Thursday, September 28, 2006

An Open Letter to The Bounce Agency

To My Blog Stalker:

I don’t know who you are, Mr. or Ms. Minion of The Bounce Agency. I don’t know if you are a copywriter, an art director, a media gal, an account wonk or a bored intern. I don’t know if you are a man, woman or internet-loving mutant goat. I just know you’ve looked at my blog every single day since I installed my site counter. And that was weeks ago.

Why?

Why do you darken the door of my AdHole on such a regular basis? Does the natural beauty of South Carolina not adequately fill your soul? Are my observations about life, advertising and lemurs so weighty that you simply cannot wait for a new one to be posted? Are you simply crying out in your loneliness, hoping to find a kindred soul in the vast cosmos of the intergorelactic cyberuniverse?

Or are your motives more nefarious? I warn you: Do not taunt the power of the shiv.

Reveal yourself!

Later,

Fox

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Once Upon a Manifesto

I was cleaning out my emails this morning when I happened upon the missive I sent to my fellow creatives at Bernstein-Rein on my last day back in February 2005. Here’s the meat of that email, offered because I believe it all to still be true. My apologies for the inside jokes, but you’ll get the idea. Also, I need to buy more black clothing.

Things to Remember When Creating an Ad (and Other Random Musings):

  1. Nobody wants to read/watch your ad; give them a reason to.

  2. You will constantly have to remind others that you don't need to say the product in the first sentence of a TV spot. It's 30 seconds. If you can't hold someone's attention for the 20 seconds it takes you to get to the product name, find some other line of work.

  3. A technique or look is no substitute for substance. Monkeys, however, are.

  4. When someone tells you, "We'll really have to do a good job of casting for this one," look him in the eye and respond, "Well, you know, that *is* actually our job." Although I personally prefer something much more sarcastic.

  5. If a direct-mail person tells you you have to have an odd number of bullet points, use one per subhead. After all, you can't argue with the science behind a 1% response rate.

  6. Never underestimate the intelligence of your audience. The subtleties of value-priced hemorrhoid cream are lost on few.

  7. The AE is not your CD/writer/art director/producer no matter what the Wal-Mart account people think.

  8. The next time someone tells you, "We've got to pick our battles," ask them if they can even remember the last battle they picked.

  9. Ellipses are the devil's handiwork and/or handmaiden (sorry, Shan).

  10. Assume you're right until proven otherwise.

  11. It's the little compromises that add up to a giant bucket of suck.

  12. Black is still slimming.


Later,

Fox

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Diddy Denied

I’m on a roll. It took them over a week, but McSweeneys.net has rejected my list from this blog.

That’s just wrong. “Scone Father” alone should’ve gotten it approved. I shall crush them for their insolence.

Later,

Fox

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Sweetest Day of the Yarrrrrrrrrrrrrr

That’s right, kids, it’s National Talk Like a Pirate Day. So go on. Avast something. Scrape off the barrrrrnacles and carrrrrrbuncles from ye keel. Eat a Pop Tarrrrrrrrt™ and watch a Peter Saarrrrrrsgaarrrrrrrrd movie.

Latarrrrrrrr,

Capt. Fox

Monday, September 18, 2006

Hacks vs. Artistes

Extremism, as Katie Couric incessantly reminds us, is bad. Bad, bad, bad. The extreme right wing, bad. The extreme left wing, bad (unless you’re Katie). Extreme sports, dangerous. Extreme spelled X-treme, dumb. Extreme bingo, unsafe for senior citizens. Anything taken to the extreme strikes most people as a bit fanatical and as something not to be trusted. Hence the poor sales of Right Guard Xtreme deodorant. No one wants their antiperspirant to push the limits of fair play with their sweat glands. It’s just rude.

So what about the extreme camps that exist in advertising? The first camp is one that most, if not all, of the people reading this blogtacular prose will readily decry – a group I collectively label The Hacks.

