Productivity, Here We Come

Do you know what will change your life? An ergy Microsoft keyboard and a 22-inch LG monitor. As I write this, I'm reading the Vox homepage and my email at the same time. This is incredible.

If I could bring this set-up with me during conferences, I'd be tip-top.

In other news, today Watershed Publishing -- the company that owns MarketingVox -- took a minority stake in Adrants. The deal is expected to finalize at November's end.

Because Adrants took me on last year and MarketingVox took me on earlier this year, it's a little like my universe has come full-circle.

Next year's going to be an exciting one.

YPulse: Closing Up with the Coveted Words of (REAL!!!) Tweens

If you followed my Advertising Week adventure at all, you probably know I hit YPulse on Friday. In the late afternoon, a bunch of kids were corralled onto the stage to give us one last shot at learning their inner-workings before hitting the road.

Like the minds of the demographic it hopes to distill, the one-room YPulse Tween Mashup conference hall is a different world.

Upon entering, you're accosted by Michael Jackson's ABC (this is before Hanson's Mmmbop was spun about 6 different times) -- and with so much pink SWAG just waiting to be snapped up, you feel roughly the same emotional tug that only Lisa Frank's overpriced unicorn-shaped pencil sharpeners could conjure.

With all this going on, the YPulse atmosphere serves to make marketers feel pre-adolescent and out-of-touch, all at the same time.

While waiting for the feature -- a panel consisting of children who seem worlds smaller than I remember being at age 12 -- I hung out with Maura of WeeWorld and a girl named Allison from Fleishman-Hillard.

From what I could gather, FH is a data aggregating firm for youth.

"So what exactly do you guys do?" I asked. "Is it a TRU kind of deal, where you take streams of information and paint pictures of Queen Bees and goths...?"

Allison gave me a look that actually made me feel like a member of the demo we came to see. She has a very expressive face. "No," she replied. "Actually, we make forecasts about upcoming trends."

"Cool," I said. "How do you do that? Like, do you take previous data and..."

Before I could finish, Allison interrupted in a manner most factual. "Our founder just knows things," she said. "He really has a good grasp on what's going on."

"I'm sorry, I don't understand." Seriously. I was confused.

Allison replied, "Well, he's made a lot of predictions that turned out to be true," she explained, broadening her hands for emphasis.

"Oh, he's clairvoyant," I said. After this she seemed to think I was some species of lizard, so she stopped talking to me for the most part, but I hung out near her anyway because that's where all the computer outlets were.

Somehow, it seemed fitting to close up a week-long ad conference orgy with a panel consisting of eight 10-12-year-olds.

Each of the kids gave their names and ages. They started out shy, with personalities that developed once they realized every marketer in the room was falling all over himself to field a question. And not even just for general opinions, either. On actual products. From what I recall, a woman from a major technology company actually asked whether they like the special features on her firm's DVDs.

"I like playing the games," a 10-year-old (who's teaching himself how to CODE!) answered nonchalantly. "But I hate it when you send me to websites. I like doing everything from my remote control."

Most of the panel members already owned a cell phone, though I can't remember having possessed one until I was 14 - and even then I was considered ahead of the curve. Talk about being dated. The kids also said they prefer to IM rather than text their friends, though one girl said the idea of texting was appealing, mainly because she didn't have a mobile phone and all her friends did.

A few young members of the cult of Apple expressed their preference for instant messaging because they could video chat.

The oldest of the group, a 12-year-old girl, kept emphasizing how technology gets boring after awhile, and sometimes she wants to go out and play, or see her friends face to face. Other panel members echoed her view - the 'net could get boring, it helps to get some fresh air. These opinions seemed largely overlooked.

Who plays outside anymore? That was so, like, mid-'80s (remember those branded basketballs that McD's used to give away?).

More importantly, the wee gen-Y reps admitted that when an ad appeals to them, they make the coveted click. Ads with little games are popular, but the most favored of all are ads that don't redirect them to another website. In fact, it's "really annoying" to get sent to a page they don't want to be on. Tell it like it is, baby.

