I’m reading Carl Sagan’s wonderful The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  He writes, “At the heart of some pseudoscience is the idea that wishing makes it so. How seductive this notion is, especially when compared with the hard work and good luck usually required to achieve our hopes.”  Sagan is writing about the dangers of not knowing, or rejecting as the creationists do, the wonders of science in favor of ignorance, misinformation and certain religious belief systems.  How many more people can discuss with assurance the allegedly lost continent of Atlantis, for which no scientific evidence has been found, than able to discuss basic laws of quantum physics, or natural selection, or how viruses spread?

Pseudoscience prevails in advertising, too.  I’m thinking specifically of the pseudoscience of quantitative copy testing, but let’s face it, wishing and hoping things to be a certain way play an active role across the board.

Creative copy testing has had a long and disputed history.  From the now discredited Burke Day-After-Recall tests, to questionable Millward-Brown LINK tests, to account planning qualitative small group interrogation, the methods and “belief systems” are legion.  While all creative people hate copy testing, the majority of clients rely on quantitative results to aid, or in many cases, substitute, their own judgments.

I recently had a heated discussion with a client over “testing” to determine emotional content in television ads.  The methodology was Millward-Brown’s LINK tests.  Ignoring my opinion that all LINK test results are artificially derived under abnormal viewing conditions, and therefore of limited value in assessing true market place performance, my point was that if a person can’t tell something is emotional, then it probably isn’t.  And the converse is true: we know a commercial is emotional when we see it–when, after viewing it, we feel happy, sad, unnerved, elated, disgusted, moved to tears or laughter.  No one needed to test Apple’s famous “Think Different” TV work to know how emotional this combination of words and pictures was.  It still makes me tear up.  Or last year’s “Imported From Detroit” ad with Eminem to launch the Chrysler 300.  Or FedX’s hilarious “When It Absolutely, Positively Has Yo Be There Overnight” campaign.  Remember DDB’s classic “Spicy Meatball” commercial for Alka-Selzter?  Did you laugh out loud?  Did MVBMS’s “Survivors” campaign for Volvo stir strong emotions?  No one needed an unseen respondent to click a mouse when he or she felt “emotion.”  The emotion was there.

Conversely, creative advertising people aren’t immune from hope, from wishing things to have the impact they intend.  Often judgement is undermined by ego.  Passion and risk-taking have their place in ad development, when grounded in insight and reasoned, collective opinion.  Yet sometimes entire agencies get caught up in the novelty of an idea for the sake of its novelty.  This is often the case in new business pitches, when an all or nothing enthusiasm takes grip.  These pitches invariably fail.

Malcolm Gladwell describes in The Tipping Point the quixotic and serendipitous process by which the long ignored Hush Puppy shoes regained popularity.  Would Hush Puppy have uncovered this remarkable resurgence by testing ads for potential marketplace sales prior to these real life events unfolding?  Not likely.

More often than not, the purveyors of advertising testing market their methods as “scientific.”  No well trained scientist would assert this.  It would be better for these companies to define their strengths (if they have any) and limitations in realistic ways, rather than in dogmatic, deterministic language.  Clients could use this information as possibly providing one piece of the evaluation puzzle, not the entire picture.

One last observation: the most talented copy writer I know recently wrote a radio ad for a well-known product.  This copy went through no fewer than forty-five client requested revisions, that in the end removed nearly every word of the original language (excepting “and” and “the.”)  My copy writer friend called the finished ad the single worst radio ad ever produced.  Nevertheless, this was the only ad the agency ever created that received written commendation from the client CEO.  At the end of the day, it’s our job to make clients happy.  So goes life in advertising.

Last Wednesday I had lunch with my friend Roz Savage.  Roz is an ocean rower.  She’s rowed the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans—solo.  Roz rows to raise awareness for the environment and cleaner oceans.  After Oxford she was a management consultant in London, when she decided her way of life wasn’t contributing to the well being of the planet or to her own soul.  She asked herself, “How can one person change the world?”  The answer was one stroke of an oar at a time.

It’s impossible to conclude anything other than the oceans are beyond real repair.  The rate of pollution, from garbage to chemicals, to thermal warming, combined with environmental abominations such as Japanese bottom scraping or BP oil rigs or the Exxon Valdez, all vastly outstrip the oceans’ ability to heal themselves.

Roz has rowed to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area estimated to be twice the size of Hawaii with a weight of 100 million tons.  The Patch consists of submerged plastics, chemical sludge and debris trapped in the currents of the North Pacific.  The issue isn’t whether this vast area can ever be cleaned up—it can’t; the issue is what changes must occur in the commercial world to stop the proliferation of these pollutants in the first place. (We could elect more Republicans and hasten the dying process.)

What I find so depressing, and where marketing plays a significant role, is that for every one Roz Savage, there’s Exxon, P&G, Dow, BHP…the global list goes on and on.  Think for a moment about the amount of garbage, apart from recycling, the average household accumulates every day of the year. Think of entire industries such as cosmetics where packaging far exceeds product size.  Packaging that goes straight from the shelf to the garbage bin.   Happy Meal toys that capture a child’s attention for about fifteen minutes and have life spans of centuries.  Old tires, broken surfboards, dolls, nylon stockings, condoms.  They’ll be with us forever.

We live in a commercial, materialistic society.  Status is mostly pegged on things we own.  It’s too late to change this.   Entire industries are built on this premise.  Entire industries support the industries that build the products that we crave: law, accounting, consulting, advertising, marketing.  Everyone is responsible.

So where does charge start?  Do we need individually wrapped slices of the most ordinary cheese?  Do we boycott Kraft?  Do we stop shopping at Safeway?  Do we opt out of consumer society?

The most pervasive criticism of advertising is that it’s created to sell unneeded products to unsuspecting people.  Elementary school students are taught to distrust what they hear in ads.  Proponents argue that consumers are free to buy or not buy whatever they choose.  Advertising only makes people aware of a product’s existence and availability.  Yet any practitioner knows that this is only a partial truth.  The objective of advertising is to persuade someone to do something through a variety of tried and true creative means: emotion, sex, status markers, hope.  Elaborate methodologies have been developed to evaluate advertising effectiveness, down to analyzing second by second every word in a television commercial or tracking click-through, bounce rates, site navigation among many web metrics.   We know an awful lot about what motivates a consumer to make a particular purchase.

How many of us can become another Roz Savage?  Become a crusader for the environment, for the planet?  Probably not very many of us.  But what if everyone did just one thing every day to take a stand: chose an unpackaged brand over a packaged one; printed two-sided copies (or never print at all); took public transportation to work; let manufacturers know that their practices are unacceptable; let advertisers know that their ads are false, misleading or ethically questionable when they are.  Buy products from environmentally committed companies such as Seventh Generation.

