Gingrich's WW III comment is five years late

Newt Gingrich now tells us that we are in the early stages of World War III. I would argue that we are five years into that war, and, for the record, I made this point in the following letter to the editor that I think the Sun-Times was afraid to print so soon after 9/11.


[Written 9/13/01]

Dear Editor:

No one ever envisioned that it would be like this. World War III, it has always been assumed, would be the name of the nuclear holocaust that would wipe humanity from the face of the earth. But when we begin a war in which every country in the world must choose sides and take an active role, and the future of the civilized world hangs in the balance, what else can we call it but World War III. The outcome of this World War III, we can only hope, will be the preservation, rather than the annihilation, of our species.

Jim Morris
Evanston

Creativity didn't run this one either.

This letter may not make much sense if you didn't read the column I was reacting to. Oh well.


Editor,

Gary Barnett applying armchair physics to advertising is just silly. First of all, audiences are not becoming more fragmented. Audiences have always been, and will always be, far more fragmented than the media that attempt to reach them. The macro-audience isn’t fragmenting into “tiny particle audiences” because the macro-audience has always been a myth. It has always been, in reality, a collection of “tiny particle audiences.” But since, until recently, our media capabilities were macro, the only practical way to view this collection was as a macro-mythical-audience.
While media accelerates its pursuit of the unreachable goal of becoming as fragmented as the audience, this tendency will be limited by the impracticality of achieving “tiny particle media.” At some point, it’s simply too expensive.
Meanwhile, an audience is a different kind of entity than a medium. And both are different than a positioning. The fact that media are able to fragment these days, in no way mandates, or even makes possible, a corresponding fragmentation in the positioning of brands. A brand is one of those large objects Barnett refers to early in his piece. It’s a big, gross, gestalt thing, more like a planet than a subatomic particle. And like a planet, if you fragment it sufficiently, pretty soon there is no planet left.
If Barnett wants to draw useful advertising insights from a field of science, he’s looking in the wrong place. Physics doesn’t have all that much to teach advertising. It’s neuroscience that will transform our beloved, charmingly backward, guesswork quilt discipline into a cold, hard, predictive process. And it won’t be by way of sloppy analogies.

Stoically,

Jim Morris
The Communicaterer

Creativity was afraid to run this one.

Okay, if all this blahhg is is a repository for old letters and other junk, then here's another one. If anyone read my posts, I would point out that the spot in question in this letter ran in early 06, but not lately. Perhaps I shamed Coke and W&K into pulling it. Oh wait, the letter never ran in Creativity so I couldn't have shamed anybody into doing anything. Well, I'm sure if it had run, it would have shamed them into pulling it.



Creativity Editor,

Are you kidding? How do you justify wasting space in "The Work" section with that Coke spot featuring the guy taking sips of his self-serve Coke and then refilling it because it's oh so good that he can't resist cheating a little?
Rather than being a resonant, slice-of-real-life moment in the daily life of a Coke devotee, as I'm sure the creators of this spot intended, it only reveals how little insight into their target audience's day-to-day Coke experience they actually possess.
As any truly committed soft drinker will tell you, we live in a world of free refills, especially in self-serve contexts. This is not news. It's been like this almost everywhere for many years. That's why, the first time I saw this spot (could it have been during the Superbowl?), I was jaw-droppingly baffled. If it had been a retro spot taking place circa 1960 or so, okay, I might buy it. But if the act featured in this spot was ever even slightly naughty, it ceased to be so not long after the authors of the offending spot were born.
Personally, I never walk away from the spiggot at whatever gas station, convenience store or fast food haven I'm patronizing without taste-testing my Diet Coke to make sure the mix is within specifications. Having done so, I refill my Super Big Gulp before exiting. Who doesn't? Because, with the advent of the age of free refills, even those retail environments where refills might cost you 50 cents or whatever, like convenience stores and some fast food places, the concept of " a Coke" as a discrete, absolute unit within the self-serve, fountain context, is so blurry that taking liberties with that unit has been rendered ethically benign.
Ergo, the guy in the spot is not getting away with anything. No rules are being bent. Being bad can't feel good if you're not being bad. There is no guilty pleasure to be had in the act of tasting and refilling, since so many self-serve establishments have a sign saying "Free Refills" unless they don't bother any more because it is so universally understood.
Wieden & Kennedy is one of the few pillars of great advertising still standing. What has happened to them? Don't they have account planners? Or a client that knows, or belongs to, the target audience? Because, clearly, the creators of this spot don't. I can only think of one explanation for this botch job. All of the people involved in the creation of this spot must have assumed that, because there are no free refills on grand lattes or obscure imported beers or wines by the glass, the same must surely be true of soft drinks.