You know The Hacks. They’re the people that keep using stock photos of men shaking hands and men pointing at computer screens and men standing around with a look of unspecified concern. Many Hacks can be found in agencies with names like Awesome Advertising Concepts, SuperPostcards+ and Deutsch. The Hack believes that advertising is a science. A science best practiced through direct mail or, as they call it, The Direct Response Paradigm. They have a euphemistic name for everything. They don’t mail things in boxes or tubes. The send them in Dimensional Mailers. A postcard is a Business Reply Card – the dreaded BRC. And they have rules aplenty. Always use an odd number of bullet points. Always use a lot of bullet points. Oversized postcards really stand out even though everyone else is using an oversized postcard. Put the same message on both sides of the Self-Mailing Oversized Post Message Delivery Unit just in case the spammee doesn’t flip the card over. Even though no one in the history of everything has ever not flipped a postcard over. The Hacks know what they’re doing, dang it. And it doesn’t matter what your brand stands for or to whom you’re advertising – if you want to sell something, they’ve got a formula to do it.

You hate The Hacks. I hate The Hacks. If we have a department of Hacks in our office, we often argue with them. Hacks give the rest of us the stench of hucksterism. And if I’m going to stink, I prefer my own natural musk. It’s kind of like creamed corn. You’d love it.

At the other side of the scale is a group that doesn’t get its nose tweaked very often. A group that is generally praised and even worshipped in the Halls of Advertising. They are The Artistes. Artistes believe that advertising is not just an art form, it’s *the* fine art form of the 21st century. Tapping into the zeitgeist. Altering the zeitgeist. Excessively using the term “zeitgeist.” The Artistes worship at the Alter of Bogusky, even if he thinks they’re all wankers. They wonder – out loud – why Spielberg hasn’t tapped them to pen the next Indiana Jones after seeing their wicked awesome Downy Dryer Ball spot. The Artistes believe in Advertising for the sake of Advertising. A cool ad is a cool ad, so what if no one remembers whom it was for.

The Artistes bug me almost as much as The Hacks. Almost. But I believe it’s easier to knock an Artiste down to the reality of being real advertising creative artist than it is to pull a Hack out the swamp of one-percent response rates (score!). An Artiste usually has a bit of talent whereas a Hack, well, is a hack. Nonetheless, both groups need to be kicked in the head a bit. The Hacks, just because. It won’t help, but it feels good. The Artistes need to be reminded that advertising is not the be-all-end-all of artistic endeavors. Most people, when asked, will not tell you that “1984” is the best commercial ever produced.


They’ll probably stick out their tongue and say, “Whassup?!” And telling them that that is so 2000 is not going to help. There’s a reason we have to give ourselves so many awards. And it’s not because we’re all so flippin’ sweet. So chill out, Chachi.

Make it cool. Make it work. Go home.

Later,

Fox

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Holiday Inn Back with the Wacky


A few years ago, Holiday Inn ran one of my all-time favorite campaigns. You know the one. It featured a 30-something loser named Michael who lived with his parents and grandmother. Instead of getting a job, he kept trying to get perks, rewards and whatnot that prompted one of his cohabitants to query, “What do you think this is, a Holiday Inn?” It was basically the same spot done over a dozen times, yet each one was so well done with such crisp writing and acting that you didn’t care that you knew the punch line. Now that’s good stuff.

Since then, I really have no idea what Holiday Inn has done in the way of broadcast advertising. (And the great Holiday Inn Express campaign doesn’t count as it’s for a sub-brand.) But the company has decided to crawl out of whatever advertising spider hole in which they were hiding to unleash a new TV campaign aimed simply at getting people to rethink their impressions of the chain. Produced by their long-time agency Fallon, these spots feature three coworkers – Ted, Marcus and Zack – on an office trip. Simple, sometimes bizarre hilarity ensues.

I think these broke in June, but I’ve just started seeing them in heavier rotation. Probably because the new season is upon and watch NBC for hours each night just for previews of “The Office” and “My Name is Earl.”

Anyway, go watch.

Later,

Fox

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Once More Into the Breach

Time to take another stab at McSweeney’s Lists.

Other Names Besides “Diddy” That Sean Combs Can’t Use in Britain

P. Haggis
Bono
Q. Mum
Sir Mix-a-Lot
Scone Father

Pure gold, baby. Pure gold.

Later,

Fox

Monday, September 11, 2006

Remembering 9/11

Today marks the fifth anniversary of 9/11/2001. But I will leave it to others to report and opine upon what this day represents. Instead, I offer a little bit of happiness as to what 9/11 means to me. Not 9/11/2001, but 9/11/2002. The day I met my wife. One of the saddest days in human history is, for me, forever intermingled with one of the happiest days of my life. The supremely bitter with the overwhelmingly sweet. Ain’t that the way life goes.

