• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Hello ____, it’s me, Luke.

I hear “through channels” that those clients have had you on the ropes for the last month or so; got you a little down.

Been there, dude. I spent THIRTY THREE years in the trenches where you are now and I think I had one client, one stinkeen client who needed no education. One client in alllll that time who just kinda got it.

In order to survive 33 years of clients who either don’t or won’t get it, I encourage you to do what my big brother Kip did.

Kip was (is) a Harvard-trained lawyer who spent all of his professional life earning 1/100th of what he could have earned being a corporate lawyer. Instead, he spent years as a $14,000-a-year kind of lawyer who represented nonprofit clients, causes that couldn’t pay a dime, organizations that were busy fighting the good fight — standing up to big power companies that were turning off the power in the homes of poor people, causes like that.

And one day I asked my brother, “Damn, how do you keep from getting mad or depressed as you fight such people?” And his answer was, “I never let myself get over-the-top mad. I just keep my anger at a very low boil. Always.”

A low boil. NO boil means you’re close to giving up. You need to keep some fight in you. But boiling over? That leads to a short bitter career; probably a short bitter life.

I’ve always remembered my big brother’s answer. In order for any artistic soul to survive in a world full of number-crunchers, politics, and marketing people who just don’t get how cool and how effective advertising can be, we need to remember, LOW BOIL. I wrote recently in these pages, “The first duty of an artist is to survive.” You must make sure that the bright light you bring to the industry is not snuffed out by the first 85 bad meetings you have, and you’re gonna have ‘em.

If something dies, in fact, when the first 85 things die, soldier on. One out of 85 things surviving? Sad to report, but that’s pretty much par for the course in this business, which is essentially one of artists presenting things to scientists.

So, my young friend, let your defeats be funerals of short duration, but your victories? Celebrate any victory, large or small, with wild bacchanalia.

Your cheerleader, Luke Sullivan

Sue me if you want, but I agree with Heidi’s mom and want to pass along some advice to students everywhere: If you are even capable of being bored, I don’t wanna hear it. In fact, never let on to anyone, especially your creative director, that you have the kind of intellect capable of being so switched-off it can be bored.

When you say, “I was so bored this weekend” you’re stating that you find the entire universe – in all its mystery, in all its explosive beauty, in all its fractal complexity –  that the entire universe bores you. Saying “I’m bored” suggests  you’ve in fact seen  and thought of every interesting thing in the universe, read every book, been down every street, looked into every window, talked to all 7 billion people and that until some NEW material comes along, frankly, you’re not at fault for mopin’ around the house and draggin’ your knuckles a little bit. “Sorry, but there’s  nuthin’ ta DO.”

I simply cannot imagine a smart person being bored, ever.

I try to picture Albert Einstein moping around his house with “nuthin’ ta do.” I can’t. I try to imagine, say, Malcolm Gladwell hangin’ out over at Paul McCartney’s house and they’re tossing cards into an upturned hat, both grumbling about how bloody boring everything is. I can’t. I try to imagine George W. Bush  and …  well, that’s a fairly easy image to conjure.

(There’s W at his ranch. His cable is out which means he can’t watch NASCAR so he’s out on his porch waiting for the cable guy, munching on Cheetohs and as he reads the back of the bag, his lips move.)

The other day someone told me how bored he was and the metaphor came to mind of a street drunk asleep on the steps of the public library, his brain an insensible dollop of meat loaf  idling  at the feet of the stone lions in front of the vast cathedral of knowledge; his back to kaleidoscopic mystery of existence, his legs twitching, and his sputtery little two-cylinder mind, idling, twitch-dreaming of some Sterno-numbing pleasure, perhaps a People magazine.

Perhaps I am too harsh, but if he’s waiting for this watchman to prod him along down the sidewalk with my nightstick, forget about it. Be bored. Yawn into the abyss. The rest of us will be too busy inhaling all the knowledge and experience  we can before our time is up and our candle gutters. We will never be bored. Good creative people are naturally interested in everything, curious about everything.  They inhale the world.

My first "ad." (I know, I knnnow.)

(I just “liked” my own essay to see what would happen. What happened was my name ends up in the list of likers. Made me feel creepy. Please forgive, won’t you?)

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

A friend of mine is writing a book about advertising and he asked me to contribute some thoughts about my earliest experience with the craft, in particular any memories about my “first time,” my first successes (or failures).

As many of you know, I am a huge fan of Ray Bradbury. I think he’s one of the best writers in captivity. In a biography about the man, Mr. Bradbury  remembered the time he first realized he’d written a good short story (The Lake).  Of that 1944 story he wrote: “When I finished [writing it], I was crying. I knew at long last, after ten years of trying, I had written something good.”