Those of us who get paid to create the marketing strategies and advertising and social media campaigns need to apply our own personal standards to our professional activity.  This could mean fewer, or different, clients; less money.  My own standards might have been necessarily low by my career choice, but only once—my first account assignment– did I feel compromised by working to support a highly questionable product: cholesterol-free New Age Cheese from Anderson-Clayton Foods.  Coming in four “flavors,” these slices lacked any semblance of taste, were filled with artificial ingredients and when melted shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp.  In this case, consumers voted with their feet and the product failed.  So there is hope yet.  I should add, however, that my second account assignment was as the Assistant AE on P&G’s blockbuster product, Rely Tampons–of Toxic Shock Syndrome fame.  You heard right.

Meanwhile, we can all make a difference and support Roz’s mission for a cleaner environment and maybe help save the oceans of the world.  Check out her site: http://www.rozsavage.com/

And bring your own bag the next time you go to the grocery store.

I recently attended a panel discussion at CNET/CBS, moderated by my friend Paul Sloan. The topic was start-up funding.  The panel consisted of Naval Ravikant, Dave McClure and George Zachary.  The audience was mostly guys (few women) either in the early stages of a start-up, or hopefully launching an idea into a reality.  The best answer I heard to the many questions about how seed funding decisions get made was Naval’s “Surprise me.”

The discussion inevitably turned to Facebook’s IPO.  The consensus was that a rising tide lifts all ships, with the result that the hype and capital infusion would stimulate more start-up investment.  Then, Naval R remarked, “who really uses Facebook anymore?”  Serious people have moved on to Twitter and Pinterest, leaving Facebook for kids, housewives, and, by implication, the non-serious.  While I’m sure this would be a surprise to Mr. Zuckerberg and his investors–no doubt adding millions of users around the globe as this panel discussion progressed–I wonder if there isn’t some truth to what Naval had to say.  Natural selection is relentless.

Look at the trouble Groupon is in.  It seems like only months ago the site was the darling of the web, ushering in an entirely new platform for promotion and commerce.  It may now fall by the wayside, and I for one won’t miss it.  The promise of engendering repeat purchase and long term customer loyalty was always a false, untested proposition.  Rapaciously marketed to small and medium businesses, it proved to be a money loser at best and often a death knell.

I bought a Groupon once, an offer to get $60.00 of merchandise for $20.00 at a single proprietor, high end pharmacy in my neighborhood.  The place sells expensive European products.  I figured how could I go wrong, so with my offer I went in, selected my purchases and paid with the Groupon.  I asked the woman at the counter, who turned out to be the owner, how this deal was working for her.  She said, “It’s the worst business decision I’ve ever made.  I’ve lost so much money and haven’t ever seen anyone return to the shop.”  It’s a common story.  How rueful Groupon’s founders must be for not having accepted Google’s offer (and how happy Google must be that they didn’t.)

All of the social platforms we use today will be replaced in time, some sooner than later.

Despite the many frustrations, and often against my private instincts, I engage because part of being alive is to live on the wave, not be stuck on some retaining wall.  Yes, privacy is sacrificed; hacking is a nuisance; our keystrokes are aggregated and repackaged for marketing initiatives; the government conducts surveillance; Big Brother is watching.  But what, today, is the alternative?  I have a young friend, a college student, who is mortally against all forms of online sharing: no Facebook, no Twitter, no use of Google search, no downloading, no YouTube, no Netflix…  Gmail is a necessary evil.  He wears a specially protected wallet to prevent possible RFID scans.  He also attends Defcon and supports Julian Assauge.  His seemingly contradictory career goal is to work at Twitter in their security department.  To me, he has narrowed his worldview to a degree I find depressing and ultimately uninteresting.  Maybe he’ll turn out to be right and I will be on the losing side of the battle for personal integrity and privacy.  When “they” come, they’ll get me long before him.

In the meantime, we’re here to explore and evolve. And not be fearful of unknown destinations.  There’s too much uncertainly even to hope of controlling outcomes.

I come back again and again to the final passage of Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen.  I’ve quoted this before.

Margrethe And sooner or later there will come a time when all our children are laid to dust, and all our children’s children.

Bohr When no more decisions, great or small, are ever made again. When there’s no more uncertainty, because there’s no more knowledge.

Margrethe And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world? Our ruined and dishonoured and beloved world?

Heisenberg But in the meanwhile, in this most precious meanwhile, there it is. The trees in Faelled Park. Gammertingen and Biberach and Mindelheim. Our children and our children’s children. Preserved, just possibly, by that one short moment in Copenhagen. By some event that will never quite be located or defined. By that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things.

I read this and think about my sons and the world they’re inheriting.  They have a lot more optimism than I do, believing that when the really bad times come, there will be a solution.  Science has saved the human race before and will again.  No doubt rational forces will eventually win out in this country to replace the bigotry, self-delusion in the name of faith, anti-science, anti-women, anti-education populist beliefs that seem to be sweeping much of the nation.  After all, National Socialism had its downfall.

Many believe, Malcolm Gladwell notwithstanding, that social media has played a role in advancing social change.  Like wildfire, people get connected, informed, mobilized and united in common cause.  In retaliation, repressive regimes shut down social media portals, as has recently been the case in China.  The power of social platforms, such as Twitter, is recognized, understood and feared.  Just as marketing has shifted from the hands of manufacturers to the hands, and opinions, of consumers, politics is shifting from centralized control to decentralized communities of citizens.

Would we rather be part of these movements, or isolated in our own fears of lack of privacy and personal control?  “With Privilege Comes Responsibility.”  There will always be the irresponsible, the hackers of the free world.  And there will be those irresponsible to the status quo who will carry huge responsibility.  (Wikileaks may be one.)

Fear versus potential.  You’ve got to choose.

 

Where we’re going is more important than where we’ve been.

Yet, we all come to be the people we are from somewhere.   Life has a serendipitous way of landing us places we never expected, much less planned.  One thing leads to the next and suddenly we’re doing something in the far left field of our original life-plan.

I participate in a mentoring group at Stanford called The Product Realization Network.  Once a month graduate students present their ideas for new products and based on our individual talents, we offer free and often valuable counsel.  Last year there was a young woman, majoring in electrical engineering, who proposed a web business that tracked the circuitous routes of successful people.  Her idea was to encourage students to forget straight-line career trajectories by looking at the zigs and zags most of us have traveled to arrive at where we are today.

My own life has been no exception.

During my freshman year at Bowdoin, I took a photography course from the college’s photographer-in-residence, John McKee.  John had recently held an exhibition at Bowdoin’s Walker Art Museum called As Maine Goes… and had developed a cult-like following of admirers and would-be photographers.  I learned darkroom techniques, the zone system and basics of composition, all within John’s spare and elegant framework.  He was a spare and elegant man himself, living a Zen inspired life alone in an austere 18^th century Maine farmhouse, which he kept unheated and nearly empty.  While his photographic vision and passion for “the print” rubbed off on me, somehow his personal aesthetics did not.  The beauty of an empty room is something I admire, and perhaps even long for, but have never achieved as evidenced by every cluttered space I’ve ever occupied.

