Read any little books lately?

     Have you read "the little book"? Everyone in advertising and marketing should have a copy to read and re-read every year.

      "The little book", as it is known by professionals, is "The Elements of Style". It was originally written by William Strunk, Jr., an English professor at Cornell. Thirty-nine years later one of his students, New Yorker magazine essayist E.B. White, wrote the introduction and added a chapter.

      "The Elements of Style" makes the case for accuracy and brevity in 71 pages. It will help you become not only a better writer but also a clearer thinker. Everything will be sharper, with its edges showing. Professor Strunk was the enemy of ambiguity. Careless writers often use fuzzy language for pleasing doubters. Trouble is, customers want to know --- and are entitled to know --- exactly what a product will and won't do.

       "The little book" will help your writing get trimmer, slimmer, without losing any of its strength. It will help you cut out extra words and meaningless conversational fluff. Professor Strunk writes forcibly, and issues orders. White sharpened the points of these directives and aims them at the heart of today's writing. The book takes those things you learned in elementary school and helps you better understand and appreciate them, finally.

        You'll never again use language such as "a member of the student body" when you can just write "a student".

        You'll shudder at using such expressions as "the foreseeable future" because you'll wonder who can foresee what how far in advance.

        You'll understand that "type" is not a synonym for "kind of" and value the difference.

        You'll learn what to do when you become mired in a sentence; how muddiness destroys hope; how adjectives bleed nouns; and when never to use "not".

         I still use the 95-cent copy I bought when I was starting out. It's about $15 now, and even comes in a slightly more expensive illustrated edition.

        Buy it. Read it. Keep it. Use it. It can make a writer out of you.

The last of the speed livers.

        Ross and I worked together at our second jobs, at a large automotive ad agency in Detroit. I had started at a small agency in Chicago, Ross at the huge J. Walter Thompson in New York. He introduced himself as "the last of the speed livers"  --- meaning he lived at a furious pace. He worked at the office as an art director about 50 hours a week, then went home to be a husband and dad, worked all evening improving his house, and half the night as an artist.

       Watching Ross work on an ad was like watching one of those cartoon characters. It was a flurry of color, a blur that magically always turned into a striking ad. One day Ross' father came to the office and asked what he did. Ross showed him how he created layouts by using his great drawing skills. "You draw?" his father asked. "Don't let your boss know you do that on company time."

       We worked together only occasionally, because we were in different groups, but we became good friends. We lived in the same small Michigan town, Huntington Woods, and Ross picked me up every morning in his black VW beetle, and returned me at night. The return trip was more exciting. "There's a grab bar to hang onto," he'd say every night. "This is going to be a white knuckle ride." On the morning trip we'd tell what we planned to accomplish that day. On the way home we gave all the excuses why we couldn't.

        Three days in New York changed Ross forever. He and two friends of ours, Marv and Marty, snuck off to New York with suitcases full of samples, mounted on heavy cardboard, to get jobs. Marv and Marty got what they wanted; Ross got a job offer he really didn't want. He came back to Detroit and studied the "hot" New York agencies with a vengeance. Then turned around and went to Doyle Dane's L.A. office where he did those great VW outdoor boards, and then moved on to the hot new L.A. agency, Chiat/Day. That agency had a culture of hard work that suited Ross. (The company T-shirt said "Chiat/Day" on the front, "And Night" on the back.)

       Ross thrived at Chiat/Day, and became one of only 13 shareholders. He then moved to their San Francisco office as Creative Director. In a few years he retired to paint and called me up one day. "The cleaning lady comes to my condo to vacuum every Thursday. Can I come to your place and make ads with you?" I was thrilled, of course, and he stayed for three years.

       Today Ross is retired for good, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where his wife Jean is from. He is painting and writing books about people in advertising.

        I forgot to ask him if I'm one of them.



   

Just how social can you get?

        Jennifer Cobb is a good friend, and whenever I have dinner at her house I learn two things. One, how good homemade Mexican food can be; and two, more about the relationship between technology and culture. Jenn's an expert at both.

        This time I learned how concerned she was about Internet privacy, and how what we once considered ephemeral ("Hey, I like that!") has now become a permanent part of our digital history. Our online behavior influences search results, the ads we get, and how others view us.

        Jenn is concerned because of what she sees as a problem of asymmetry. When we meet on Facebook, we don't have an equal chance of knowing about each other. A lot is held back, and she feels that's why we're not so concerned about privacy. 

        Also out of alignment are big companies' interests in us. They want to sell us. We want to learn something or get help, usually not to be sold something.