I think as we grow up as artists and creative people, our reach exceeds our grasp for years and years. We grow up being able to see so much more than we can do. We love the creativity we see in the art we love, but it takes years for us to learn a craft well enough to finally make something as good as the things we’ve been admiring.

So it was with me.

When I first got into the business, my mentors were the Original Minneapolis Duo, Ron Anderson and Tom McElligott. For the first few weeks after they hired me, Ron and Tom put me in a room with their collection of One Show award annuals. They called these books the “graduate school of advertising” and told me to sit down and read them all.

I was such an ad geek that I did more than read them. I Xeroxed every single page of every annual and then cut them all into individual pieces, all the ads, and then assembled all the world’s best auto ads in one book, all the best tourism ads in another book, creating a shelf-full of 3-ring binders of the world’s best ads broken into categories. Then, whenever I got a job order, whether it was for a restaurant or a brand of liquor, I’d go back to those books and re-read everything in that particular category all over again.

I would give the same advice to students today.

Learning the language of persuasion, of excellent copywriting, it isn’t a whole lot different than learning French. It’s about immersion. I immersed myself in the craft and you should too. Eventually all that smart starts to rub off on you.

So I started by copying. I didn’t copy concepts of course, but I did my best to copy the rhythms of, say, Neil Drossman’s brainy headlines or Ed McCabe’s smart-ass writing style. After awhile (in my case it took about 3 years) your own style begins to emerge.  You don’t decide what your style is, you discover it. Style is hard-wired into your brain and it’s a matter of discovering what your style is and then sharpening it, exploring its dimensions.

I’d like to say that once I studied all these masters, my own style quickly emerged and I was brill from then on.

Oh, but becoming good at anything is rarely a graceful process. In those first  years, I created some truly horrible things. I’ve already written about my first ad in my book Hey Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Advertising, and if I may, I’ll pull this short quotation:

As hard as I studied those awards annuals, most of the work I did early on wasn’t very good. In fact, it stunk. If the truth be known, those early ads of mine were so bad I have to reach for my volume of Edgar Allan Poe to describe them with any accuracy:  “. . . a nearly liquid mass of loathsome, detestable putridity.”

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s my very first ad. Just look at it (for as long as you’re able): a dull little idea that doesn’t so much revolve around an overused play on the word interest, as it limps.

Rumor has it they’re still using this ad at poison control centers to induce vomiting. (“Come on now, Jimmy. We know you ate all of your sister’s antidepressant pills and that’s why you have to look at Luke’s bank ad.”)

As I said, it ain’t pretty and it ain’t graceful. I sucked for quite a while and this in spite of having some of the best teachers in the world.

Hall of Famer Tom McElligott once looked at a radio script I presented him, handed it back to me shaking his head and said, “This is a real mess.” It was a mess. Oh, it probably had some shred of concept to it but it was undisciplined, not single-minded, it sprawled, it had useless little asides I thought were so clever, and on top of all that, it had the most junior of mistakes — it didn’t time out to a sixty.

I had another excellent teacher, copywriter Dick Thomas. I remember bringing Mr. Thomas another over-long radio spot. He could tell at a glance it was too long and said, “Here, let me just trim it a bit.” That’s when he fed my script into an oscillating fan he had running on his desk. “There,” he said, handing back my shredded, truncated script. “Rewrite it to that length.”

May I take a moment here to humbly thank all those brilliant teachers I had early in my career.

And now, in parting, I’ll summarize: Study the masters. Immerse yourself in their work over and over again until you have it memorized. Surround yourself with people who are better than you are. Don’t waste time defending your early efforts. Just shut up and listen to your teachers. Stay humble. Stay hungry.

Sooner or later you’ll produce something that looks like the work you’ve been studying and admiring. Like Ray Bradbury, one day you’ll lean back and realize, wow, all that work, it’s starting to pay off.

Sullivan family in full "merchandise frenzy," 1961

(Article I wrote for the Los Angeles Times.)

My mother, a dyed-in-the-wool Minnesota Democrat, is sitting across the breakfast table from me. She’s reading the paper and comes across an ad for the big after-Thanksgiving sale at The Mall of America.

“How can people even go to that place?” she laments. “It’s just a … just a monument to Capitalism!”

She’s my Mom, so what can I tell her? I wish I could say, “Ma, that dress you’re wearing? Did you, um, grow it or something? And those shoes, did you … whittle those? No, you bought ‘em, Mom, with money, in a store. That’s capitalism … and it’s okay.”

