I feel bad about Nora.

          A gifted writer I admire has passed away. Surely you've heard of Nora Ephron.

          She is the author of bestsellers "Heartburn" and "Crazy Salad", and "I Feel Bad About My Neck". Nora received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay for "When Harry Met Sally", "Silkwood", and "Sleepless in Seattle", which she directed as well. She wrote "You've Got Mail" and the play, "Imaginary Friends".

          Few people have brought so much joy to so many. Here's a bit of what she wrote about handbags: "I hate my purse. I absolutely hate it. This is for women who hate their purses, are bad at purses, who understand that their purses are reflections of negative housekeeping, hopeless disorganization, a chronic inability to throw anything away, and an on-going failure to handle the obligations of a demanding and difficult accessory. The obligation, for example, that it should, in some way, match what you're wearing."

           I loved the way Nora Ephron wrote,the way she thought. She was sharpened to a precise instrument. If she was famous for anything, it was her vulnerabilities.We have that in common. Not being famous, being vulnerable. She said that when she was young, she wanted to write like Dorothy Parker.

           I hope you don't think it's inappropriate, but I'd like to end with this Nora Ephron comment, which I've laughed out loud about for years: "Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the upside of death."

           Goodbye, Nora. We should've told you long ago that we loved you just as you were.

To hop or not.

         A headline in Advertising Age got my attention: "Intelligent job hopping now the best way to achieve job security". I guess that depends on how you define "intelligent job".

         My entire career in advertising was based on job hopping, I don't ever remember being secure. I hopped just about every time someone offered me a new job. It always sounded better than where I was at. Suddenly my present job seemed a lot less good than it did the day before.

          It wasn't just the money. It was the scope of the new position. The authority, the budget, the "opportunity".

          According to the piece in Ad Age, there are four big advantages to changing jobs:

          1. Experience. "Every agency works with different brands that require distinctive thinking and ideas." So I guess you get experience but the client doesn't. That's silly.

          2. Networks. "It's all about who you know." I've known a lot of great people in the ad business. Every time you leave an agency, you kiss them goodbye, usually for good. Except for your now-ex-boss, for whom you've created a lot of problems by leaving.

          3. Salary bump. "Probably the best way to increase your pay." And your unhappiness, unless you're very lucky.

         4. Creative fertilizer. "Most people need change and a chance to reinvent themselves." True, most do. The good people are already reinvented.

          By now you get my point. I've job-hopped a lot, and it's a lot like falling in love with anyone who sends you a valentine or asks you to dance. I would've been just as well off staying put all these years. And if you're the type of person who's willing to continue learning all the time, you'll keep learning while staying put.

           I must admit I don't know how job-hopping gets you more security. It's always taken mine away, and taken about a year or two to get it back.

     

It's been a (long) year.

        For those of you who haven't been counting, I've written 365 of these pieces in the last year, one a day no matter what. "No matter what" covers a lot of ground.

        When I first started, my nephew Jeremy urged me on. Jeremy is in L.A., where he's the Mac technician to the stars, and a very good guy. His company name is Macman. But even his familial loyalty gave out after a month or so, and I haven't heard from him since.

         All of these pieces have been written for educational purposes. Writing them is how I educate myself. My students of advertising and marketing say they like them as well. Maybe I should give them a quiz.

         The other morning one of my colleagues told me this blog has a lot to offer. I asked how she happened to read it and she said it was recommended by a friend of hers who teaches in the United Arab Emirates. He emailed her that he recommends it to his students.

         An average of a thousand different people read this every month. That's scary. It really whips up my anxiety level.

         On days I commute from Berkeley to San Francisco, I write these in the morning on BART, the trans-Bay train. The other days I write them at  PIQ, the wonderful Italian coffee house in Berkeley. Then I edit them in the evening and post them first thing in the morning. It's become an obsession.

         Starting today, I hope to go on a different schedule. Mondays-Wednesdays-Fridays. But since there are hundreds you haven't read, you're still invited to come here tomorrow. That would be good.

         When I first became an ad agency creative director, I was a wreck. The title was great, but what if all my time was taken up doing administrative stuff? So I decided to take advantage of my new position and assign all the interesting jobs to myself. People started grumbling, but then I decided it was not only fine but appropriate. Those kinds of tough problems deserved my thinking.

          Besides, every writer has to write. Thus, my blog.

          I'd like to hear from you, so please keep commenting. That way, I won't run out of ideas. Hopefully, neither will you.

         See you Wednesday.

Changing the odds in "The Pitch".

          Biographer Walter Isaacson quoted Steve Jobs: "There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by e-mail and iChat. That's crazy."

           Jobs knew that creativity came from people meeting spontaneously and having random discussions. That is, when ideas don't come from one brilliant creative person just thinking by herself.

           When I was Creative Director at Chevrolet's ad agency in Detroit, we called it "a 360° walk around the problem". It was a technique for revealing every useful concept, and I've used it successfully for many new business pitches.

           I realized early on that expecting a potential client to hire your agency based on one or two ideas was almost like daring them to hire you. The odds were terrible.

