At School School, you study the books they assign you, do the homework they give you, take the tests they hand out in class. You’re checkin’ the boxes so you can make your parents proud and get good grades.

Good grades are fantastic if you want to be a certified public accountant or a lawyer. (Please, don’t be a lawyer.)

However, for those of you trying to get into the ad business (or any creative industry for that matter), let me assure you that no recruiter or CD will ever ask you what your GPA was. They will not care what school you attended, nor will they care if you even graduated. All that counts is your book. “Show me the work” comes before “Show me the money.”

But getting to a great ad portfolio is very different — and much harder — than getting great grades.  Mostly because there’s a single correct answer for any test question, one you can usually find written down somewhere in a book. A great portfolio, on the other hand, is a big hot mess of mind-roastingly cool ideas pulled out of the thin blue air and executed so well they raise the hair on an interviewer’s arms. But the main difference is this: the really great books are the ones filled not with problems someone solved, but problems they found.

Problem finding is way cooler than problem solving. Problem solving is easy. You just wait at your desk and after a while someone brings you a problem to solve. And even if it’s a hard problem, it still has an answer, maybe several, but there is an answer.

The thing about problem-solving in advertising? It’ll never take you to an entirely new place. And if you’re not doing something entirely new, well, it’s a little bit like this marvelously snarky news item from The Onion.

‘TACO BELL’S FIVE INGREDIENTS COMBINED IN TOTALLY NEW WAY.”

“LOUISVILLE, KY–With great fanfare Monday, Taco Bell unveiled the Grandito, an exciting new permutation of refried beans, ground beef, cheddar cheese, lettuce, and a corn tortilla. ‘You’ve never tasted Taco Bell’s five ingredients combined quite like this,’ Taco Bell CEO Walter Berenyi said. ‘With its ground beef on top of the cheese but under the beans, it’s configured unlike anything you’ve ever eaten at Taco Bell.’”

See? You’re just sorta reorganizing things, stuff we’ve all seen before. But problem finding?

Problem finding is about exploring a thing so thoroughly, digging so deep, and thinking so creatively, that you begin to see around corners, and start asking questions — usually really stupid questions – and finally you flip the game so hard on its head that instead of thinking outside the box you sell the goddamned box on eBay and reinvent the problem, opening a hidden door that leads to more doors that all open into new and interesting places.

Remember, there was no job order for, say, Halo, or iTunes. Nobody walked in anyone else’s office and said, “Damn, if only you could solve this problem.”

Back in school, yeah, we solved problems; we sought order and found it in the predictable corners of the isosceles triangle. But in ad school, we’re looking for solutions to problems we don’t even know we have. Think about it. What “problem” did Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band solve?  What problem did YouTube solve?

Where problem solving ends after you solve the problem, problem finding means you’re just gettin’ started. And these cool discoveries, almost all of them happen out of a sense of play, not work, but play; they come out of the clear blue; out of a “Hey what if we…”

This leads me to a piece of advice I see becoming more and more relevant: “Always be inventing.”

Inventing means making something new; which is basically problem finding in my book. Inventing things uncovers new problems because with each iteration of a new idea, we see what are called “adjacent possibilities,” the definition of which somebody (can’t find the source just now) put this way: “The adjacent possible is what can be done with the next iteration using the elements present in this one.” The boundaries of the adjacent possible just keep growing as you explore the boundaries; doors opening onto doors.

So, don’t worry about grades. Just keep inventing.

(Or if you prefer, the Ellen-DeGeneres version from Finding Nemo: “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming.”)

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

Early in my career I encountered a situation that challenged my personal ethics and became a Lean In moment that forever shaped my life.

I was about 10 years into my career running an agency pitch for a campaign that would almost certainly gain national prominence. I was a director level/middle manager within the organization, but I was leading the campaign, so it was my responsibility to successfully lead the agency review.

Accepted practice when you run an agency review is to provide a fair and balanced opportunity for all the competing agencies in the process. Each agency is given equal access to internal knowledge, data, insights, experts and so on.  During the review period, agencies are not permitted to curry individual favor, time or insights with company contacts, as it can provide unfair advantage and can also muddy the clarity of decision-making for those involved from the client side.

In this instance, as we were ending the agency review (an intense 10 weeks), I discovered that an executive from one of the participating agencies and one of our senior executives had spent extended time together (a weekend golfing) during the review process.

Perhaps it was my naiveté, but I was shocked. To me this was, without question, outside of acceptable and appropriate boundaries and significantly compromised the integrity of the review and, indeed, the results.

Following corporate protocol, I immediately voiced my concerns to my direct boss. I was disenchanted and disheartened that this could have happened under my watch and my first thought was: How can I ever explain how this happened to the other competing agencies who have worked nonstop, in good faith, for the last 10 weeks?

Instead of agreeing with me, my boss essentially told me “sometimes things like this happen in business” and “to be a good soldier.” When I argued my point further, he said the agency decision had been made and that it came not only from him, but from his boss as well.

I was stunned. That night I sleeplessly wrestled with this outcome as I weighed my options. The same thoughts played through my head: This is not how you want to work. You know the chosen agency did not win the review. This can be the company’s decision, but it doesn’t have to be yours.

Adding to the dilemma was my personal life, including a new marriage and a new mortgage. I gingerly approached my husband about the possibility of separating myself from the decision and, therefore, my job. To my delight, the next morning I found a spreadsheet outlining our current financial situation. While we’d have to make some adjustments, we could meet our commitments without my salary.

