Have you fallen into the Ad Hole?

I've started calling certain people ad-holes whenever they do something I don't like. It's original, and it fits, because mostly the people I don't like right now are in advertising. And yes, they're assholes too, but I'm sure they've already been called that. A lot.

Today I also changed the phrase "the end is near" to "the end is here", but I wasn't referring to my husband's career with the ad-holes. I was referring to the fact that my almost-two year-old son has learned to tease his older sister, complete with the "nah-nah-na-NAH-nah" song, to add to his repertoire of hair-pulling (which I suspect she actually likes).

Here's hoping he doesn't one day turn into an ad-hole.

Who's Watching The Store?

Once there was a little boy who had a Meyer lemon tree in his back yard. Every fall the lemons would rain down and pile up on the grass, and since the little boy was kind of lazy

(he was really, really lazy)

he would usually step over them as he played and let other people eventually pick them up, like his mother or his neighbors, to make lemon bars or other delicious lemony things. One hot day he discovered that if he asked her nicely, his mother would make him lemonade from these fancy lemons, and this lemonade was so tasty that soon his friends began to flock to the house for it. So the little boy asked his father for a lemonade stand, and because his father was handy, he made the boy a sturdy wooden booth that had a counter and space for a sign at the top. The father wheeled the booth to the corner (because this was a time when a ten-year old boy could safely sell lemonade on the corner) and gave him coins to make change, and the little boy's mother began to pick lemons on the double.

After one week the lemonade stand became the talk of the neighborhood. Housewives (because they had those back then, real ones!) admired the unusual sweetness of the lemonade and construction workers began to make it a regular lunchtime stop, praising the little boy for his industriousness. "I pick them all myself," the boy would say. "It's a lot of work, picking all of these lemons, but it's worth it because the lemonade is so good and everyone is so happy." At the end of the day, the little boy would trot home, pockets jingling, to find baskets of mama's freshly-picked lemons waiting for him.

Soon the little boy became bored with tending his booth all day. (He had become a lemonade entrepreneur quite by accident.) So he asked his friend to sit at the lemonade stand while he went off to play baseball in the empty corner lot, promising to give the friend a whole dollar at the end of the day. The friend, wanting to be a part of the boy's glamourous enterprise, agreed, and sat down in the hot sun. This arrangement continued for several weeks, with the friend happily pocketing a dollar at the end of each day and the little boy making quite a good deal more while he was, in effect, off playing ball and having a good old time.

And then one day the lemonade wasn't very good. No one was really sure what the problem was, but suddenly the lemonade stand had fewer customers and by the end of the week, there were hardly any people buying lemonade at all. The boy began to complain each day about having to give his friend a dollar for tending the stand, even though the boy's friend was a very hard worker. Indeed, the friend was a very good person all around. He always kept the lemonade fresh, was polite to customers and never took more than a few sips for himself in the course of a day. And the little boy (who remember, was lazy from the beginning) liked having his friend tend the stand while he was off playing. He just wanted to keep a good thing going.

And so the little boy began to blame his friend. "It's your fault we're not selling any lemonade," he'd say. "Work harder. Make bigger and better signs. Get out there and sell yourself," he'd admonish, as he trotted off with his mitt to play ball.

Now do you see where I am going with this?

(The little boy grows up and somehow finds himself in charge of an advertising agency. But he still hasn't learned how to take responsibility for anything, really. He hires a friend to run things for him and goes off to play baseball, or the grown-up version of it, while the friend holding the bag gets ulcers and high blood pressure and has to deal with the crybaby prima donna Creative Director. Some things never change.)

You're Going To Eat This Kale If It Kills You

Working in advertising is like wearing an old sweater from college that you've just re-discovered on the top shelf of your closet. When you find it, you're faintly happy to see it, so you can't resist trying it on. After about thirty seconds you begin to itch and find you've made a horrible mistake, and then (you idiot) you remember that you made this exact same mistake about a week ago, and two weeks ago, two months ago and five years ago. Over and over again, you keep finding the sweater and every time you find it, you forget why you hate it so much.

