Rants

Ok, I’m bitter. I admit it. The Saints shoulda been there. Of course I went to a friend’s house for a party and ate chips and dip and brisket and drank a couple beers and caught up with folks and laughed and had a fine time. A great American tradition and a welcome...

I’m not sure where this crazy obsession with Citroens came from. Maybe it was a vague memory from my first trip to Europe back in the early 80’s. I was a skinny 20 year old college brat hitchhiking around Europe with a backpack. I slept on trains and stayed in the...

I've been in the ad business a long time and I've always loved it. Where else can you work in three different industries in a single day. Plumbing fixtures in the morning, enterprise software for lunch and beer in the afternoon. I've spent most of my career in Austin,...

I grew up in Long Beach, California. It's a quiet little DMZ between LA and OC. My whole neighborhood for miles around was strawberry fields back in the 50's and one night got whipped up into a sea of cheap, little houses with three bedrooms and one bathroom and...

We've all had jobs. Jobs that we loved or hated but jobs that paid our bills and let us live a reasonable life. But deep inside, haven't we all thought that maybe our jobs are only fulfilling half of who we are and who we wish we could be. Maybe deep, down inside......

Chances are, whatever you know about Harley motorcycles isn't about the Shovelhead. The Shovelhead was a kind of Harley engine that powered all their bikes throughout the 70's. They dressed them up a lot of ways, but the engine was basically the same. They were...

This isn't about the tacky movies. This is about a rambling 1971 song by Don McLean. "Bye Bye Miss American Pie... Drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry..." You know the song. We all know the song. I heard it on Pandora the other day and it brought back an...

Man, I've seen some miserable messaging. Complex, overly verbose, rambling, bland. Here's a great example. I spent a fair amount of time in a big tech company a few years back and one of the execs would do presentations that were composed entirely of business cliches,...

I'd recently presented concepts for a campaign and that was the reply. "But I wanted something really creative..." At this point in my career I know that's the wrong answer. I pushed back and explained why, in my judgement, a less "creative" answer was better. Years...

She’s gone. She retired from her wanderings a few years back and felt it was time wandering around the back yard, sleeping on the bed and looking for a lap to sleep on. and sleeping in. But now she’s gone. She slipped into what I could only assume was a bit of a cat...

It ain't just about being funny. Or laughing. But it doesn't hurt. At one point in my life I was leading three-day creative workshops for my clients. I was all over the country and did around 40 of these things. They were a blast but they were brutal. I had to keep...

Went to a funeral yesterday. They never get easy. It occurred to me, as her friends and family spoke, that there is a great metaphor for how we know each other. Imagine if you will, a piece of sculpture is set magically in a pasture. It's a great masterpiece by...

"A billboard is done when there's nothing else to remove..." I learned that in a billboard design class in college and it's stuck with me all these years because it's one of the truest things I've ever heard. Take away everything till there's nothing left to take...

It’s not often that you get to lose a month. Thirty full days of no obligations. Get off the planet. Off the grid. Jump ship. Away. This happened again. And as I look back on my life, I’ve managed to make it happen quite a few times. But this one was a weird one. I’d...

Disruptive is a miserable word. It's a cliche. It's been beat to death and when I hear it, I don't think of anything positive. I think of an angry baby in the seat behind me on a long flight. That's disruptive. So I won't use disruptive to talk about what I do for a...

Give it away. C'mon. You've been learning your business for years. You've picked up the skills and insights to make a great living. You've helped others succeed and grown their businesses and maybe grown your own business as well. And maybe you've made mountains of...

I've worked in a LOT of companies over the years. Literally hundreds. So that means I've worked with a LOT of people and seen a lot of corporate cultures and an idea has become pretty apparent. Some people are really good at knowing what is. And some people are really...

I spent several years traveling around the country leading creative discovery sessions for a process I called The Dozen. After seeing how most intranets were built, I realized that the only way to build an effective site was to get a real understanding of the company...

Someday... Someday I know it's not going to happen. I'll go to that deep, dark recess of my mind, trying to come up with The New Thing and there will be nothing. The deadline will come closer and closer and nothing. I'll have to make that painful perp-walk to the...

I realized a great truth yesterday in improv class. Of course, I've always known it but it'd never had such a snappy term. Bear Hugging The Thing. What the hell does that mean? Well, in improv it means quickly realizing what the scene is about and embracing it fully....

It sounds counterintuitive from a business startup, but I love cheap clients. I've learned over the years that the clients with less money to spend are more likely to be adventurous in their marketing. That thrills me. My philosophy is that you can either throw money...

That's one of my favorite Ad Guy Quotes. And to be honest, I've had that quote in my head for years but only recently figured out it was Stavros Cosmopulos that said it first. Here's to you Stavros. You nailed it. Thank you. I started in this business back in the 80's...

Remember when doing business with a company meant calling information for their 800 number, calling them and they'd send you a pocket folder? And remember BRC's? Business Reply Cards... You'd get a direct mail package with a letter (laser personalized yet) and a...

I had a couple days between projects and decided it was time to deal with that canvas. I'd built a huge canvas over a year ago, sketched in my subject and stared at it. It sat in the studio waiting for me...Taunting me... Daring me to start painting. But it was...

I love a good pitch. As an Ad Guy, there's nothing more fun in this business than to pitch a new client. There's the competition, the short timeframe and the great theatre of presenting ideas. It's my favorite part of this business. I've done hundreds of pitches over...

I admit it. I'm hooked. I love the mad rush of having to rethink everything against an impossible deadline. To process huge amounts of information and ideas and distill all of it into something nobody else has seen, often working all night and presenting whole room...

As a brand developer, I've been in around two hundred startups in the last twenty years. I've seen a lot of tragedy and triumph and here are some lessons that bubbled to the top. 1. When everyone has a thousand dollar Aeron chair, you'll fail. I've walked into...

I worked for Bruce Campbell's ad agency back in the distant 80's. He was usually good for a story or fable but one saying of his always stuck with me. "There should be two artists to do a painting. One to paint it and one to shoot him when it's finished..." So true....

No, Carlos isn't in the ad business and it's been years since I read his work, but he had one idea that's stayed with me and any company needing new thinking should embrace. In the story, Don Juan is giving advice to someone with a poorly behaved child. They just...

If you're an Ad Guy you probably know about this ad. I remember reading it back in design school somewhere back in the early 80's. It inspired me and, really, has been the driving philosophy for everything I've done since. So I got to thinking that maybe I could find...

OK. So I never actually MET Hunter S. Thompson. He's not actually a "friend," not even in the Facebook kinda way. But I've always admired how he thought. His communication skills amazed me and I've read nearly everything he's ever written and some things really stand...