Chairman Jimmy's Advertizingers

Gingrich's WW III comment is five years late

2006-07-21T20:18:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-06-27T18:58:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-06-04T14:46:00.001-07:00

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.

2006-06-04T14:46:00.000-07:00

Stupid NPR

2006-04-28T11:13:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-20T07:58:00.000-07:00

[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

2006-03-27T10:33:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-03-13T06:40:00.000-08:00

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.]

Retail Rage: The pen is mightier than the dollar sometimes

2006-03-01T12:52:00.000-08:00

I've spent countless hours writing letters to dozens of companies over the past score, taking them to task for misdeeds, maltreatments, and other forms of screwing me over. Sometimes these letters produce the hoped-for result, sometimes not. In either case, once I've sent a letter off, it's tossed on the ragheap and forgotten. This is wrong. Some of these letters are inspired tantrums, so I've decided to make this stupid blahhg of mine (Hey, there's a song in there I think: This stupid blahhg of mine I'm going to make it . . . I'm going to make it . . . crap, can't think of a good -ine or ime word) a repository for these letters.
This serves two purposes. It makes me feel a little less like I'm wasting my time writing these letters. And it gives me an easy, lazy way to post frequent entries/enter frequent posts without doing any real work. And that's the point of blahhgs, isn't it?
I promise that all letters I post here are precisely as written, no cheating, tempering, fixing, modifying. Which has a lot less to do with some sort of artistic integrity as it has to do with me not feeling like putting any more effort into them than I already have.

Here's the first one, which is the most recent one I've written. No word back from them yet.

February 21, 2006

Dear Mr President or CEO whose name is a closely held secret,

I have just completed one of the worst consumer experiences of my life at the hands of your company. And, may I say, I found your company so secretive (both Bionaire and parent company The Holmes Group), I suspect that you are just a puppet, and Dick Cheney is actually pulling the strings.

I’ve been a regular customer of yours for many years. Lately, you have been my source for wick filters for my White Westinghouse humidifier, model WWHM-3300.

As of this year, you no longer carry the original wick filters for this machine, but you do have another filter that I was told would work with my unit. So I ordered four of those. For several years now, four filters got me through a winter, since each filter would last about a month, with the help of some anti-mineral treatment, which I used religiously, every time I refilled the tanks.

This year, the wick filters didn’t last a month. They lasted a week. I didn’t believe it when the first filter pooped out after a week. So I tried another, then another. Each filter lasted one week.

To my mind, this is unacceptable. I would characterize these filters, which cost about the same as the old filters that lasted a month, as of inferior quality, or else somehow defective.

So I called your company to get a refund.

I spoke to Tonya, who was very snippy and refused to issue a refund, because, apparently, your company doesn’t stand behind its products.

I then spoke to her boss, Neil, who was far snippier. We spoke for some time. Neil wanted to send me more filters. I explained to him that I definitely didn’t want any more of your defective filters. It was obvious to me that I would need to acquire a new humidifier (one that wouldn’t require a Bionaire filter), so additional filters would be of no use to me. Finally, Neil reluctantly promised me he would submit a “request for credit”, but he didn’t think “they” would approve it. This was a week ago or two ago, I don’t recall the exact date. Neil refused to tell me his last name, though he had mine. This seemed unfair. He also refused to give me the name or number of a person I could appeal to, should I be refused the refund. All in all, one of the most unpleasant conversations I’ve ever had with a company.

On February 15, I received a box full of eight more of your defective filters. I didn’t order these filters. In fact, I was very clear that I definitely did not want them. But Neil sent them to me anyway. Which meant I now had to call your company back and go through the exercise of getting these returned, which is time I resent having to waste on this matter.

I called this morning and spoke to Christopher, who was far more pleasant that Tony or Neil. However, he was unable to accommodate my request for a shipping label so that I wouldn’t have to pay the postage to return my filters. And, after putting me on hold a couple of times for quite some time, he told me that your company would definitely not issue me a refund, nor would they give me the shipping label (and he informed me that, contrary to Neil’s promise, he never did submit that request for credit, which would make Neil, correct me if I’m wrong, a liar).