While at Bowdoin my photographer friend John O’Hern and I spent many, many days driving up and down the Maine coast taking pictures, from Olsen’s Farm where Andrew Wyeth painted Christina’s World, to Popham Beach, to wild asters in Rockport, to the lighthouse at Pemaquid Point.  It’s where my taste in painters and painting was formed.  Winslow Homer (his paint-box and kit housed in Bowdoin,) Marsden Hartley, Andrew Wyeth, John Marin, Fairfield Porter and Rockwell Kent…these remain favorites today and have led to my own pursuit of watercolor painting.

All of this was preparation for one of the formative experiences of my life, working at Aperture, the photographic foundation founded by Minor White and then under its (in)famous publisher, Michael Hoffman.  Arriving back in the States from having obtained a graduate degree in Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College, Dublin, I had written to Michael expressing my desire to work at Aperture.  From the moment we met at his Manhattan apartment on East 36^th Street it was assumed I would.  For the next three years I was Managing Editor, living in Duchess County, New York, where Aperture maintained its headquarters to be near Michael’s immaculate late 18^th century farmstead compound in Pine Plains.

Such extraordinary experiences!  Aperture gave me the opportunity to meet every famous living photographer, from Paul, and his wife Hazel, Strand, to Ansel Adams, Paul Caponigro, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brett Weston, to the mysterious Frederick Sommer and the chronicler of the Ghosts along the Mississippi, Clarence John Laughlin.  We would visit Dorothy Norman at her house on Farewell Lane in South Hampton and talk about Alfred Steiglitz.  And rummage through boxes of prints by George Platt Lynes at the house where he died.  Having the opportunity to handle prints by all the great 19^th century photographers—Frederick Evans, Julia Margaret Cameron, P. H. Emerson, Samuel Bourne, among others—was a rare privilege.  (I gave away an Emerson print to someone I once loved and wonder what’s become of it.)

On weekends Michael’s house became a destination for photographers and visiting artists of all stripes.  I listened for hours to Paul Caponigro playing Thomas de Hartmann’s haunting music from Gurgeiff on the piano.

As Managing Editor I was involved in the selection and publication of Aperture’s monographs and the quarterly magazine.  I spent nearly a month working daily with Marvin Israel, the designer and Diane Arbus’s last lover, in his tower overlooking lower Fifth Avenue, as we edited Aperture’s landmark Arbus monograph.   Then, there was selecting and editing The Last Empire: Photographs of British India, which involved convincing very private collectors like Sam Wagstaff to lend their treasures—Queen Victoria’s Empress of India and Dehli Durbar albums– and Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the last Viceroy, to write the introduction (we had breakfast together in Manhattan.)

A close friend at the time was a young photographer, Mark Goodman, who on a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, was recording the people and everyday life of Millerton, New York, the mostly blue collar Dutchess County town where Aperture was based.  Mark’s Millerton portraits capture a time and place, now gentrified out of recognition, as poignantly as Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange.

My time at Aperture also led to formative associations with a number of other non-profit small presses, whose publications we distributed.  Chief among these were The Jargon Society, published by the North Carolina poet and polymath Jonathan Williams, and The Eakins Press, published by the kindest man I’ve ever known, George Leslie Katz.   Through Leslie and his writer wife Jane Mayhall, I became friends with Lincoln Kirstein, then the chairman of The New York City Ballet and noted arts patron.  Parties at Lincoln’s brownstone were events from another world.  He kept Serge Diaghilev’s calling card on his front hall table, as though the Russian ballet impresario had dropped by yesterday.  Leslie introduced me to an effete New York world of another, nearly extinct, generation. (Today it is no more.) We would have lunch with Monroe Wheeler at his apartment and once took tea with Father Flye, of James Agee fame, at St. Luke’s Rectory. (Father Flye was the only person I ever knew with an ear trumpet!)

I became Secretary of The Jargon Society, and with that role became friends not only with Jonathan Williams, but also with his authors, patrons and many, many artist friends.

Of lasting importance was my friendship with the writer Paul Metcalf, Herman Melville’s great grandson, and his wife Nancy.  Their house in the Berkshires became a haven for me, as it did for so many others.  Paul’s mother Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Melville’s granddaughter, was an important fixture among Melville scholars, and herself the discoverer of many Melville manuscripts, including Billy Budd, stored in a bread box by Melville’s daughter.  Paul had grown up in the Berkshires near Melville’s home Eagle Hill and was a Melville authority himself, as well as using his heritage as a springboard to his own wonderful, highly creative writing.  Spending a day with Paul at Eagle Hill, listening to him tell the family stories, was unforgettable.

Then there were the Jargon Society annual meetings in Winston-Salem and Highlands, North Carolina.  Always hosted by Philip Hanes, the meetings were adventures in art and literature and nature and Southern hospitality—whether skinny dipping down rock slides in frigid mountain streams of the Southern Appalachians, to visiting the grave of Joel Chandler Harris, author of the Uncle Remus tales, with English poet Basil Bunting in tow, to dinners at Philip and Joan Hanes elegant anti-bellum house, lovingly disassembled in tide-water Virginia and moved to Winston-Salem as a wedding present from Philip’s mother.

The love of fine printing and small presses along with classic photography has stayed with me ever since.  I bought a small hand letterpress a few years ago—having taken courses in typography and printing at the New School in Manhattan—but have yet to set it up.  Maybe next week.  Photography has been a closer affection, both collecting and taking pictures.  Even here, though, I’ve been selling more prints than buying, and am more likely to make photo books on Snapfish than drop off film at one of the few processors left in San Francisco.

What were the photographic aesthetics that these key influencers engendered?  Originality of vision, composition, quality of the print, grandeur, commitment.

Novelty alone does not make a photograph great.  Technique alone does not make a photograph great.   Subject matter alone does not make a photograph great.

Why does Diane Arbus succeed when her many imitators fail?  Why is a landscape photo by Ansel Adams magnificent and one by, say me, merely pictorial?

While an amateur photographer, I do know what makes a photograph great.  I got myself in many sticky situations with agency art directors who didn’t want, or respect, the opinion of some account guy.  Today I just keep my mouth shut and pursue my passion on my own.  Plus the craft has changed so much, from dark rooms to computers.  I think the advance has been spectacular. And, there’s still a role for traditional photographers—not commercially, but still a given for the art photography market.  Even I take far more pictures with my little digital Leica than with my old SLR’s and rangefinders.  I gave away my wooden 8 X 10 view camera  years ago.  Talk about a lot of trouble—but oh the detail and resolution.  I also gave away my Polaroid, another antique from another era.

This reminds me of a favorite Pepsi commercial created by BBDO.  An archeology professor is excavating an ancient tomb and finds a peculiar object encrusted in dirt and grime.  He carefully removes this covering to reveal a Coca-Cola bottle.  One of the students asks what it is and, bewildered, he answers, “I have no idea.”

