Availability Is The Most Important Ability

In an increasingly digital world, more and more people work remotely.

I think it's wonderful that we can work from anywhere. I firmly believe, however, that being in the same location as colleagues changes everything.

When you're separated by scores, hundreds or thousands of miles it becomes all to easy to forget that there are people with complementary abilities who can complete and improve upon what you're doing.

We look to those nearby.

We look to those who show up every day.

We look to those who always have their hands raised to answer questions and offer assistance.

If you're not around, you won't have the opportunity to do the work.

Onboarding Sounds Like Waterboarding.

A day of onboarding activities is a delirious waste of productive time.

Just like mandatory corporate fun.

I don't want to team build.

I don't want to listen to someone pontificate on how I can better align with the corporate culture.

I don't want to learn how I can live the company's values.

I have a team (that conveniently shares an address and dinner table with me).

I have a culture that has nothing to do with work (and it involves a lot of getting dirty in a garden).

I have a set of values that I live every minute of every day. Heck, I've even written about my rules, and how everything is a matter of integrity.

So what do I want?

I want to do my best work, collect my paycheck, and get back to the people and things that matter.

Keep the fruit punch. It's just that much more for everyone who cares about such things.

Sic Semper Tyrannis

As I look at another series of all-too-soon deadlines, I'm reminded of a single, inescapable truth of working in advertising

The tyranny of immediacy is the biggest danger to creativity.

Everything is due yesterday—usually figuratively though often literally. There's barely time to fill the prescription as written, so there's certainly a limited time to actually review an ad brief and truly diagnose the problem.

So we have to be ahead of any brief. We must render it almost meaningless to the work except to tell us when, where and in what media our work will appear.

The only solution I can see is for copywriters to regain control of the brief.

The only way to regain control of the brief is to make it utterly obsolete.

You know what clients you have, what products they peddle, and what results they want. If you don't, you should. So find out.

Then spend time thinking about your audience. Use whatever you can to get a feel for how they think and work and live. Your own research is best. Primary research from your colleagues is second best. Everything else is lesser, but at least it's something.

Absorb the information. Memorize it if there's data involved. Make that customer your best friend. Then craft your messages accordingly, and in a voice that sounds like your client would say it.

Be the brief. Free yourself from tyrants at least a little bit.

The Gig Economy Is Killing Expertise

Someone asked me about freelance apps and crowdsourcing creative today. It's a topic that always pisses me off.

So this is more of a half-baked rant than anything else.

Finding freelance work as a creative professional is a hard hustle. In addition to doing outstanding work each and every time, you have to cultivate relationships and manage expectations. That way you can develop repeat customers.

Freelance apps and websites are making it harder.

More than that, they're undercutting the value of expertise.

Everything is reduced to a blind bid; and mostly at prices that would make even the any-minimum-wage-is-too-high crowd blush.

Hell. Fivver is predicated on the idea that you can get professional creativity for five bucks. And the offers on UpWork are ridiculous "$20 for a series of articles" or Of course there are crowdsourcing options like 99 Designs where only the "winner" gets paid.

Give away creative ideas for free? No. And you know what you can go do to yourself for asking.

As Don Draper said, "That's the job. I give you money. You give me ideas."

If you want my ideas, I get your money. Period. And it had better be more than the spare change in your pocket.

Outside the creative arena things are even more awful on the pay-scale front. Uber. Lyft. Task Rabbit. Takl. They're all digital plantation owners getting rich off the hard work of others.

Of course, that leads me down the rabbit hole to LinkedIn, Yelp, FourSquare and countless sites that generate revenue on content they get for free.

I'll be writing a lot more about this topic.

And as I do so, I'll be reminding everyone I can that no one buys the cow if they're getting the milk for free.

Corporate Recruiters Don't Actually

Recruiting means something. 

It means going out and enlisting help, or engaging someone to join your organization.

It's active. It's even proactive.

Unless you consider corporate recruiting. In that form of recruiting, it's incumbent on the recruit to be the active one. The corporate recruiters base all their activity on being reactive.

When you read the words “college recruiting” the images in your head are magical.

Trips to campus.

Meals with coaches.

A college showing young athletes that their skills are not just wanted but also highly coveted.

Every aspect of the process is carefully orchestrated to convey one simple fact—we want you more than everyone else does. For the next four years, we'll be your surrogate family.

When you read the words “corporate recruiting” the images are exactly and intensely opposite.

They’re mundane.

They’re exhaustive online forms that are a copy/paste from your résumé—that you must also attach.

They’re a mandatory list of references before you’ve even interviewed.

They’re a requirement to tell a possible employer what your salary history has been—so they can low-ball you or find a cheaper alternative.

As with college recruiting, every aspect of the corporate recruiting process is carefully orchestrated to convey a simple fact—we expect you to beg for a job. And to be grateful if you ever hear from us because we have hundreds of applicants and we can't possibly connect with all of them.

College recruiting is all about spotting, scouting and wooing talent.

Corporate recruiting is all about telling people you know to tell people they know that you have an open position, and they should send a résumé. Or posting on countless job sites. Or spamming social media networks. Or any of a hundred other less active ways of finding and securing talent. 

When you do submit a résumé and fill out the exhaustive online application, 99 times out of 100 you won’t receive a response.

Not even a form letter.

Let’s dispense with the pretense that HR Recruiters actually recruit.

They fill gaps in the corporate structure.