I asked Chris, but he didn’t know who you were or what your address was. He couldn’t find anyone else to talk to me because apparently everyone was on the phone. In lieu of your name, Chris told me that some guy named Mike Wirtz was the general manager (or some title like that, Chris wasn’t sure.) But Chris wouldn’t let me talk to him, nor would he give me his mailing address. The best Chris could do was to promise me that some fellow named Arthur, title unknown, would call me back when he got off the phone (which I predict he won’t). Oh, and by the way, after the last time Chris put me on hold, he returned to the line to inform me that he had just been told by some unnamed authority that it was not possible that these filters only lasted a week. It had to be the humidifier.

Translation: Mr. Morris, you are a liar.

I’m writing this letter as I wait for Arthur’s return call.

Prior to this experience, my impression of your company was that you were an upstanding, respectable company that made reliable, quality products. As you might imagine, after the past week or so, my impression has changed dramatically.

Worse than the fact that you don’t stand behind your product, what I find so offensive is the closed-lipped management philosophy (It’s not just that no one will tell me who anyone is on the phone, but your website has no information on upper management, no indication of where your headquarters are located), and the lack of respect for me as a customer.

I’m writing this letter for two reasons. I would like a refund in the amount of $35.99 for the defective filters, because I simply did not get what I paid for. And I feel it is my obligation as a conscientious consumer to try to alert the top guy at any company whose employees treats its customers like crap. I realize that this letter will probably never reach your eyes, especially at a company as fearful as yours. But I feel I need to try anyway.

I feel bad for Chris, who seemed like a nice guy, and seemed very uncomfortable having to do the dirty work for a bunch of frightened, cowardly middle managers.

I’ve enclosed copies of the two bills of sale, one for the original four pack, and one for the eight additional, useless filters, that represent a disingenuous, empty gesture of faux customer service.

By the way, as an advertising professional, I’m a big believer in word of mouth. So I’ll be posting this letter on my blog, and I’ll be sure to make mention of this incident in my next newsletter, which goes out to a couple hundred very influential, very talkative fellow advertising professionals. What good is bad will, after all, if it doesn’t do some damage?

Have a nice day.

Stoically,

Jim Morris
1423 Leonard Place
Evanston, Il 60201
847-869-3415

P.S. It is now five days later. Imagine my surprise that my prediction to Chris that Arthur would never really call me has come true. Which makes either Chris, or, more likely, Arthur, a liar, as well.

cc:
President or CEO of The Holmes Group, whose name is a secret
Better Business Bureau
Illinois Attorney General
Mike Wirtz
Arthur (who refuses to disclose last name or return my call, as promised)
Chicago Sun-Times consumer complaint column

Yes, I watch American Idol. So sue me.

2006-02-23T18:19:00.000-08:00

I won't bother to defend my attraction to American Idol. I know it's a manipulated, cheesy mess. But that manipulation is very well executed. Ergo, I'm hooked. A big part of the attraction is seeing if you can pick the winner early in the elimination process. Maybe the fact that I picked Kelly Clarkson during her first audition, which wound up being a brilliant hunch, is what hooked me. Boy, am I an astute judge of American Idolness.

Of course, I haven't come close since, prediction wise. But this season, which is still working its way from 24 to 12 finalists, I know for certain who the last four standing will be. It is sooooo obvious that I'm committing to this prediction right now, on February 23.

Four bonafide winners, the rest are fatally flawed. And I'm pretty sure I know who the final two of that four are. So, if you enjoy the drama and don't want me to spoil it for you, don't read any further. Here's where we will land, weeks from now:

Final two males standing:
Ace
Eliott
(Dark horse hedge: Taylor instead of Elliott. Taylor's strength is also his weakness in this competition. He has too much personality, he's too distinctive, not quite down the middle enough. Of course, Elliott looks kind of funny, so that may do him in.)

Final two females:
Lisa
Catherine
(No need to hedge)

And of those four, it will come down to Lisa versus Ace.

I admit I can't see the obvious winner between those two, though if gun were to my head, I'd predict Lisa.

So there you have it. If I weren't so weak, I would just skip all the shows leading up to the final four. It's something to strive four. Of course, since I'm just talking to myself here, I will have only myself to impress when I'm right. But I'm easily impressed, so why not?