Exactly why do so many people get disdainful of the idea of stores and buying things and capitalism this time of year?

The Thanksgiving dishes are barely in the sink and before the first boozy uncle can tether his blimp to the sofa and unbutton his Spandex to make room, everyone’s all “Christmas has just become so commercialized.”

Shopping is suddenly bad. And why? We’ve been coming out of stores all year long, teetering under Grinch-size piles of merchandise that would buckle a sherpa’s knees. Eleven straight months of spend-spend-spend, but have a turkey drumstick, watch a football game, and boom – the nation’s on the shrink’s sofa again going “Geez, aren’t stores bad? It’s bad to buy things, isn’t it?”

Everybody seems to have forgotten the long July 4th weekend and that 3-day AmEx bender we all went on at Home Depot. And when it was over, I don’t remember any hair-shirt whining about “Who can celebrate national independence anymore, what with lines this long to buy a grill? Kinda makes a fella forget what the Declaration of Independence really stands for.”

Didn’t happen.

But here we are again at that one time of year when our nation’s super-ego puts on its Self-Hatred Christmas Special, when the apologists line up to lament the excesses of one of the world’s strongest economies, and through it all we’ll hear one Scrooge after another puttin’ the spin on the Ghost of Christmas Past: “It wasn’t like this when I was a kid.”

Oh hush, it was exactly like this when we were kids. The presents were geekier, yes, and the lights on the tree were the big hot kind you could smell from upstairs. Other than that, it was exactly the same.

As a child of the ‘50s, I personally recall some serious merchandise worship happening under the tree. It may not have been an xBox I was opening, but don’t try to tell me I was on some higher spiritual plane as I ripped through the 1959 wrapping paper, my teeth gritted in full Merchandise Frenzy: “Shut up everybody! It’s a Daniel Boone raccoon hat and it’s mine!”

Let’s face it. Stuff is fun. And stores are where we get stuff. But the Puritanical gene, though recessive, still runs strong in America. A penny saved is a penny earned, but now it seems a penny spent is the top rung of the ladder straight down to hell.

But the fact is, ladies and gentlemen, ours is a species that runs on commerce. And whether your tribe happens to trade pelts or Euros, the rites of celebration have always involved a bit of excess consumption. At history’s very first ritual of celebration, I’ll bet Grandpa homo sapiens bought drinks for everyone in Olduvai Gorge, yelled “Kill the fatted calf,” and woke up a day later to a cave that was a complete mess.

Go ye forth, Americans, I say, and spend. Note I didn’t say spend without restraint, but spend without guilt. It’s part of life.

Personally, I’ll be doing much of my shopping online this year. And, yes, one day when I’m old I’ll be slumped in front of my son’s computer, grousing about my own Christmases Past. “Well, back when I logged onto amazon.com, I tellya, downloads happened just like that! And click-throughs took you right to the Christmas specials. And those damn pop-up ads let a man shop in peace!! I remember back when e-tailing meant something!”

This one isn't particularly funny. But some of them are. Check out http://www.quickmeme.com/Junior-Art-Director/?upcoming

The new icon for a "long idea"?

Gareth Kay is one of the few certifiable digital experts out there and he proposes that there’s a subtle but important difference between big ideas and what he calls “long ideas.” These are ideas that are rich enough to be extended into digital and other channels for a long time. They are less brand ideas than they are brand stories.

Kip Voytek is another digital brainiac I’m lucky to call a friend and he added to Gareth’s description with this long wonderful email:

I still think it’s worth encouraging teams doing digital work to come up with good ideas – emphasis on good rather than big, and plural rather than singular.  I have a speech slide with a picture of Madden 2010, World of Warcraft, the iPad, and Nike+ and I challenge people in the audience to come up with the “big idea” behind each of these products.  While people invariably come up with a high-level descriptor, they usually wind up discovering that there are dozens and dozens of big ideas in them; design details, executions, lots of ideas that all add up to its market appeal.  When I had the Nike account in 2002, Nike kept asking us, “What is the big idea of this site, this app, this page?” An art director finally got exasperated at this ongoing request and said “Don’t you get it?  I have to come up with dozens of great ideas to make a great digital experience.  If you make me focus on only one, you’ll have an experience with one great moment followed by dozens of mediocre ones.”

Kip went on to suggest that teams who are briefed to find the one big idea almost always come up with a decent concept, while teams that are freed from the mandate for one big idea think about the long view of the customer and come up with rich experiences that work across the entire customer journey.

