Always loved Joni. Her voice was ours, young and bright and knowing and her song made a lot of us who came of age in the turbulent 60s feel like we knew a lot because we'd seen it (even experienced it) first hand. We bought the concept.
"Ya, I've been there myself".
But that wasn't the truth at all. Maybe we weren’t listening to her closely enough and hearing the caveat: “I really don’t know life at all”.
There was a lot more to see of the sides of a lot of things that "both" just didn't cover even with the peyote perspective factored in. Joni wasn’t old enough to guess. I know I wasn’t. When you're 20-something you think you know a lot. Maybe you do. At least about a little. But "both sides"? I think not.
But eventually the sides are revealed and you find that “both” and “up and down” are only part of the perspective and even when your knowledge base grows it suffers shrikage with the growing awareness of the tip of the iceberg – no, the massive glacier of things you know little or nothing about. So your world grows smaller while the universe expands and you do the best you can to master that little world. Which would have satisfied most people from a different generation.
Less so the children of the 60s.
There's always the Other Side and the only way you can see and know it is to go where it is. Adjust your perspective. Or attitude. Or latitude. So said the Prophet Buffett.
Joni found the truth. A few years ago I heard her rerelease of Both Sides and heard in her voice what she'd learned and it was a whole different scene of clouds and love and life.
The changes of place and perspective and the awareness of life that living it a long time brings constant revelation. If you drive a certain set of roads for a long time and learn where the potholes and the shortcuts and the scenes of beauty are you can understand the ease of movement through life that some of the aged have mastered.
"I Get Around" The Beach Boys sang back then.They didn’t know the half of it.
They do now.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Mad Men: The Work
The Senior Creative People discuss Mad Men. I read and pass on some of blogger Nelle Engeron’s observations. The theme that recurs -- in the midst of the highest standards of creativity we see in the show (and Nelle’s synopses) -- is the lack of creativity in the agency’s product. “The Work” sucks.
In the May 13 episode it seems to be both nastily and nicely put into context. Pete rails because the hour he spent with a Times reporter yields no mention in the published piece. He jolts Don Draper out of bed who opens the magazine to the story. The most noticeable ad by far on the page is Volkswagen.
I recall a line Don fires at Pete: “Don’t bother me with your failures”. In The Times’ context there’s a good chance that The Work is the reason why SCDP didn’t make it. Hacks are not “hip” and SCDP’s mediocrity is on the CD’s head.
Critiques of the ad product are frequent and usually sharp in the blog's Comments. The story invites us into The Work. One viewer saw Don as “a corny old geezer” with a corny campaign. I’ll buy his “corny” campaign comment but he missed the mark with that “geezer” thing. The fact that Don is a hack has nothing to do with his age.
In the May 13 episode it seems to be both nastily and nicely put into context. Pete rails because the hour he spent with a Times reporter yields no mention in the published piece. He jolts Don Draper out of bed who opens the magazine to the story. The most noticeable ad by far on the page is Volkswagen.
I recall a line Don fires at Pete: “Don’t bother me with your failures”. In The Times’ context there’s a good chance that The Work is the reason why SCDP didn’t make it. Hacks are not “hip” and SCDP’s mediocrity is on the CD’s head.
Critiques of the ad product are frequent and usually sharp in the blog's Comments. The story invites us into The Work. One viewer saw Don as “a corny old geezer” with a corny campaign. I’ll buy his “corny” campaign comment but he missed the mark with that “geezer” thing. The fact that Don is a hack has nothing to do with his age.
Also, the fact that I'm almost twice the Don character's age may be a trigger point here.
But here's the real point: This is not a show about a great agency or great creative work, it’s about wonderful characters beautifully detailed in a finely-etched setting. SCDP could be the Ted Bates of its time. In the 60s Ted's name alone horrified more good creative people than Norman of the same surname. Does anyone remember the little Bufferin “Bs” threading their way through a crudely-animated digestive tract ahead of Aspirin “As”?
That commercial generated more headaches than it helped cure.
Mad Men is a well-told tale about an ad agency with a consistently poor-to-mediocre creative product. That means The Work is tailor-made to the firm.
Someday, when we have the time, the Senior Creative People will take a shot at a campaign for an SCDP pitch. I’ll post it here.
We’ll let this audience of consumers (of the show) be the judges.