While I'm baring my soul, here are a few other admissions:I really like that "You had a bad day" song. I also really like T.A.T.U., Click Five, Lillix and Two and a half men.

If no one ever visits a blahhg, does it exist?

2006-02-20T13:06:00.000-08:00

I’ve decided to view my blahhg as an experiment of sorts. It seems that almost all blahhgers buy into the aspect of blahhging that entails being viral. You don’t just enter postings on your blahhg. You comment on other people’s blahhgs, partially in the hope of having the commented-upon blahhger check out your blahhg in return. Also, you create links for your blahhg, sending people elsewhere, and hope that others will create links to your blahhg. And I’m sure there are other strategies for increasing the odds that people will read your blahhg and send other to it as well, The game is about gaining readership, garnering attention. The success of the blahhg is measure mostly in hits, right?

Well, in theory, if the blahhger is interesting, has something to say or something to offer, eventually, due to the viralness of the blahhgosphere, the world will discover and embrace the blahhg. All of the above strategies merely accelerate the process.

We’ll just see about that. Since the purpose of my blahhg is mostly just to see if I had the technological know-how to create one, I have no plans to promote it, to reach out to the community, to make any connections. I’m simply going to post entries, or enter postings (both ways of saying it feel awkward to me). I’m not going to expend any effort going “hey, look at what I did!” I’m just going to do it. Blahhg as therapy.

So far, my blahhg has remained virtually invisible. I’m interested in seeing how long it will remain so, absent any attempt on my part to make it visible. My hope is, it will remain off the radar forever.

If you’re reading this, I’ve failed.

In Google’s quest to do no evil, it fails miserably.

2006-02-08T14:05:00.000-08:00

The nature of the flaw in Google's business model ensures that evil will permeate their process. Their model, as do the models of so many internet-based enterprises, denies the value of human interaction. Holding email conversations interrupted by two-day gaps in no way resembles human interaction. Any company that doesn't embrace the notion of timely, personal, genuinely responsive customer service, as Google most assuredly doesn't, will inevitably do evil on a daily basis. Below is one such example of that evil that Google do so well.

