SEO SOS

As a freelancer aka intermittently unemployed person I am a big user of search.

In the hunt for work I spend a lot of time pounding the virtual pavement searching for any faint whiff of a potential job. I read a lot in the advertising trades about search engine optimization and the companies who make that their business. Optimize away me hearties because my biggest complaint across all the search engines and sites I have used is the lack of search precision at giving me accurate answers to my simplest requests. They really can’t seem to tell shit from shinola. The fact that both words begin with `sh’ is obviously confusing. This is not generally a complaint I’m leveling at Google or Bing or Yahoo or AOL, it’s the search engine monkeys who work on the so-called job sites. I click on one such as Creative Jobs Central, for example, and enter the keywords `Creative Director’. What I get back are links for senior software designer or Fashion editor. On another such site I got Registered Nurse. And another obviously thought the word Director was the most important word and mined the depth of its garbage cans for anything with that word in. Managing Director for Plush Toy Company and Financial Director for Internet start-up. I was surprised to see that Stage Director for end of year school play was missing.I would have applied for that. Here are some other offerings based upon a search request for Creative Director;-Director of Business Development, Director of Employment Counsel, and a doozy here - Director of Compensation Strategy, There was also a Worldwide Director of Emerging Markets opportunity. And these are not unknown sites. Monster.com is a prime offender sending me alerts that a job for Director of funeral services is crying out for my application. Having clicked on a site obviously puts me on a list for adjacent interest sites. `Jobs near your zip code’ sends me a list of jobs for Warehouse Manager and Forklift operator at least 5 times a day. In response to Copywriter I get Art Director jobs. Then there are the advice sites. How to power up your resumé , how to get the job of your dreams and most worryingly how to apply for a reverse mortgage. And then there are the people who email to tell me that they love my resumé and think I would be perfect as their insurance agent or as a purchaser of franchise. It scares me now in this time of unprecedented government surveillance that somewhere in Idaho or wherever the big data reviewing machinery is with its bots and drones reading all our mail and search histories that the same imprecision is at work. In Terry Gilliam’s movie `Brazil’ a fly getting squashed in the mechanism of a typewriter sets off a chain of misidentification. We don’t have flies to worry about but we sure do have a lot of big bugs.

Which one of these is not like the other

This is the award winning ( and I think  rightly so ) film for Chipotle with Willie Nelson
singing that Coldplay song about scientists.

And this is a spot I saw for the first time last night with Frank Perdue's son going on about being better
than regulations. Hmmm. Was it inspired by Chipotle or did the creative meeting go like this
`Let's do something like that Chipotle spot that won all the awards.'  Hmmmm.

Another effing app

First came the fucking weather app which amused me no end in times of absolute and crippling boredom. Now comes something that takes that attitude in an even more fun direction.
WHERE THE FUCK SHOULD I GO FOR DRINKS?
If it sounds fucking British that's because it is. Here's the nice write up.
`There’s a neat little web application that has been out for a while now, called simply “WHERE THE FUCK SHOULD I GO FOR DRINKS?” (yes, all caps). Created by British creative consultancy coolography, the website gets right to the point. It is inspired by the similar What The Fuck Should I Make for Dinner? which gives users suggestions on recipes.
The location is random, and if you go back to the site, chances are a different location will come up. 
The first button, “My Location is Fucking Wrong,” lets you change the default starting location, to search a different area perhaps. The second button (the middle one), “No, That Place Looks Like Shit,” spins the wheel again and gives you the next random selection. The third button, “Actually, I’m Fucking Hungry” takes you to it’s twin-sister site, “Where the Fuck Should I Go To Eat?”
Or you can get there from here
http://www.wherethefuckshouldigotoeat.com

What appeals to me,beside the childish pleasure of the `f' word is that it re-inforces the fact that your smart phone is fucking way smarter than you and knows it. It makes your computer so fucking superior its an insight to the future when nano chips breed more nano chips and make themselves sentient.
It may not be quite what Arthur C Clarke envisioned for the future but I think it was exactly what Phillip K Dick imagined. And his stories are a lot cooler that Arthur's. In my fucking opinion.

Oh poop!

Today's post has a distinctively scatological theme.Bodily waste.And in the two examples I'm
floating here it's use is relevant. The anti-smoking film event above makes its point although I don't know if it's as hard-hitting and convincing as some of the emotionally wrenching tv work that's been running here in the New York area.Telling me that a component of dog shit is found in cigarettes obviously earns a `eeewww' from the audience but so would telling them that bat guano is an ingredient in mascara.Yes this poop and pee show creates a spectacle but I doubt if it changes habits. There's a tv spot running currently in which a woman is told by her doctor that she has lung cancer and the voice over chillingly says the only thing worse that getting this news is giving this news to your children.
At which we see the woman trying to pluck up the nerve to tell her kids that Mommy is going to die.