But here's the real point: This is not a show about a great agency or great creative work, it’s about wonderful characters beautifully detailed in a finely-etched setting. SCDP could be the Ted Bates of its time. In the 60s Ted's name alone horrified more good creative people than Norman of the same surname. Does anyone remember the little Bufferin “Bs” threading their way through a crudely-animated digestive tract ahead of Aspirin “As”?
That commercial generated more headaches than it helped cure.
Mad Men is a well-told tale about an ad agency with a consistently poor-to-mediocre creative product. That means The Work is tailor-made to the firm.
Someday, when we have the time, the Senior Creative People will take a shot at a campaign for an SCDP pitch. I’ll post it here.
We’ll let this audience of consumers (of the show) be the judges.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
The 60-Year-Old Candy Bar
A few days ago I went looking for an Oh Henry!. I’m not sure why. There are a few reasons why I should not have been looking for an Oh Henry! not the least of them having to do with type-2 diabetes. Nevertheless I found the bar, bought and ate it and reconnected with a lot of things that had disappeared into the nether regions of my braincase.
I remember buying the candy on my way home from school and taking care not to exhale in the direction of my mother who could detect peanut breath at preternatural distance. Failure to cloak it meant a short pithy speech titled “Spoiling Supper” that often included ominous references to dentistry. The peanuts were clearly the triggers that blew my cover and I considered short-circuiting the alarm by picking them out, but the Oh Henry! experience would not have survived. The bar became an Oh Henry without the punctuation.
So why, 60 years later, with total awareness of blood sugar issues and the danger of dental consequences was I suddenly out looking for that Oh Henry! experience? I guess I had other things lurking in the braincase.
Like Hank Aaron. Hank was a great ballplayer. I didn’t follow his teams but I had tremendous respect for his skills long before his run for The Record. Babe Ruth’s 714 homers stood for nearly four decades and seemed beyond human capacity in the doing and even harder to match. Impossible – until Hank stepped up to the plate on April 8, 1974 and hit number 715. That shot went much farther than over the wall. It penetrated deep into the heart of racism in baseball – an unsustainable hatred to which not even a hard-core bigot could cling. A great player topped The Babe’s record. So he was black and The Babe was white. It’s done. Get over it.
I already had a deep, personal appreciation of the value of black players in baseball. Without Jackie Robinson my beloved Brooklyn Dodgers would never have won the ’55 World Series. Any Brooklyn fan knows what that means.
Back to the candy.
Sometime during Hank’s run for the record the bar’s manufacturers tried to reposition the bar in his image. Babe Ruth had his Baby Ruth. Now Hank had Oh Henry!. I was already buying, but I bought more. Then I stopped. And then I came back a few days ago after a 30+-year hiatus.
I’ve read about the reasons why we buy. Some of it is dense and complex and dips into the Dispositional Theory of Moods, Mood-Congruent Cognition and stuff like that I refer to when I get too deep (over my head) into theory. I do know some of it is beyond research and reasoning. But more than one generation is recalling what they bought “back then” and driven by distant memories are buying again.
All I know is that an old brand reached out to me from half a lifetime ago and brought back the good and the bad of baseball, race relations and peanut breath.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Infographics: Following the Money
How we spend, what do we owe and how we're scored. Courtesy of Experian.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Infographics: Seniors and Facebook
This week's infographic is also on seniors and Facebook (similar to our March 13 post), provided by AllAssistedLivingHomes.com. Amongst the interesting facts are the different ways senior's use Facebook, the length of time they're logged on, and the amount of interest seniors have to Facebook – enough to fill hundreds of 80 people training classes.
Monday, March 26, 2012
The Definitive Mad Men Blog
Mad Men returned last night – and what a great episode it was! This is going to be a great season! With that in mind, here's a link to the definitive Mad Men blog by Nelle Engoron at Salon.
http://www.salon.com/writer/nelle_engoron/
Nelle will be writing amusing and insightful running commentaries for each new episode. You can view her previous Mad Men episode summaries here:
http://open.salon.com/blog/silkstone
Missing Mad Men
They were a long time away. And now they're back. But they still seem to be some distance from the place where the real-life madness was happening just across town. The contrast might have looked something like this:
The scene opens with Roger Sterling walking into the lobby at 20 West 43rd Street. He’s on his way to join a golfing buddy–an Account Management Supervisor with Doyle Dane Bernbach–at his office. They’re going out for drinks. Roger steps onto the elevator and after a moment he’s joined by a Jewish Copywriter and an African-American Art Director. He knows the Jew is a Copywriter from the way he’s talking about writing the end of a TV commercial. He knows he’s a Jew from the yarmulke on his head (holy days are on). From the conversation and industry jargon he guesses the black guy is an Art Director. The ethnicity he doesn’t have to guess.