          So we always told a client that we started off by looking at ideas from every point of view. For cars, for example, an historic point of view, a woman's point of view, a family's point of view, a technological point of view, an economic point of view, various social and psychological points of view, and so on.

          Once we introduced our "walk", we got over 80% of all the accounts we pitched, large and small.The ultimate test was a few years later when we made our presentation to the Mexican Tequila Producers' Association. Their marketing committee came to visit us at Interpublic's offices in Chicago for their $10-million account and I presented an elaborate version of a "360° Walk Around Tequila". It took a good 45 minutes and the next morning we were awarded the account. That's when I was first told how great that was, because nobody on their committee spoke or understood English.

          Steve Jobs was right again. Our agencies' ideas were arrived at nose to nose, pencil to paper. Nothing phoned in, texted, or Skyped in.

          I'll drink to that.

Lonely enough to face Facebook?

           The Atlantic is worried. In their May, 2012 issue, the magazine asked, "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?"

           The article by Stephen Marche says that we never have been lonelier or more narcissistic. "This loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill." He calls it an epidemic.

           Marche's condemnation is flat out. "We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information."

          He admits that while solitude can be lovely, crowded parties can be agony. "Loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state," he says. 

          The article quotes the UCLA Loneliness Scale, which shows loneliness rising drastically over a very short period recently. Is social media to blame, even partly?

          Research shows that today we meet fewer people in person, as we increase our "friendships" in social media dramatically. To discuss our real problems, we hire 77,000 clinical psychologists, 30,000 social workers, 400,000 non-clinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental-health counsellors, 220,000 substance abuse counsellors, 17,000 nurse-therapists, and 30,000 life coaches.

          And being lonely is bad for our health. Marche says technology is enabling our tendancy for isolation. Here are some things to think about:

          1. Does Facebook encourage more contacts outside of family, at the expense of family contacts?

          2. Do lonely people spend more and more time on Facebook? Is it a substitute for personal relationships?

          3. Does "Liking" substitute for expressing yourself fully?

          4. Is wandering through Facebook a lonely task or a social task for you?

          The article concludes that loneliness is not something that social media is doing to us. It's something we're doing to ourselves.

          Whatever is going to become of solitude?

Threatened by a little bug.

           I owe you an update on my Volkswagen Beetle. You've heard how thrilled I was to own one, and I haven't had a moment's trouble. From the car.

          The Beetle I bought is a beige convertible. Car people call it a camel ragtop. It is what it is.

           I think it should be re-named the Rodney Dangerfieldmobile. Driving it, I get no respect.

           People in every other make and model are passing me up, cutting me off, going around me, and generally letting me know that their Dodges and Subarus are much more important than my Beetle. Much more stature and substance.

           It's something I've never experienced before, and I certainly wasn't prepared. Of course I'm evolved enough to understand that it's just envy. Piston envy, I guess.

           These so-called other motorists have undoubtedly been wanting a VW Beetle since they were in high school, at home studying for their drivers' license eye tests. They've always wanted a car that gets in small parking places, has a trunk big enough for a loaf of bread, and no ego. In other words, a car that either says they're cool or on the runway for take-off to their midlife crises.

           I really don't know how to get even with them. My driving is pretty normal and I want it to stay that way. I certainly can't tell grown men that they wasted their youth, that love makes the world go 'round, and that they should stop and smell the roses instead of cutting me off at the corner.

           Incidentally, it's always men who are this rude and ruthless. The women are too busy on their cellphones to notice.

Here's Johnny.....

           Ed McMahon had a great quote on a recent TV documentary about Johnny Carson. He said, about being a sidekick, "You had to be good, but not too good".  I've been there, done that in advertising.

           I've paid my dues as the sidekick to a variety of creative directors, each with their own priorities and their own schtick. It wasn't easy.

          As Associate Creative Director, I worked for one CD who simply left it up to me to get all the department's work done. He knew I could be depended on to get everything done, even if I had to do a ton of it myself. He said I was "the perfect combination of the Protestant work ethic and Jewish guilt". He spent most of his time at lunch.

          Another creative director loved my work, discussed his problems with me --- until his envy finally emerged. After a meeting he threw a dart into one of my layouts he had presented in the meeting. Being the strong, silent type, I never did tell him why I quit.

         Still another creative director I worked for simply over-creative-directed. Everything had to be exactly his way. He came to every meeting equipped with two red pencils and two red pens. He re-wrote people's copy on the spot. When I left he offered me a huge raise to stay. But it was blood money.

         Throughout these tenures, I learned to be "good but not too good". It had its rewards. Good pay, a good title, a good amount of respect. I agreed to be second banana in return for less responsibility. I could always duck and let my boss take the fall for unpopular decisions.

          But I also had less authority to do things my way. I eventually let myself become the top banana and took the bad with the good. It had its painful moments (such as when you come in second on a new account). Ultimately it felt more honest.

         My advice to you: go for it!

(Footnote: Top banana and second banana are burlesque and vaudeville terms. The second banana takes it in the kisser with the soda water. The top banana is the comic who does the spritzing.)