This evening I was watching an old Charlie Rose interview with the New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane.  Lane happens to be my favorite critic and is a wonderful writer for the magazine on his off weeks—he shares the film critic role with David Denby—when he writes articles and profiles of people who interest him.  Somewhere in my files I’ve kept his profiles of Patrick Leigh-Fermor and P. G. Wodehouse.  Who can resist anyone who writes, about Wodehouse, “There is one short story, “Uncle Fred Flits By,” that I try not to study in depth more than once a fortnight.”

In his interview with Charlie Rose, Lane talks about the need for a film critic to know history and art and literature and popular culture; to be involved in the world; to have perspective.  Lane possesses such a breadth of knowledge.  It’s one reason his reviews are so much more than film reviews.

Sometimes I daydream about the fun I would have being someone else for a day or two.  Anthony Lane is decidedly on my list.  Mayor Bloomberg.  Or, imagine the thrill being Tobias Meyer—worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s—conducting an evening sale in London.  He has the distinction of selling the world’s most costly painting, a $104.2 million Picasso.  When asked what he does, he answered, “I make art expensive.”

Now, what does any of this have to do with marketing?  Nothing and everything.  Have you ever tried to have a conversation with a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur about anything other than his latest idea?  Hopeless.  This is undoubtedly a generalization, but the very idea of “knowing things” in the broadest sense is a unknown concept.  A former friend once reported that she overheard three young employees at Google wondering where Tonga was and deciding it was somewhere in the Caribbean.  I know very intelligent Stanford grads who couldn’t identify a Californian field of columbine.  Most surprising to me was one of my MBA students at USF who, on the day of the star’s death, asked, “Who’s Elizabeth Taylor?”

Maybe none of this matters.  I wonder, though.  I’ve worked with many companies on the development of brand campaigns.  Brand campaigns are always driven by one person at a company.  (I’ve written elsewhere in this blog that I believe all marketing begins with one person.)  The most successful are people with broad experience and an all-encompassing worldview.  People who know psychology and history and music and symbols; who have a cultural frame of reference in which to think about themselves and the brand they want to establish.  Brands don’t live in isolation of the world around them. Clients who believe that a brand is its advertising miss the point entirely.

The top branding experience I’ve had was working with the management at Philips on a new global brand campaign, based, ironically, on their dull as dishwater tagline “Let’s Make Things Better.” The reason it was great was because the initiative was led by two exceptionally intelligent, well read, cultured individuals: Gerard Dufour and Kevin Greene.  When Kevin, head of global advertising, came to brief the agency he had no deck, no PowerPoint, no strategy hand-out (that came later once the higher goal was communicated.)  What he had was a reel of TV commercials: ten of the world’s best commercials in his opinion.  They were from many different categories and times.  Each was outstanding.  He simply said, “I want that.  I want a commercial on that reel.  I want you to make Philips famous.”  The process to get there was the most informed, intellectual route imaginable—interspersed with dinner conversation about Mikhail Bulgakov’s great novel The Master and Margarita, or a detailed history of Scottish single malt makers.  Kevin’s colorful, half-Spanish-half-French boss Gerald Dufour, head of global marketing at Philips, only added to this unconventional route to produce an advertising campaign.  At the time, Gerald’s best friend was the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, the director of the Mariinsky Theatre and the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.  Gerald and Valery took us to a production of Boris Godunov at the Met.  When Gerald evaluated music for a commercial, he knew what he was doing.  Too often, I hear clients say things like, “I’m not loving it…”  Gee, that’s helpful: as though it has anything to do with an assistant brand manager’s personal taste.

Speaking of music and advertising, when I led global brand advertising for Fujitsu, our senior client, the head of Corporate Advertising, was Yasuo Sangu.  Sangu-san was a remarkable man, not least because he was also the founder and president of the Frank Sinatra Society of Japan!   Not only did he know every imaginable detail about Sinatra and his music—he had an entire room in his house devoted to Sinatra with thousands of recordings—but he was a world expert on jazz.  When recording music for a commercial, Sangu-san would request specific musicians for each instrumental role.  Many, many times he would call from Tokyo saying, “I see there’s going to be a special on PBS tomorrow night in New York of a 1950’s Sinatra/Garland concert.  Could you tape it and send it to me please.”

We learn things by way of many pathways.  Our parents and families; school; travel; museums; work.  Being in the street.  Listening to music. Looking at everything with a sense of wonder.  Being open to all that’s new, that’s different.  And reading.

I’ve been extraordinarily lucky in all of the above, both in having so many advantages presented and taking advantage of all of them.  Reading, however, is available to everyone.

Among the very well read, I’m in the minor leagues.  (You might say Susan Sontag headed the Majors.)  Yet, reading has been a constant in my life since a small child.  How I look at the world largely has been informed by what I’ve read.  The single most moving and consequential course I had at Bowdoin was Literature as Philosophy, taught by the eccentric and brilliant philosopher C. Douglas McGee.  (Doug and his wife Phoebe became life-long friends.)  What the course and Professor McGee gave me was the profound understanding that a novel could be more than a novel: it could be a framework for living, for viewing the world in a larger way, for deeper insight into the human soul.  The books we read and discussed are the touchstones to the way I think and the foundation to the idea I have that there are certain books that help to make us civilized.

So I’ve created a list of the books that have been most meaningful to me. This is obviously a highly personal list.  It reflects my own preferences and life experience.  It’s clearly the list of an American.   There are “great” books on the list, as well as not so great but wonderful to me.  I’ve read all of them–some many times.  A Confederacy of Dunces I’ve read more than ten times, to date–every time I feel sad and low. It cheers me up immensely.   (Based on the number of times I’ve read it, I guess those feelings have been too frequent.)   Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s A Time of Gifts is maybe my favorite book.  The Iliad is the start of it all for me.  I’m reading two new translations right now.  There are parts that no matter how many times I read them I always cry: Priam’s plea to Achilles for the body of his son Hector; Hector’s farewell to his wife and son. What father could not be brought to tears by these passages?

Jules Henry’s Pathways to Madness is perhaps the most important book–for me–that I’ve read.  Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita my favorite novel (although that’s a hard one…Henry James’s The Ambassadors is a very close second.)  Over this past summer I reread Brideshead Revisited four times because it’s the saddest, most nostalgic novel I know and it suited my heart-broken mood, unfortunately.  (Even though a crusty Bowdoin English professor called it the best of 2^nd rate novels.)  Haruki Murakami is my favorite contemporary novelist…no, wait, that would be W. G. Sebald, but he died in a car accident ten years ago so maybe he doesn’t count as contemporary.

Then there are also terrific one-off reads that pop up—but don’t make the list– like last year’s biography of Cleopatra by Stacey Schiff.  Or best sellers I refused to read, and then did, and was happily surprised by how good they were, like Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Or Stephen King (everyone should read his On Writing.)