Sometimes, they show an ad to their parents if it features something they really, really want.

This is a tendency that's not new to kids, but is largely overlooked by marketers in the digital era - unless you're Virgin (Parental Enlightenment, anyone?), which pretty much never overlooks any opportunity that involves desperate feats for attention.

In the early '90s, Nickelodeon leveraged kids' willingness to bring parents to ads by giving them examples of how they could actually nag adults into buying them a subscription to Nickelodeon Magazine. I wish I could find the example I remember. In any case, here's a classic in which kiddies are encouraged to tell their parents about some weird experiment involving herring, and give their parents the phone number for the Nick mag.

"Just give them the number, heh-heh." Even while awash in pleasant nostalgia like this, that guy still creeps me out.

Never underestimate the power of "gimme."

Advertising Week: Getting Behind Big Ads with the Editors

Mainly for personal conceits, Advertising Week's Why Editors Matter panel was by far our favourite.

The panel consisted of Chris Franklin, Big Sky Editorial, NY; Paul Gowan, Rogue Editorial, Toronto; and Neil Gust, Outside Editorial, NY. Check out the link to the panel information to see the work they've done; notably, Paul Gowan is known for having edited that Dove Evolution piece that people keep subjecting us to.

Each of adland's Geoff Emerick's had an opportunity to speak, which we'll go ahead and synopsize here:

Paul Gowan

At the outset, Gowan observed that you "just can't get enough of" any of the three spots for which these editors are particularly known. And he's right. A resilient, infectious piece isn't just prerequisite of great art; it's critical to an ad's success (for, um, obvious reasons).

If you can't watch them over and over, what makes you think you're going to push product?

Onto Dove Evolution. Contrary to rumors we've heard, the girl's metamorphosis took three hours - not 10. To address still other rumors, the agency did a making-of video to, we suppose, distill the finehanded work implicit in whittling down a long process in a way that still captures a watcher's attention.

"It does get tiring," Gowan admitted of both editing an hours-long tape and watching it.

And while Dove Evolution seeks primarily to cut into the deception inherent to advertising, it's not without its own smoke and mirrors. The model used in the film was chosen specifically for her relatability to "average" women.

And that Photoshop-esque series of functions at the end, where a mouse widens her eyes and lengthens her neck? Complete invention. If shit were that easy, there'd be no excuse for Condy Rice to look the way she does half the time.

All told, the spot took a whoppin' three weeks and 15-17 hours.

Neil Gust

Gust has got to be the most touchy-feely of his cohorts in terms of talking editing. His work seems to be less about smoothing technical rough-edges than taking unrelated snippets to convey a feeling, a non-narrative that flows like it tells a story.

The object, Gust explains, is to capture a chemistry associated with feelings that clients hope to associate with their product - like "sexy" or "gorgeous."

"They tell me how they want it to feel," he says, and his job is to create relationships from shot to shot that best convey that sensation. Good shortcuts include building formal relationships between themes that leap from cut to cut: streaky imagery throughout, consistent shapes and logical flow.

In the case of the Jaguar ad, the client wanted a "really long car shot," which didn't quite fit into the existing "hyperkinetic visual." To make it work, they stuck in a scene where the car skids to an abrupt stop, the music halts, and an airport voice is dubbed over the long shot of the vehicle. Then the pace speeds up again.

Chris Franklin

Franklin probably reminds us the most of the electives professor with promise that we all encountered in high school. He compares showing off an editor's back-end work to airing your underpants for all the public to see - it's clearly uncomfortable for him, but there's a tinge of exhibitionist pride at the same time.

He calls editing a series of mistakes that work eventually; mainly, it's a painfully solitary and long process.

"You just try to find variations that keep you going, keep you thinking," he says. Sometimes you have to go off and stare at a wall, or buy a flower, just to keep the ideas flowing.