You do this because of the drippy, mis-remembred gooey-nostalgic feelings you have associated with the sweater. What you've built up over the years into this fantastic story is nothing close to the truth.

Advertising's like that, too. Some of my best friends have tried, unsuccessfully, for years to get out of the industry, but as soon as they're out they begin to wax romantic for the good old days of late-nineties holiday parties that rained five-dollar bills down like confetti, for the time they got to share a limo with Charles Barkley or got lost on the way to the Vegas airport and wound up spending 36 hours on the strip, all expenses paid. The old glory days. It's all remembered wrong, of course (the fives were actually ones, it was really just Charles Barkley's agent, it was only four hours on the strip) but none of that matters in hindsight.

And then there's the Mister, who has been in and out of advertising (and in fact, in and out of one agency in particular) so many times we have both lost count. On the wagon, off the wagon, on the wagon. On. Off. On. Off. (I'll stop doing that. I think you get the picture and plus, it's annoying.) I'm not really sure why he keeps getting sucked back into the ad business. It could be as simple as the smart, friendly coworkers and megamillion-dollar bonuses or as complicated as, well, I'm not really allowed to say. Anyway I don't really think it matters.

As his partner in crime and astonished witness to what happens in advertising, I've decided to ignore root of the problem and resign myself to treating the symptoms (like any good wife, right?) that keep popping up because of his career.

So far, the best band-aid this year has been kale, in massive, more-than-anyone-should-probably-ingest quantities. Actually, kale is probably good for fixing more than just the ills of advertising, but I've got to stick to what I know. Eating kale (steamed raw juiced diced sliced chopped and baked) has made everyone around here feel just a little less crabby about everything else. And that's a good thing. And it reminds me that many more of my dear friends (who, by the way, also swear by kale) have gotten out of advertising, for good. And so there is hope.

It's All About, Er, The Art (II)

Most Creative Directors were once young, aspiring art students with little to lose and stars in their eyes. They dreamed of one day owning an ultra-modern loft studio somewhere in Brooklyn or maybe, of becoming the next Basquiat.

They were capable of staying up all night editing the perfect noir sequence or spending hours getting the color of the sky just right, simply because they had nothing better to do. The art could come first, and because it did, the artist was happy and the art was pretty pure. Earning a living hadn't really entered the picture yet, nor had anything else that had to do with reality. You could still eat chips for dinner, mooch the university's art supplies and inside-out your laundry if you didn't have the change to wash it.

As I sit here typing and eating chip crumbs off my sweater, it occurs to me that it's a good idea to live in this pre-reality period for as long as you can. Stretch it out, but good, because once you pop the bubble, you're kind of screwed.

Fast-forward the art student a couple of years. All the lofts in the hipsy part of Brooklyn are taken, and Basquiat, well, he's been dead for ages, and it wasn't a very pretty story. (And although his art is still amazing, he's still dead. Not the best end to the dream.) By now inconvenient things like rent and respectability have entered the picture, bringing with them the need for cash, and not just a little bit of cash. It's time to grow up.

Enter advertising. Beckoning, seducing, lying.

Aspiring artists and writers become interns. Interns (if they are neither total idiots nor smart enough to get the hell out) become assistants, and assistants (if they are capable) become art directors or copywriters. And sometimes, art directors and copywriters (if they are still breathing) can become creative directors. And by the time you become Creative Director, if you've been paying attention, you figure out that the agency has simply by promoting you landed you back inside your bubble. (That's a long way to go for a ham sandwich, but there you are, the ham. And you're on top of the sandwich.)

At this point even I am wondering where I am going with this, so I'll get to the point.