Several years ago, in an attempt to bring more visibility to my website, I opened a Google Adword account. For me, this was no mean feat. I was stymied at the point in the process where I had to determine how much I wanted to pay for every clickthrough. The guidance they provide was just short of useless. I could pay a penny per clickthrough, or $100, but there was no intelligible way of determining what amount made sense for me. All I knew was that the more you paid, the better your odds were of having your GoogleAd show up on the first page of an appropriate search.
Then something remarkable happened. I somehow managed to circumvent the virtually impervious Google wall, and actually got ahold of a phone number that connected me with a live Google employee. This was, from all I’ve heard, a very improbable accomplishment.
On top of that, the person I spoke with was friendly, patient and helpful. She spent a considerable time explaining the complicated formula by which one determines the amount they should pay per clickthrough. I didn’t understand much of what she said, but I was able to land on a figure that seemed reasonable. It gave me a very good shot at showing up on that first page, without putting me out of business the first month.
I began paying for a reasonable number of clickthroughs every month, typically between $100 and $150 a month. Now and then a clickthrough would actually lead to contact from someone out there in internet land inquiring about my services. Over the next couple of years, two of these contacts turned into paying projects, and one of those became an ongoing client. Seen in that light, the money I invested in the GoogleAd seemed to pay off. It certainly was far more effective than any other strategy I had tried to make my website visible.
Then I took a full time position at a local ad agency. After a few months, it occurred to me that the money I was still spending every month for my GoogleAd was being wasted. Even if I were contacted by someone with a project, I couldn’t take it on because my full time job precluded it.
So I decided to pull the plug on the GoogleAd and save myself that chunk of money every month.
Here’s where Google’s insidiously evil ways became manifest. On January 17, 2004, I first attempted to follow the process outlined on the Google site for canceling the account. As with the initial registration process, I was almost immediately stymied. The instructions told me that I should do such and such and it would take me to a page where I should do so and so. I did such and such, but the page that appeared contained absolutely no opportunity to do so and so. I started over, and followed the process to that same point, with the same brick wall result.
So what does one do next? Well, in the world of Google, the only option is to email them, which I did. Of course, Google takes two days to respond to any email. So right there, that’s two days that I’m being charged for my GoogleAd clickthroughs, which, if their process worked, I would not have had to pay, because my account would already have been cancelled.
Two days later, I received an email from Google, essentially telling me to do the same thing I had tried and failed to do two days earlier. Clerarly, they had not read, or comprehended, or taken seriously, the email I had sent, explaining the difficulty I was having. So I had to email them back and tell them again that this process wasn’t working for me.
I will spare you the ensuing blow by blow. Suffice to say, several more emails were exchanged. A phone call was placed. All to no avail. Google’s responses to my pleas, none of which actually responded to my concerns and questions, became more combative. My responses followed suit.
Meanwhile, day after day clickthroughed by, and the charges kept mounting. Finally, a letter was sent to SCHMIDT, the big Googlehead himself. In that letter, I chronicled my fruitless conversation with his company, complete with copies of the emails. Incredibly, no one from the Google Fortress ever responded to that letter. In my considerable experience with these sorts of situations, being stonewalled at the corporate level of a company only happens at the most unscrupulous, bottom-feeding companies. I almost always get some sort of response, even if it’s only a form letter. I even got a response from Best Buy eventually, during a recent altercation, after the customer service reps there, to a person, solemnly vowed that a written response would be impossible.
Meanwhile, somehow or other, I finally succeeded in canceling my account. I seem to have wiped the specifics from my memory, which I’m told is not uncommon in cases of extreme trauma.
This cancellation occurred in February, approximately five weeks from when I first attempted to cancel.
The next month my credit card bill showed a charge from Google of almost $150 for the period of time during which all of this back and forth was going on. I immediately called the credit card company and protested that charge. I sent them the trail of emails and made my case for why I shouldn’t be held responsible for those charges.
Here it is two years later, and I never heard if or when this matter got resolved. I was never credited the money. Frankly, I had moved on, carrying with me only a very bitter taste from the experience.
About a year ago, I left my full time position and returned to my freelance business. Recently, I began wondering to myself if, despite the horrible experience they put me through, I should consider re-opening the GoogleAD account. After all, it had been the only successful internet marketing tactic that had worked for me.
I decided I might consider it, if and only if Google would agree to let me do so by phone, so as to avoid most of the pain they inflicted on me the last time. I emailed Google with this proposal.
Two days later, I received a reply (which I’m now convinced is not generated by a human, but, rather, by a form-email-spewing program at Google, because the language is largely identical with the responses I was receiving two years ago).
The reply starts out benignly enough, apologizing for my frustrating experience. But before too long, the email lets me know that Google is still fighting with my credit card company over that final charge from two years ago.
I am stunned. First of all, how can this matter remain unresolved after all this time? Secondly, how can Google be so recalcitrant and short-sighted, risking such an enormous amount of bad will—the kind of bad will that might cause a person like, say, me, to post the whole evil story on his blahhg, and even send the story, in letter-to-the-editor form, to the next magazine that runs a worshipful article on how brilliant Google is and how admirable their “do no evil” thing is?

I'm already weary of this stupid blahhg.

2006-01-26T21:13:00.000-08:00

I've had this thing up and running for less than a month, and already the novelty has faded and it is just one more burdensome chore on my endless list. Why am I bothering? Is every entry from now on going to be some variation of this same lament? I wish I lived in some alternative universe in which the only difference was that the blahhg phenomenon never happened. Can anyone help me out with this? I'm told I have a lot of opinions. But I cannot produce interesting, new, provocative, funny or any other kind of worthwhile stuff as frequently as the blahhg demon demands. Already I view my blahhg as a repository for old stuff I've written for which I've had no outlet. Wait. I just wrote "repository." Why did I choose to say repository instead of depository. The apparently denote the same thing. I'm sure there is some subtle connotative difference that caused me to choose repository instead of depository, but whatever that difference is, I can't articulate it. I have no idea what it is. Would my meaning have changed in any even slightly meaningful way for anyone who reads this had I chosen to say depository instead? Almost certainly not. As you can see, I'm now resorting to some kind of stream of consciousness drivel to fill out this entry in my stupid blahhg. But don't kid yourself. This isn't really stream of conscioiusness at all. For instance, I just paused and thought for a few seconds before I wrote these last couple of sentences. All sorts of thoughts probably flowed by during that time which some part of me apparently deemed unworthy of writing down. I'm pretty sure I could go on like this for at least an hour or two, if I could think of a reason to. But I can't. Apparently, unlike me, there are millions of fellow blahhgers out there who have found a reason to ramble and spew endlessly. What is the reason they've found? Do they think what they're writing is interesting, that there is an audience for all there inconsequential, trivial, mundane minutiae? Do I? And if I don't, what other motivation could I have for writing this word? Or this word? Hey, you. Stop reading this. Go away. How can I stop writing if you won't stop reading?