When we pay to slavish obedience to a “big idea” we can end up leaving a lot of good concepts on the table. Does every single thing we produce have to look like a clone of the main idea? My guess is no. Yes, it needs to report to the same brand, the same idea, but let’s not get all Concept-Nazi. Sticking to the war metaphor for a minute longer, I am reminded by a cool thing my friend Mike Lescarbeau (CEO of Carmichael/Lynch) told me: he compares a really good idea to a nuclear bomb and asks “Does it really have to land precisely on target to work?”

Come to think of it, long ideas apply also to other areas.

Is every single Beatles song the best one they did? No, but the Beatles story, the Beatles voice, the Beatles brand? Solid as a rock. I liken this long idea concept also to the output of authors. I happen to like Stephen King. In my opinion, the last top-notch A+ story he wrote was The Green Mile, but the dude keeps puttin’ the new titles out there and I keep reading because I love his voice. I love the idea of Stephen King. Long ideas are what you want for brands that are gonna be around for awhile. This blog, it’s a long idea, too. Not every posting is A+, but I’m pretty sure I’ve done some good ones. What’s more important is that I keep at it, keep posting, keep adding to the original iteration.

So remember: It’s not a big idea if it’s only a big idea for a while.

Distilled from a recent interview on blog radio with the delightful Heidi Ehlers, founder of Camp Black Bag – “The Boot Camp for Your Career.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I was in the advertising business for 32 years. To yield that figure in dog years (an appropriate metric for this business), we multiply by by 7. Performing the calculation, I am not surprised to see I was in the business for 244 years.

244 long grinding years.

What makes dog years such an accurate chronometer for life in advertising is the wear-and-tear the business takes on you. Particularly your spirit. Because 100% of everything you create in this business will be second-guessed and 95% of it will die.

Not just die, but killed; murdered actually, usually bludgeoned over its head by a client wielding a chart of some kind. What’s worse is that you’ll be asked to re-solve the same problem you just solved. For 244 years I listened to people asking me, “Can you do it over?”

Often I think we should go into some profession which requires only math. At least when you’re done solving a problem in math, no one comes in and says, “I see you have 2 + 2 equaling 4 … but I’m not crazy about the number 4. Can we have it equal something else?”

It’s a rough business on the sometimes tender creative spirit. So, what are we to do?

Many years ago, I heard this piece of advice: “The first duty of the artist is to survive.” Took me a long time to see how smart that advice was.

The world is not kind to creative people, nor their creative ideas. The world in fact conspires to reject new ideas. Good ideas are usually surrounded at birth by anti-bodies that do not recognize their strange DNA and want them dead.

Given this harsh environment, it is not surprising how often we hear about creative people burning out. And I’m not talking about the piles of dead rocks stars in hotel rooms, the writers eating shotguns, the artists slicing off ears. That’s mental illness and addiction. I’m talking about regular people like you and me who just grow sick of defending their work and finally leave, usually with a parting remark like, “It’s just not as fun as it used to be.”

It seems for creative people to survive, some sort of Kevlar must be laid over the spirit.

What you do to figure out how to care for your spirit, to keep it strong and flexible, that will be up to you. All I can tell you is what helped me.

Cultivate the ability of infinite resignation. Resignation doesn’t mean resigning. It means accepting. It’s about finding a way to be in the fight, but not of the fight. It’s a hard thing to describe and the best description I ever saw was in a book I read in college.

( Looks like I’m gonna get “all deep” on everyone again, so let me just don my clip-on pony tail here and let’s do this. Oh…. and bragging points to anyone who recognizes the book.)

“A man of knowledge knows that his life will be over altogether too soon. He knows that he, as well as everybody else, is not going anywhere; he knows that nothing is more important than anything else. … Under these circumstances his only tie to his fellow men is his controlled folly. Thus a man of knowledge endeavors and sweats and puffs and, if one looks at him, he is just like any ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is under control. Nothing being more important than anything else, a man of knowledge chooses any act and acts it out as if it matters to him. His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn’t. So when he fulfills his acts, he retreats in peace and whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn’t, it is in no way part of his concern.”

As expected, U.S. entries to Cannes were way down this year given the recent Zombie Apocalypse.

Observers are surprised ad people continue to even exist given their worthlessness in a economy that now values productive trades like farmers, electricians, and mechanics. In fact, the few agencies still operating attribute their success almost entirely to being above the second floor.

“You’re not going to see as many TV entries from DDB this year,” remarked CD Jay Russell, speaking from the balcony over Whacker Drive. “The entire production work force of L.A. is infected and…” Russell’s interview was cut short as a horde of undead photographers’ representatives stormed the locked doors below, their withered purplish arms extended, still clutching portfolios and complimentary bagels.