Here from Bangkok and actually looking more like a penis than a turd is another example of advertising indulging in coprophagy. This time it's an ad for people who are unwillingly anal-retentive and I guess it comes under the heading of `oh those crazy Bangkok creatives and their lax advertising standards authorities!' But having got me to the `eeewww' nose-wrinkling stage once again it does nothing to convince me to take the brand seriously. I'm sure it will win awards after all throwing shit at the wall and seeing if it sticks has been a time-honored practice in this wild and wacky ad world. I only hope the trophy is more tasteful.

You're ugly and fat go away!

Abercombie & Fitch. What genius lives within the walls of this company! What perfect ambassadorial spirit of the American dream! No ugly fat people wanted. Brilliant marketing.Are you taking note Mrs Obama? You can preach all you want about the values of vegetables and good nutrition to a young generation but nothing will get them off their lardasses like being denied entry to the hallowed halls of A&F. The white kids of rich suburbia now have a reason to abandon those thousand calorie Starbucks frappes and start working out.
Or you can consider them the worst kind of fashion fascists who deserve to have all their clothing distributed to the homeless who thanks to severe malnutrition can model their brand perfectly.

hold your nose

I love those Fabreze ads where blindfolded people are in a really stinky environment
filled with dead cats and rotting vegetables. It's the ultimate demo and it's entertaining to watch. High fives being slapped on both sides.
Now this past weekend I decided to make a curry not quite from scratch but almost
and I labored over the pot like a crazy alchemist . The results were amazing: It was a great  meal. My
fingers were bright yellow from the turmeric.My pans were destroyed. And somehow the smell of the curry seemed to be everywhere and it wouldn't go away.A day later the smell was still hanging around. Day 3 the same. Day 5-same again.  Day 6 I bucked and went out to buy a bottle of the magic Febreze. This stuff can fend off monster stench.I know because I have seen what it can do in commercial land.So bottle upon bottle of the stuff is discharged into the atmosphere only to have negligible effects.More bottles and plug in fresheners are deployed. And still the curry cloud hovers above the house.In the end 5 bottles and 2 plug-ins later I can still smell it.
I'm waiting now to see the disclaimer saying we apologize for not being able to deal with curry smells.
I'm hoping that by the time that happens the smell itself will have disappeared.

Algorithm and Blues

A long time ago in a galaxy far away when I was a writer working on Coca-Cola the talent agency CAA or rather Michael Ovitz the über-agent to the stars at CAA decided that Hollywoodland could do a better job of advertising than Madison Avenue. He figured that having sway with the cream of directors cinematographers scriptwriters and actors gave him an advantage. His pitch was enticing. `Ladies and Gentlemen , imagine if you will the vision of Francis Ford Coppola, the humor of Rob Reiner,the energy of Richard Donner….yadda yada yada.’ Well I can’t remember if Coppola actually got to shoot one since he had previously shot a spot for General Motors which that client considered un-airable and the Coke folks were gun-shy after seeing why. I do remember that the most lasting thing to come out of this exercise was the animated Polar Bears. A wise man (as opposed to wise guy) at McCann called Bruce Nelson said to me at the time how crazy it was for the  Coke client to fall for  CAA’s story since if an ad agency had the same success rate as the movie biz we’d all be out of business in a month. The movie hit and miss ratio was and still is pretty awful. Which is why it was interesting to read in the New York Times today about Vinny Bruzzese (now that sounds like a wise guy) chief executive of Worldwide Motion Picture Group who is bringing analytics to evaluate movie scripts and better predict if they will be boffo or bombs. He and his team of data demons compare story structure and genre of a script and use a database of focus group results for similar movies and also surveys 1500 potential moviegoers. He has already been hired to analyze over 100 scripts and his magic algorithms were apparently instrumental in  tweaking movies such as `Oz the Great and Powerful’. I’m sure that feelings are mixed. Scriptwriters who get thumbs up from Vinny will say it’s great and those who get the thumbs down will be unhappy. I agree with those who are concerned that it will bring a greater degree of conformity to an industry with a microscopic comfort zone. I think it would be a great exercise to try a little blind testing and provide him with scripts from original and critically acclaimed movies and see how they fare under the scrutiny of Vinny’s successo-meter. I can also see his analytics being incorporated into script writing software so that just as you type in `Open in a bowling alley’ a box will pop up to remind you that the success rate of movies with bowling scenes is  2% and can you change it from bowling alley to laundromat because the success rate there is 78%. That would be both fun and useful. Ahh but then in the very same issue of  The New York Times I saw the perfect opportunity for Vinny to make it magillah big. The article was about how media giants like Condé Nast were creating their own on-line content and looking for advertisers to buy into them in the same way they buy into broadcast programming. One such piece of `content’ was a series in which Vogue person Hamish Bowles is seen shopping his way around the world. Yahoo has created an on-line series with actor John Stamos interviewing other `celebrities’ about where when and how they lost their virginity. This is the perfect place to bring in Vinny and testing. There is such a rush now to throw` content’ on the internet thinking that there’s an audience just sitting around waiting for it and willing to drop the daily dose of Word with Friends or Angry Birds for 20 minutes of Hamish trying to decide between floral and stripes. Content is in danger of just being content pollution. Which is something I'm very discontent about. It’s stuff I don’t want to see getting in the way of stuff I want to get to. If agencies and now studios are pre-testing their work doesn’t it make sense for media companies to do the same. Vinny’s analyzer offers the perfect way to measure if any this `content’ has any value. At the least it could spare us from seeing Hamish buying bowling shoes.

