The She Monkey and I are sitting at a Starbucks (your friendly, neighborhood wi-fi hotspot) logged in and checking in with work.
She’s doing emails; me, I caught up on four weeks of timesheets (the bane of my professional life).
We made the trip over from New Orleans in record time, save for a small batch of stop-stop-stop-and-go traffic in Mobile, Alabama and, since Saturday, we’ve been happily camped out on the beach. Camped out, as in lounging comfortably in a beach-house that sleeps 25.
Seeing the destruction in New Orleans was pretty amazing. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but whatever it was, the destruction on the ground certainly surpassed it.
It’s been, what? Eight months since Katrina hit the city and we passed through neighborhoods where people were literally sleeping in tents in their front yards. Incredible.
Navarre Beach, while hit, is still here. They’re doing major reconstructive surgery, to be sure, including pumping acre upon acre of fresh sand on to the beaches, widening them and creating a storm berm to help protect the homes.
My favorite bar on the island, Juana’s, was blown away (about what you’d expect from a tiki hut on the beach in a hurricane) but has been rebuilt.
The She Monkey and I have been going to Juana’s for fifteen years and it’s nice to see her back and open for business.
(Juana has a nice gig. She lives on a 50-foot sailboat and spends six months out of the year here at her location in Navarre and the other six months at her location in the Bahamas.)
We’ll head back on Saturday, with an overnight in Natchitoches, Louisiana (where Steel Magnolias was filmed and Jim Croce was killed in a plane crash). We should be back in Dallas on Sunday.
For now though, my next destination: back to the beach.
The She Monkey and I are in New Orleans, and stopped in for a drink (or two) at Johnny White’s, the only bar in New Orleans that remained open during — and after– hurricane Katrina, living up to their motto, “Johnny White’s never closes.”
Purchased: one t-shirt. Copy: FEMA evacuation plan: Run, Montherfucker, Run.
Back from Chicago and all packed for a weeklong trip to Florida (with a stop in New Orleans) to commune with the sand, surf and the She Monkey’s family.
I need to stay somewhat plugged in to work (love those kinds of vacations, don’t you?), so I should be able to provide an ad monkey’s off-and-on perspective on such things as 1) the building of the perfect New Orleans daiquiri, 2) suntan lotion product testing and, 3) ruminations on travels through a part of the US that should, yet again and as all indications point to, get blown around in this year’s hurricane season (which begins June 1).
Just settled into my room in Chicago; we’re in town for a Gatorade research session around the corner from where I’m staying.
Thanks to Omnicom and their fantastic buying power/negotiation skills, we’re able to stay at the Ritz-Carlton downtown, literally across the street from the John Hancock Center, and I have a view of Lake Michigan. It’s a tough life, but tempered by the fact that the focus groups will run until 10:00 P.M. tonight (with a debriefing to follow, no doubt), so my luxury hotel time will mainly be spent with my eyes closed and the blankets pulled up around my chin.
Slightly interesting story about the flight in this morning: There’s bad weather rolling through Chicago today and flight patterns and take-off times were fouled up this morning between here and Dallas. Our flight, unlike many others, took off right on time, flew a direct course with no holding pattern circling, and landed precisely on time. The Captain chimed in over the loudspeakers commenting that the control tower told him his flight was the first to do so all day. Additionally, the service on board was excellent– even on a 100% capacity flight– and we rolled right to the gate with no waiting necessary on the tarmac.
The next time I fly, I’ll try to call ahead and see if I can dovetail with his travel schedule.
So we’re off to a pre-briefing in a couple of hours and then it’s 8 hours of focus groups and ever-present, research facility M&Ms. This is my twelfth year doing advertising, in one capacity or another, for Quaker Oats/Gatorade (and, once they were purchased, PepsiCo) and, given QOC is a better-marketing-through-science kind of company, you can imagine how many focus groups I’ve sat through.
I do enjoy the research process… for the first two hours. I always enjoy learning something new, but groups usually become repetitive after the second or third one, even when doing novel research into new targets or insights. It’s at that point you’ve either confirmed or denied your proposition and the rest becomes dancing on the head of a pin in terms of learnings and added dimension and detail.
That’s when you realize focus groups are a marathon, not a sprint, and the aforementioned, ever-present M&Ms come in handy (both for their sugar content and for flinging, hail-like, against the one-way glass in hopes of startling the participants on the other side).
