Belly of the Beast

Well, it had to happen I guess, but seeing the awful reality of it is almost too much to take. Citibank or Citicorp or Citi or whatever it is has junked its “Live Richly” campaign in favor of ….of….

“Let’s get it done.”

The red arch logo has been wrenched from its context as an umbrella (necessary with the divestiture of Travellers is my guess) and turned into a bridge. Because Citi is your bridge from dream to reality. From a sketch on a napkin to an IPO. From, let’s see…from Dick Cheney on a carrier deck to Dick Cheney in a perp walk.

The inevitable anthem intro commercial rounds up all the usual suspects: the simple, repetitive Phillip Glass-like score; the hopeful children; the intense entrepreneurs; the retired couple on the dock; the proud college graduate. Citi’s dead-man-walking CEO Charlie Prince wanted to put his own stamp on the company’s image. In this derivative, clueless effort, he has succeeded wildly.

“Live Richly” had its detractors, and for sure a bank talking about money not being everything in life is an easy targets for cynics, but jeez, at least they took a shot. It avoided most financial-advertising clichés, it appealed to people’s better nature, and it set them apart. In a category where 90% of what you can say is regulated by statute, that’s pretty good. When Sandy Weill comes back to rescue Citi from his own anointed successor, I’ll bet anything that “Let’s get it done” will be done as well.

Forgot to mention in my last post that this new Travelers campaign ends with this somewhat opaque slogan:

Not sure what it means, but I’ll let it go. It’s planner BS they had to paste onto the work to put it “on brief”. No, the thing I want to focus on is the period abuse. The. Way. An extra period. Is inserted. To make the line. Punchier.

Copywriters do this all the time. I know I have (Weight Watchers. Real food. Real life. Real results.). And there is a hilarious passage in Matthew Beaumont’s book E in which the agency’s hack Creative Director is ID’d by a former art director partner by the period abuse in his emails.

And no wonder. Maybe as a reaction to chronic period abuse by their writers, most art directors hate putting one period, let alone 2 or 3, in headlines or tag lines. Why mess up nicely kerned type with some random…dots?

I made my own advertising mash-up last night. In my head. No editing software necessary.

I was watching Heroes (itself a pretty good mash-up of comix, sci-fi and nerdy soap opera) and a spot came on with this sleazy character named Risk. Risk wears a cream-colored zoot suit and throws banana peels out there for you to slip on.

I think this spot was a :60. It was lonnnnnng. And, as is the fashion, it saved mention of the advertiser to the very end. Which gave my overly active imagination plenty of time to fill in the blanks. I’d been seeing a ton of new print ads from Marsh (aka Marsh & McClennan before the scandal) that looked like this:

So, naturally, I thought this new spot was the TV translation. Here he is–the Upside of Risk we’ve been looking for! Except what could be the Upside of a meddling douchebag who looked like Snidely Whiplash? Wow, I thought to myself, where was Marsh going with this?

And then a telltale red umbrella appeared, and the Travelers Insurance logo. And some drivel about how Risk never sleeps so your unsurance needs to keep up, which I assume means minimizing the downside and not finding the up. And, suddenly, my mash-up movie was over. But for 55 seconds, the commercial playing in my head was not the one on the TV.

I consume a lot of business media, so I’m seeing a lot of human-ness lately.

Cisco is running a campaign about something called “The Human Network” which must be what I’m on right now because my wireless connection speed is dial-up slow.

And a few pages later, Dow (aka Dow Chemical) brings us “The Human Element,” which I guess is…them?

These two outfits must have gone to the same focus group, in which they found out that people think big business is cold, impersonal and amoral. Hence the need to “humanize” their respective brands.

“Human” is one of those words that, when you see it in the context of advertising, is best understood by putting the word “not” in front of it. So, for example, when Dow says it’s all about “The Human Element”, what they mean is “The not-Human Element.” It’s Dow Chemical, for Chrissakes. Better living through chemistry!

Here’s some other terms that, like “human,” pretty reliably mean their exact opposite when used in advertising:

Personal
State of the art
Smart
Caring
Green
Unique

Feel free to add your own to the list.

I’ve always admired Mike Hughes of The Martin Agency, and a recent conversation with him in Creativity (or as they typographically refer to themselves, Creat Ivity), only reconfirms my respect.

Hughes freely admits that he didn’t like the gecko concept when it was first presented, and only relented after repeated pitches by his team—and only because he believed it was just a one-shot.