Like me

The Beatles may have believed that money can’t buy you love but

today it can sure buy you a boatload of `likes’. And I was reading in my

trawling of the interweb that there as many as 20 million fake follower accounts for twitter . I think that’s what I’m going to demand for my birthday –fake twitter followers. I think that would be better for my self esteem issues than the Old Spice body wash gift set I’m expecting and it will help me vent my impotent rage as yet another old friend I  reach out to in search of work gives me the old non-reply treatment. My fake twitter followers will re-tweet everything I post so that I can publicly humiliate the bastards and make it trend at the same time. If one fake tweet can devastate Wall Street my legion of twittery Orcs and their twitchy thumbs can cause some real damage. At $60 for five thousand fake followers I can command an army the likes of which has never been seen before. Not counting Justin Bieber’s fake followers of course. Bieber is King. And while I’m at it I can set up 2,500 likes for $34 on Facebook. Fake likes on my fake page? Yes I have a fake Facebook account doesn’t everybody? Now I want to connect my twitter followers and Facebook fans to it to my LinkedIn page and have a thousand recommendations for nothing and truly be seen as a leader in emerging media. There’s nothing new about this. It has been done before. About six hundred years ago actually.

Back then the Church had a practice of selling what they called `indulgences.’

Think of these as spiritual `likes.’ You hand over the cash and someone gives you a piece of paper setting out the value of your blessing. Indulgences were one of the things that had Martin Luther flipping his wig and breaking away from the church of Rome. This schism brought on what’s known as the Reformation. It was a pretty big deal that rocked the religious universe way back in the day. Can the fake friend controversy of today have the same effect in the work world of today? Possibly. Where’s the value in friendship when you can buy yourself a bunch of fake ones really cheap and let the true ones go to hell? 

Where's my beer?

What does Peroni, the Italian beer and Skegness the British east coast resort have in common? Nothing. So say the makers of the beer who refused to have their product sold in said sea side town because it didn’t fit with the brand equity.Now while its true that `Skeggy’ as its known to those who go there is no Biarritz or Miami by the same token Peroni is no Dom Perignon either. This is another sad mad example of a brand too consumed with itself that it’s forgotten that it exists to be consumed by the public. Successful brands today are exploring every platform and relevant outlet and letting the tone and manner with which they populate these places inform and amplify the brand equity. Is Karl Lagerfeld too

runway to refuse to be sold in H&M? No. Karl understands the difference between inexpensive and cheap. One magnifies his brand. The other he knows would destroy it.

Being in a discount clothing shop doesn’t mean compromising his air of exclusivity

Peronii is a beer of the moment. And those moments can be over very quickly.

It’s a premium beer mostly because of its price. One beer that shares this position and celebrates it is Stella Artois. Stella is available to everyone but affordable only to those prepared to spend the extra money. Someone drinking Stella wants you know that it isn’t cheap. It's a status symbol. Will the absence of Peroni in Skegness force visitors to go elsewhere? I doubt it. Do people reflect on the `equity’ of the beer they drink. I doubt that too.The absence of  draftt Peroni in Skegness won’t change Skegness. It’s just

a missed opportunity for Peroni.