I fear I am defeated.

2006-01-13T10:07:00.000-08:00

I have always prided myself on my tenacity in dealing with large companies to whom I fall prey. If I’ve been wronged, I doggedly pursue the righting of that wrong until I succeed.

I usually have dialogues going with a handful of companies at any given time. Currently, Having just finished going around and around with Apple Computers, Best Buy and the Underwood folks, I remain in negotiations with an insurance agent that represents Farmer’s Insurance, Speakeasy (my DSL provider), and a cell phone company that shall remain nameless because it is sort of a client of mine.

Each of these companies is currently or has recently received money from me that they had no business receiving—despite my best efforts to prevent this from happening.

Because of the impossibly mindless, uncaring, unconscious inertia with which all of these entities lumber along, money is being extracted from me for services they all could and should be providing me at a lower cost. Except no one’s paying attention except me. They don’t care. They’re happy to get paid more than they’ve earned.

The system is designed, perhaps intentionally, perhaps not, to wear customers down, keep them in the dark and ultimately, to defeat them, should they resist this propensity to rip people off.

For almost a year, Speakeasy extracted a large monthly charge from me for a very slow DSL line, while they were providing newer customers a much faster line for a significantly smaller monthly charge. They never notified me that this faster, cheaper service was available. If I hadn’t stumbled across this fact on my own, I’d still be being gauged by them. I wrote them a letter asking to be compensated for being overcharged and underserved. They never responded. For many companies, this strategy of simply not responding seems to be replacing the only slightly less infuriating form letter in which the non-response is carefully articulated.

The same was true with my insurance agent/company, with whom we had a very expensive, high-risk policy. Our old insurance company had cancelled us because we had the gall to initiate two claims within one year. That cancellation bumped us to high risk.

After a year or two, apparently, we were no longer considered high risk and could have switched to a less expensive, conventional policy. Except we were never notified that our time was up. As a result, we paid over $1000 of unnecessary premiums to this company before we figured out on our own that we were eligible for a far less costly policy. Neither the agent nor the insurance company felt it necessary to let us know about this.

And then there’s the cell phone company. It turns out they have a discount for teachers, of which my wife is one. But they don’t ever tell you such a discount exists. When we found this out from another teacher, we went and had the discount implemented. We thought. But the guy in customer service failed to enter something properly, and, instead, our monthly bill went up by about 30%. This went on for two months before we decided that something had gone wrong and went back to them. The process of successfully applying the discount and re-imbursing us the money we were wrongly charged because of their ineptitutde was so time-consuming, convoluted and stressful that we caved in before we were able to be fully reimbursed. We simply waved the white flag and plodded on home because we couldn’t stand to watch the customer service person fumble and stumble his way toward a resolution of the the problem any longer.

This is what worries me. In the past, I would have found the resolve to see it through, driven by my sense of indignation at being treated so disrespectfully. Lately, however, I find myself letting some of these wrongs slide. I frequent the big Century multiplex in Evanston, because they are one of the few places that runs foreign and independent movies. But, since that place opened five or six years ago, I have been raging against it for one reason or another, almost constantly. I will spare you the specifics, because the litany would render this near epic tantrum truly epic. But my confrontations with their management are becoming less frequent. Not because of any improvement on their part. Oh no. They continue to be the worst run movie theatre I’ve ever encountered. But the futility of my complaints is eroding my willingness to fight the good fight.