How many creative directors do you know who will cop to something like that? A lot of history has been rewritten by CDs who claim early support—or, worse, authorship—of ideas that they originally crapped on.

Hughes also volunteered that while he was not initially keen on the gecko he had a lot of heart for an idea revolving around flying monkeys, which was pulled after only a few days on air. Not surprisingly, no one else is trying to horn in on the credits for that one.

Advertising Age – Kmart Hands DraftFCB $200 Million Creative Account

To quote my daughters: Ewwww.

Weren’t DraftFCB’s presentation boards for Kmart still damp from Julie’s embrace?

I’ll leave the Julie-bashing to others. But K-Mart! Have some self-respect. Do you really have such WalMart envy? They’re falling over themselves trying to be Target. And didn’t you see Howard’s video address to his troops? He’s Sammy Glick and Ursula the Sea Witch’s love child!

Nike is falling out of love with W&K.

Altoids dumped Leo Burnett.

Dead people come back to life and talk about popcorn.

What other signs do we need? Lee Clow’s head turning 360% around on his neck?

It’s time to get right with whoever your deity is.

Google, AKQA, R/Greenberg and a few other lucky souls are locked and loaded for The Rapture.

The rest of us will be left here to contend with The Beast, forced to prove ROI endlessly, speaking corporate babble we don’t even understand, locked in a focus-group facility for an eternity while harpies shriek and tear at our work.

In the meantime, we just got a nice new piece of business . Things are looking up!

It’s enough to cause terminal cognitive dissonance.

On one hand you’ve got sad but familiar stories like VW getting pulled from Arnold, or Altoids from Burnett, when newly-installed clients bring in old agency buddies. Relationship trumps the work.

On the other hand, you’ve got Bob Barrie and Stuart D’ Rozario taking the entire honking United business with them from long-time agency Fallon, where they created their beautiful campaign. Work trumps relationship.

Or…not? What it’s hard for outside observers to ever know is: did the decision makers at United keep the business with its creators because, bottom-line, it’s about the work? Or were Barrie and D’Rozario, and not anyone in management, the key relationship people?

The easy answer is: both. United likes and trusts these two guys, and appreciates and values their work. And I hope that’s actually true.

But it’s also possible—I know because I’ve seen it—that the United folks have no idea why the work is good. They may have bought total shit work at some earlier point in time and might be capable of doing it again in the future but right now, they believe that Barrie and D’Rozario “get them” and their business and like hanging with them and it’s just a happy coincidence that they can do kick-ass work too.

“Lightning in a bottle” my business partner Matt Seiden calls it. When it happens to you, make the most of it.

It’s been weeks since I’ve posted to this blog and the readership stats have, predictably, flatlined.

I was warned early on in this exercise by no less a blog authority than George Parker that the key to readership was frequent posting. Clearly this is a lesson I haven’t fully internalized and that’s because I keep mistaking what I’m doing for writing, which it only superficially resembles.

Blogging looks like writing. I use a word processor, I compose, I edit, I search for the right word or phrase. But what’s wanted in a blog is not lapidary prose but frequent electronic stimuli…intermittent reinforcement for people with short attention spans and lots of options.

So having proved to my satisfaction that blog postings, unlike limited-edition sneakers, do not gain in value from scarcity, I’m going to try for a few weeks to post every day and see what that fetches. If I don’t see a readership spike, I will have to confront the harrowing possibility that the problem is content—i.e. I suck at this—rather than frequency.

But I don’t want to confront that idea yet. Maybe I can post my way out of this.

Lost in all the schadenfreude about Crispin Porter and its Volkswagen work—the departure of client champion Kerry Martin, the strange “Fast” creature, the proto-Nazi designer—are these two lovely print ads.

Every agency that has worked on VW since it left Doyle Dane has kept the iconic Avant Garde typeface and the spare, white-space aesthetic. But no agency has been comfortable enough in its own creative skin to return to the original, classic layout and copy approach.

Just as it took certified Red-baiter Richard Nixon to finally establish diplomatic ties with Communist China, it took CPB to do these ads. Not just because they have nothing to prove creatively, but because someone there actually knows how to write.

The copy sells hard but gracefully and is 100% bullshit-free. The style is literate and witty but in no way condescending or snarky. If Crispin does wind up losing this business, it will be a shame. These ads are the real deal.