So that day I went to work and resigned. News of my decision traveled rapidly through the organization.  Our CEO, confused about why his advertising director had quit, came to my office to express his disappointment, but I held firm.

Within a day, there was press coverage on my exit. That coverage was like a free want ad for a job and I received numerous job offers. I was amazed by the many emails and messages I received from friends and strangers alike congratulating me for “standing up for my values and principles.” And notably, while not a consolation, the “losing” agencies did feel some sense of vindication. Most importantly, I felt proud of myself for standing up for what I believed in.

Perhaps the most important learning from this experience that I carry with me today is this:  I’m pretty sure at the end of my life no one is going to wax lyrical about some advertising campaign I launched in 1999. But, if I do my best to lead with values, purpose and principles, they just might say that I was a decent person. And to me, that’s a far greater achievement.

> ahem <

Yours truly is happy to be included on a list from Forbes — “The Top 100 Global Agencies That Know Social Media and Google.”

Full disclosure, however. Am no longer a global agency. Sad to report the closing of heywhipple.com’s Auckland, Amsterdam, Berlin and London  offices. Just the one office here in Savannah now. Had to let everybody go.

Yukfest aside, there are some really cool people and agencies on the list you oughta make sure you click on from time to time. My old agency, GSDM, is there. So’s my other alma mater, Fallon. Plus social superstars like Brian Solis and Edward Boches and places like Big Spaceship. Man, this is some seriously good company. Thank you to Forbes and author Scott Goodson (founder of Strawberry Frog) for putting it together.

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

“Why, yes! I would love to spend the night in the empty gothic house where I was terrorized by my psychotic, alcoholic, gun-waving father.”

This is usually the part of the horror movie where someone in the audience stands up and yells, “DON’T GO INTO THE HOUSE!”

But this isn’t a horror movie. As it happens, I actually am saying these words to a very nice man on the phone, a realtor who has the listing for the house where my psychotic, alcoholic, gun-waving father terrorized and abused the family – my mother and my five brothers. The realtor and I are finalizing arrangements for a tour of the house, after which I will spend my first night there in 45 years.

After we agree on my arrival time, I hang up the phone. It’s here they usually cut to the rotating newspaper and the headline: “AREA MAN FOUND SLAIN IN CHILDHOOD HOME.”

There is, actually, a headline about me in today’s Rochester Post-Bulletin but it’s just about my little 8pm book reading downtown at Barnes & Noble. It reads: “Brilliant Mayo Clinic surgeon created a private hell at home for family in this memoir of ‘50s and ‘60s Rochester.” My book I’ll be reading from is titled, Thirty Rooms To Hide In: Insanity, Addiction, and Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic. (It’s kind of like The Shining, but funnier.)

As I start the drive to Rochester – where I will both read from Thirty Rooms and walk through them – the whole thing actually does start to feel like a movie. Because after the bookstore event some 100 readers will be driving out to take a nighttime tour of the house. There will be wine and cheese and the realtor will be on hand to point out the home’s wonderful selling points. I’ll be skulking about 10 feet behind him quietly pointing out which horrible things happened where.

(“That’s where the axe thing happened. That’s where he kept the gun. That’s where he bashed my brother’s head against the fridge.”)

Should be fun.

• • • • • •

You don’t just pull into the driveway of the home my father purchased in 1954. That would be the cymbal crash without the drum roll. No, first you have to drive up into the hills outside of Rochester and after turning off onto successively thinner and thinner roads, you will come at last down a lane shadowed by 50-year-old balsam fir trees which stand like bodyguards obstructing your view of the house until the last possible second.

And then … then when you turn into the driveway between the giant stone gate posts, you’ve had the proper warm-up for your first viewing of the great house we called the Millstone. This would be the part where the movie music crescendos and the camera pulls wide to take in the four glorious acres of Minnesota that are its kingdom.

It isn’t just the size of the Millstone or its grounds that make you want the house. It’s the sense of stability to the thing. It had already been here a quarter-century when my father first pulled into the driveway in 1954; its walls already thick with ivy, the red slate roof veteran to a thousand Minnesota snowstorms, and the windows on the third floor looked down on every trespasser and said no matter how long you live, the house will outlast you. Even the owners only rent.

I pull into the Millstone’s driveway at noon and the realtor is out front to greet me. Nice enough guy. He hasn’t read the book but he knows I’m some author guy who used to live here. I tell him I’m hoping to spend a few daylight hours inside shooting pictures before the reading. I’ve brought along a folder of old family photographs from our years in the house, images I’d like to recreate shooting from the same spots my father stood when he took them.

There’s a jangle of realtor’s keys, a quickening of heartbeat, a push against the thick oaken door, and we’re inside.

• • • • • •

This isn’t my first visit back to the Millstone. All six of us have returned to this door many times; sometimes in twos, threes, sometimes alone, arriving over different years, always asking the same thing, hey would it be okay to maybe step inside and just sorta contemplate the smoking apocalyptic battleground of our traumatized youth?

Considering the stories in Thirty Rooms To Hide In, why any of us ever wanted to return is a mystery. On the other hand, if we’d had idyllic childhoods here, would we have been drawn back to visit so many times? (“Oh, and remember what happened over there by the pretty balloons? That time we all smiled?”)

