On Getting the Point of Cannes Lions

We're a breath away from Cannes Lions, and it's usually around this time that everybody starts wondering what The Point of this conference (or even our jobs!) is. Is it Awards? Notoriety? The Networking* that may lead to a Better Job, Awards and Notoriety? 

I'm in freelance. We get no Awards and probably no Notoriety (unless maybe we write a book). So for me, The Point has to be something else.

I've been working in freelance for nearly seven years, only the last four of which involved Real Agency Work. One of the biggest things I learned when I actually got inside was how hard it is to do work you're proud of. All the vitriol people lobbed at me for critiquing their babies on Adrants suddenly made sense: when you've got crazy clients (vague briefs but high standards!), a political agency system, a fixed budget, and a pile of conviction-laden creatives in the mix, you just wanna go home at night. 

You don't want some coffee-fueled CPG epiphany to be your fucking cross to bear. Not when there's sleep to be had and children to (almost) watch grow up. Because this industry? It takes your whole life: complete sacrifice for cereal slogans, holding company positioning statements and the merits of Flash versus HTML5. If you go Joan of Arc every time things go pear-shaped, you really will lose your shit.

A certain freedom comes with the uncertainty of freelance. All that hopped-up agency madness? You can enjoy it for the lifecycle of a project, then peace out and take a nap. You can travel. You can do sports. If you're stuck on something, you can move onto another, then come back to it. You can say, "Catch you later, I'm going to Cannes Lions -- FOR MY BLOG!" and nobody can say "SIT YOUR ASS DOWN, THERE ARE NO AWARDS WAITING FOR YOU."**

Professionally, freelancers may not be part of a big agency network, but we do form groups: clients and other freelancers we look forward to seeing randomly throughout the year. It's more Lost Boys than Ogilvy, but it's people we like -- not the prickly ones you secretly hate and have to deal with every day until somebody finally leaves.

And it isn't just work relationships that bloom. I once thought there was no time for more than 3 reasonably good relationships in a life, but now the world seems full of people to go to dinner with, learn things from, collaborate with, and plan last-minute weekend picnics with. At any given time I feel a deep, meaningful intimacy with all of them. They aren't just local: with Viber, Gchat, iMessage, Twitter and Facebook, I feel intimately connected with people far away. Like my sisters. (Although the distance probably helps them like me more.)

The biggest tradeoff, though, is having to make your own success metric. It's hard to find; at an agency, you do a pipeline of good-to-great things, win awards, get promoted and maybe someday you'll be ECD. I don't deny I'd like that, and often wish I was drawing closer to (instead of farther from) it.

Now, work changes day by day; it's stuff that challenges and that I enjoy, so I don't question it or wonder what it's building to. But that Big Question -- what's the next step? -- seems secondary now.

At this point I feel strangely okay not knowing its answer. I realised today that while the projects are important, it's in great part because the people I've managed to cultivate in the Darwin Dice Toss of Freelance are so good. As long as I have time for them, and they for me, life seems full -- generous, even. The Bottom Line is no longer the metric, but it seems to take care of itself: it's hard to drown when there are so many hands around to grab you.

Then I thought, maybe this is The Point. The Point of Social: what we should be telling brands in the first place. The money, the endless search for more ways to penetrate a "consumer occasion", and the mind-numbing hammering of TV ads are not The Point. The people you can really touch, truly befriend, mean something to? That's where it is.

To make those connections, there are risks to take: a certain giving of yourself so that people can see what your insides are like. But in the commercial arena, that seven pounds of flesh will be withdrawn with or without your consent; it may as well be on your terms. Isn't it worth it? Because then you don't have to be scared. There'll be so many hands that you simply won't drown; at the worst of times they'll drag you kicking and screaming forward. They'll never lose faith if they can trust that you'll remember what The Point is.

Going into Cannes Lions, that enormously drawn-out stomach pump of an event, it's a reassuring thought. Talking to creatives high off a win (or close to one), they start waxing poetic about what they learned about people. Often the road to that insight was finally understanding something about themselves: I'm this way. I love this. I hate this. If the stars are aligned, you execute well and production and timing are just right. And like good comedy, this tiny propped-open window into your own naked and trembling subconscious yields an unanimous universal AHA! -- and for a breathtaking second you feel like you're holding hands with the entire fucking world. 

It's precious. That connection, the birth of something worth cultivating? That's The Point. And it nourishes the entire ecosystem.***

---

*Running into that Stockholm ECD who had an Alky Nap on your porch last year?

**They probably want to, though.
***It is true, however, that for every inspiring storyteller you come across there'll likely be a troupe of Certified Douchebags waiting to claim him. Our industry is rife with these and they are merely an occupational hazard. Make like a freelancer and RUN AWAY.

Running List of What My Parents Have Offered Me to Get Me to Come Back to America

• Adult onesie
• Trip to Waterworld
• Gummy bear multivitamins
• Peanut butter

At one point or another, these have all seemed like very effective reasons.