Clearly no one else on earth would select this list of books.  I used to think if anyone else ever read all these books they would be a civilized person, just like me.  But then I realized they would simply be a lot like me, and who would want to be that.  No equation with civilized.  Maybe well-read, but hardly civilized.  One can be illiterate and civilized.

So here they are.  My plan was to select 100, but as usual that too-limited plan was abandoned, so now I label the list 100+ Books.

100+ Books

A Personal Selection

Niland Mortimer

Homer-Iliad

Homer-Odyssey

Euripides-Medea, The Trojan Women

Plato-The Republic, The Symposium

Aristotle-Poetics

Aristophanes-The Frogs

Sophocles-Oedipus the King

Virgil-The Aeneid

Beowulf

William Shakespeare-Plays, Sonnets

John Milton—Paradise Lost

W.B.Yeats—Collected Poems

Henry Fielding—Tom Jones

James Boswell—Life of Samuel Johnson

Virginia Woolf-To the Lighthouse

Samuel Beckett-Waiting for Godot

Dante-Divine Comedy

Chaucer-The Canterbury Tales

Walt Whitman—Leaves of Grass

Henry James-The Ambassadors

Henry James-The Golden Bowl

William James-Varieties of Religious Experience

E. M. Forster-A Passage to India, Howards End

Patrick Leigh-Fermor-A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and Water, Mani

Charles Dickens-Bleak House, Pickwick Papers

Jane Austen-Pride and Prejudice

Emily Bronte-Wuthering Heights

William Wordsworth; John Keats; S. T. Coleridge—all of it.

Thomas Mann-The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann-Dr. Faustus

Joseph Conrad-Heart of Darkness, Victory

George Santayana-The Last Puritan

Herman Melville-Moby Dick

Melville-Billy Budd

Nathaniel Hawthorne-The Scarlet Letter, stories

T. Nansen-Farthest North

Bible-Old Testament (only)

Fernand Braudel—The Mediterranean

Ivan Turgenev-Home of the Gentry, Fathers and Sons

D.H. Lawrence -Women in Love

Gustav Flaubert-Madame Bovary

Leo Tolstoy-War and Peace

Dostoyevsky-Crime and Punishment

Dostoyevsky-The Brothers Karamazov

Montaigne-Essays

H. D. Thoreau–Walden

R. W. Emerson–Essays

T.S. Elliott-The Waste Land, Four Quartets

George Meredith-The Egoist, Modern Love

Cervantes-Don Quixote

Yukio Mishima-The Sea of Fertility

Colin Thubron-Shadow of the Silk Road

Lawrence Durrell-Bitter Lemons, The Alexandria Quartet

Marcel Proust-Remembrance of Things Past

John Swain-River of Time

James Joyce-Ulysses, Dubliners

DeToqueville-Democracy in America, The Old Regime and the Revolution

W.G. Sebald-Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn

George Elliott-Middlemarch

Jan Morris—Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Venice

H.V.Morton, In Search of London

Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World

Stephen Hawking-A Brief History of Time

Flannery O’Connor—Collected Stories

Eudora Welty-Collected Stories, Losing Battles

George Orwell-1984

Mary Lavin—Collected Stories

William Faulkner-The Sound and the Fury

Haruki Murakami—The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84

Yasunari Kawabata—The Master of Go

Charles Darwin-The Origin of Species

Sigmund Freud-Civilization and its Discontents

James Fraser-The Golden Bough

F. Scott Fitzgerald-The Great Gatsby

V.S. Naipaul—In A Free State

Harold Acton—The Bourbons of Naples

Balzac—The Human Comedy—yes, all of it.

J.R.R.Tolkien-The Lord of the Rings

Mikhail Bulgakov-The Master and Margarita

Lampedusa-The Leopard

Marquez-One Hundred Years of Solitude

Antoine de Saint-Exupery-Wind, Sand and Stars

Ernest Hemingway-A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Thomas Wolfe-Look Homeward, Angel

Descartes-Meditations on First Philosophy

Hume-A Treatise of Human Nature

Jung-Psychological Types

Locke-An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Hobbes-Leviathan

Jules Henry-Pathways to Madness

Willa Cather-The Song of the Lark, My Antonia

John Updike-Rabbit Angstrom novels

M.F.K. Fisher-Two Towns in Provence

Iris Origo-War in the Val D’Orcia

Albert Camus-The Stranger

Jules Henry-Pathways to Madness

Marguerite Yourcenar-Memoirs of Hadrian

Mark Twain-Huckleberry Finn, Innocents Abroad

Robert Byron-The Road to Oxiana

Tatiana Metternich-Tatiana

Marie Vassilchikov-Berlin Diaries

Gunter Grass—The Tim Drum

Waverly Root, The Food of Italy, The Food of France

Toole, J.K.-The Confederacy of Dunces

V. Nabokov-Speak, Memory, Lolita

Maurice O’Sullivan—Twenty Years A-Growing

Norman Lewis—Voices of the Old Sea

Rebecca West-Black Lamb and Gray Falcon

Wallace Stevens—Collected Poems

Barbara Grizutti Harrison-Italian Days

Tim O’Brien-The Things They Carried

Stephen King-Carrie

John Steinbeck—The Grapes of Wrath

Thorton Wilder—Our Town

J.D. Salinger—The Catcher in the Rye

Ford Maddox Ford-The Good Soldier

Somerville & Ross—Experiences of an Irish R.M.

John Synge—The Playboy of the Western World

Sherwood Anderson-Many Marriages, Collected Stories

C.V. Cavafy-Collected Poems

Mikhail Lermontov-A Hero of Our Time

Claude Levi-Strauss—Triste Tropiques

Kenneth Clark-Civilisation

Evelyn Waugh-Brideshead Revisited

Oliver Statler-Japanese Inn, Japanese Pilgrimage

Barbara Pym-A Few Green Leaves

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—The Sufferings of Young Werther

Henrik Ibsen—Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House, Ghosts

Guy Davenport-Tatlin

Edmund de Waal—The Hare with Amber Eyes

Michel Houellebecq—The Map and the Territory

Peter Carey—The True History of the Kelly Gang

A. B. Facey—A Fortunate Life

Simon Schama—Landscape and Memory, Citizens

Jane Jacobs—The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Bill Wilson—AA Big Book

Wallace Stegner—Crossing to Safety

J. M. Synge—The Playboy of the Western World

Henry Beston—The Outermost House

I’m rereading Robin Dunbar’s How Many Friends Does One Person Need.  Were I a philanthropist, I would buy a copy for every person in America—especially every teenager.  Were I a benevolent dictator, I would demand its reading.  The number in the title is 150—the limit on the number of social relationships that humans can have, a figure that is now graced by the name “Dunbar’s Number.”  It’s based on the relationship between the size of the neocortex and group size, first seen in nonhuman primates and then shown to be valid for humans, from pre-history to today—Facebook not withstanding.  Dunbar’s book is an unflinching look at the effects of evolutionary natural selection, of how we can’t fool Mother Nature.  When we try, the results are disastrously consequential.