But here I am again. And the first thing – it’s always the first thing – is that ancient smell; of wood, of stone, of time. And the second thing – the silence. Near complete silence. Standing inside the empty house, what I can hear is the page turning in my head to Shirley Jackson’s opening lines of The Haunting of Hill House:

“Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

And, as my realtor might add, “Walked alone … through a stunning 5-bedroom, 4-1/2 bath, 1920’s beauty. Check out this woodwork.”

We close the front door behind us revealing the entryway closet, a feature the realtor is already busy selling. “Check out this big ol’ walk-in, perfect for kids to set their muddy boots!” Meanwhile, my memory conjures a somewhat darker sales patter. “And this shelf here? Perfect for storing rifles to wave in the wife’s face if she just won’t SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

We walk into the main hallway and at the bottom of the stairs I pull the first photo from my folder and hold it up. And the six ghosts appear, standing at the top of the stairs, still waiting for the okay to come thundering down to Christmas, 1962.

I ask the realtor if he’s ever had houses with ghosts.

“No. Don’t much believe in ‘em,” he laughs, adding, “Just the same, I’m glad it’s you bunkin’ here tonight, not me.”

Maybe it’s time to admit that I am a little afraid of the supernatural. Most of the time my western education prevents such fears from bubbling up. But ever since parking my car in the shadow of the great house, the kevlar vest of rationality I‘ve been wearing all these years suddenly doesn’t feel as snug as I’d like it to.

The realtor and I lock eyes, both smiling at our private musings. I shake mine off thinking Hey! If there are ghosts here, they’re gonna be cute little boy ghosts; laughing holograms of boy-energy still wandering the grounds of a house they loved and lost many years ago.

Outside again, I discover another little clutch of spirits, standing both directly in front of me as well as in the year 1956 under a summer rain that falls onto the dry patio stones under my feet, and as my poor head tries to reconcile the permanence of place and the fluid mystery of time, my reverie is broken by the arrival of a car and the year 2012. My brother Dan, age 59, steps out, says we’re late.

• • • • • •

The Barnes & Noble in downtown Rochester is housed in a beautifully preserved movie theatre called The Chateau, the very place my brothers and I first saw movies like “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Mary Poppins.” That wobbly feels-like-I’m-in-a-movie feeling  sharpens into Technicolor as I realize wow I’m signing books about my childhood right in the Chateau Theatre, ground zero of so many vivid memories. And to thicken the plot even further – thank you very much – two more of my brothers arrive at the reading; Collin and Chris.

Books are signed, hands shaken, coffee drunk, and more than one reader leans in a little close but very grateful, saying, “It’s so freeing to know my crazy family wasn’t the only one.” And before you know it, the as-promised Warholian 15 minutes of fame have come and gone and I’m getting into a car with three of my brothers to drive though the night to the home we left 45 years ago. Along the way, Dan expresses interest in staying overnight in the house with me. Secretly, I’m relieved.

There are many strange “firsts” this night. Not being able to find a parking space at my childhood home is one; not being able to find standing space inside it, another. And then to stand and speak honestly and openly about my angry, abusive, alcoholic father – in some of the very spots where I used to hide from him – strangest of all.

The crowd is big and as I go through the house describing what happened here, there is a cleansing feeling, one I attribute to the power of storytelling; to the power of witness. The nodding heads and looks of empathy surround me like a benediction and their public condemnation of the story’s villain helps to cleanse the rooms like the smoke of white sage.

• • • • • •

The crowd is gone and the four youngest of the family end the evening sitting quietly in our old living room in front of its iconic fireplace.

Our mother and father often posed for pictures here before heading out to Mayo Clinic parties; nights that routinely ended of course with Dad in a drunken rage. Earlier, I held up one of the old pictures to the scene and was surprised by how short my parents were. Tonight, we all wonder again how a man as slight as my father was able to get away with abusing and tyrannizing what was basically a crowd of seven people.  Dammit, we could have just tackled the fucker, just covered him in a huge pile and sat on top until the cops pulled in.

It simply never occurred to us we had the power.

Brothers Chris and Collin have plans that keep them from joining Dan and me in our overnight stay and, after hugs and warnings to watch out for vengeful zombie dads back from the grave, they head for the Twin Cities. By 11:30, Dan and I are alone in the Millstone.

We turn to begin clean-up and to shut the house down for the night. Picking up plastic wine glasses and flicking off lights here and there on the ground floor is an agreeable enough job. But we soon remember the lights have been turned on everywhere for the open house; including way up in the attic and way down in the basement.

One would think that two grown, college-educated, otherwise-sane men from the 21^st-century would not get all heeby-jeeby about having to go alone to an attic or a basement and turn off a damn light for Christ’s sake, but as Dan and I look at each other it’s clear we both harbor a very small but very real hope that maybe the other guy’s going to volunteer for the job. Then, perhaps remembering that tomorrow we each have to be able to look our wives in the eyes, we divide the duty; one up, one down.

This of course is the part in the movie where we’re picked off one by one. But curiously, we manage to turn off all the lights in the house and neither my brother nor I are slain by vengeful zombie dads back from the grave.

We end the night in the living room again chatting by firelight. Dan’s going to sleep in the master bedroom upstairs, I here on the couch. And tonight, after 45 years of thinking about this house, and dreaming about it, and talking to psychiatrists about it, we realize we are finally its equals. We’re okay with it. It’s just a house; a house we loved and one we’ve been happy to visit again, but it’s just a house.

As if to test this new feeling by inviting fear into the room, Dan recounts a nightmare he had only a week ago. In the nightmare, he was here in the Millstone, up in his old room, and “something horrible was floating just outside the window. And there was a rage, a malice directed into the room. ” That’s all he remembers. Malice and rage, floating.