Digital Detox

“You are now entering a technology and device free zone. Please refrain from using your cellphone inside this space. The use of WMDs (wireless mobile devices) is not permitted.” Word about the Device Free Drinks party, billed as an occasion to “enjoy a few hours off the grid,” had spread through Facebook and other social media ... and drew about 250 participants. But asking people to surrender their digital tethers at the door still required some coaxing...

- Andy Isaacson, "Learning to Let Go: First, Turn Off the Phone",
The New York Times

Eight years ago a much older friend said, "One day, only the rich will be able to disconnect." Hipsters off Union Square are hardly the richest slice of the populace, but their little Digital Detox shindig captures the spirit of his idea: disconnecting has become some novelty thing you do in a club over drinks with other giddy friends eager to "experiment".

But what really got me was the party's structure: little activity stations encouraged you to type, draw and chat in "analog" ways that, in order to reassure (or be relatable), still bore traces of the digital world: you didn't just draw; you drew profile pictures. And what would you type at the typewriter station, if not a tweet? Finally, perhaps for the most adventurous, a jar labeled "Digital Detalks" included strips of paper with questions you could ask others in order to start a conversation.

I remembered a scene from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. In the book, the US government is overthrown by a theocratic conservative extremist group, under which women lose most rights, including the right to read, and people's lives become tightly regimented. The country's name is changed to the Republic of Gilead. At some point the protagonist, a "handmaid" or concubine for a wealthier couple, finds herself at an underground party where people wear makeup, dance and dress the way they did before the Republic was established. There is something sad, desperate and deeply caricatural about the way people at the party interact, as they draw mainly from memories of how they used to behave -- memories that grow less unreliable and more cartoonish with time.

The purpose of a Digital Detox party is to remind us of the importance of establishing and maintaining real non-digital connections, but part of doing that is remembering how it's done. I guess that's why the activities, so heavily (if playfully) inspired by our digital lives, struck me as imaginative but sad: have we come so far that the only way we can be cajoled into drawing is by using the template of profile pictures? Or by pulling talking-points out of a jar...?

What'll a party like this look like 10 years from now, or even five? Maybe we'll only be able to paint if the utensils are arranged like Photoshop features: life's cheap imitation of digital. And I thought the iBook page-turner feature was sad.

I'm being glib. All this is to say don't let yourself get so disconnected from reality that you need a themed party to explore the concept. (I'm saying this for me, too: I'd be the first in line at a Digital Detox to turn my phone in ... then cry.) Digital will penetrate every aspect of our lives -- and our bodies -- soon enough. So soon, in fact, that once it's arrived we'll have no time to turn back and remember what the world was like before, much less ask ourselves what we've lost for this gain.

We're running out of time to relish in the freedom we really do still have. Why surrender it so readily?

CentUp: Making Change for a Little Change

If you haven't already heard of CentUp, you will. Co-founded by our friend Len Kendall, it's an opportunity to improve content produced by hard-working folks like YOU (and US!) while paying a little forward to charities making change around the globe.

How it works: Alongside your standard sharing buttons, blogs and other content sites will have the option to add a CentUp button. If you like what you've read or seen, you can toss a few cents to the content provider; half of what you give will go to a worthy charity. It's that simple.

You have just 40 hours to contribute funds to CentUp's launch on IndieGogo. Take advantage; we think they're worth it, and not even just because Len proposed to his fiancée via meme.

Girl-on-Girl Violence + the Danger it Poses to 'Feminism'

"Dare. Change", an ad for Peruvian clothing brand Saga Falabella. It is old but captures the spirit of this post nicely. It's a symphony of modern womanhood: our own battle with the timidity and shame that's strong enough to stay that next step. And when we do dare to fight those feelings, it's beautiful, right? So we should all get up and clap, right? So why don't we?

So Sheryl Sandberg, who's enormously wealthy and successful, published a book called Lean In, which is supposed to help women achieve career success in the context of a sexist environment.

This sounds politically charged, but it isn't. Any woman who has been in any primarily-male workplace ever has likely been made to feel uncomfortable, put down, come onto, or passed over for reasons that somehow tie back to her gender. It is not something I or any of us really complain about, it just is, and among the many talents of being a career woman is learning how to dissuade people, change perspectives, or find other loopholes to achievement without making this a "gender" thing. Because making this a "gender" thing can result in the worst alienation of all.

That is just life in the workplace today, and there are plenty of reasons why it is thus, and they are not really the subject of this post.

I haven't read Lean In, but I did read an enormous number of angry reviews about it -- most written by women. There have been so many, in fact, that Michelle Goldberg of The Daily Beast wrote a takedown of these critics, arguing that they're "aimed less at what the book says than at who Sandberg is."

Sandberg, as I mentioned above, is now filthy rich. I don't know if she was born rich, but she certainly wasn't born COO of Facebook. (Or VP at Google, or a Harvard MBA.) That happened later. When she was small, she went to public school, like a lot of us, and studied hard. That's something lots of women can relate to.

