TWO-SEASON COATS

A lot of the kids in my neighborhood wear coats with long flapping sleeves like straightjackets. Little ones with zippers starting between the ankle and knee. They are adorable! Swinging their sleeves back and forth and swatting at each other. Two-season coats. Their parents have tried to buy coats that will last more than one year. Isn't that adorable?

The professional class is COMPLETELY out of touch with reality, myself included. My kids had fresh new coats every season as did all of their friends. So here I am a world apart from the parents in my neighborhood. Smiling benignly at a pre-schooler with a coat to her ankles. How cute is that!!??

My profession is advertising. The dream factory. And right now it feels woefully out of step with reality. We all know the rich are getting richer and the poor and getting poorer. Marketing seems to follow money and I'm starting to feel like I'm in the court of Louis XIV, looking out of the watery glass in the window of Versailles thinking - ah coats with long sleeves, how adorable! Is that the new fashion trend? 

A Point of Realization

Where else can you see a thirty year-old woman who seems to be gainfully employed, sucking her thumb on the subway,  a few seats down from a Taylor Swift look-alike? There are so many reasons to love this city. The view out the window is the icon, the romantic ideal, New York that they sing about. But a subway ride - good god it's just a bath of stories every day. Too much sometimes.

When I was a young actor, one of theatre's best qualities was that it forced you to neither judge nor wall yourself off from anything a human can do. To play someone, you have to be in them. You have to find a deep settling in your brain and heart for this hooker, killer, cheater, saint, suburbanite you are playing. I loved that near religious quality of acting. Judge not.

What I find now is - it's a good funnel for any penny to roll down. Helpful for writing advertising. Helpful for teaching kids. Helpful to make a marriage last. Judge not.

So I wondered why that woman was still sucking her thumb, against all odds for so many years. But beyond vague curiosity, I felt like cheering her on. 

A Plea For the Subjective

I was just thinking last night as I ate arguably the best salad of the year: trust a macrobiotic chef to make a great salad. And if you try to figure out why it’s so great, you wouldn’t think to ask the right questions. I’m not the last or first creative person to bemoan the beleaguered and overanalyzed world of creative concepting on behalf of commerce these days. But I’m going to tell it to you perhaps again – we’re asking the wrong questions about work and we’re doing the wrong things to make work that’s compelling.

We're led to believe it’s all about the words and the numbers. People seem to have forgotten some kindergarten rules – just because you have something to say, doesn’t mean anyone wants to hear it. And sometimes kids remember a lesson because it’s attached to the smell of Play Doh. Great creative is great at framing information so that it strikes you as unique and personal. Sometimes that framing is visual. Sometimes that framing is about the audio. Sometimes that framing is about a simple gesture or metaphorical device.

“Are you a different sort of human than I am? Do you look at ads differently?” I said.

Years ago, I did pose those questions to a CFO who wanted to put some aggressive statistics in a television ad. As you can imagine, it didn’t go well. I meant it honestly. Most people I know watch TV with feet on the coffee table and frequent excursions for junk food – no time for math. Were CFO’s different?

What I should have focused on at the time was how to explain to a different and analytical mind the strengths inherent in subjective ideas. I have been part of projects that used dissonant sound to completely sell out a particular clothing line. I have used unpredictable and haunting music to sell out hotel rooms. We redirected a discussion about pallets of packaging material to a discussion of glass being important in life. Generally at all times, I have focused on beauty and the unpredictability of truth in all mediums.

So it’s strange to find that the practice of testing the common denominator has so overrun the business that it’s impossible to articulate or “prove” what makes a great idea great. And the parts of concepts that testing can readily measure are concrete and unambiguous things like the specificity of informative words and numbers. So (as a writer by training) I am saying to you now – a dissonant sound will do more than a rational sentence. The use of light will hit people in profound inexplicable ways. Sometimes absence makes presence more palpable than you can imagine. There are emotional underpinnings that people attach to their play, their work, and the products and services they make and offer. (I think I don’t have to add but will: if a statistic is really that good and completely mesmerizing, use it and don’t couch it.)

As for the power of the subjective itself, I ask myself and you, if a single meeting of two fingers on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is the most memorable image in that entire four-year painting endeavor, why can’t we understand the value of focus, metaphor, emotion and ambiguity? Why did Michelangelo make the choice of that small space between those two fingers? He could have made a hand grab. He didn’t. A hand grab would’ve tested more concretely – no wondering about what God was doing there. Or a big toss of Adam like a dove release – that would’ve been very clear too. But the space in between those fingers ? Very ambiguous, riveting, impossible to let go, sad in some very big unnamed way. So much so that no one remembers the rest of the ceiling.

As for the salad? Besides the sheer freshness of the ingredients that you would expect, it was room temperature – the greens, the nuts, the dressing, the crumbled cheese. The brilliance of being lukewarm.