A week later, Dan wrote to me, “Even after that nightmare earlier in the week, and even as you and I sat there in the dark, my imagination couldn’t conjure anything evil or sinister about the house.”

He was right and that night we slept without dreams, like happy guests in a huge bed-and-breakfast, without the breakfast. The next morning we took one last look around, pulled the oaken door shut behind us, and drove away; Dan to the Twin Cities, I to the airport and on to Savannah.

“When I left that morning I had a good cry in the car,” Dan continued, “and I didn’t know why. I still don’t really know. It was a sweet sadness. I guess it felt like the last time we’d be truly alone with the house. It felt like the Millstone embraced me one last time and bade me farewell.”

For me, my emotional moment happened the day before when I was in the house taking pictures. Several families had been invited by the realtor to tour the property and as I came around a corner I almost tripped over a very cute 7-year-old boy. He was coming down the stairs from the top floor, followed by his mother, father, and little brother.

“What a big house, Mom!”

And so I told him all about the horrible raging man who once lived here and threatened little boys with axes and guns.

No.

What I said to him was, “This is a big house. I think you ought to tell your mom and dad to buy it. You will have so many happy times here.”

I give the parents a wink, partly to apologize for putting them on the spot and partly to hold back a tear, because the moment feels like I’m in yet another movie, but this time in a happy one.

(Interested readers can view more family photographs, letters, and videos on thirtyroomstohidein.com.)

Check this site out. It's funny.

In your career you will hear many very stupid things. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to keep a straight face and not laugh out loud. And this site just posted a nice series of some of the silliest client comments turned into posters. It’s very funny, very cool. My favorite client story is the “Mr. Froggy” story. It was a tale of such immense stupidity that you’ll just have to take my word for it that it really happened. I put it in my book Hey Whipple, Squeeze This. But here’s the excerpt:

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

Koncept Krushers can be bigger machines than just a client’s research department. The whole company may, in fact, be structured to blowtorch new ideas. This sounds cynical, I know, but I’ve seen it. I’ve stood right next to these furnaces myself and felt the licking of the flames.

Try this on.

The client in question was one of those Sisyphus accounts I described earlier. A big Fortune 500 company. Huge. The kind that asks for tons of stuff that’s always due the next morning and you find out later it’s for a product they’re thinking about introducing 10 years from now.

So, anyway, this poor art director is stuck on a Sisy Corp type of account. She doesn’t know this, so the day she gets a job for a big TV commercial, she’s excited, right?

Well, she and her partner begin working on it. After a vast amount of work, they have a couple cool ideas. I mean some really smart things that also happen to be potential award winners (or “podium wobblers,” as they’re called in Britain).

Cut to next scene, meeting number 1 with the client — all of their ideas are dead. The reason? Doesn’t matter. (You’ll see.)

So they get to work on another series of ideas to present in meeting number 2. Days later, there’s excitement in the creative department, rejuvenation. “We’ve done it again!”

Time wipe: It’s meeting number 3. The client opens the meeting by announcing they’ve changed the strategy.

Okay, here’s where we cut to that movie cliché — the clock hands spinning ’round and ’round, the calendar pages flying off the wall. The changes keep coming in. The client doesn’t like the idea. Or they cut the budget. Or they change the product, or they change the strategy. One time it’s the client himself who’s changed — fired, actually — and now there’s a new client who wants something totally different. Whatever it is, it’s always something.

It gets worse.

During meeting number 4 through number 63, the campaign is watered down, softened, and diluted so much that the final commercial is precisely as interesting as a bag of hair. The last interesting thing in the commercial is successfully removed in meeting number 63. An optimist might say that things should have gone smoothly from here on out. (“For cryin’ out loud. It’s a bag of hair! What’s left to complain about?”) But there are no optimists in advertising.

It’s Friday. The scheduled day of meeting number 64.

Meeting number 64 isn’t even a very important meeting, given that the CEO signed off back around meeting number 50 or so. But there needed to be a few dozen more “For Your Information” sort of presentations, and if any of them went badly the agency would have to start over.

The meeting begins. The art director goes through the old moves, trying to remember the fun of presenting it the first time. But there’s no spark left. She just . . . presents it.

The client sits there. Says nothing at first.

The client then reaches down into her purse and pulls out a small Kermit the Frog doll. (This really happened.) It’s one of those flexible dolls, and she begins bending the frog’s arms around so that its hands are covering its ears. Then the client says: “Mr. Froggy doesn’t like some of the things he’s hearing.”

This really happened.

The client actually said, “Mr. Froggy doesn’t like some of the things he’s hearing.”

Let me put it this way. There are two kinds of hell. There’s “Original” and then there’s “Extra Crispy.” This was Extra Crispy.

Well, Ms. Froggy-Lady, as she came to be known, wasn’t able to kill the commercial, only make it a little worse—a feat in itself. And so, finally, in meeting number 68, the whole company had signed off on this one storyboard.

All in all, it took 68 presentations to hundreds of MBAs in dozens of sweaty presentation rooms. In fact, there were some sarcastic agency memos to the media department suggesting that since the commercial had been shown to thousands of people already, there may not be a need to air it at all.

The creative team went back to the agency, opened two beers, and sat looking at the sunset through the windows of their offices on the 30th floor. There, over the body of the original storyboard that lay on the floor, they performed an advertising postmortem, discussing the more shocking moments of its horrifying death.