They’re caulk.

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Shaking My Head At Ad Agencies

I've spent many days recently in a state of head-shaking bemusement. I'm bemused by a variety of articles and posts from ad agency professionals about the PepsiCo video debacle. My greatest amusement​ has come from the morally superior voices who claim that it's proof that in-house creative is to blame. 

They all trade on one basic belief, "Ad agencies would have stopped that"!

Nonsense.

Ad agencies can't stop themselves​ from having a lack of diversity. Ad agencies can't stop themselves from underpaying women. Ad agencies can't stop themselves from cashing big checks for digital media that only gets seen by bots. Ad agencies can't stop themselves from rigging production bids. 

I could continue ad nauseaum.

Plus, if an agency had said, "No. We won't execute that idea." their holding company would have executed them for hurting shareholder value and turning down such high-profile work. 

This won't be a death knell for in-house creative groups. I'm sure it will be quite the opposite. It will hasten the process and deepen the resolve of companies who were contemplating it. 

No one wants to hire a know-it-all hypocrite.

Twelve Rules

All of our lives we're surrounded by rules.

"Don't run in the hallway."

"Don't play ball in the house."

"No shoes. No shirt. No service."

All to often, these rules tell us what not to do. And they're usually very context specific. It seems to me there are twelve very basic rules that are foundational to the rest. (Yes, I'm ignoring the "golden rule," all ten of the commandments and every other form of religious doctrine.)

These rules are more about what to do. They apply to work, parenting, gardening, and life in general. The quick list is:

1. Keep your word.
2. Do your best. Always.
3. When you have to eat a turd, don't nibble.
4. Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.
5. When the job is done, walk away.
6. Don't believe. Verify.
7. You panic. You drown.
8. Choices have consequences.
9. Clean up after yourself.
10. Leave room for chaos.
11. Life ain't fair.
12. Be the quiet fox.

TheKiddo™would probably tell you I have lots more rules than that. Admittedly, I do still yell, "Look both ways"! as she's crossing the street. So she would have a point. My counter, however, would be that I'm merely reminding her of rule 2, and crossing the street without looking isn't her best.

Growing Up Too Fast

If you build it, they won't come

While reading an article about a start-up company that had to "pivot" away from the "game changing" app they had been planning to make, there was a sentence from one of their major investors that sums up so much of what is wrong with business thought in the early 21st century.

... it would have to be done in such a way that the restaurants come to you and you don't have to go and sell to them ...

Ignoring the annoying lack of punctuation in that sentence (which is a lot harder than you can imagine), the very hubris of it is glaring.

I don't have to sell. My product/app/jim-crack/gee-gaw will be so blindingly awesome that everyone will want it!

This isn't "Field of Dreams."

If you want to grow a business, you must market that business.

If you want to increase sales, you must sell.

If you want to get noticed, you must advertise.

Creativity Requires Tenacity

Standing in my garden among several hundred onions and garlic, I gazed down at one of the many nemesis I had been facing. The current one was a bit of henbit (or lamium aplexicaule if you prefer) that simply needed to be removed.

Yes, I know, some folks like to eat it. I prefer to think of henbit as a yet another weed that needs to be removed from my vegetables, and fed to the chickens. I'd been at it for a couple of hours wdhen I'd spotted this weed. During that time, I became more and more disturbed by the pervasiveness of the weeds.

This particular piece of henbit was so large, and encroaching on my garlic, that I wondered how I hadn't seen it first.

Then I recalled the first ad I ever wrote.

After I read the creative brief (which I helped write - but that's another story for another time), I began work on the project with headlines.

I first wrote the most obvious and on-the-nose headline I could imagine, "We sell insurance and investment products, and you should buy them from us."

I started with the obvious, because it focused my attention on what the ad needed to convey. It was a conscious effort to reduce the creative brief into something more the length of a haiku. Plus, I knew it could only get better.

Then I started writing more headlines.

And more headlines.

Page after page of headlines on my legal pad. And I had a whiteboard filled with words that struck a nerve with me.

Most of them were awful. Just limp, little, half-formed ideas begging to be tossed in the waste.

So I started weeding. Pulling and cutting and getting rid of the ones that were just taking up space and getting in the way.

After the weeding, I had to plant. So I wrote more headlines.

Another page on the pad filled quickly.

As I wrote, I kept weeding until I had a dozen or so headlines that I thought were worth sharing with my Art Director partner. (Yes boys and girls, back in those days there were still copywriter/art director teams.)

When I showed him what I had, he looked at the one I had written at the top of my pad, and said, "That's brilliant. Why'd you bother writing more?"

The reality was, that I'd written that particular headline as one of the last ones. I just happened to like it so I wrote it at the top of a new page on my pad before showing him. Sure, I'd written a few more after; however, it was hardly the first one I wrote, regardless of how it must have appeared when I handed him a notepad with that headline at the top.

Just like the henbit that perturbed me, the headline we settled on to pitch to the client wasn't the first one. It just became more and more obvious as I weeded a lot of others out of the way.

I didn't stop at one ugly headline, any more than I'd stop after pulling one ugly weed.

I kept working until I'd found something worth writing.

The weeds will always return. There will always be more for me to yank, and feed to the chickens or toss into the compost bin.

And I'll be there, just as I was when trying to write that first ad.

Because I'm far more tenacious than any weed.

Potatoes Growing & Cucumbers Planted