Rants
The case of the 50 year missing sandals.
I went to school at Cecil B. DeMille Junior High School in the early 70s. Only in Southern California would they name a junior high after a film director. The school is gone now. It was built in the 1950s and served us well. When I was there, the school was divided...
The 31 things you need to know about SXSW for 2019.
If you're coming to South by Southwest in Austin, here are a few quick tips to make your week even better. 1. Learn the lingo. South by Southwest is called "Southby" by the locals. Attendees from out of town are "Southies." Since you're coming here for the event, thou...
The teams took the field and it was fallow.
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...
Driving The Goddess Home. The Great American road trip in a French Citroen DS.
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...
Trainwrecks and rainbows. Confessions of an Ad Guy.
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,...
The deliberate submarine life.
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...
What price loyalty?
I understand loyalty. I've worked on loyalty programs for years and I'm very conscious of how corporate behavior affects my own loyalty. I'm as jaded an Ad Guy as could possibly exist so I can see through all the loyalty programs you could ever dream up and they...
The perfect imperfect human touch. A story about imperfect shoes and a great direct marketing campaign.
My favorite pair of shoes didn't match. They were a pair of black oxfords that I picked up at an outlet store for a big-name expensive brand. I'm sure I'd never have spent the money on them originally, but these were a bargain. They were simple, elegant and amazingly...
Three things I wish I knew when I got into advertising.
There may actually be a hundred things I wish I knew before I got into advertising, but I'll save the other 97 for another day. 1. Get a mentor. I grew up watching Bewitched and I wanted to be Darren Stevens. Seriously, not kidding. The other kids wanted to be...
HeroBracelets.org. The story about how I almost lost my agency and did a tiny little thing to make the world better.
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......
Applying to a creative agency? Here’s a quick class.
I shot this with my good friends over at Sparksight here in Austin. If you're looking to work in a creative agency, there are some things to think about before you sit for your interview. Watch it here.
The Harley Shovelhead and UX.
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...
Miss American Pie and the Ninth Grade Epiphany.
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...
FUD vs. The Piano and the piano wins.
FUD. Fear, uncertainty and doubt. It's an old advertising cliche that I think should be buried along with those Camel cigarette ads about how more doctors smoking Camels blah, blah blah. Fear, uncertainty and doubt. The art of scaring your prospects into buying your...
How does your company simplify the message?
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,...
“But I wanted something really creative…”
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...
Rio The Half Cat on her final walkabout.
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...
Why your company should have improv training.
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...
Will you get there by exhilaration or transportation?
Is new and shiny and perfect better than hand made, worn at the edges, flawed and very human. I guess the answer is, is it the wing on the airplane I'm flying right now or my dinner plate. Or a vehicle. When I think about vehicles, I think about the strange collection...
Funeral for a friend.
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...
The billboard is visual cognac.
"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...
The Great Accidental Brainstorming Lesson.
The Austin Technology Council had tapped me to do brand development and guerrilla marketing presentations a couple times a year and I always obliged. Then one day they had a cancellation. And a very last minute cancellation at that. I get a call that the meeting was...
The Art of Going Feral. A Strange Tale of Life, Luck and Mutiny.
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...
Eat. Pray. Come up with big ideas.
I listened to a talk on NPR today by Elizabeth Gilbert. She wrote the book Eat Pray Love and I admit I may be the only person on earth that hadn't read it, so I'll get that out of the way. She was talking about creativity and a unique concept of where it comes from......
Kicking over tables… One company at a time.
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. It will come back to make you happy.
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...
The Edge… A great preamble to an Ad Guy Manifesto.
Hunter S. Thompson could have made a great Ad Guy for one reason. He didn't play it safe. He knew that the only way to break through the constant noise is to make a completely different noise. See what everyone else is doing and not do that. But that's a risk. Taking...
Are you a Know What Is or a Know What Could Be?
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...
Bring in the Torpedo People.
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...
Carlos Santana and The Tornado.
I heard a tornado one afternoon. Then I saw it. The old adage of a tornado sounding like a freight train seemed accurate at the time, but one tends to think of a freight train in sudden, frantic energy. The tornado kinda crept up on me and kept getting louder and...
The Edge… Jump off, the water is fine.
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...
Bear Hugging The Thing… Everything I already knew about advertising I learned in comedy improv class.
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....
Guerrilla Marketing a trade show… Always bring a gun to a knife fight.
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...
“Keep the layouts rough and the ideas fancy…”
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...
“Call our 800 Number and we’ll send you a pocket folder!”
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...
The fire hydrant in the woods and the giant Facebook-free canvas.
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...
Everything in life is improv, so take an improv class.
I'm taking a comedy improv class. For the first time, I look forward to going to school when I feel funny. It's a blast and if you have conversations, meetings or presentations, you should consider taking a class yourself. Even if you think you have no ability to make...
The Pitch and the mountain of sausage.
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 see dead people…” The entrepreneurial curse.
I don't even remember what that movie was, but what a great line. The kid has some weird gift/curse and he can see people who aren't there, and actually interact with them and help them do whatever happens next. Having been an entrepreneur and worked with literally...
A new campaign always makes my day.
I have the best job in the world. I get to make something out of nothing. Or, in this case, something out of sausage. Shiner Smokehouse got it's roots in a little meat market in Shiner, Texas back in the 1930's. And if you don't know, Shiner, Texas is a berg an hour...
A 24 Hour Brand delivered in Houston.
It works. They loved it. And it wasn't a simple problem, but it was a simple solution. A company in Houston booked a 24 Hour Brand. We had several conversations. They sent me everything they could on competitors, their marketing problem, their history and their goals....