I’m not at all sure I could extend the list of my friendships even to 150.  Most of us have no more than three or four friends who know everything about us, and us them. Friends for whom we would go out of our way to help, to lend money, to share the most intimate confidences.  Then there’s another ring of friendships—maybe around 10 to 20 people—who are one step removed from the first ring of friends.  And so on, until we get to acquaintances, friends of friends.  From prehistoric tribes to successful business practices today, Dunbar pegs the optimal number at 150.

There’s something else going on, however, with having more than 550 Friends on Facebook, as I do.  I know a man with more than 4,000.  What’s this about?  Has social media changed our world, or is Friends simply the wrong word?  Wouldn’t Links be better?  Social theorists call these ecosystems of influence and this is a construct I understand and believe.  Yet for the most part these are not my friends.  Oh, maybe a few are and I know these are within my 150 because they are the Friends who read and comment on my postings, and whose postings I also read and comment on.  There’s an exchange that might also occur in real life if I were to see them. I care about these Friends.

I’m thinking of paring my Friends on Facebook down to 150.  [I sincerely hope the other 400 take no offense.] I’m really not too interested in sharing my experience, or attempting to influence, people outside of my inner rings.  It’s rather like the 20-year-old waiter who spontaneously tells me his favorite items on the menu.  Why in the world would I care, or even believe his dubious judgment is in any way equal, or superior, to mine?  It’s not as though Andre Soltner shared his preferences with me.

Andrew Keen, the author of The Cult of the Amateur and notorious foe of the social web, writes about how everyone is an expert online.  A blogger with no expertise may be read with the same legitimacy as a true expert in the field.  Everyone’s a musician, a photographer, a diarist, a celebrity.  Keen fears a future “where ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”  That pretty much sums it up!  We have gone far beyond Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame.”

Lady Gaga has more fans on Twitter than anyone else: as of today, 19,923,324 and growing.  One might say this is a colossal exercise in the irrelevant.  But as reported in a recent article in The New York Times, Lady Gaga is extending her considerable influence to promote a social cause to reduce bullying and increase fairness in schools.  It’s her Born This Way Foundation, launched at Harvard last week, with the mission of creating a kinder and braver world. Who wouldn’t like that (the Republican primary candidates notwithstanding)?  It just might work.  But it isn’t about Friends.

I wonder, though, about the growth of Facebook, and its competitors abroad.  Is there a point at which all these Friends don’t really matter?  Does the platform become simply a framework for advertising and self-promotion rather than an exchange between friends?  Many people pointlessly compete to see who has the most number of Friends.  I had a friend who even counts the number of birthday greetings posted to her Facebook wall as an indication of her popularity and perhaps even self-worth.  How much more significant would it be to get a call on one’s birthday, or a letter, or even a direct email greeting?  Especially since our awareness of the birthday is prompted by Facebook itself!

So if our influence—and I’m talking about ordinary people like me, not celebrities like Lady Gaga—is reasonably limited to our circles of friends, how do ecosystems function and spread?  I think they begin as small conversations, and extend, initially, from one person to another.  That’s where sharing becomes relevant because it gives an idea the opportunity to extend beyond one’s own circle into another’s.  And another.  And another.  It’s exactly as described in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.  There comes a time when the influence of an individual tips to the group, then tips outside the group to a population never even conceived by the original influencer.  Remember Gladwell’s story about the re-emergence of Hush Puppy shoes?  What started out as counter-culture statement by a few hipsters in the East Village spread to larger and larger circles of people until the nearly defunct company became a nationally accepted brand once again.  (At which point hipsters everywhere stopped wearing them.)

Sometimes one person’s influence can be tragic.  It’s one of the reasons I actually tear up reading Robin Dunbar’s book.  Like Dunbar, I believe in science to explain why we humans behave in the ways we do.  New knowledge gained from advances in neuroscience and genetics have added immeasurably to our understanding of evolution and natural selection, of who we are.  This knowledge does not make us super-human, but more human.  As Newton observed, “We stand on the shoulders of giants.”

Yet, when we have someone on the national stage who is intent on inflicting a personal belief system on the American government and people—a belief system that is anti-science, anti-education, anti-women, anti-health care, anti-fairness, even anti-Constitutional—then I despair for our collective future as a civilized nation.  That this person commands support and popularity, all in the name of “values,” is a malaise I fail to comprehend.  We become little different from the theocracies of the Middle East.

It’s my hope that all of us who oppose such bigotry and prejudice will use their own circle of influence to create a wave of sanity that builds to an ocean of hope.  It’s not about opposing the individual about whom I’m writing.  He’s entitled to his beliefs.  [Although in an election year it does come down to opposing an individual.]

It’s about opposing a culture of limits, as opposed to a culture of possibility; a culture defined by exclusion, as opposed to inclusion; a culture of narrowness, as opposed to a culture of expansiveness.

Start with our friends, our community of 150 friends.  It’s my moral obligation to my children and my children’s children.  It’s a moral obligation to myself.

 

 

I’m depressed that in Julie Bosman’s article in The New York Times on the perils of Barnes & Noble’s future, she had to remind her readers that an independent bookstore is what they saw in Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan’s “You’ve Got Mail.”  Have we become so indoctrinated by the Big Box mentality that we can’t even recall what a neighborhood bookstore looks like?  You know, the ones that Barnes & Noble has steadily driven out of business?

At the same time, one of the most popular recent blog pieces, appearing on Facebook walls everywhere, is “The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World.”  Take a look– they’re stunning:

http://flavorwire.com/254434/the-20-most-beautiful-bookstores-in-the-world?all=1

The day Borders went out of business I believed a little piece of sanity had returned to the world.  I know that’s churlish, and maybe even elitist.  But there was never anything elite about your local independent bookstore.  Those that remain are havens of intelligence, warmth and pleasure.  Places where you want to be.  Do you know Crawford Doyle on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan?  Or City Lights in San Francisco?  Or Elliott Bay in Seattle (even in their new, less wonderful space.)  Or Powell’s in Portland, OR?  Or Rizzoli on 57^th Street?   These are destinations for browsing, thinking, dreaming.  Finding books you never knew existed, much less wanted.

I’m occasionally troubled that I have too many books.  Maybe 6,000+.  Tragically, eighty boxes of my books are in storage in Westchester County, NY.  I need to deal with those orphans. If there were Bookaholic Anonymous I would be a charter member.  I become like Mr. Toad in The Wind and the Willows, my eyes twirling, when I walk into a new unexplored bookstore.