God bless,

Fox

Friday, September 08, 2006

Pimping with Scissors

And now a spot that freaked me out so much the first time I watched it that I managed to block it out of my mind for over a week: “Scissors” from Discover Card. You’ve seen it. And if you haven’t, you will. The spot where thousands of ubiquitous orange-handled Fiskars parade around town cutting up credit cards that townspeople, more or less, feed them.

Basically, it plays out like a prologue to a remake of “The Birds,” only with cutlery. First there are a few scissors skipping about innocently. The townsfolk are puzzled, yet accepting. Then one of them tosses a credit card – how he knew to do this is a mystery – and suddenly humanoid/shears bonding ensues. The streets are lined with adoring throngs tossing their MasterCards, Visas and AMEX cards to the waiting jaws of what? Credit freedom? Maiming? Death? We even see a little baby (not a frickin’ huge baby like Howard Dean) toss one of her mother’s cards to a scissor.

Awwwwwww. How cute.

But the subtext of this spot is much darker than the happy, shiny blade overlords would have you believe. First, from where did these scissors come from? Satan’s own Office Depot? Newman’s Own desk drawer? Albuquerque? Second, and more important, the townspeople have obviously learned nothing from history. Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Hitler (“Hey, what’s a little Poland between friends, Guv’ner?”) eventually led to atrocities far greater than Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor,” correct? So what happens when the citizens of Hooterville run out of credit cards to feed the scissor overlords? Yeah, that’s what I thought, Mr. Craven.

I’ll stop rambling like an over-analyzing marketing manager now.

Later,

Fox

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Rollin’ Back the Years


So yeah. I was on the front page of the business section of The Dallas Morning News yesterday. The accompanying photo, as you see here, was taken the day after The Great Hair Reduction of 2006. Good timing. But, more importantly, the article has basically made me the poster boy for Gen Y.

That’s right, people. The Dallas Morning News thinks that a soon-to-be 34-year-old pasty man with lanky overtones is the perfect portraiture of a generation made up of people aged 3 to 29, according to Wikipedia. Good call, guys. Well played.

Granted, the entire article, or a least the parts related to me, is awash in half-truths and misreporting. It’s about how businesses are tooling their spaces to be more Gen Y-friendly. Whatever. We work at an ad agency. Our space was designed by Baby Boomers and Gen Xers to be, that’s right, a cool ad agency. Not as a sop to junior folks fresh off the graduation boat.

Anyway, the main quote, “My room – oh, I mean, office,” was just a slip of the tongue by one of my junior writers. The reporter then spun that into making our entire office seem like one big home away from home. She called our concept room a den. It’s not. How many dens do you know of that are T-shaped and have a giant dry erase board taking up one wall? (The space, by the way, is called The Furnace.) And we don’t have a living room. We have a kitchen/lounge area where we get coffee and sometimes eat lunch. Craziness. Madness. Insanity.

Oh, and they misspelled my partner’s name. It’s James Helms. Not Helm. Idiots. And they only show his feet. Although they are, as the ladies will tell you, his fourth best feature.

Whatever. I have poster boy duties to which I must attend. At least until the masses turn their attention from me to Paris Hilton’s DUI. Which should happen just. About. Now.

Later,

Fox

Friday, September 01, 2006

It MUST Be the Advertising

So, JCPenney – headquartered a few miles away from whence I write this – has dumped DDB in favor Saatchi (does the second Saatchi get peeved that we always leave him off?). Great. More power to Saatchi for landing a $430 million account. Will they do better advertising for this once-great department store? You got me. But I do that the reason I generally avoid Penney’s is, well, they blow. Their store layouts are cramped with merchandise racks spilling out into the aisles. Their product mix is lacking. And a fair chunk of their salespeople seem like folks who were rejected by Nordstrom and then rejected by Dillard’s. And maybe even Big Lots.

Yet their sales have been strong the past couple of years. Go figure. And feel free to ride that train as long as you can, Saatchi. I look forward to your Fall Linen Clearance Sale spots.

Later,

Fox