Eavesdropping, a casual listener might have thought the two had just come out of the theater and were talking about a horror movie. (“Yeah! And remember when that one guy came in and ripped all its guts out? Man, I did not see that coming at all.”)

That’s when they noticed something out their window — something disturbing.

Outside their window was a 40-story building.

The thing is, the 40-story building wasn’t there the day they began working on the commercial.

With horror, the creative team realized that a building had been raised, built from a 30-foot-deep hole in the ground and 40 stories into the sky, faster than their little 12-frame storyboard had been destroyed and approved.

Why do I tell you this? To chase you away from the business?

No, to steel you for it.

This stuff happens all the time. And keep in mind, none of these clients were stupid people. (Well, we can discuss Froggy-Lady later.) They were all pretty sharp businesspeople, trying as hard as they could to solve a problem for their brand. But as smart and nice as they all were individually, a calcified approval process had crept into the company’s structure, and it became completely impossible to get a decent idea out the door.

This happens all the time. Be ready.

(Okay, fine. As for favorites, mine happened to end up pretty far down the list of the infamous USA Today Ad Meter: the spot for Oreos (“Whispering in the Library”) made it to only #26. I also happened to like #20, the silly argument between Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd for Samsung. Both spots had all the right SuperBowl-ness to them while at the same time building their story directly around product benefits.)

Nah, favorites have been done. But what about the bottom feeders?

Between you and me, I sure wouldn’t wanna be the brand manager at Calvin Klein who said, “Trust me, this is a Super Bowl spot.” Fact is, the CK spot would’ve sucked on the local farm prices report. Sue me, but I think fashion is the last great hold-out to good advertising. The whole fashion category still seems convinced advertising has to be flash without substance. As long as this belief persists, fashion brands will continue to be the bimbo of the advertising world.

I’m still scratchin’ my head about Anheuser-Busch’s three crappy spots. A-B usually occupies the top spots of the list but this year they stomped $11 million down a rat hole with three commercials that prove yet again your strategy has to be just right, before you do the creative.  In fact, it’s hard to find any strategy at all in the spot titled (ironically) “Here’s to Taste.”

The opening line? “We summoned the finest of this nation to help us taste and choose a golden amber lager.”

The helpful video shows us that the “finest of this nation” is a fake-roomful of AMW’s from Los Angeles. (AMW’s – “actress-model-whatever.”) Criminy. It reminds me of one of my favorite toasts — Steve Martin in the movie Roxanne: “I’d rather be with you people than with the finest people in the world!”

And yet, even after Anheuser hit bottom with “Here’s to Taste”, they kept digging the rest of their way to China with another commercial further defining “the finest of the nation.”

The VO says: “The loud. … The savvy. … The famous. … It took all of us to taste and choose the new Budweiser Black Crown.”

Seriously? Somebody needs to hang up a sign in Anheuser’s break room that says “Crack is for weekend use only.”

The final spot where A-B blew $3.8 million was for Beck’s Black Sapphire. Here the “idea” was a Pixar-like black goldfish sorta swimmin’ around the bottle. I’m guessing they got to this idea by first seeing the beer as “black gold” and then taking that > > > to black goldfish. (“Dude, a black goldfish. You nailed it!!”)

Typically, I never criticize other people’s work in public. Fact is, I’ve done some pretty miserable work of my own. Still, I’m making an exception of these three spots because Anheuser-Busch, … they should know better.

I’ll also happily make an exception to criticize the annual national embarrassments that are the commercials  from GoDaddy.

Yes, bringing up the rear — the spot with the poorest rating – was GoDaddy.  Once again, they didn’t disappoint and aired an execrable spot in which a curvaceous model French kisses a guy who has the skin condition known as rosacea; complete with the squirm-inducing wet sounds of a serious make-out. This isn’t marketing. It’s a drunk frat boy with $3.8 million to blow. Too bad, especially considering GoDaddy ran another spot that wasn’t about boobs or bad taste; it wasn’t half bad. Go figure.

In any case, there you have it. The five worst commercials of Super Bowl XLVII. They cost $11 million in media alone.

If only they had listened to my marketing plan I could’ve made these companies millions in cold hard cash. Here it is.

“Don’t run these spots.”

Boom. $11 mill, right there. You’re welcome.

I never cured a disease or saved someone's life. But I wrote a book that didn't suck. Woo hoo.

Sorry I haven’t posted in awhile. Cardinal sin of bloggers, not to create new content. That, and sucking. But anyhoo, here’s an interview I did a while back with some nice folks in Romania.

Here was their very nice intro. (I promise, the interview’s more interesting.)

Luke Sullivan is included in the Business Insider’s top of the most influential marketing people today. Accumulating over 30 years of experience in the industry, he has worked for agencies such as The Martin Agency, Fallon, and GSD&M and won awards at all the major advertising competitions, including D&AD, One Show and Cannes Lions. In 1998 he released the first edition of Hey Whipple, Squeeze This A guide to making exceptional ads (the official Romanian translation: Hei, Whipple, incearca asta – Un ghid pentru a crea reclame de exceptie), included in the bibliography of every adman and considered a Bible in the field. Now at the 4^th edition, Hey Whipple was included in the Ad Age top of the most important media and marketing books of all times. Last year, Luke Sullivan gave up his agency job and started teaching, becoming the Chair of the Advertising Department at the Savannah College of Art and Design. He continues to write about advertising on his blog and his Twitter account and he holds conferences that have an important merit: they don’t suck.