Used bookstores are even better—independents taken to the next level.  For me they are small spots of heaven.  My local used bookshop here in San Francisco is Russian Hill Books, owned by the keen and charming Carol Spencer.  I cannot walk in without finding a book I can’t live without and currently have advised the staff to just say No anytime I want to make a purchase.  Happily, the shop also buys used books, selectively.  My strategy is to sell twenty and buy one.  Just yesterday I decided that Picasso was no longer part of my aesthetic, so packed up twelve large art books to cart down the hill and sell.  I have my eye on a fifteen volume lovely 1906 set of Thackeray.  I hope Vince or Ben say No.

Here in San Francisco we are blessed with many used and rare bookstores.  Another favorite is Forest Books in the Mission—still a fine bookstore but greatly diminished by the loss of Jason Espada, who in the evening would play classical guitar for hours.

And I would sit and listen for hours.  It was as close to a spiritual experience as one could get anywhere outside an 11^th century French cathedral.  Forest Books’ owner, who shall remain nameless, should be lashed daily for letting Jason go.

Then there’s the Brattle Street Bookstore in Boston.  And the Strand in New York.

A year ago I discovered a delightful used bookstore in Chapel Hill where I found the 1897 two-volume first English edition of Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North, a book every teenage boy in America should read.  Forget about the Boy Scout’s “Be Prepared.”  Read Nansen’s narrative of his successful journey to the Arctic and truly understand what being prepared means, and why it’s important.  (Think of the folly of Scott in the Antarctic.)  And my copy has the long forgotten fountain pen inscription “From Henry M. Hunter.  Christmas. 1897.”  I wonder who the lucky recipient was.

So, how does any of this rant on physical books in real bookstores have anything to do with marketing?  It probably doesn’t.  The shift to ebooks has already happened.  Amazon is a marketing juggernaut.  Hell, when Walmart ranks as the top book brick-and-mortar retailer, you know some kind of intelligence nadir has been reached.  Sorry if that offends.

Of late interactive books have been on my mind.  I think they’re mostly pointless—experiences produced more for the novelty of the “experience” than for intellectual content.  Interactive children’s books are an exception.  They brilliantly open up worlds of wonder that can engage and captivate a (small) child.  But will that interactive experience lead to “real” reading?  Or only to more of a visually dominated culture, to more TV, more online games, more apps.

I don’t think it leads to wanting a fifteen-volume set of Thackeray.

A once in a lifetime experience—never again to be repeated—for millions of young readers around the globe was the sequential releases of the seven Harry Potter novels.  As the bookish father of three boys who literally waited with baited breath for each new volume to appear, it was an unsurpassed joy.  All my boys went to a summer camp on Lake Champlain in the Adirondacks and each summer of the latest Harry Potter release, a hundred Amazon parcels would arrive at Camp Dudley’s gate.  And a hundred boys would spend the rest of the day in their cabins reading the latest marvel from start to finish.  I think the camp had to give that day off from regular activities.

With my boys, the adventure of reading Harry Potter, among many others, led straight to the other-worldly world of Haruki Murakami, the delight of A Confederacy of Dunces, and with my middle son Sam, a devotion to Balzac.  My oldest son David has read The Lord of the Rings maybe…eleven times?  Adam my youngest just finished the new biography of Steve Jobs.  I hope never to see an interactive version of that!

Stephen King, in his excellent book On Writing, advises that if you want to be a writer, read everything, everywhere, all the time.  In bed at night, at the bus stop, waiting in line at the bank, of course in the toilet—everywhere.  Read everything, not just the greats.  Discover what bad writing looks like as well as great writing.  Read novels, biographies, science books, history (especially history,) poetry, and epics.

On his march across the known world, Alexander the Great slept with his copy of the Iliad, annotated by his tutor Aristotle, next to his pillow.  He never left home without it.

As a business there’s nothing more absurd than an advertising agency.

It doesn’t own what it makes.  It’s manufacturing operation walks out the door everyday.  Its business model is at the discretion of its clients.  Its business ebbs and flows with the fortunes of others.  There’s no loyalty. Everybody believes they can create a better product.  Everything is subjective.  Everything is personal.

Somewhere at the very beginnings of the industry the idea of creative ownership was lost.  Nothing an advertising agency creates is owned by the agency.  It’s a though somewhere in the copyright laws there’s a clause that excludes advertising agencies.

Agencies spend a great deal of time and money to recruit, remunerate and keep brilliant creative talent.  This talent is as rare as finding gold bullion in your back yard.  Few agencies have it, and when they do, it usually doesn’t stay. All a talented copywriter has at the end of the day is his reputation, his portfolio and his salary.  If he can deliver client-loving and product-selling work over and over again, he will have achieved a degree of job security.  But only a degree.  When the client goes away, the creative team likely goes away, especially if the team is junior.

Imagine if recording artists couldn’t copyright their songs?  Isn’t this why the recording industry went nuts when Napster arrived on the scene?  Imagine if Oliver Sacks couldn’t copyright his work, and every other day some other writer regularly stole his titles and sentences and ideas?  “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Diet-Coke.”  It’s called plagiarism and there are copyright laws against it.

But this occurs every day with advertising copy.  Take two of the most copied examples: Goodby Silverstein & Partners’ “Got Milk” campaign and McCann-Erickson’s “Priceless” campaign for MasterCard.  How many times have we seen these campaigns ripped off?  I’ve even seen “Got Condoms?”  A creative team in San Francisco or New York sweated hours to think up these ideas.  Their work makes their clients and their agencies famous.  But they receive no commensurate financial benefit from having created these ideas, these words.  There are no residuals that accrue to creative talent, as they do to acting talent.

It’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  No, it’s not–not in advertising.  It’s creative theft.  Let others think up their own ideas and respect the talented–more talented–people who created the original work in the first place.  Advertising that enters the vernacular isn’t fair game for imitation.  Frankly, I avoid any product that has appropriated another’s campaign, or anyone who bends the ideas to his personal self-aggrandizement.  These simply lack integrity.

The other thing agencies gave away, most specifically to management consulting firms and so-called branding agencies, is their intellectual capital.  (OK all you viewers of Mad Men.  You might be thinking what “intellectual” capital?)  During the final year and a half of Digital Equipment Corporation’s existence, a well known, Boston based, consulting firm was brought in to develop the final dissolution strategy.  By “brought in” I mean over fifty consulting firm employees on site, the CEO personally managing the process and legions back in the home office developing alternative scenarios of how to break up and sell–never save–the company.  Of course the agency, nor I as the global account lead, was not party to most of this strategizing.  We were asked, however, to recommend our own solution, based on our day-to -day experience with the eleven divisions across sixty plus countries.  Led by our strategic planner, our recommendation exactly matched that of the consulting firm.  And how much was Bain paid?

I’m not venting sour grapes.  Agency talent, whether creative, account, planning or media, become well compensated when their work is successful in the marketplace.  Agencies are great places to work, a benefit above getting the right salary.  Where else can you work when in a single day you collaborate with people of wildly different backgrounds, talents and aspirations; where you become versed in multiple industries; where you get to travel around the world in service to your clients and company; where you make friends for life with such diverse people you might never had met had you worked in, say, a bank.  So many of my own friends are agency and client colleagues in such diverse places as Tokyo, Vienna, Hamburg, London, Paris, Singapore, Melbourne, Barcelona, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Prague.  Much less spread across the USA.