         I told this to my students, and asked them about the implications. They agreed that Facebook was getting information that they could sell to advertisers, but thought it didn't much matter. Being on Facebook was simply great fun, even though only one student said she ever learned something important on it. 

         Personally I don't mind that Facebook wants to sell ads that target me, other than the aggravation of deleting over a hundred messages a day. They usually aren't things I want, and if they are, that's positive.

         In this regard, social media really doesn't change anything. I'll still only be interested in something relevant to me, or something that's cool that I want to know about. All this talk about digital targeting makes social influence marketing appear more powerful than it really is.

         You can target the hell out of me and I still won't be interested in snowboards or water skis, books about tropical fish, or cameras that work at high altitudes, even if I told somebody that I miss the change of seasons, went to the aquarium, or love the view from the penthouse of the TransAmerica Building.

         Sure, I'd like to know what my friend Jay thinks of a movie;  his comments may convince me to go. But if he just bought green socks, that won't send me rushing to the J. Crew website, because I wear only black socks. Social media, when all is said and done, is only media, and I care less about the medium than its content.

          Please pass the salsa.

It's all relative, in the Readers' Digest.

       This morning I heard the grim news about the Readers' Digest. It's in debt over $2 billion, and about to change owners again. Quite a comedown for a magazine that once had a circulation of 18 million copies in the U.S. and editions throughout South America.

       I've never been a regular reader of the Digest, but I have done many ads that had to appear in it. It was a particular favorite of General Motors. The magazine either had a lot of car-buying readers, or threw a lot of good parties.

      Doing an ad for the Digest is hard; the pages are so small. After trying to shrink a regular magazine ad to fit that size, we'd give up because we always had words and pictures left over. So we finally caught on and did the Readers' Digest ad first, and then blew it up to fit the others.

      As a result of all this aggravation, and because the ads looked so dinky in our portfolios, we'd often plead to have the Digest taken off the media list, which upset the publication's bosses no end. They tried everything, including taking all the art directors to the Bahamas for "training". At one of these workshops, they tried to sell the idea that everything's relative. A page ad has prestige and a page is a page, regardless of the size. We weren't buying it.

      TV Guide was exactly the same size then, and the Digest people said we could run the same ad in both. We asked why would we since they're different audiences? As a writer, I liked the size of a Digest ad. It always seemed like a good challenge, like writing a billboard. Besides, I didn't have to write as much.

      Another time my life intersected with that magazine was when I was in college. I wanted to go somewhere nice for spring vacation, but didn't have the funds. In the Journalism Department they announced that the Digest would pay $5,000 for a story by a student, if they felt it had journalistic significance. I searched but couldn't find one that would take me to Florida to write. Hey,Washington, D.C. was also nice in the spring, so I tried that.

     I read about William Worthy, a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American whose passport was rescinded because he went to Communist China. That's it! Freedom of the press! I got the $5,000 and spent my vacation in the cherry blossoms interviewing Senators, the State Department, the Soviet News Service TASS, journalists, Worthy's editor in Baltimore, even a member of the Supreme Court. The result was a long story that got me good press around school.

     I feel sad about the Readers' Digest's plight today. I guess the Internet is wiping them out. Along with any hopes I might have for another free vacation in Washington.

The tyranny of entertainment.

      In his book, "Life: the Movie", Neal Gabler points out that "No medium generated images like television...Compelled to keep us stimulated, less we switch channels or switch the set off altogether, television took everything on its screen and converted it to entertainment."

      Neal Postman, the author of "Amusing Ourselves to Death", took it one step further. To him, television was the cosmology that governed American life.

      Entertainment-as-life actually started much earlier than television. The editor of the original Vanity Fair magazine, Frank Crowninshield, described his magazine as an "increased devotion to pleasure, to happiness, to dancing, to sport, to the delights of the country, to laugher, to all forms of cheerfulness."

      This is how the critic Geoffrey O'Brien described the movies: "Everybody could go in the same dark room --- no matter where it happened to be located --- and zero in on precisely the same dream."

      The Internet helps us get to that dream faster, personalized to our tastes. This is the environment of intended pleasure in which our culture bathes us. The environment in which marketing and advertising either thrive or die.

      Who's the champion in the lingerie business? Maidenform, which informs us about the latest features in good fit, or Victoria's Secret, which entertains us with a fashion show? Who's the most talked-about success in the insurance business? Is it rock solid Prudential, or a parade of funny ducks, geckos, and a wily salesperson named Flo? In some categories, it's hard to choose a champion. Both Coke's and Pepsi's advertising will be glad to tickle you into being happy.

       Have marketing and advertising turned into entertainment? You bet. Is that good or bad?