Complaining to companies and writing letters to the editor used to be among my very favorite hobbies. I can still get it up to shoot off a zinger to some editor or other, but the intransigence of the corporate entities against whose brick walls I bang and bloody my brain is proving less and less surmountable. At least for me.

If the few customers like me who are willing to make and maintain a stink fold their tents, what hope is there for these big, stupid companies to ever improve the way they deal with their customers? I fear I am defeated.

Advertising as storytelling

2006-01-09T11:37:00.000-08:00

Conventional wisdom tells us much of the best advertising consists of short stories, well told. That Volkswagen spot featuring the young couple dancing and the old guy living below them complaining is a prime example.
If ads are often stories, then copywriters and art directors can be seen as modern day storytellers of a sort. But the storytelling doesn’t stop there.
Ad agencies themselves are collective storytellers as well. The stories ad agencies tell, however, don’t take place within an advertisement. They take place within a meeting room as they present their work to a client.
Agencies don’t simply present work and then plead with the client to buy the recommended campaign. They sell work by telling a series of interrelated stories that are often largely conjecture. The effectiveness of these stories ultimately comes down to how plausible, how coherent and credible, how passionately it’s presented, rather than how true the story is.
Of course, agencies would like to think that what they do is construct well-reasoned and well-supported arguments in favor of whatever they’re selling. Sometimes they do. But very often their arguments are built on loads of speculation, guesstimation and best case scenario-building. The guesswork may be grounded in intuition, judgement, probability and experience, but it’s still guesswork. If the client finds the guesses to be reasonable or likely ones, then they will buy the work. If they don’t, the agency can only try to make up some other story that the client will nod their heads to.
I call this persuasive speculation. The ability of an agency to tell clients stories that effectively sell ads and then, once the ads are running, stories that credibly credit success in the marketplace to the advertising.
There’s nothing wrong with this, per se. But there is something wrong when there is the pretense of a high degree of predictability. There is something wrong when agencies feel compelled to characterize their stories as more true than they actually are, because the client needs this illusion of certainty in order to buy the work. There is something wrong when methodology dresses up as science. Or when correlations parade as causal.
So what kinds of stories do agencies tell clients? Stories about how their customers think and feel and behave, about what they care about and don’t care about. Stories about how target audiences break out into nice, neat, discrete demographic segments. Stories about cluttered environments, about what words and pictures will affect their customers and in what ways. Stories about the competition. Stories about brand equities and how to leverage them. Stories about how many people look at this or that magazine or website or TV show. Stories about how “look at” equals “engage with” or “pay attention to.” Stories about the dynamics of surfing and zapping. Stories about how people who tend to do such and such are also likely to do so and so.
Because these stories are speculative, an infinite number of them can be generated. Genuine knowledge and true understanding seldom constrain them.
The most important stories agencies tell clients are about how the advertising they are trying to sell will affect the clients’ customers. Of course, the agency can’t really know ahead of time whether any of these stories is true. Because they are predictions. Speculations. Guesses. Hypotheses. Only consumers’ actions over time will tell if the story turns out to be true. And most of the time, even time doesn’t reveal the truth. Because most of the time there is no clean, unambiguous, unspeculative way to measure the effectiveness of the ad.
The ad runs. Sales go up. But wait, there was also an FSI running that week. And, uh-oh, the POP materials went into stores that week as well. When there’s one effect and several possible causes of that effect, how do you determine the true cause or combination of causes? It could be any one potential cause or any combination of them. The agency can tell the client a story about why sales went up, but there are any number of other stories that might be true instead, and the truth of these stories may preclude the truth of the story the agency is telling.
The illusion ad agencies and clients often mutually agree to sustain is that they are working together to plot out courses of advertising action based on information, facts, insights, solid research, hard numbers, etc. There are reams of supporting documents and Power Point presentations galore to help them prop up this mutually agreed upon illusion.
The reality is that, very often, both parties agree to accept as true and real this or that highly speculative, educated guesswork and the hypotheses that such guesswork spawns. Agency and client enable each others’ rationalizations. It becomes, collectively, their story and they’re sticking to it. This is not surprising. The client is looking for some kind of assurance, an emotional comfort level, that the campaign they are about to sink a large piece of their budget into is going to work. This is an assurance that both parties know perfectly well can’t be given. But the need remains. And the agency is eager to meet their clients’ needs, even the irrational, emotional ones.
The client says, “How can we be sure this campaign is going to work?” The agency could tell the truth. “We can’t be sure. But it seems like our best shot so let’s give it a try and see what happens.” More often, having just been invited to make up a story, the agency does just that. In this case, it’s a story about how the client can be sure the campaign will work. Then the agency’s charge becomes to interpret future events so as to make this story true, whether it is or not. Rather than determining as best it can whether the campaign worked and why (or why not), which, in the long run, is far more useful information for the client.
Think how much healthier the process would be if clients and agencies recognized that advertising is inherently trial and error, every time out. That it’s the collective best guess of a group of smart people with limited information and a willingness to rely on experience, judgment and intuition. This kind of intellectual honesty would make for more realistic expectations and less need to dress guesses up as gospel.
So tell the client a story if you must. But try having the guts to recognize—out loud, to the client—that it remains to be seen whether this story will wind up being true or false, and that, with so many potential causal variables out there, you may never know for sure what the truth is. In doing this, you will contain client expectations, at the same time limiting your own tendency to take undue credit for successes and to deflect responsibility for failures.