It's understandable that many women now feel she's out of touch with your average chick on the rise, but this isn't a critique we make of wealthy men who write success how-tos. Some also tout Sandberg's "war on moms", despite Sandberg repeatedly expressing respect for mothers. As Goldberg nicely puts it, "Her message isn’t that all women need to be corporate executives or high-powered lawyers or political leaders. It’s that we’d be better off if more corporate executives, high-powered lawyers, and political leaders were women."

Why did the book, or the idea of the book, piss so many girls off? I'm gonna cite Goldberg (and Sandberg) one more time before getting to my point:

Women are conditioned to compare themselves with one another. When we’re not wholly at peace with our own choices—and who is?—those comparisons sting. “There is always an opportunity cost, and I don’t know any woman who feels comfortable with all her decisions,” Sandberg writes. “As a result, we inadvertently hold that discomfort against those who remind us of the path not taken. Guilt and insecurity make us second-guess ourselves and, in turn, resent one another.”

All this got me thinking of girl-on-girl violence: its insidiousness, its ugliness, and the way it hurts women: as children, as teens, as adults.

In college I learned about female genital mutilation (FGM) -- from a woman, who was French, and who taught it through an optic that a male American sociology teacher wouldn't have. This is what was most telling about that lesson: studies and journals reviewing the act of female circumcision find that it is the women who most often perpetuate the tradition today.

I'm not taking the blame off men, who obviously got the ball rolling on this bad-boy. But give it a generation or two, and they don't have to do a thing. When you're a young girl in a culture that embraces FGM, the pressure you'll feel is from the women, who tell you that your honour is tied to this act. A woman is often also the one who orchestrates the circumcision.

It's the same with slut-shaming in high school: the trauma associated with being called a "slut" usually finds its roots in other girls. I was a "slut" in high school: girls gave me that name, it had nothing to do with promiscuity, and there was nothing I could do about it. I'll venture to say that the adult female equivalent of those chicks who sullied your reputation because they didn't like how you dressed is today's "war on moms" instigator. She's not the only species, but this is the one that rears its ugly head in the Sandberg story.

Working mothers sometimes, and guiltily, lament that the toughest thing about going to PTA meetings are the stare-downs from the "stay-at-homers". They get this enormous sense that they aren't really doing their jobs as "real" mothers because they haven't made that same 24/7 commitment. I'm sure that stay-at-home moms also feel pressure, intentional or not, from women who seem to be able to "do everything", even though we all know this is never the case: nobody can do everything. There is no choice that's easier to make than any other, particularly when it comes to how you're negotiating your household.

All this shit about Sandberg has been needlessly tied to "feminism" and how she's somehow hurting The Cause, but I'm going to argue that anytime a woman hates on a life choice some other woman made, however different the path, that is what hurts feminism.

Like Sandberg I have trouble calling myself a "feminist" because the word is loaded. A lot of people look at me stupid and say feminism is just about believing that women are equal beings, and that's just dandy. I'm all for equal beings. But I also know that identifying as a "feminist" carries a lot of baggage that I'd rather not be associated with: abusing women you don't consider to be "feminist" is one of the biggest. But it's really just the same old demon: garden-variety girl-on-girl violence. The act is so prevalent that some women pride themselves on "having no girl friends" or being "unable" to get along with women -- they think it makes them look less passive-aggressive and more pragmatic. That is a shame, but it's also not their fault: women can be vicious to other women.

At Berkeley, some women behaved like I was carrying the patriarchy on my shoulders because I shaved my legs and wore high heels (I had a job at an office, which I usually ran off to after school). They whispered about me in class and gave me mean looks when I walked into a room. That was pressure I didn't need to feel; it's not like I was doing it to please some guy back home on some tigerskin rug by the hearth (and if I was, who cares?). I like to shave my legs, and I like it more than not shaving my legs. We can go into why I feel that way and the history of hair removal and constricting footwear and how it's all very patriarchal, but this post is not about that either.

In this life, you pick your battles, and you decide who you're comfortable being based on an unending number of negotiations with yourself and with the society at hand. There are no easy decisions. So why fight each other over the ones we did or didn't make?

Being a woman, and making another one feel terrible about some choice you would never have made, is not a constructive or empowering act -- the feelings that should fuel feminism. It's demeaning and shaming -- the emotional WMDs that keep patriarchy ticking. It's a vicious, horrible thing we've been taught to do to keep other women in line, and it improves the lot of exactly no one, including the perpetrators, who feel just as shitty as the perpetrated do.

So ladies, lay off Sandberg. If you don't like her book and don't feel it applies to you, then you're in luck: you don't have to read it, change who you are, or wage some misguided war to protect the honour of Women Like You. It doesn't have to be any of your damn business. And if you read the book and didn't like it, write about the contents of the book. Don't write about Sandberg. We don't need to invent another cafeteria slut.

On Being Fired from a Really Visible Perch

I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you.

-- CEO Andrew Mason of Groupon gets fired.

Also, I love that he starts it with "After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding - I was fired today." A little legerity in a rough situation never hurt anyone.