       I believe it all depends on how the entertainment is being used. Bill Bernbach, the great creative person  that upset the "Mad Men" years, used to say that it's only okay to show a man standing on his head if you're advertising trousers with zippers on the pockets, so things won't fall out. That's the point. If the humor, music, animals, dancing, icons, and general fooling around help demonstrate something, or help us remember something, that's fine. If not, all that entertainment is wasted effort.

       For us in marketing, entertainment is a tool, not an end in itself.

      Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go put on my clown make-up.



     

Pointing a Tim Gunn to my head.

       Tim Gunn, the fashion mentor on "Project Runway", has a mantra for all of us: own your own look. I've been owning my own look and everybody else's for years.

       I went to a progressive high school in Winnetka, Illinois, where everyone was encouraged to be themselves. All the boys wore khakis and madras shirts. We bottomed it all off with fuzzy pigskin shoes, or white bucks. We did have a suit for important occasions. Mine was tweed, but luckily important occasions rarely happened in summer.

      When I went to college, I switched to button-down shirts and nondescript pants. Corduroys were okay, in a drab color.

      Once I graduated, I became a wardrobe schizophrenic. Looking in my closet you would've thought I was seven different people. For work, the idea was to look like the guy in the office next door; don't call attention to yourself. Grey jackets, ties with little amoeba designs, blue button-downs, and your pants from college. For weekends, you'd think those seven guys went up north and someone mixed and matched their clothes. I usually looked suburban on top, urban on the bottom, and western in the middle.

       If I went to an Alfred Hitchcock retrospective, I'd comb my hair and wear a striped tie like Cary Grant the next day. If I read a story about a safari or saw "Lawrence of Arabia", I'd find a safari shirt and look like I just crawled out of King Solomon's mines. After I saw "My Fair Lady", I dressed like Henry Higgins for a year. Now I've settled down to sport coats and nice pants and a cotton dress shirt.

       I'm telling you this because I respect Mr. Gunn and am tired of being the exception that proves his rule.   This lack of cultural intelligence seems to be present in a lot of my gender, and is undoubtedly the reason many men resent shopping so much. If there's a woman nearby who knows style and would like to donate a Saturday to a worthy cause, I'm it. These days, I can use a guide through the land of men's outerwear.

      The last time I went to Banana Republic, I asked the men's department manager a question. He said, "I have the perfect person to answer that." He left for four minutes and returned with an older woman. "This is Betty," he said. "She's an old-timer. She can help you." And she did. You'd think that after all these years we'd know how to dress ourselves.

       Again, anyone want to be a personal shopper?



     

The intern with portfolio.

       Last night I decided I need a new hat. For the last few years, the only thing I wore on my head was a baseball cap (Giants) and only when it rained. But watching "Mad Men" made me want something more substantial. I also want to put my trenchcoat back in rotation, but that will have to wait for winter.

       I even went down to the basement to see if I could find the attache case I bought when I was an intern. At the time, the attache case was a symbol of my success. It was the summer between my junior and senior year in college, and I was an intern at a big ad agency --- in Detroit. The pay was $175 a month, and my father said sending me there from Chicago cost him more than if he had sent me to camp.

       When I received the paycheck for the first two weeks, I practically ran over to Saks Fifth Avenue to look at leather attache cases. Everyone at the agency had one, and I wanted to be one of them. The one I wanted cost $55, and I had to think about it overnight, before I bought it. I do still have it, although by now it's pretty beat up.

        A week later at work, I won a contest to write a "house ad" --- an ad for our agency --- about the internship program. It ran in the New Yorker and Fortune magazines, and I came home with a proof for my portfolio. I also wrote two Chevy outdoor boards and a full-color trade ad about an agricultural bug killer. More for my portfolio.

       The agency was very impressive, and I was very impressionable. The beautiful, modern offices for the Copy Director and the Executive Art Director had a sliding wall between them, sort of a tip of the hat to the new New York idea of art and copy working together. Adjoining them were seemingly endless rows of offices for writers and art directors along the windows, with a huge open area in the middle. (I nicknamed the creative department the "elephant house", because it looked like the zoo, and was later told that tag stuck for years.)

       I loved those two months at the Detroit agency and made a lot of good friends. When I returned to college, I was sort of a celebrity in the Journalism Department, especially after that issue of the New Yorker came out. The professor for whom I worked two hours a day even voluntarily increased my pay by five dollars a month, to $40.

      That summer also gave me two things very valuable. It gave me a mentor and friend named Tom, whom I've cherished ever since, and the sense that I could make it in the world of advertising.

       Neither of which was a small thing for a kid with an attache case too big for his britches.