If I hate blahhgs so much, why do I have one?

2006-01-02T12:40:00.000-08:00

I've been on record as pretty much loathing the entire Blahhg phenomenon for years now. So how can I justify starting one up? I'm not sure I can. But I have three reasons for doing so. Whether they constitute a justification, you tell me. Here they are:

1. As a boomer in a business where boomers are dropping like flies, I feel compelled to keep my finger in the cultural pie, and one slice of that pie is the rapidly changing technology that relates to communication. Since I get paid to communicate well, I need to at least know what the available avenues are about. One of these avenues is the blahhg. Thus, I find myself contributing to the blahhgosphere that I hold in such disdain.

2. Irony. It appears that about the most powerful platform for railing against the blahhgosphere is within a blahhg.

3. Since I'm entirely responsible for the marketing of my own brand(actually two brands—The Communicaterer and Chairman Jimmy—the former being more about my advertising business aspect, the latter representing a more personal aspect of me, though of course these aspects overlap)—I'm obliged to consider any strategy, tactic, ploy that presents itself. At the moment, the only ways I'm using to get the word out about how great a copywriter I am are via my "meletter", called My Time with The Humans, which I haven't figured out how to italicize or bold yet, and via the letters to the editor that I write a lot of, and of which some get published, netting me some visibility, and which are themelves product demos of a sort, since they display my writing. With no other easily accomplished options apparent to me, I'm going to try this blahhg route and see if it bears any fruit.

Though I'll grant that setting up this blahhg was easy, nothing else is being easy about it. Today I couldn't figure out how to post this new posting, which is a term I don't care for. As I mentioned above, I can't figure out how to do anything to the words here, like italicizing. It took me quite some time to figure out how to revise the settings, because, even though there is a big tab called "SETTINGS" at the top of the page that I'm staring at right now, I didn't know the things I wanted to revise were called "SETTINGS". Now I do.

I certainly can't figure out how to stick a link into this thing. Not that I plan on providing a lot of links. In fact, the only links I would provide here if I could figure out how to, would be to my website, www. communicaterer.com, which contains an archive of my meletters, one of the most recent of which contains my case against blahhgs, and to this URL, www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u-banish, which contains a glorious trashing of the blahhg.

If you were to take the trouble to read both of these anti-blahhg diatribes, you would have a pretty good understanding of the problems I have with blahhgs. If you've gotten this far and don't take the trouble to check them out, then you are probably suffiiciently intellectually lazy that you aren't going to be back here any time soon anyway and I can't believe you've even gotten to this point.

Let me just finish this up by being very clear (for a change): this blahhg, to the extent that it remains active, will not be for the purpose of telling you about all the cool stuff I've found on other blahhgs. I have no interest in other people's blahhgs. And I'm not here to help those of you who are. Find your own dang blahhgs. Or better yet, get a life.

This blahhg, like so many million other blahhgs, is going to be an exercise in excess, a self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing mememe, which I will try to view as one more therapeutic outlet for the spewing of bile. Because, honestly, I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to subject themselves to my spewing, any more than I would want to subject myself to the spewing of others. Have a nice day.