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I grew up on the streets of… nope, not even the streets of, but the back roads of Rochester, Minnesota. My dad was a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Oh, have I mentioned yet that my second book just came out? It’s the perfect answer to this question because it is a memoir: Thirty Rooms To Hide In: Insanity, Addiction, and Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic. Oh, I have mentioned it then? Good. Didn’t want to not mention it. My new book, that is.

As a child, I dreamed of becoming Steve Ditko or Jack Kirby, the famous artists who brought Marvel Comics to life. Them, or the Beatles.

(Just checking. I did mention my new book, right? The Thirty Rooms one? I did? Okay, sorry. Proceed.)

This picture of me being Superman was taken in August ’65 on top of the great house I describe in Thirty Rooms To Hide In. (And for those interested, there are more family photos and movies at the book’s official site, http://thirtyroomstohidein.com).

The craziest thing I did in highschool is that I wrote, printed and distributed a small book calculated to tick the school officials off. Titled “Student’s Guide to Better Skipping, Smokig, and General Misconduct”. It worked. We had this Nazi named Thatcher who called me into his office to yell at me about the book. If I called a kid in today about somethin’ like this, I’d be upset if, like, the layouts were crap, or there was too much kerning or something.

In college I was the guy who thought it might be a cool idea if we called the dorm elevator up to the 9^th floor, and then ran up to the 10^th floor and forced the doors open, hop on the top of the car and go “ride the ‘vators.” Oh, my poor mother.

Being a stand up comedian about a year and a half in 1981 helped me learn how to present. I can think of no better preparation for pitching work to clients than doing stand-up. You have just the microphone and the curtain behind you to tell a story and make people laugh hard enough to remember you. You can’t fake it. You can’t have a second try at it. You just gotta go out there and kill. Does wonders for your confidence.

I decided I wanted to work in advertising when I was going through all these old school papers and things my Mom had saved for me. They were all drawings and stories, drawings and stories, and I thought, man, what else is like that? I knew right then.

My current relationship status with advertising: We are seeing other people now. I am now the Chair of the Ad Dept at the Savannah College of Art & Design. This gives me the opportunity to concentrate on helping others get into the same business I’ve had so much fun in all these years.

Not working in an ad agency anymore makes me breath a deep sigh of relief. I don’t have to worry whether I’m going to come up with the big idea before 9am tomorrow. I don’t have to worry whether a client is going to take its account into review. But I still have worries. Like, whether or not the kids in my class are really getting it, or just seem to be getting it. But it is nowhere near as bad a worry.

What is great about working in advertising is that I got to work with the funniest, smartest people in America. I never had the same day twice. And I never had to pick up something heavy here and carry it over there and put it down.

I like to fish insights from anywhere but work. I used to have to take the train from Richmond to Philly. Loved sitting in the dining car, my writing pad open, and watching the fall colors whip past the window.

That second book started off in the year 1992, mostly as a family project. A project that provided a snapshot of my family during those terrible years when my father was insane. I was just going to gather all the letters my mother had written to her grandfather, as well as all the diaries my brothers kept during those years and sort of turn it all into one big copy-heavy scrapbook. But as the project grew over the years (it took forever) I realized, wow, this is a heck of a story with all these letters and photos and diaries and so what if I just tried writing the story instead of pasting its pieces together.

Is there anything  in Hey Whipple, Squeeze This with which I would not agree anymore with what I’ve said? Well, I appreciate you giving me an out like that, but I’ve had the opportunity to refresh it through 4 editions. I wasn’t ready to tackle the digital revolution until I could at least talk about it intelligently, if not fluently. I almost started writing about it in the third edition, put if off. Then I realized, dude, you’re never gonna be an expert in this stuff. It changes way too fast to think that you can put some definitive piece into a paper-based book that’s reprinted every 4 years. So, I took the summer off in 2011 and just sorta wailed on it. Every chapter was scrubbed and rewritten with digital in mind. Most of the examples in the book were updated. And Chapters 5 and 6 are where I focused hardest. I still kinda dig my title for Chapter 5: “Concepting for the Hive Mind”. Yeah, the 4^th edition is the one to get; has the grey-ish cover. It’s also available as an iBook and for that platform I made sure the cool examples mentioned in the text were linked. So if you wanna see a famous TV spot, click, and you’re watchin’ it. It doesn’t suck.

I believe that digital changed advertising completely and totally. There is no more digital revolution. It is over and digital won.

The most rewarding moment in my career was when I refused to work on a tobacco account.

I feel most frustrated when I can’t get a great idea out of the agency. That means you have traitors inside the castle walls. Ads are supposed to die valiantly in battle with the client out in front of the castle walls; not get a shiv between the ribs in the wine cellar.

My best sources of inspiration are reading, movies, and TV. But mostly reading.

When I’m online, I am always checking The Onion. I think it is the funniest print being written these days. I always check out the new trailers on the appletrailers page. I update my blog. I like to see all the cool stuff my friends have posted on Facebook. I like Tweetdeck because I can use it as a weather post to see what people are talking about, as well as a sign post – to point people to other cool sites, or my blog.

The reason I have a blog is that I’m a writer. And writers ought to be writing. If you’re not writing, well, then you’re not a writer. Right?

The best piece of advice I ever received from someone in the industry is “Start from where you are.” That actually came from a speech by author Anne Lamott. It’s advice I now give to people who are overwhelmed by the size of a campaign they have to do. I liked the advice so much, I devoted a blog entry to it.