The Ellen spot for American Express consisted of seven hours of footage, and the actress was never shot in the same room as the animals. In fact, each animal in the boardroom scene was shot one at a time.

90 percent of the spot was composite-driven, and each animal (and actress') performance had to be elegantly orchestrated to appear like they were all moving together.

A particular point of pride is the moment in which Ellen and an ostrich nod downward (um, toward a kangaroo) at the same time.

Franklin also scoffs at the notion of a "viral ad."

"All advertising is viral, period," he says. "Any advertising is viral." When you really think about it, that makes sense.

As a final thought, Franklin admonishes editors-to-be against attending the shoots that produce the images you'll work with. "AVOID the shoot at all costs!" - the politics behind the cuts will always affect your unadulterated view of the final footage, and that's a shot in the foot.

Overall, editing is described as as much emotive and sensory as it is logical. And music, dubbed "spiritual glue" by Franklin, is a big factor for casting the feel of a spot. The audience can't be expected to see what you're seeing if you don't provide them with the right background noise.

The Ellen/American Express ad has a distinctive Dick Van Dyke feel that hits you the moment you start watching it, and you're not even really sure why. It's cast in black and white, and the vintage music was produced to give it a "timeless" quality. This early sensation is part of the bouquet of emotions you're intended to feel over the life of an ad.

One of the editors observed that without an appropriate soundtrack, this stuff just doesn't work - and it's all too easy to aim for a popular pop song, because those types of tracks can make nearly any series of images likable, which can lead to lazy editing.

In fact, Gowan calls the use of popular music "Irresponsible [...] unless you're Microsoft." It's considered part of the job to stockpile obscure, interesting and affordable music.

Thankfully, indy artists will meet you halfway in this regard. Now, plenty of records get "made" on the strength of an ad. (Consider the popularity of Telepopmusik's "Breathe" after Mitsubishi eased it into that one ad where that raver dude is dancing around in the car.)

At this point in the game, Franklin notes that great ads can leverage equally good -- but otherwise obscure -- indy work "because RADIO SUCKS, but that's a different story."

So much for Emerick.

How to Leverage a Hostel Stay During a Business Trip

When this entry was posted on Adrants, Steve saw fit to give it a preamble. I'm just mentioning it (yeah, preluding the prelude) so you don't wonder why I'm referring to myself in the third-person - in italics, no less.

Believe it our not, everyone that writes for Adrants does not, contrary to popular belief, live in New York. So revel, herewith, in the story of Angela as she masters the art of traveling on an Adrants budget as opposed to an Advertising Age budget which, for Adrants readers, is a very good thing.

After all, do you want the highly-edited, overly-tame version of Advertising Week - or do you want the gritty reality of life in the big city as seen by someone like you: People without huge expense budgets who go from glitzy hotel to cab to advertising conference and back again without reveling in everything New York has to offer? Read on.

You never know when you'll need the skills necessary to support your survival (and cool factor) if you happen to find yourself at a youth hostel during Advertising Week on a (trendy) Bohemian budget. And after three days doing it, I'm a PhD. Read on to glean the fruits of my loving labors:

1. Buy a map. This serves two purposes: locating all the 1 Line stations in Manhattan, and all the shot-in-the-dark buildings the Advertising Week people chose for the seminars (couldn't one location have done the job?).

If colleagues ask why you never take a cab home, say nonchalantly that you know the Subway like the veins on the back of your writing hand. They'll be impressed. Or at least they'll look like they are.

2. Debate, fairly seriously, the merits of leaving the hostel in one set of clothes and changing into another at the conference. You feel like an jerk frequenting a hostel in your working pinstripe. It's probably the only time in your life you'll feel excruciating lust for a pair of flip-flops and a wife beater. Besides college.

