new models, but use TV and magazines for the heavy lifting.

          The best outdoor advertising, like all print advertising, relies on how the words combine with the visuals. One of the all-time greats was a board for the VW "bus". It showed seven or eight nuns, in their habits, getting out. The headline: "Mass transit". When you put the words and picture together in your head, it was a delightful discovery.

          As a young copywriter in Detroit, I was called to a meeting about our client Chevrolet. It seems President Lyndon Johnson's wife felt that outdoor boards were spoiling the vistas of the great outdoors. Chevy was the biggest user of outdoor ads at the time, and wanted a response. What should we do?

         We had to create boards that didn't spoil the scenery, and maybe even contributed to it. We did beautiful designs that saluted the wide open spaces in words and pictures. My own contribution was a board that hat only the word Chevrolet atop the frame --- and everything inside cut out and removed. You would look right through it and enjoy the scenery.

         Somehow, the problem soon dissolved, but it was fun to try to solve it.

         Try writing some outdoor boards for a product you like, with no more than eight words. See what a good exercise it is.

         And it better be persuasive!

Creative directors aren't people.

          What I finally learned about putting my portfolio together was that my cereal ad wasn't there to sell cereal, my airline ad wasn't there to sell seats, and my whiskey ad wasn't there to help people socialize at the end of the day.

           They were all in my book to sell the same thing: me.

           Creative directors aren't going to read your portfolio the way your friends read a magazine. They look at it mainly because they have to. At the end of a long day making and critiquing ads for their clients, their job description says they have to look at more. They have a position to fill, have to help a young person start her career, or simply take the temperature of the available talent out there.

            Keep all that in mind. The creative director or recruiter is daring you to make them smile and even laugh. Your job has to impress. Break the ice. Demonstrate that you can land running. Your job is to convince them they need you. Not because you knew how to sell cereal, but because you can come up with ideas for them, to make the creative director rich and famous.

             Your work has to be the kind the creative director doesn't want to slip away.

             It doesn't always work the way you want it to, though. When I was in my 20s and in New York on a photo shoot, a headhunter made an appointment for me to show my reel at one of the top ad agencies. The creative director went nuts over one of my commercials for Hush Puppies shoes. He called all his art directors and writers into the conference room to "show you the kind of commercials we should be doing".

             After his department saw it and filed out, I asked to hear more about the job. "No", he said,"I don't think you're right for our agency".

             Two weeks later, that same commercial got me a job at another agency. It also sold a lot of shoes.

             Today your samples have to be online, and it's even easier for the creative director to push the delete button. You may not be there to explain the problem and what a nifty solution you came up with and how the client gushed over it.

              Your work will be there, all alone, with a creative director who has seen everything.

               And is about to look you over.

Is creativity a joke?

         This morning, I heard on the radio the results of a study involving Robin Williams. After listening to five minutes of his comedy, the survey participants suddenly became 20% more creative in solving problems. Speaking was Jonah Lehrer, author of "Imagine: How Creativity Works".

        I never would've suspected that humor leads to creativity. I've always thought it worked the other way around.  That creative people would be 20% funnier than non-creative people.

       The link between comedy and creativity has interested me for some time. In high school, I became a scholarly observer of comedians, comparing their techniques, their timing, their facial and body motions, and so on. I took copious notes. I thought that, somehow, that interest (and my long-lost ability to mimic them) contributed to my ability in advertising.

        Most of the advertising that we call creative tends to be funny. We love humorous commercials, quoting them to our friends and posting them on YouTube. It's the unemotional straight ones that we call boring.

        Like ad people, comedians have to be quick on their feet. They have to think fast and respond fast, lest the humor be lost. Or they get hit with tomatoes. I believe this speed facility is related to intelligence, another ingredient of creativity.Yes, the Three Stooges were smart.

         Steve Jobs said creativity was the ability to connect things. To connect existing ideas in a way that creates something new. That, of course, is what creative people do. So do comedians, when you think about it. Creativity always seems like more than a connection, but Jobs certainly was a creative connector --- of people, of ideas and knowledge --- and the results were incredible products.

        This connection business can be misleading. I don't think you can just sit back and wait for your brain to connect things. It's probably more productive to try to solve a problem, and let the connections seep in.

        In advertising, we're charged with connecting people with products and services. I suggest starting with people, and working the connection to products. Starting with products is where all the uncreative advertising comes from.

        Come to think of it, maybe we all should start by listening to Robin Williams.

         


   

Is your client your real client?

          In many advertising agencies, there's the attitude that it's the client's money we're spending, so the clients should be whom we please. That kind of thinking can lead to disaster.

           Clients are often right, but not always. If they're wrong, they should be told. Or you're wasting their money.

           As marketing and advertising people, our job is to know the customer.  We're paid to know what she desires, fears, hopes for and dreams of. We're paid to put that understanding to work in helping people choose things and ideas and services.

           What a client does or doesn't like is irrelevant. "I don't like purple" is not a valid reason for changing an ad. "Our customers don't like purple" probably is.

           One of our clients was a chain of pet supply stores. We went through months of recommending they go on the Internet. They said no, their customers don't go on the Internet. Their customers were too busy playing with their dogs and cats.

           Finally, they admitted they were wrong, and decided to go on the Web. They insisted on doing it entirely by themselves. The day they launched, they thought they would go broke. They offered $25 worth of treats to everyone who registered. By 10:30 that morning, 8,500 people had registered. By 3 o'clock, 25,000 had registered. Packing and shipping the boxes would break them.

           We suggested they email coupons, instead. Had they listened to us earlier, we could've saved them a lot of grief.

           An art director who had worked for me became creative director of Doyle Dane Bernbach in Toronto. Their policy about likes and dislikes by clients was very clear. There are only three reasons a client could reject an ad: if it was factually incorrect; if it was against company policy; if it was a legal problem.  That's it.

           I asked him what happens if a client doesn't like it. He said it was the account manager's job to sell it. He said it should stay in the trunk of the account person's car until he finds a way.

           I'm not really as tough as I may sound. If a client doesn't like purple, I'll tell him why we used it. If he still hates it, there are plenty of other colors in the world.

           But ultimately, the only client is the ultimate customer. If she isn't sold, we can argue till we're purple.

       

Let's meet to decide on the meeting.

          With one exception, the most creative people I know in advertising love the work but hate the meetings. They see meetings as stressful, unproductive get-togethers where participants dance on their tongues.

           I once made a deal with one of the country's top art directors. He agreed to work for us at a greatly reduced rate if I would promise him he wouldn't have to go to meetings. I agreed and paid the price: I had to go to every meeting.

          Over the years I think I've mellowed and become more of a meeting person. I never used to talk very much (and not at all if somebody else from the agency would). Then I realized that it could actually be fun to present ads and commercials, and I became good at it. I remember a 9 a.m. meeting in Indianapolis where I had to present 18 television commercials to the executive committee of Gatorade. I didn't faint once.

           After presenting the work at a meeting, I want to leave the room. All the discussions, vacillating, bantering and posturing aren't for me. I'm not Judge Judy.

           But because I had to defend the work when nobody around could do it well, I became very lawyerly about it. I listened carefully and marshalled all my arguments.

           The better I became at meetings the more meetings I was invited to, and the more I bristled at them. I always wished I had a twin, separated at birth, who could go in my place and fill me in later.

           I did learn a lot, though. I learned how to yawn with my mouth closed. How to read upside-down when presenting an ad or a storyboard.

          And I learned at exactly what instant you had to say something or forever be known as a non-contributor.

           Ultimately, meetings are a part of business, so we have to get used to them. I certainly intend to.