Without television, U.S. agencies’ hopes at Cannes rest on a few out-of-home entries, including McCann’s boring “God help us” messages painted on sheets and hung from their Manhattan office windows. “There are a few decent headlines,” observed Creativity’s Theresa Nelson. “But most are the usual crap like, ‘Need water,’ ‘Need food.’ At least that one team was trying with the ‘John 3:18’ thing.”

A few agencies are breaking out with messaging designed to change the eating behaviors of the zombie hordes. But J. Walter’s “Eat Smart” backfired as zombies simply ate bigger brains. Tribal’s “Dot.Zom” experiment on Facebook failed because zombies can already  “like you” simply by eating your brains. And DDB’s campaign for a heart-healthy diet (“More Gra-a-a-a-a-a-ins, Less Bra-a-a-a-a-ains”) died after focus-group zombies crashed through the one-way mirrors and cracked the researchers’ skulls like rotten Georgia peanuts and ate their pulsing brains forthwith.

Agencies are now trying simply to survive. To divert the zombie hordes away from their agency on 17, creatives at DDB have hung posters in the stairwells positioning the JWT survivors on the 5th floor as “the other white meat.”

That teeny caption upper left says: "Reading analysis and eye-tracking data courtesy of Interaction Labratory..."

This is the cover of the new book from London’s D&AD, The Copy Book. I am crazy proud to be one of the featured writers. That said, I would  have trouble looking anyone in the eyes and claiming my work should be featured in this book, and not that of my friend Greg Hahn’s. Or Jim Riswold’s. Or Ari Merkin’s.

(But screw ‘em. Isn’t it great?? Yesssss….)

Ahem … sorry about that … uncalled for. Unprofessional, is what that was. Let’s start again, shall we?

D&AD’s fantastic new book is out now, in a second and updated edition. The layout of new edition is better than the first with many of the featured ads appearing as full spreads, as they originally appeared in the magazines. And alongside the work, the advice of 48 different writers on the craft of copywriting.

At the risk of a wagging finger from its publisher Taschen, I’ll end today by excerpting my short offering in the volume, an essay titled “In Praise of the Humble Print Ad.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

In Praise of the Humble Print Ad.

It is no longer as fashionable as it once was to be able to write a great print ad.  A print ad simply isn’t as cool as it once was.

A print ad is not interactive and it doesn’t link to other print ads. To create a print ad, you don’t have to go to LA or to Hyper Island. It usually ends its short life under a puppy and print ads are almost never featured on YouTube. Yet in its bare two dimensions the humble print ad contains all the challenges of the entire creative process.

In fact, when I am looking for talent to hire, I find the most telling pieces in their portfolios are the print ads.

There’s nowhere to hide in a print ad. The idea is right there on the surface or it isn’t. There’s no music to tell me how to feel, no loading bar to tell me the clever bit is about to happen.

You are reading a book that is still devoted (I presume) to print ads. If this edition is anything like the last, it is fairly bursting with good advice from great writers on their creative process. So I’ll limit my remarks today to just this: If you are a student or just starting out in this business, I encourage you to learn (before you learn anything else) how to write a great print ad.

It is the molecular building block of the advertising universe.

1.) He didn’t work from notes. Notes suck. Notes say, “What I’m saying is so unmemorable, even I had to memorize it.” Speak from the heart.

2.) It didn’t feel like he was presenting. It felt like he was talking with us.

3.) He stopped 23 agencies from pitching for Apple’s business and just assigned it to an agency he admired. God, the pitch process sucks so bad.

4.) He sounds like a creative making the pitch to a client, not a client.

5.) He was actually proud that Apple had done what he called “award-winning work.” These days, even agencies are afraid to say their work win awards. (Today award-winning means the work didn’t sell stuff but was really cool.)

6.) The speech is entirely about brand advertising; about values, about “soft” stuff like that. Yet today Apple is the one of the most valuable brands on the planet and for awhile there, Apple had more cash reserves on hand than the U.S. Government.

7.) I challenge you to find just one speech by a company CEO talking about his company’s “values and vision” that does not either set off your bullshit alarm or put you into a deep, restful, and refreshing sleep.

8.) Makes a cool point about how a company’s market challenges can change wildly, but its values do not; or should not. Companies which have values and stick to them, they last. (Which is what the book Built To Last is all about.)

9.) He made it very clear that Apple’s core value is this: “We believe people with passion can change the world.” And there he was, a walking example of it. How many other brands can  a.)  talk about having such a cool core value,  and b.) can then actually walk the walk?

10.) He used the phrase “the soul of this company.” How many companies have a soul? Apple does. Did  any of the phone companies in your life have a soul? Press 2 if your answer is no.