The tragic flaw in the design firm model.

2005-12-30T16:10:00.000-08:00

In ad agencies, where once upon a time copywriter was conceptual king, the domain of language is still valued, and is firmly under the copywriters’ control. Some visual people will attempt to influence the copy, and that is a healthy thing. But the writer still gets the final say.
Design firms are another story. Recognizing that any generalization about design firms is going to be gross and riddled with exceptions, I will make this one: Design firms tend to play fast and loose and badly with language. Language is devalued, thus diminishing the value of the work produced by design firms.
Here’s my theory about how this happens.
Most design firms are staffed with designers and the like, and not so much with copywriters. Either copy is provided by a freelance copywriter, or, if the firm is large enough, maybe there is a writer on staff. But there is seldom if ever a person in power who is equipped or inclined to advocate passionately for the language. This arrangement invites the insidiously subtle, systematic denigration of language. So we have a problem. Three problems, in fact.

The problem with using freelance copywriters.

A freelance copywriter will not fight the good fight. He is cast in an order taker role, so, while he may make a case for using this piece of language rather than that, he will not be falling on any swords for it. He is being paid to provide copy, not grief. A contentious freelancer gathers no work.

The problem with using the staff copywriter.

A staff copywriter at a design firm is a defenseless orphan. He will quickly learn to do only what is necessary, copy-wise. And he will learn that, when the designer changes “one little word” in the headline so that it breaks more cleanly, there is no court of appeals. If he raises the issue, he is being “difficult” and blowing the issue out of proportion. In the long term, therefore, the better copywriters will not populate design firms because of their place in the pecking order. So staff copywriters are B or C players, delivering pedestrian copy, perpetuating the design firm habit of being okay with, and accustomed to, pedestrian copy.

The problem with not using a copywriter.
Clearly, seeing copywriters as second class citizens and sources of necessary-evil clutter is problematic. But there is a more insidious cancer at work in these environments, and no one seems to want to acknowledge it.
The designer is often put in a position to act as de facto copywriter. Budgetary and time constraints provide an easy excuse not to bring a copywriter into many projects, particularly if the project doesn’t involve long copy, but merely some copy. Not everybody can design, but, hey, everybody can write to some extent.
As a result, many designers become passable copywriters. But only passable. And that is where the insidiousness creeps in. For the designer, once he has learned that he can construct a coherent sentence or a paragraph or even a headline, and can come up with bad puns with the best of them, and worse, finds that no one seems to object to the quality of the writing, he becomes more confident and comfortable in this role.
For the design firm, this becomes a very cost-effective solution. No need to pay a freelancer. The copy just shows up on the page, more or less free. It may not be riveting copy, but, again, no one objects, so it must be okay.
Some designers recognize, deep down somewhere, that the piece they’ve just created isn’t as good as it should be, because the language, and often the concept itself, is unremarkable, pedestrian, the same old blah blah. But it sure looks shiny and new. And the client loves it because they haven’t learned to expect exceptional copy, just “good enough” copy. The only criteria the copy must meet have to do with being clear and grammatically correct. The same criteria you would apply to an instruction manual.
If you are never exposed to design that sparkles plus copy that sparkles, you don’t miss it.

How did this happen? It’s really very simple. Design Firms are generally started by, run by, owned by designers. Designers are visual. Language tends to be a liability, visually. It complicates things. It clutters the page. It mushes up and mucks up the design. Many designers simply don’t truly embrace and value language appropriately. It is almost universally considered, within the world of design, to be a necessary evil. And designers are less likely to value language because they are less likely to be good at it. Designing isn’t writing. People whose talents lie in the visual arena tend to be less language-oriented and vice versa. This might be a good time to remind yourself that I recognize the risk of such sweeping generalizations.

The question remains: How can this state of affairs be fixed? I’m afraid the only way is if the work produced by design firms that do value language is more successful than work by firms that don’t. Over time, good writing would become perceived as a competitive advantage for design firms that provide it. But I don’t see this happening any time soon.

By the way, why are design firms called firms while ad agencies are called agencies?