Stoically,

Jim Morris
The Communicaterer

Creativity was afraid to run this one.

Okay, if all this blahhg is is a repository for old letters and other junk, then here's another one. If anyone read my posts, I would point out that the spot in question in this letter ran in early 06, but not lately. Perhaps I shamed Coke and W&K into pulling it. Oh wait, the letter never ran in Creativity so I couldn't have shamed anybody into doing anything. Well, I'm sure if it had run, it would have shamed them into pulling it.



Creativity Editor,

Are you kidding? How do you justify wasting space in "The Work" section with that Coke spot featuring the guy taking sips of his self-serve Coke and then refilling it because it's oh so good that he can't resist cheating a little?
Rather than being a resonant, slice-of-real-life moment in the daily life of a Coke devotee, as I'm sure the creators of this spot intended, it only reveals how little insight into their target audience's day-to-day Coke experience they actually possess.
As any truly committed soft drinker will tell you, we live in a world of free refills, especially in self-serve contexts. This is not news. It's been like this almost everywhere for many years. That's why, the first time I saw this spot (could it have been during the Superbowl?), I was jaw-droppingly baffled. If it had been a retro spot taking place circa 1960 or so, okay, I might buy it. But if the act featured in this spot was ever even slightly naughty, it ceased to be so not long after the authors of the offending spot were born.
Personally, I never walk away from the spiggot at whatever gas station, convenience store or fast food haven I'm patronizing without taste-testing my Diet Coke to make sure the mix is within specifications. Having done so, I refill my Super Big Gulp before exiting. Who doesn't? Because, with the advent of the age of free refills, even those retail environments where refills might cost you 50 cents or whatever, like convenience stores and some fast food places, the concept of " a Coke" as a discrete, absolute unit within the self-serve, fountain context, is so blurry that taking liberties with that unit has been rendered ethically benign.
Ergo, the guy in the spot is not getting away with anything. No rules are being bent. Being bad can't feel good if you're not being bad. There is no guilty pleasure to be had in the act of tasting and refilling, since so many self-serve establishments have a sign saying "Free Refills" unless they don't bother any more because it is so universally understood.
Wieden & Kennedy is one of the few pillars of great advertising still standing. What has happened to them? Don't they have account planners? Or a client that knows, or belongs to, the target audience? Because, clearly, the creators of this spot don't. I can only think of one explanation for this botch job. All of the people involved in the creation of this spot must have assumed that, because there are no free refills on grand lattes or obscure imported beers or wines by the glass, the same must surely be true of soft drinks.

Stoically,

Jim Morris
The Communicaterer

Stupid NPR

Hello ello ello ello. Echo echo echo echo. Anybody home ome ome? Apparently this chasmic blahhg continues to elude the humans. So far, so good.

So, apparently, to the extent that I continue to clog up my invisible blahgg, it will be with stuff I've written for other purposes, articles and other things that have been rejected, ignored or otherwise tossed on the slagheap. Below is a piece I submitted to NPR, which has revived an old radio thing called "This I Believe." I guess this was popular during the mid-twentieth century, and then became unfashionable. The directions that are provided regarding the writing of a submission to "This I Believe" are very confusing. But one thing seems clear. They want positive stuff. No harangues or rants. This restriction stymied me for awhile. All of the topics that occurred to me were negative beliefs, i.e. "America is an idiot.This I believe." Finally, I landed on a topic that I consider positive.This is what I submitted and never heard back about.

Everything is funny. Everything. Not all the time. Not to every person. But, to somebody, at some time, on some level, everything is funny.