The Art Director, a big guy, wearing a dashiki and standing a head taller than Roger, nods to him, bobbing head accentuated by a huge Afro:
“Hey, man. Howyadoin’?”
This does not put Roger at ease. His rides up with these two, but since he’s a bit flustered he gets off one stop too soon, steps out of the elevator and into the Creative Department. He heads for the Receptionist (also black) and into the path of an Asian Art Director, identifiable as an Art Director by the way she’s talking to the Copywriter with her.
But it’s the Copywriter that really rattles Roger.
The guy’s head is shaved (except for a scalp lock at the back), he has a large white mark in the middle of his forehead. He’s wearing full-length saffron robes. He is barefoot. Hari Krishna!! AMC does not permit profanity, but we all know that Roger is a profane man. “WTF!??!!!” Roger says, now leaning against the wall and clutching at his chest. Another copywriter (shoulder-length hair, torn jeans and sneakers) comes out of his office and asks Roger if he’s OK. Offers him a joint.
Cut to Roger in the ICU at Bellevue. He has tubes coming and going. Fade out.
This scene – the fictional world of Sterling Cooper meets the real world of Doyle Dane Bernbach – will never happen. But the clash of cultures is true-to-life. The 60s world of Doyle Dane was incomprehensible to the Roger Sterlings of the time, and largely unreachable by his agency’s creative people. We wonder if the series’ creator is aware of this.
Matthew Weiner is brilliant and obviously obsessed with his amazing creation and the story it pulled us into. But along with kudos come abuses. Creative people of his caliber are always being “interpreted.” Often by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. But an environment so realistically fashioned in such minute detail invites – demands – observations from the real world in which it's set by the people who do know what they’re talking about. If the haircuts and the lamps and the ladies underwear and the behaviors are so true-to-life, then true life as it was then will step in to observe the fantasy.
Mr. Weiner was on CBS This Morning recently. He was asked if the 60s were “The Golden Age of Advertising”. His response was: “According to them it was.” Interesting. “Them” who? His advisors, we assume, since Matthew wasn’t there himself. And who are his advisors? Obviously the people who in broad strokes shaped the world of Sterling Cooper, a place that (to this point in the story) has had no part in – or concept of – the “creative revolution”, a place of “rigid rules” that bore no resemblance to the Doyle Dane of that or any other day.
In fact it was Doyle Dane Bernbach that started the “creative revolution”, turning the advertising business and a part of our society on its ear. Doyle Dane called a client’s car “ugly” (it was). Also “defective”. The Volkswagen ad “Lemon” highlighted the defect and turned it into a perfect reason to buy a VW. The agency demeaned another client’s service as lesser than its competitor: “Avis. We’re only number two”. They were.
Business boomed.
In 1964 the team of Sid Myers and Stan Lee created “Daisy Girl”, the TV spot that changed political advertising forever. And Doyle Dane people created positive political ads for other candidates that continued to win campaigns and make news. All of this came from a place far more freewheeling and wilder than “Sterling Cooper”. No rules. Everybody welcome – if you had the talent to do Doyle Dane-caliber work.
So, is it possible that Mr. Weiner is unaware of all of this, his eyes locked on a “rigid rules” workplace where Doyle Dane work isn’t possible? Or even conceivable? Or maybe he’s just being coy. He’s skilled at that too.
All of these scenarios may be advanced in the new season. Peggy Olsen is a Copywriter on the move. My guess is that sometime during the coming weeks she will be asking herself if she has the talent to work at Doyle Dane Bernbach. She will put her book together and come knocking on our door. Don Draper? The powerful presence and good looks wouldn’t get him in the door and he’s smart enough to know it. So he rolls on at Sterling Cooper, a Creative Director perhaps with a creeping suspicion he isn’t all that creative.
The scene opens with Roger Sterling walking into the lobby at 20 West 43rd Street. He’s on his way to join a golfing buddy–an Account Management Supervisor with Doyle Dane Bernbach–at his office. They’re going out for drinks. Roger steps onto the elevator and after a moment he’s joined by a Jewish Copywriter and an African-American Art Director. He knows the Jew is a Copywriter from the way he’s talking about writing the end of a TV commercial. He knows he’s a Jew from the yarmulke on his head (holy days are on). From the conversation and industry jargon he guesses the black guy is an Art Director. The ethnicity he doesn’t have to guess.