Up to the test

Like many a creative before me I have a hate/hate even more relationship with the methods of testing advertising. I once worked as the personal slave to a grumpy old creative director who said on the agency reel no less that he didn’t write for consumers any more.Instead he wrote for Millward Brown. This highly esteemed and even more highly rewarded company is one of many who have a prescription for telling clients whether the advertising the agency has sold them will work. The old curmudgeon I worked for did have a point. After you experience the soul tearing bad reviews of your work by a company like Millward Brown or Ipsos or Neilson or any of the others you retreat bleeding to your cave and resolve never to let that happen again. So you learn their hit points, what scores and doesn’t and you produce work as nimble as a ballet dancer with lead feet. Every now and then, like the cicadas that crawl up from the ground every 17 years comes along a creative director determined to fight the system and produce work unconstrained by the laws of testing. It may be someone from the elite agencies we hear about around the campfire late at night, the agencies that don’t have to have their work tested and qualified to run. This person usually lasts for a few months by which time they have suffered a brain hemorrhage from trying to get his or her head around what the testing methodology is forcing the advertising idea to do. And it doesn’t help that many client brand teams have an interest in testing that goes beyond curiosity. I’ve known brand teams whose bonus is linked to success at testing. If the evil stopped at that I wouldn’t be so alarmed. What really gets me mad is when work that has done backflips to pass the testing goes on to bomb in market. No work goes out unless it has passed testing with flying colors. So how can it fail in market? What is the relationship between testing and actual performance? That’s something that probably needs to be tested. This disconnect is something that a lot of companies turn a blind eye to because it raises very fundamental uncomfortable questions. If testing can’t be a predictor of market success then why test. Equally ridiculous is the amount of weight given to the preliminary communication checks that involve 18 women in Hackensack NJ or the equivalent discussing the pro’s and cons of your work. Don’t get me wrong it’s an invaluable tool for uncovering new turns of language and potential communication disasters. But that’s it. Unfortunately many people report and stick to the verbatims as if they were delivered in stone from atop a mountain and represent the infallible word of god the holy consumer. When 18 sketchy folks in a room off an interstate somewhere are responsible for green-lighting your project it speaks a lot about the inability of the client to feel the work and trust their instincts and their agency. Like I said I have a hate/hate even more relationship with all testing and mostly because when work tests well and the gang of 18 love the work I am so creepily and pathetically grateful. I roll over for a belly rub like the pathetic ad-ho I am. A jury of genius’s  agree with me and love my work. Oh happy day.

Farting in the elevator

So many pearls of wisdom have been attributed to David Ogilvy that it’s hard to trust the source of the one I’m about to quote.

Not that it really matters. When I first came to McCann in New York

I was a very gullible guy and a very senior and senatorial account man

used to open every presentation with quotes he’d attribute to either the original Mr. McCann or Mr. Erickson or Marion Harper Jr. and for a while I swallowed this shtick whole until he admitted in private that they were all completely bogus. He did it he said to add a degree of gravitas to whatever cornpone he was feeding his clients.

So this Ogilvy gem may be real or totally cubic zirconium.

`Getting attention is easy. Anyone who farts in an elevator gets attention.

Getting attention for the right reason is a more difficult task.’

Whether he said it or not the principle is right. I was reminded of it recently when I saw two commercials. One for Kmart where people use the word `Ship’ as though they are saying `Shit’. For example-`I ship my pants’  ` I ship my bed’ etc.

Another spot I saw was for an on-line travel-booking site called bookit.com and features the use of the word `Booking’ as though it meant `Fucking.’  For example –`Look at the booking room', `the booking view', `we’re so booking happy' and so on.

Is it possible that these campaigns were crowd sourced from a group made up exclusively of boys in first grade? But that only makes sense to me if the clients buying the work were also first graders. Then I could imaging what a laugh riot the presentation was,much rib holding and rolling on the floor ensuing. Alas the folks buying this work are all probably MBA alumni of some prestigious alma mater somewhere.

And their justification is probably that the work `tested through the roof.’

I’ll save my thoughts on testing for another post but I will say that having gone through the roof this work should have continued its trajectory and landed somewhere safely out at sea where it could mingle anonymously with all the other excrement out there.

I have no squeamishness about the use of the words fuck and shit. They are everyday words and in the right context bring authenticity to dialogue. In England where I grew up much coarser words are often used as terms of endearment. It’s the farting in the elevator aspect I don’t like. Yes you got my attention. I can recall it clearly not only because it makes you look stupid but because it assumes I am equally as infantile.

I wonder if in the presentation some slick account dude started off with the famous quote from H.L Mencken `Nobody went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.’

In which case it’s a pity David Ogilvy is in the great boardroom in the sky as he could have piped up `Never insult the customer-she is your wife.’