Now it’s time for lunch and a phone call in to the She Monkey. If I have any spare time before I catch a cab to the groups, I’ll spend all 45-seconds of it marveling at the expanse of my room.
Wal-Mart (or at least their P.R. agency the people employed by their P.R. agency to spread the word) has involved themselves in “grey” P.R. in the past; this wasn’t one of those times.
Can we just get back to bashing awards showsCP+B our own industry now?
Yeah, I’m still alive. It’s just been a little hectic in my corner of the ad jungle of late.
It’s black asshole time. A short week, combined with a trip to Chicago this Wednesday, combined with going on holiday next week, combined with another big trip to Chicago the following week, combined with a fistfull of small, painfull internal projects, combined with larger, even more painfull projects, combined with…. has led to more than a few hair-pulling moments over the last week.
(And why is it, without fail, you always receive “hey– how ya doing– been a long time– come work for us” calls when you’re at the bottom of your advertising bi-polar cycles?)
On the upside, Matilda has a new voice; specifically, 750 watts of pure concrete-pounding, car alarm triggering, oh-my-god-am-I-deaf audio parts. She’s a bad bitch and she knows it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go cover my head under a pillow and pretend the world doesn’t exist.
Scamp, over at, well, Scamp, wrote that he doesn’t enjoy sourcing music.
Me, I like it. For me, finding cool tracks has always been one of the really fun parts of any broadcast assignment.
I’ve got an absolutely massive music collection of stuff from all over the world. My iTunes is sitting at the 9,000-track mark at the moment and I’ve probably got another 35,000 tracks backed up on CD-ROM (yeah, I rip every CD I own). The more quirky and obscure the track, the more I like it.
My favorite record store is Hollywood’s Amoeba Music, and I’ll rarely buy anything new. I will, however, spend three hours going through their used CD stacks and walk out with $200 in gently owned, $3 discs (the She Monkey hates it when I do that).
Having an ass-load of music helps when it comes to creating original music, too.
I created a radio campaign once upon a time (and many, many moons ago) and used the fine folks at Austin’s Tequila Mockingbird to bring the project through to reality.
The experience was quite a thrill for me. The composer, Danny Levin played fiddle in Asleep At The Wheel and his partner, Wally Williams, is a personal advertising superhero of mine.
Long story short, because I have that aforementioned ass-load of music, I was able to talk about the sound I was after like I might actually know what I was talking about, and could toss out ideas like making the guitar sound like, oh, Don Rich.
If you don’t get music you just won’t get what I’m saying (and that’s ok), but to me it was a little like walking into the New York Yankees dugout, requesting they play ball a certain way, and having the team go “Oooooooh…. cool!”
You can’t beat that with a stick, even if it’s a bat.
And that brings me to today’s track, one that’s been created for an internal interactive assignment (DHP’s podcast will soon have a permanent home). It was created by The Listening Chair and I thought they did such a good job with it I’d add it to the Music for Monkeys playlist (track #34).
You’ll be hearing it soon on a website to be named later.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in hearing what Don Rich-style guitar sounds like in the context of a quirky radio campaign, take a listen. The spots turn ten years old this summer, so happy birthday to them. You tell me– how well do they hold up? If you think they do, it’s not the writing, it’s the Don Rich influence.
Sorry Scamp, but if you don’t like sourcing music, you’re missing out on half the fun of being a writer.
Network uprfronts are in full effect, and a few of the major players at DHP are in New York for the showjunketspectacleinsider’s glad-fest strategic planning session.
For those in need of a play-by-play, Virginia Heffernan, television critic for The New York Times, is blogging live from the event.
It’s Friday and that means it’s tequila time and that, in turn, means it’s “The Monkey Listens to Music” time.
I’ve added ten new tracks to Music for Monkeys, which now includes cuts from Ibrahim Ferrer & Ry Cooder, Boozoo Bajou, King Chango, Jack Johnson, The Buzzcocks, Akwid, Dwight Yoakam & Buck Owens, Les Hommes, Cross Canadian Ragweed and The Kinks.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to turn on, tune in and drop out.
Had a shoot for one client, yesterday, where we had to make do with some of the worst hero cups I’ve seen in a while. We developed an alternate plan (read: tons of retouching) and had it locked and loaded before the client arrived. Everything ended happy-happy-joy-joy, including the client’s signature on the cost-plus for the additional retouching work.