The Art Director, a big guy, wearing a dashiki and standing a head taller than Roger, nods to him, bobbing head accentuated by a huge Afro:
“Hey, man. Howyadoin’?”
This does not put Roger at ease. His rides up with these two, but since he’s a bit flustered he gets off one stop too soon, steps out of the elevator and into the Creative Department. He heads for the Receptionist (also black) and into the path of an Asian Art Director, identifiable as an Art Director by the way she’s talking to the Copywriter with her.
But it’s the Copywriter that really rattles Roger.
The guy’s head is shaved (except for a scalp lock at the back), he has a large white mark in the middle of his forehead. He’s wearing full-length saffron robes. He is barefoot. Hari Krishna!! AMC does not permit profanity, but we all know that Roger is a profane man. “WTF!??!!!” Roger says, now leaning against the wall and clutching at his chest. Another copywriter (shoulder-length hair, torn jeans and sneakers) comes out of his office and asks Roger if he’s OK. Offers him a joint.
Cut to Roger in the ICU at Bellevue. He has tubes coming and going. Fade out.
This scene – the fictional world of Sterling Cooper meets the real world of Doyle Dane Bernbach – will never happen. But the clash of cultures is true-to-life. The 60s world of Doyle Dane was incomprehensible to the Roger Sterlings of the time, and largely unreachable by his agency’s creative people. We wonder if the series’ creator is aware of this.
Matthew Weiner is brilliant and obviously obsessed with his amazing creation and the story it pulled us into. But along with kudos come abuses. Creative people of his caliber are always being “interpreted.” Often by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. But an environment so realistically fashioned in such minute detail invites – demands – observations from the real world in which it's set by the people who do know what they’re talking about. If the haircuts and the lamps and the ladies underwear and the behaviors are so true-to-life, then true life as it was then will step in to observe the fantasy.
Mr. Weiner was on CBS This Morning recently. He was asked if the 60s were “The Golden Age of Advertising”. His response was: “According to them it was.” Interesting. “Them” who? His advisors, we assume, since Matthew wasn’t there himself. And who are his advisors? Obviously the people who in broad strokes shaped the world of Sterling Cooper, a place that (to this point in the story) has had no part in – or concept of – the “creative revolution”, a place of “rigid rules” that bore no resemblance to the Doyle Dane of that or any other day.
In fact it was Doyle Dane Bernbach that started the “creative revolution”, turning the advertising business and a part of our society on its ear. Doyle Dane called a client’s car “ugly” (it was). Also “defective”. The Volkswagen ad “Lemon” highlighted the defect and turned it into a perfect reason to buy a VW. The agency demeaned another client’s service as lesser than its competitor: “Avis. We’re only number two”. They were.
Business boomed.
In 1964 the team of Sid Myers and Stan Lee created “Daisy Girl”, the TV spot that changed political advertising forever. And Doyle Dane people created positive political ads for other candidates that continued to win campaigns and make news. All of this came from a place far more freewheeling and wilder than “Sterling Cooper”. No rules. Everybody welcome – if you had the talent to do Doyle Dane-caliber work.
So, is it possible that Mr. Weiner is unaware of all of this, his eyes locked on a “rigid rules” workplace where Doyle Dane work isn’t possible? Or even conceivable? Or maybe he’s just being coy. He’s skilled at that too.
All of these scenarios may be advanced in the new season. Peggy Olsen is a Copywriter on the move. My guess is that sometime during the coming weeks she will be asking herself if she has the talent to work at Doyle Dane Bernbach. She will put her book together and come knocking on our door. Don Draper? The powerful presence and good looks wouldn’t get him in the door and he’s smart enough to know it. So he rolls on at Sterling Cooper, a Creative Director perhaps with a creeping suspicion he isn’t all that creative.
In an earlier episode Don didn't understand "Lemon". In fact, he "hated" the ad. In the first episode of this new season he covets the American Airlines account. Back in that day when rumors were flying that the airline was looking for another agency, Doyle Dane created this ad (full-page, New York Times) for its client, American. Compare it with Don's lame "Equal Opportunity" gag. It comes from a far distant planet and totally different level of the craft.
The fictional world of Sterling Cooper vs. the real world of Doyle Dane Bernbach.
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