Creative Directors have been through a lot to get where they are. They have made a lot of bad ads and have been largely told what to do by the creative directors who bossed them up the ladder. They are, essentially, artists who have been kept on a leash for ten or fifteen years, trying to build their portfolios whenever possible from mediocre ads that they had very little control over. Now they start to take it all back, and here's where it gets really interesting.

Creative Directors are usually agency principals. They have an interest in making the company profitable. But usually they would rather make art, and make it the way they made it back when they were in college. And here's the best part: they get to do it! And they're getting paid! And they have lackeys to get them coffee! So, they lobby, cajole and threaten the other principals (the grownups and the money guys) to choose boutique clients and projects that will be fun, interesting, challenging and look great in the portfolio, regardless of whether they are fiscally sound projects or not.

And oddly enough, the Creative Director, for whatever reason, usually gets his or her way. Maybe it's the tantrums, a sense of entitlement or a general spinelessness on the part of the other grownups, but whatever it is, here's what happens:

1) the Creative Director only wants to pitch business that will pad his or her portfolio

2) the Creative Director spends way too much time on these projects and goes over budget

3) the money guy begins to sweat

4) the Creative Director says "I don't care if we lose money. I just want to do it my way."

5) the client yells, the grownups make excuses, and people start to fight and quit

6) the Creative Director somehow gets his way

7) five or six people quit, the grownups make more excuses to the client and

8) everyone else is miserable.

And on and on. There's more on this, I swear, but I am out of chips.

It's All About, Er, The Art

So, I am an artist. And I'm also a little bit of an egomaniac, since I write a blog and assume people will want to read it. Just wanted to get that out of the way up front.

There's a funny dynamic that goes on at advertising agencies, a constant war between multiple factions who are all motivated by different things. First and foremost, as always, there's the Creative Director whose job it is to oversee the 'art': colors, squiggles and snippets that might someday be demeaned into ads. This person is motivated purely by egomaniacal selfishness (please note my subtle use of foreshadowing here.) And then there's the worried-looking person in the blue suit, the bottom-line guy, who counts the beans and pays the people. Lots of times these two people pretend to get along.

And then there are the grownups in advertising, people like my husband, who want the agency's creative people to make nice with the agency's money people. The grownups try to keep the peace, all the while juggling live squirrels and playing Three-Card Monte with the client. The grownups tend to sweat a lot and gobble down blood-pressure medication like it's candy, but rarely lose their cool at the office (ooh ... more foreshadowing!)

So I have to interrupt this blog to go work at my daughter's preschool. More soon ... expect it to contain interesting true stories about greedy Creative Directors and how they always bring just a little extra grief to every agency, in a very artistic way of course.

"Now Behave, Dammit!"

This morning the Mister had to gather his people (not unlike Moses gathering his people, or maybe it was the Pharaoh who gathered them) and give a talk about how to act like adults, about how to be nice to each other. I'm sure the meeting was replete with phrases like "we're all on the same team" and "let's strengthen our united front to the client" and "you f*ckers are all just a bunch of babies anyway, so go f*ck yourselves" -- that sort of thing. Niceties, with maybe a few carrots thrown in.

I'm not sure what kinds of plagues they have in the advertising world, but I can guess. Locusts? No. Famine? Probably not, especially if your client is a major candy company who sends you truckloads of sugar every other day for 'branding purposes'. (Wait - was famine even one of the original plagues? If not, it should have been.) So that leaves frogs, lice or diseased livestock, which does bode well for the agency's dogs.

It's Like, A Movie

I'm not really a mad housewife. I'm just a person who knows a lot about how working in advertising sets people on the path to ruin while somehow making them feel special, like Dorothy on the yellow brick road, knowing it's dangerous but powerless to do anything about it while skipping into a den of sinister flying monkeys. And actually, from what I've seen, agencies typically contain the same staff of crazies as the characters in the Wizard of Oz. Pre-acid, pre-war filmmaking had nothing on what goes on today in advertising.