This simple assertion may sound preposterous in the shadow of the Iraq war, the Tsunami, Katrina, Genocide in Africa, mine disasters, mothers drowning their own children, young innocents dying in the crossfire of urban gang wars, and all of the other tragic, sad and horrific events with which we’re inundated in the news every day.

But, so far, as far as I know, no subject in the history of the world has ever arisen that lacks the potential to elicit laughter from someone at some time. It’s just that when unthinkably sad events occur, we are initially incapable of seeing them in any humorous context. Funny is a function of time, perspective and context. And, of course, no event is funny in and of itself. Everything is only funny to somebody when considered in a certain light, from a certain perspective, within a certain context, at a certain time. Given those conditions, everything can be funny. Humor is a lens through which we can view all that we experience. It’s just that the availability of this lens to any one person is limited.

Some of the funniest jokes in the world are the most politically incorrect. Not all Polish jokes are funny. But the funny ones sure are. And, for the most part, they aren’t really Polish jokes. They’re fill-in-the-blank-with-whichever-group-you-want-to-laugh-about jokes. Morons. Blondes. Nebraskans. It doesn’t matter. Humans like to make fun of dumb, maybe because we all are, at one time or another, and humans like to make fun of themselves. That’s just how it is and it’s not a sin.


But surely, you say, some things are just too unthinkably evil or tragic—the holocaust, 9/11, the crucifixion of Christ. Well, I dare say that holocaust survivors would tell you jokes were made and laughter echoed within the death-drenched confines of Auschwitz. As for the crucifixion, how many people have laughed at that classic joke, the punchline of which is Jesus’ exclamation, “Hey Peter, I can see your house from here!” In a world filled with unthinkable acts and unfathomable tragedies, Laughter is perhaps the single most potent coping tool we have.


The size and shape of each person’s sense of humor is different. But thank goodness that, collectively, we as a species are able to find humor in everything, for laughter is one of the few remaining strands of behavior that is not just uniquely and exclusively human, but also irreplaceable, inviolable and, I would argue, essential to human life. And if to be human is to have a sense of humor, then the more indiscriminate your sense of humor is, the more fully human you are. In which case, every one of us ought to cultivate the most robust and wide-ranging sense of humor we can muster—deliberately, vigorously and daily.
This I believe.

Why I hate Google

[Adweek chose not to run this letter, which was my response to yet another worshipful article about these digital darlings.]

Dear Editor,

As a former Google AdWords client, I have first hand experience with one giant flaw in Google's business model and its underlying philosophy. Chris, Tim and Tony apparently made a decision early on that their relationship with advertising clients, at least the small potatoes ones like me, wasn't important enough to allow us to ever actually talk to them. The only interaction they permit is via email, which imposes a rather chilling day or two delay in every interaction. I learned this the hard way, when I tried to cancel my account with them and it took almost a month, due to the pony express pace of our "conversation"—a conversation made necessary because their online cancellation process was broken. Of course, it's in Google's interest to take their time in addressing such problems because every day the account stays active, they make more money on those click-throughs. They'll need to rethink this profoundly cynical approach to servicing their advertising clients if they hope to succeed in the world of advertising. In this business, most of us have learned that the goal is to come as close as you can to creating meaningful, responsive one-to-one human conversations with your customers, rather than going to extraordinary lengths to avoid them. If they treat their other clients with as little respect as they treated me, some more enlightened competitor will eventually eat Google alive.

Stoically,

Jim Morris
Communcaterer

The Letter Time Magazine refused to print

Dear Time Magazine,

This "person of the year" charade has deteriorated into a sad joke perpetrated by weak, undisciplined, committee-think. If you don't have the editorial backbone to choose one single "person of the year", what's the point of the exercise? You may as well take the next step, in People-like fashion, and fully embrace the "100 most important people" route, because you're almost there. The difference between one and three is far greater than the difference between three and a hundred. Get a spine.

Stoically,

Jim Morris

Guess what? Toyota sucks.