More than talent, creatives should have curiosity and outside interests. Oh, and not be a douche-bag. I’m leery of hiring kids who have no outside interests. To not be passionately interested in something outside of your stupid job? That’s just creepy. Curiosity is also a must. If you’re not innately curious, why did you even get out of bed this morning? Don’t you wanna know where the digital economy is headed? Don’t you ever wonder why we only see one side of the moon and never the other? You know how they say never to go grocery shopping when you’re hungry? Because you’ll buy everything? I feel the same way about going to book stores. Because I’m goin’ in stupid and there is so much in there I gotta know about. And lastly, don’t be a douche-bag. Nobody good will want to work with you and you’ll soon find yourself starring in the movie “The Lone Douch-Bag”.

I think a great speech should be equal parts substance and entertainment. If it’s all substance, well, it may not suck but it’ll be more of a lecture, won’t it? And if it is all entertainment, well, then you’ve just wasted an audience’s time doing stand-up. I work very very hard to make sure my speeches don’t suck. When people book me, they know they’re getting more than just some ad dinosaur who’s gonna show slides of his 14^th century portfolio. I work very hard to stay current (hey, when you teach, you have to) and I work hard to make sure the material is presented in a way that’s either really funny or just “Oh, wow, I never thought of it that way”.

My advice to all the juniors who want to create great advertising is study the masters. Read all the awards books. Study the working masters, too. Read all the best advertising sites (the best of which is, according to some – me – heywhipple.com). Read all the great books out there on advertising. There aren’t many and I listed my favorite 30 or so in the back of Hey Whipple. For juniors, there is no better book out there than Vonk & Estin’s Pick me: Breaking Into Advertising and Staying There. And lastly, for the first couple of years, listen waaay more than you talk.

Radio is my favorite medium. I think it is the very toughest one to work in. So I am doubly pleased to have my favorite career-long work be a radio campaign for a technical school in Minneapolis called Dunwoody Technical Institute. It was one of those small break-even clients we occasionally did at Fallon.

A good headline is ‘Lose the ability to slip out of meetings unnoticed’ (The Economist).

Let me show you two print ads from my students.

I love the print ad for the Boston Bruins done by one of my SCAD student’s Ariel Heinnman. I like it because she wrote it and she’s an art director. The great creatives can always do both. I like how she uses the phrase “inside voice.” Such a nice matronly thought to appear in an ad as mean as this. I like how politically incorrect it is. And though you can’t see it, I like the whole idea behind her campaign which is “Save The Crying For Baseball”.

I love the Vespa ads from my student Nicole Corely. She’s a writer (and just landed a job at GSD&M). I loved her Vespa campaign for the headlines but she also did a pretty good job art directing, considering she’s a writer. I like how she cropped out the face of the person in the Vespa. Makes it easier for the reader to sort of put herself in the picture. My fave headline from this campaign was based on a truth and went something like “No One Ever Pulls Up Next to a Buick and Asks to Take a Picture”. I may be butchering that line, but the truth is still there.

In Hey Whipple, I described some of the common horrible clients you’re all likely to meet out there during your career. Let’s see, there’s the Meat Puppet, the skinny little product manager who runs on fear and kills everything. There’s a place called Pablum Park, where they don’t really have anything to advertise but want to look at some advertising anyway. There’s the Bully, any mean-spirited MBA who is certain he is right. And then there’s any agency or client that has one of those huge research machines in the basement, the worst being the one called the Koncept Krusher 2000. Those are just the main ones of the Bad Client Ecosystem. In the end, the ones I had the worst time with were those who were dishonest.

The best clients are the ones that have a good product and want to make money with it, realize they are not the communication experts and so rely on your judgement. Also, I love clients who are just delightful people. I mean, come on, this is just advertising we’re talking about here. Can’t we all have fun while we work on this stuff? Clients like these are the ones I worked hardest for. Partly because if I failed, damn, it’s because I failed. There was no client to blame it on.

TO:

FROM: Communications Manager

Please move the 56th pixel on the 233rd row about a 64th of a inch to the left. Also, the dot in the “I” should come down one font size, but not the lower vertical slash of the i, just the little dot on top of the i. The serif of the letter “k” is seems to be too big (am willing to discuss) but would like to see it both ways. Also, this is the second time I’ve asked about retouching the bottom two molecules of the lower 1/564^th inch of the logo. It’s very “bland” and I’d like to see it the same way as presented to me in the pitch. The top of the two molecules is fine, but the lower molecules have atoms that are clearly not from our corporate palette. One last thing. The electrons in the outer shell of the lower atom are rotating counterclockwise. We talked about this already. Could we also see what it looks like when the electrons rotate clockwise, in time for today’s 3pm marketing meeting. For next week’s agenda: Now that the existence of the Higgs boson has been established, we will be able to help the agency make even finer improvements to the work.

He’d read my advertising book Hey Whipple, Squeeze This and just wanted some advice about some marketing stuff. Turns out he’s as nice and normal a guy as you could wanna meet, which is amazing for a superstar many would call the best player on the planet.

So anyway, a coupla weeks back I wrote to him. (Yes, I have the Mamba’s personal email and yes, I am very cool.) I asked him if he’d return the fave and just do a posting on his Facebook account about my new book, Thirty Rooms To Hide In: Insanity, Addiction, and Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic. I didn’t want him to sell something he wasn’t a fan of, so I gave him an out. I said, “Hey, all you have to say is ‘I couldn’t put it down,’ which will be true if you never pick it up.” Kobe says, “Sure,” and so I threw the book in the mail.