So let's start with the slightly paunchy late-forty-something Creative Director and cast him as the Wizard, wearing hip sneakers and nerdy non-prescription glasses to make seem (ironically) younger and (impossibly) smarter than he is. His cast of lackeys keeps him in chilled, name-brand Kombucha and carefully tallies which witty lines have been used on which clients ("Let me introduce you to my best friends, 'Smoke' and 'Mirrors'? Ha-ha!" and "That's a long way to go for a ham sandwich!")

Hoping to knock Mr. Wizard off his throne are the myriad agency munchkins, dressed in a variety of costumes depending on what job they do. And as is the case with the Lollipop Guild and Lullaby League midgets (can I use that word, midgets?), it's often hard to tell the difference between a creative department lackey, an account lackey and a media lackey just by looking at them. A wardrobe identification and system of mannerisms (WISM) is definitely in order. When I run out of things to do in my life, I will design a fancy WISM chart with colors, icons and cross-referencing, but for now, here's my (deeply opinionated) rundown:

Assistant Media Planner Munchkin: Wears black and that 'put away wet' expression. Frequently referred to as the village bicycle (everyone's had a ride!) and often seen darting for the door, eye makeup running, in order to lean back against the brick wall outside, stare up at the sky and petulantly blow cigarette smoke out her nose. A decade ago this type pioneered the wearing of tiny fashion backpacks as purses (black, leather, utterly useless) and more recently has proven a quick mark for the uber-utilitarian fashion trends of pointy shoes, short-sleeved coats, skinny jeans and upwardly mobile thongs. Has perfected the art of making mountains out of molehills, purely by accident. (Not your smartest team member, natch.)

The Tech Geek Munchkin: The anti-hero (and therefore, My Hero) of advertising, this type has chocolate donuts and Red Bull for breakfast, lunch and dinner, as long as someone is watching. (Wouldn't you be surprised to see your A.V. guy enjoying a nice, quiet plate of supergreens at his desk with a bottle of '97 Chianti breathing nearby?) After all, he has an image to uphold: he's supposed to be nerdy, fat and unhealthy, all of which make him irretrievably cooler than the people he works for. Spends his time building clients' widgets, apps and widge-apps, playing Tetris, and giving coworkers the finger behind his comic book. Probably the happiest person at the agency due to lack of contact with clients.

Crime and Punishment (Or, Just Punishment)

No time like the present to start complaining about working in advertising. The hours are shitty, the people are snarky, and the work is wretched unless you are the client, or should I say, Client. A typical agency day consists of spending hours staring at a piece of gum (or chewy-rubbery fake-flavored hell-pellet) trying to decide which color wrapper will sell more sugar to poorish, pimply and text-addicted tweenagers, and how to make the words 'artificially flavored' sound good, or at least not so bad.

That's if you're one of the lucky creative ones.

If you happen to be in account management, you're pretty much screwed. There ought to be a manual or even a textbook, titled Ad Nausea, that is passed out to students graduating college, with warnings about being on the account side at an ad agency. Maybe I will write the book myself, a cautionary tale about simply being married to an account guy, to one of the only grownups in a playpen crammed full of unruly children. About how the Mister comes home at night, drained of life, too exhausted even to take off his shoes, whispering from lips that can barely move sordid tales of hysterically sobbing media chicks who got yelled at by the mean old client. Nasty stories of backstabbing, infighting, lying and cheating, of conference rooms full of inflated egos and dog farts competing with each other for space and air time. Sound like fun?

(By the way: Why do girls in advertising cry so much? Why do agency pooches have so much gas? I suspect I can answer both questions, but these are topics for another time.)

This post is the first of many somehow-funny glimpses into the murky, sweat-stained advertising industry and more specifically, it's a tell-all about being married to someone who has to deal with crybabies all day long. Let's face it: advertising is a sham, a waste of time in the greater scheme of life. Eventually, all of this time and so-called creative brainpower will just end up stuck to the bottom of somebody's shoe. Just don't tell that to the Client.