We started the day today with a radio production (a market test for focus (fuck-us) groups) for a different client using non-professional, agency talent. Everything was happy-happy-joy-joy there, too, until the client decided he wanted to play the radio for the person responsible for conducting the research who, from her… unique… perspective, chimed in with all manner of creative input, none of which is easily accomplished using voice talent that’s normally found screaming across the creative pit at other ad monkeys. Through some clever re-pitching (audio pitch, not account pitching) we managed to put a high-gloss shine on what was an otherwise wash-and-wear assignment.
We’re also in the middle of agency (employee) reviews. A lot can be said for being a part of the largest advertising network in the world; mandated scientific formulas for determining your team’s worth isn’t one of them.
Which leads me to Creative Director-ness.
A couple of weeks ago, Joker, over at “Why Advertising Sucks” wrote up a spleen-filled rant regarding what it takes to be a boss.
I can’t say I agree with any of it, but it led me to think about what I do at this level.
Aside from the obvious– dreaming up, writing and producing creative– you (Joker and the more generic sense of “you”) will find that ever-expanding piles of shit come with the ever-expanding square footage of your office space.
Yeah, the small degree of autonomy you gain is nice but it’s counter-balanced by some very real-world responsibilities, some of which are acid churning, follicle-freeing pains in the ass.
Outside of the pure creative realm, team building is the easy part (or at least it always has been for me; I know others may struggle here). I’ve always had a little more fun in life and at work than I really should have, so keeping the people on my team loose and happy has never been a problem. I’ve also got a few big trophies under my belt and work on some fairly high-profile accounts, so recruiting talented people whose chemistry works with the various teams I’ve had hasn’t been a big deal, either.
So you’ve built a strong, happy team who trusts you and works their ass off for you.
Now, say you have client cutbacks and you’re facing a team shortfall of, oh, a million bucks. Who are you going to cut? At the million-dollar level, we’re not just talking one person. (This is all a current-events hypothetical, mind you.)
What happens when, on that million-dollar shoot, it begins raining and immediately puts you $125,000 over budget before you’ve even unpacked in your hotel room? Sure, you can’t blame the weather on anyone– or at least you shouldn’t– but you can bet your ass someone does, and as the person riding the tallest horse and the person representing the agency at the shoot, I’m the one that gets shot at first (deserved or not).
Then there are the simple balls-on-the-line moments like the photo shoot I mentioned earlier in the post. At some point, early on, we had to go with a plan to get the film shot to a set of standards (mine first– hey, I’m there– then the clients’, then the agency’s). With no client present, you have to make the call to go in a safe, already-signed-off-on, inexpensive (or at least budgeted) direction or one that’s going to cost someone a bucket of cash. I went with the bucket of cash approach, but what would have happened if the client pitched a fit after learning of the course-correction once they arrived on-set?
And there’s no time to sit down and ponder the possibilities or to convene a meeting of the minds. On-set the buck stops here and it’s my mortgage payment and baby formula bill that’s on the line. And, more often than not, it means being on the hook for a few hundred thousand dollars north of a bar tab.
In short, I get paid for what I can do creatively/tactically, what left-brain strategy I can bring to the table and for my experience in making snap judgments in fairly expensive cost vs. benefit situations. And those things add up to the other thing I get paid for: building a trusting relationship with my team, agency and clients that allows us the freedom to continually push the envelope and do better work.
I don’t hold meetings, I don’t dream up team-building exercises and, while I have a secretary, she’s efficient, married and wasn’t hired because she’s hot (and I share her, platonically, with other CDs here at the agency). I do a shit-load of texting– on my phone, not a Blackberry– have a wall full of trophies (they’re mine, thank you) and do own two carsmean-ass, get-out-of-my-way-you-weenie-Nun trucks. (So Joker was at least right, there.)
I’ve also mastered the art of bullshit, but my form of the art, when used well, leads to an ability to look a CMO in the eye and tell him, straight up and in a room filled with his employed marketing wonks, that the line he just dreamed up on his own means “to suck dick” in today’s teen usage (true story).
I worked long and hard to get to where I am (and, honestly, I also managed a few lucky strokes along the way, too). Did I think it was going to be like this and do I wish I were in a position that didn’t make me sometimes shit blood?
Yeah that would be nice, but then I’d have to wonder what kind of a boss I would have.
EMT-Man: makethelogobigger isn't really correct. The protocol changes every year based on your level of certification, and whether you are working on...
michel: Glad to hear you, know you have been busy!!! Enjoy the Pubs and see ya when you get back!!!