8/20/05

Dear Toyota:

When my wife and I buy a car, it is a very carefully considered decision. We don’t just buy the car, we buy the dealership with whom we will be dealing for the next five or ten years.

After looking around and considering several makes of car, and several local dealers, we chose to deal with Evanston Toyota and to buy a Scion XB. We chose this dealership because it was relatively small, giving us hope of personalized service, and because it was convenient to our home.

We ordered the car in mid-May. Our sales guys told us it would take four to six weeks. It took eight. Not a huge deal, but I do wish the sales guys, Mike and Ray, would learn that it’s more important to create realistic expectations than it is to create a false appearance of a shorter wait.

Other than that, and a couple of other slight bumps, the buying experience was good. Mike was helpful and responsive.

We took delivery of the XB on July 12. We have been generally pleased with the car so far.

A couple of weeks ago we read in the local paper that Evanston Toyota was closing down and moving to Fox Lake, Il.

All of the work that we did to identify a dealership we were willing to deal with was for naught. Had we known this was going to happen, we may well have chosen to buy a different make of car, because that five to ten year relationship with the dealer’s service department is, in our experience, at least as important, if not more important, than the car itself.

Ed O’Brien, the sales manager at Evanston Toyota (who seemed decidedly testy, defensive and unsympathetic when I spoke with him) told me yesterday that they’ve known about this move for about sixty days. This means that, for about a month during the time we were waiting for our car to arrive, someone there could have informed us that the place was closing down. That would have been the right thing to do. A company with the reputation for customer service that Toyota has should have instructed the dealership to immediately notify all customers, including the new ones like us, of this closing. But we were kept in the dark. The dealership apparently decided that they’d rather make the sale and screw the relationship, because they’ll be up in Fox Lake. They won’t be getting our service business, so what do they care about the relationship.

Ed O’Brien seemed to think that they are going above and beyond by providing their customers with an introduction to the other dealers we are now stuck with. In fact, the gesture is meaningless, because whichever dealer we choose to go to will treat us the same as they do anyone else. In the case of Grossinger, this is precisely what we are dreading.

What does closing this dealership without giving us notice mean for us? It means that we no longer have a convenient service department to go to. The only realistic option we have is Grossinger in Lincolnwood, which, ironically, was the one dealership I refused to deal with when we began the car search, based on their longstanding reputation as the worst kind of shark-infested, assembly line dealership, and based on one brief but memorable, bad experience with them several years ago, when were last looking for a car.

It means that, instead of a four or five minute drive to get service, at a dealership also convenienently located close to a public transit station, we now are condemned to five or ten years of driving six or seven miles, about twenty minutes, through city traffic, with no public transit option.

It means that, with one short-sighted decision by one of your dealers, you transformed a very satisfied customer and passionate advocate for Scion and Toyota into an angry, totally dissatisfied customer, who will never consider buying any other Toyota vehicle because your people can’t be trusted to do the right thing.

Even Mazda, the company from which we purchased our last car, made a concerted effort to keep a dealership in our vicinity when not one, but two of their local dealerships closed down. In another irony, it is a Mazda dealership that is taking over the facility that Evanston Toyota has abandoned. If the Mazda product were as good as it was a decade ago, we likely would have stayed with them,

As much as we like our XB, we deeply regret having made the mistake of buying this car. In light of being left high and dry. We look forward with nothing but dread and bitterness to years of being forced to do business with Grossinger.

The only remedy for the problem you’ve created for us, and, no doubt, hundreds of your other customers, is to find a closer-in location and open a new dealership. And we realize that, if this were an option, you would have simply kept Evanston Toyota in or near Evanston.

I wish I had the words to express how unhappy we are for having dealt with your company. I know that your company, which makes a quality product, will continue to thrive, regardless of how we feel about Toyota. Nevertheless, we want you to know that you can count us among that group of former customers who will be telling our story of being burned by Toyota to anyone who asks how we like the car. Love the car. Hate the company.

Stoically,



Jim Morris
1423 Leonard Place
Evanston, Il 60201

Cc: Yuki Funo


[NOTE: I sent this letter in August, 2005. I never received any kind of response from anyone at Toyota. Now that's what I call responsive.]