I remember one day, again back at DEC, when our agency CEO Keith Reinhard–a long time mentor–and I went up to Maynard, Massachusetts to present new creative work to the president of DEC’s failing PC division who had resisted the idea of a single global campaign.  We set all the Wall Street Journal ads out in DEC’s large boardroom and waited for this man to arrive.  And waited.  And waited.  Finally, he walked into the room, glanced around and walked out, wrapped in his immense Italian arrogance.  Keith to his credit stopped Enrico outside and asked wouldn’t he please come back and let us present the creative ideas to him.  The president said, “I saw nothing I liked,” and walked away.  Keith turned to me, smiled, and said, “The great thing about advertising is that we make new friends every day.”

Yes we do.  Yes, it’s an absurd industry.  And yes, I’ve loved every minute working in it.

Commenting on Chinese concerns over the ascent of Kim Jong-Il in North Korea, my Bowdoin colleague Christopher Hill (former US Ambassador to Iraq, Poland and South Korea and chief US negotiator with North Korea 2005-2009) wrote, “But perhaps the greatest difficulty worrying the Chinese stems from an underappreciated but familiar theme in international relations: “old think” – the inability to comprehend, much less address, new realities.”

 “Old think” isn’t confined to international relations.  It’s practically everywhere.  In the world of marketing—from the products that get manufactured, to understanding customers and how to reach them, to the relationships between clients and agencies—“old think” dominates every aspect of the business.

 Imagine for a moment if an entire industry could be re-thought based on new realities unencumbered from old ways of thinking.  What would General Motors look like? Would we have a multi-divisional corporation manufacturing a variety of totally undifferentiated car brands and models?  Would we have a Buick?

 Walk into any grocery store and ask yourself does the world need seventy-five different breakfast cereals?  Does the entire market reflect the realities of how we shop and what we eat?  Even Whole Foods doesn’t escape the “old think” grocery store paradigm.

 Or take the sticky world of politics: would we have a polarized two party system if all the new realities we face in the world were actually part of the government’s mission?

 John Lennon said it best:

 Imagine there’s no heaven

It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today

You, you may say 
I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

 Bringing this down to the prosaic world of marketing, too many businesses continue to operate as though it were 1956.  They think if their brand exists, people will want it.  That if they shout about their brand, people will listen.  That if they advertise, people will go out and buy. 

 How many young people do you know who actually want more stuff in their lives?  I know my sons don’t.  They live by the rule that for every new thing in, there’s an old thing out.  Less is more.  And when they do make a purchase, it’s decided outside the world of advertising.  They go to online forum discussions, review sites, blogs and their friends’ experiences and advice.  In fact, they are suspicious of all claims made by a manufacturer and always search for third-party validation before considering a purchase.  These are boys in college or grad school so admittedly they have an informed view of the world, though I don’t think their experience is unusual among kids their age (and younger.)

Having no TV, I am likely the last ad man on earth never to have seen an episode of Mad Men.  My son Adam is staying with me over his college winter break and we’re watching season one on Netflix.  Last night we watched #8, in which Don Draper is accused by his girlfriend’s pot smoking hippie friends for creating the wants in society for products no one needs.  Don’s response is essentially “get over it.”  “There’s no big lie.  There is no system.  The universe is indifferent.” This is the world we live in; there’s nothing else.

 I’m no utopian and truly can’t imagine living in a world untouched by materialism.  I can imagine such a world’s existence, but not living in it.  The inextricably linked businesses of manufacturing and advertising—together with a legal system that supports and protects the entire selling and buying enterprise—bear the collective responsibility for perpetuating “old think” across the board.  Our efforts to think differently (thank you Apple) are merely inroads into the much larger landscape.  Yet we need to go there in all of our affairs.

 In the early ‘90’s, Karen Stabiner wrote Inventing Desire: Inside Chiat/Day.  Together with Randall Rothenberg’s Where the Suckers Moon, it’s one of the best books ever written on the ad industry—and a vastly truer portrayal than in Mad Men, which is about characters, not an industry, anyway.  As its title explicitly states, that’s what marketing and advertising is all about: creating desire for things.  Sometimes we can rationalize away the dirty undertone by saying it’s creating a desire for things we need: a software solution for greater productivity; a better way to get grass stains out of a pair of khaki’s; a hybrid car.  Or that television advertising remains the best way to communicate to a mass audience.  Or that a mass audience still exists at all.

 As in international relations, it’s really hard to move beyond “old think.”

 In another post, I’m going to write about the relationship between advertising agencies and their clients—truly relationships built and stuck in “old think” thinking.

 

 

It’s traditional that once a year we take stock of what has passed and what role we have played, good or bad, in all the events and experiences of the year just finishing.  For many this time is at the end of the Roman calendar, the time between Christmas and New Year.  It’s holiday time, full of friends and family and for most, good cheer.  Since my birthday is in January, the end of the year is also a beginning.  For some, however, it’s a time of anxiety, grief or regret over what was lost during the preceding twelve months.  We assess what we’ve accomplished, what might have gone better, what we would sooner forget.  Sometimes our year might seem like a miserable dream; and we’d like to throw those memories away somewhere.

The past year I’m surveying gets a mixed review.  As Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times.  It was the worst of times.”  It began with promise, moved to ill-considered, plummeted into heart-break, necessitating major life changes, then shifted to new opportunities and is ending again with promise, although different from what I initially hoped for at the beginning of the year.

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.

 Along the way many lessons were learned (never combine love and work.)  The last thing I wanted was a string of “growth experiences,” though “grow” I did.  Left turns only revealed themselves as positive in hindsight.

On balance, the best outweighed the worst.  This was a hard conclusion to reach and I surprise myself saying it. New people came into my life whose trust, caring and support proved truer and longer lasting than those on whom I had placed my faith at the beginning of the year.  Old friends stepped in to offer safe harbors.  New friends were made. The strength of friends and fellowship was overwhelming. New work emerged with fascinating potential.  A new city was explored.  New skills were learned.  My connection with my sons grew ever stronger.  And I realized my affection for a place was greater than the sad associations remembered through the lens of a former shared experience. San Francisco welcomed me home.

The year was a progression of peaks and valleys, and while the hockey stick curve didn’t emerge, it’s in the making.  2011 planted the seeds of 2012 opportunity.

Life is how we interpret our experience.  It’s not an objective reality that exists outside our consciousness. There’s always a choice.  We can choose to be happy.  Or not.  We can choose to see ourselves as successful.  Or not.  We can accept the world as it is.  Or not.  We can accept people as they are.  Or not.

Understanding the dangers inherent in all the “or nots” is how we grow up and keep from drowning.

 

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started