Keep in mind the dude’s got 14 million “friends.” There are TV networks that would love to have those kinda numbers.

So I’m keepin’ an eye on his Facebook page. Weeks go by, but my short history with him showed that his life as #24 on the Lakers often takes him off the social grid. But two days ago I noticed he posted he was laid up with the flu.

Here’s how famous the guy is. Even when he posts a message as banal as “I’m laid up in bed. Not feeling well. Drinking lots of fluids,” 83,461 people “like” it. And 672 go so far as to share it on their pages. The numbers, to me, seem fairly Malthusian. So I sent him a little nudge. “Mmmm,” I wondered, “if only you had something handy to read.” That seemed to do the trick.

So he posts. And here’s the thing, people. Kobe casts such a long shadow in sports that there are bloggers out there who took the time to post things like “Check out what Kobe Bryant’s reading today.” Even the Daily News (on what, one has to assume, is the slowest news day in recent history) posted: “After scoring 40 points in the Lakers’ loss Tuesday to Indiana while battling the flu, Kobe Bryant spent most of his day off Wednesday resting. ‘Still not feeling well,’ he wrote on his Facebook page. ‘It’s a day in bed for me.’ Bryant also revealed he passed the time reading the book, ‘Thirty Rooms to Hide In: Insanity, Addiction, and Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic.’”

Looking through a site called “SocialMention” I note with interest that most of the discussion threads quickly blow past my little book and get back to talking about when Kobe will be back on the court. But a few – a very few – post things like: “If that’s what Kobe’s reading, I’m going to go buy it tomorrow.”

Bottom line? Sales up but not crazy up. And I’m pretty sure it’s not because Kobe’s kind mention of my book on his site didn’t get a trillion eyeballs. It did. My guess is that his audience shows up to talk about basketball, not what he is reading. I could be wrong and so I’ll keep an eye on the sales numbers for Thirty Rooms and do an update later.

In closing, this short exercise in humility: I’ll return the fave and mention a book about him here on my blog. “Hey everybody, I’m sick in bed and reading Kobe Bryant: In His Own Words.”

Boom. Betcha I just sold 2 copies. You’re welcome.

Kobe? Thanks so much for takin’ the time to post about my book. Get better.

OH, SUBWAY, WHEN YOU COMIN' HOME?

Several years ago, I wrote an article for Adweek about the addiction some clients have to promotions at the expense of their branding.

“Should we throw out promotions and go cold turkey?” I asked.  “Of course not. In the retail world, promotions are an essential part of the marketing mix. What I’m suggesting is, first an intervention, and then partial withdrawal.”

Today, I think it’s time we intervene on Subway sandwiches.

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OPEN ON JOHN X, SUBWAY’S CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER, OPENING THE DOOR TO SOME DINGY ROOM AT A HAMPTON INN.

INSIDE, HE’S SURPRISED TO SEE A GROUP OF 400 PEOPLE SITTING ON COUCHES, ALL WITH CONCERNED LOOKS.

INTERVENTION MANAGER: Hello John, these people here love your brand a lot and they don’t want to see you killing it anymore.

JOHN, SITTING DOWN: But …

MANAGER: With us today are representatives of the 300 agencies you’ve burned through on your promotional binge. Plus a hundred or so creatives who threw a year of their careers away hoping they might be the one to get you to stick with a decent campaign.

CREATIVE DIRECTOR #1: John, your promotions have affected the brand in the following negative ways. (HE STARTS BLUBBERING) I was up all night going through the YouTube collection of your crappy spots and I’ve never seen you commit to anything.

JOHN: Yeah, but I have all these franchisees who…

CD #1, GETS KLEENEX, CONTINUES: I saw some remarkably stupid shit with people holding up “five fingers for the $5 footlong.” And I cannot count how many idiotic spots I saw with sports figures – John Cena, Michael Phelps, some boxer named Mike Lee. Who the hell is Mike Lee?

CREATIVE DIRECTOR #2: I was so hopeful when you let our agency air the fat-people-eating-burgers stuff, but the next thing we knew, you were whoring around with that “Febru-ANY” campaign. And what happened with that marvelous “Badonka-donk” radio stuff?

JOHN: What about Jared? Whenever we ran him, sales went up.

CD#1: Then fine, stick with Jared but at least do something interesting with him, instead of the insipid, brainless, promotional crap you air.  What are you on, crack?  Jesus, Bob.

MANAGER: Calm down now. … So, Bob. What’s it gonna be? Can you commit to a good mix of brand and promo?  Can you find even a … a decent brand campaign and then really stick with it? And maybe cut back from 600 agencies to five or so?

JOHN: I… I…

THE SUBWAY CMO LEAPS FROM THE COUCH, RUNS,  THE CAMERA FOLLOWS HIM TO THROUGH THE HALLS DOWN TO THE PARKING LOT WHERE WE JARED WAITING FOR HIM IN A CAR. THEY PEEL RUBBER AND DISAPPEAR IN A CLOUD OF BLUE SMOKE.

INTERVENTION MANAGER: Well, he’s on his own. I hope when he wakes up as the assistant product manager for some third-tier regional brand of acne cream, that he’ll finally get it. That he’ll finally see how brand will get you through times of no promotion better than promotions will get you through times of no brand.