Back when I was finishing college in San Francisco and trying to figure out what exactly one was supposed to do with a BFA (besides turning it into an MFA), I used to take these endless walks and would occasionally find myself in a little tunnel that ran between the Marina district and the beach. A tunnel I sometimes discovered was also occupied by a young violinist whose musical selections and skill combined with that chamber’s unnatural acoustics to produce a hauntingly beautiful effect. Now, since the open violin case at her feet never contained more than MUNI fare and I was often the only other person in the tunnel with her, I have to assume she wasn’t performing for the money or the crowds. It was just a nice place to practice, I guess, and obviously something she loved doing.
Well, (and I’m sure you could see this coming from a mile off), I’m beginning to think I may be just like that girl in the tunnel. I love doing this, too. Not for the money, that’s for sure. Or to gather a crowd. But I do wonder if it’s serving any other purpose besides my own enjoyment. Initially, I hoped it might supply ammunition that people could use to persuade recalcitrant clients to accept more extraordinary advertising. Or maybe persuade more agencies to do advertising of that caliber to begin with. And perhaps serve as a general reminder that the principles of persuasive communication haven’t dramatically changed in the last 10,000 years, never mind since the Internet burst upon the scene.
Which, for all I know, is exactly what this site is doing from time to time. The fact that relatively few people write me to say so, doesn’t rule the possibility out. I never stopped to tell that girl how much I got from her playing either. (Although I did drop a little change in her case when I had it.) Still, notwithstanding the surprisingly illustrious group of readers I’ve managed to attract, the overall traffic to this site is minuscule and not exactly growing by leaps and bounds, either. Which is something I undoubtedly could remedy if I wanted to focus on what the more heavily trafficked advertising sites seem to offer: news that isn’t, rumors that might be, calumnies of varying degrees of vitriol, brief commentaries (and ones you might wish were briefer still) along with a panoply of material available a thousand other places and myriad links to sites no sentient being can possibly have time to visit. But I don’t want to do that. It’s just not my style.
So here’s what I’m thinking: I’m going to take some time off from posting regularly. (OK, lately it hasn’t been that “regular”, but historically, I haven’t done too bad a job.) And what I’d like you to do in the meantime, if you have a minute, is send me a personal e-mail suggesting what you think I should do at the end of this summer break. The address is: mark@silveirapartners.com, and obviously, if you really want to make your feelings known, you’ll share it with your 100 closest friends and ask them to write me too. To keep things interesting I will then report back from time to time on how many e-mails I’ve received and share with you any particularly amusing comments I’ve received (without naming their sources, of course). And at the end of this self-imposed exile, we should all have a pretty clear idea of just how quixotic this mission of mine to encourage the promulgation of extraordinary advertising really is.
Needless to say, (then why, pray tell, am I saying it?) I have no intention of stopping this altogether. I’ll keep the site up, if nothing else, as a repository of past punditry, or as others might suggest, as a textbook example of how to use the Internet to burn every bridge one might once have had in an industry. I’m sure I won’t be able to resist writing something now and then. But it will probably drop down to a monthly or even quarterly basis unless the “wisdom of crowds” (and yes, that means all you should probably write me more than once) suggest otherwise.
Look forward to hearing what you think.
Mark,
I like the romantic allusion, the “Girl in a tunnel,” far better than the more obvious and less optimistic “talking to a brick” or “spitting in the ocean.” But sadly the fact remains that Advertising–as an industry and a passion–seems very much to have lost interest in itself.
If you’ve glanced at my own, far less subject-specific ranting lately you’ll know that your former journeyman copywriter is once again on the bricks. And in the spirit of hopes-springs-eternal induced by sheer panic, I decided to give freelancing a go here in the north Florida market. And it seemed a far better bet than just adding my name to the endless lists of disaffected and/or child rearing creatives-for-hire evident in all the major metros.
As I knew well from being a CD here, good writers are pretty impossible to find and LOCAL good writers basically non-existent. The few freelance ADs I knew agreed, but one of them, the most experienced of the lot, said something that has thus far proven true: “There should be a demand for good writers here, but I wonder if any of these agencies would even know what to do with one.”
The one freelance project I scared-up since then supports that cynicism. Arriving at the agency the AD assigned to me suggested he find me “a spot in a conference room” where he could email me pdfs. WTF? I offered at that point to just work from home and the relief on this kid’s face was evident. The place, populated almost entirely by account people and Mac jockeys, surely “didn’t know what to do” with me.
I was unbalanced by the experience and I wanted some assurance that I had any hope of being called back, so I called the AD I was “partnered” with on the project after my role–near as I could figure–was complete. He assured me that the whole experience was as it should be; the copy was great and he was sorry if I felt shut-out of the process, BUT “we don’t usually work with writers in person. It’s all by email and over-the-phone. In fact this is the first time since I’ve been at this agency (6 years, BTW) that I’ve even worked with anyone local.”
Whoa.
It won’t take more than a flip-thru of any recent Rolling Stone to show you how much ideas have been overtaken by InDesign, Quark and PhotoShop. That magazine was for so long considered the Super Bowl of print and you could look at it as a sort of sneak peek at next years’ One Show book. Now? Page after ad page of over-designed drivel that reads like the promo sheets in your local Penny Saver.
The state of Ordinary Advertising in what I’m afraid really IS a post-literate society is even worse than our aging definitions of “ordinary” and national TV–despite the too-rare sliver of work our contemporaries might call Good–is no exception and provides no reassurance.
Is your mission quixotic? At best.
These days, I have real, on-the-street reason to believe that the “promulgation of extraordinary advertising” is more, or even less, than merely quixotic. The violinist in the tunnel has seen the light and it’s the speeding train of Good Enough. In fact the whole morass puts me in mind of something a mutual friend, Ross Sutherland, once said to me on the subject…
“It’s like trying to piss marbles up a glass wall, mate.”
~Jim Bosha
PS: Got any assignments you can pass me? I won’t try to create anything extraordinary, I promise.