Confessions of An All-Night Concept Adrenaline Junky.
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...
The Perfect Client. A Profile in “I Don’t Care” Courage.
I have what could be the perfect client. It's a startup that's getting great funding, has been set up well and has all the research to back up their offering. The CEO has run private equity funds and understands the market he's launching into. He's got a name and...
Quality. Value. And other Death By Verbage words.
Every so often I have a fight with a client over language. Or verbage, as I often hear (and shudder when I do). They want to use words like "quality" and "value" and "consumer" in their copy and I get itchy. First off, can anyone define what "providing value" actually...
Ten lessons from two hundred startups.
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...
Once upon a time it was more than “content.”
I remember the first time I heard the word "content" in referring to copy for a Web site. I hated it. Good marketing copy should tell a story. It should move you and motivate you and make you want more. It should grow a business and turn readers into passionate fans....
Shoot the artist when it’s done… The art of stopping.
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....
Maybe it’s time for a Cravat… (Creative Agency Vacation)
Maybe you've loved your creative agency for years. Decades even. But maybe the relationship has become a little too comfortable. Maybe your agency is skating along with the same comfortable ideas and delivering the same comfortable results. Building a good...
The Creative Savant… And 246 Toothpicks.
"Eighty two... Eighty two... Eighty two..." "Thats a lot more than eighty two toothpicks Ray." "Two hundred and forty six total." "How many toothpicks in the box?" "Two hundred fifty." "Pretty close Ray." "Um... There's four left in the box..." Maybe your company...
Carlos Castaneda and the Scary Park Guy.
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...
Looking for the Capo D’astro Bar. An Ad Guy finds purpose.
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...
From my old friend, Hunter S. Thompson.
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...
An Ad Guy sells out.
I sold out. I sold The Ad Ranch. My baby. My ad agency. That thing that defined who the hell I was (well, kinda). I had the agency for more than a dozen years. A dozen years. A dozen years. Had to repeat that. For an Ad Guy, that is several centuries. We Ad Guys have...
The neverending pursuit of The Best Stuff.
I love great design. And so does the whole world. Look at Apple. They've done very well competing in a business where everyone thought the cheapest would win. But they approached the market with the idea of making truly beautifully designed products and do you ANYONE...
The meat won.
It was a grand experiment. I went Vegan for almost two years. No meat. No cheese. No nothing that was ever part of anything that walked, crawled, swam or waddled. I felt so proud. I felt so socially responsible. I fell asleep at odd hours. Ya see, while it's a grand...
The Rat Pack Manifesto.
OK guys. Every couple years I feel the need to send this out. I don't even know how I came across it. It was published in DrunkardMagazine.com back in 2004, and I probably shouldn't be reproducing it here without permission from lawyers and such, but sometimes ya...
Bucketlist car. The Citroen DS.
I think it started around a year ago. I came to the sudden and unexpected realization that the coolest car ever built was the Citroen DS. Don't ask me why. It just happened. I remember going to Europe back in the early 80's as a 21 year college kid, schlepping my...
This is my church.
I spent a piece of my day in the National Gallery in Washington DC. Their collection of French Impressionists is amazing. Room after room of canvas and oil visions that take over my thoughts. French Impressionists are my holy sacrament. Monet. Or Degas. Or even the...
A tale of two Peche’s.
Peche and Peche Kucha. Two random events in one night. So my wife Loree was downtown last night and we met at Pesche, the most interesting bar in the city. An Ad Guy friend (although he swears he's a RECOVERING Ad Guy) named Tim McClure joined us for an evening of...
War and harmony and why we need them both.
Something occurred to me this morning. Everything is balanced between Harmony and War. I'm no Zen Master, but I think this is what they mean by the whole Yin/Yang thing. Think about this. War is awful. Harmony is good. But you really can't have one without the other....
Adios Leslie. Austin will miss you. Kinda.
Leslie died. If you live in Austin, you know Leslie. He's been a fixture here since I moved to Austin in 1994. Leslie is, well, WAS, our local crazy crossdressing streetguy. He was an Austin Icon. Everyone in Austin knew who Leslie was. Everyone had a Leslie story. He...
Two and a half cats.
I've got two and a half cats. The logical first question is "Where can I get a half cat?" So here's the story. I live on the outskirts of Austin on a hill. Behind my house is a couple thousand acres of greenbelt. Its protected space full of scrub oaks, cedar, coyotes,...
A gathering of Ad Guys.
So a lot of stars aligned last night. Back in 1994 I was living in LA and working for various ad agencies. I worked full time and freelanced for a lot of LA agencies, large and small. I even registered the name McMann & Tate (as in Bewitched) so I could wear...
What I learned from my Father.
It’s Fathers Day. I’m in a plane to Denver for business and I got to thinking about what we learn from our Fathers and what we hope our kids learn from us. I lost my father when I was 17. I’d gone through a rough patch in middle school. Hanging with “the wrong crowd”...
The Citroen DS…
So I’ve had this weird fascination with Citroen DS’s for a long time now. Somehow it bubbled up in my consciousness and has festered there, leaving me to decide I HAD to possess one before I die. And since we never know how much longer we have, it makes sense to do it...
Driving a Citroen DS through two deserts and big mountains.
It works! The damn thing works! Whodathought! We picked it up at the Reno airport yesterday around 4:00. Spent a couple hours learning how to use everything. How to open the hood (bizarre), how to adjust the seats (bizarre), how to turn on the lights (really bizarre),...