3. Actually pretend to be a starry-eyed tourist when hostel-mates catch you taking pictures of ads or bringing home Anheuser-Busch paraphernalia. The problem with hostels is all your neighbors want to talk to you. What are you going to do, ignore them? That's not an option when you share living quarters or a loo.

4. Invent a reason (besides Advertising Week) for being there. Being an ad guy - even a blogging ad guy - is not exactly sexy amongst youth traveling-kind, particularly if they're from Socialist countries or still in college.

People usually invent a reason for you, so this isn't such a big deal: "You're on vacation? How nice." Yeah, if by vacation you mean distilling the social importance of the Green Giant.

5. If you smoke, carry both rolled cigarettes and ready-mades. You'll look trendier if you roll cigs at a youth hostel, but you'll look like a fringe pot dealer if you carry the habit back to Advertising Week. (Be extra cool: bring Parliaments* to the ad parties. This shows you're fringey in a "cultured" way.)

6. Consider foregoing the extra suit in your luggage for spare towels (trust me).

7. Get up at six. This provides you with two-for-one perks: you'll awe colleagues with your fresh-faced early appearances, and you beat your hostelmates to the shower. The early bird doesn't just get the worm; it gets the hot water too.

It's worth noting that staying at a youth hostel has plenty of merits, besides the fact that you'll save $700/night that probably would have gone to a Doubletree. The bonuses are listed below:

• They sometimes have $1 beers.
• They enable you to slip out of working-mode once you've left the frenetic world of Advertising Week and Times Square.
• They have wall clocks that tell the time all over the world. I cannot describe the social dividends you rack up when you're able to recount, off the top of your head, what time it is in London for the homesick Saatchi & Saatchi guy. You will look like a genius.

---

*I'm actually a little confused about the significance of Parliaments as a trendy social tool, but from experience I know its power can't be denied. My best guess is that it vaguely associates the user with being Soviet.

Advertising Week: Getting Deep Over WeeMeetinis, and Why Priceline is Tricky

Tell me how to nail cheap two-star accommodations in NY the day before Advertising Week, and I'll call you a liar and tell you how you - yes, you - can survive in a youth hostel during a business trip.

Because after (reeeeally) bad planning on my part, that's where I ended up.

At the end of yesterday's Saving Darfur session, which ran a half hour over time, I wandered the streets of New York in desperate pursuit of the 1 Subway line.

After accidentally interrupting the filming of a movie called "Fighting," I located this crucial urban vein, hopped on and trekked to my hotel.

Priceline.com has this cool option where you can "name your price!" on a hotel. The setback is, if they find you a place at "your price!", you're married to it - no refunds, no takebacks.

So it was with surprise, some chagrin and a sudden craving for croissants that I discovered my hotel, attractively dubbed West End Studios, was not a hotel at all but a youth hostel.

The world spun. I'd gone from from Underdressed Amongst Ad Execs to Overdressed to Kill. Flippin' amazing.

I was there long enough to drop my gigantic duffel in a room - a dorm-style accommodation with a shared loo - then I changed clothes and headed back downtown for the WeeWorld Cocktail Party.

The launchpad for the fete was decorated very much like the WeeWorld universe, complete with human-sized cardboard props representing the miniature playland (ironic). Some guy took an awkward Polaroid of me (eyes closed!) and later handed me a bag of goodies, which included a framed Angela WeeMee.

This is how people see me? was my first thought, but I couldn't ruminate for long because a smiling girl with an oversized belt came and handed me a WeeMeetini - ice-blue suicide, baby - and I later stumbled off to a series of laptops, where a bunch of women were making WeeMees and talking about WeeMees and showing me all the supercool aspects of WeeWorld.

I bit the hype hard and consequently tried convincing everyone around me of how awesome it would be to build a WeeMee Facebook app that mimics WeeWorld's interactive comments feature.

Have you ever made a WeeMee? You really need to. The beauty of this deceptively simplistic business model is it does little more than leverage our fetish for individualism. I wasted at least half an hour, high on my last WeeMeetini, looking for an eyepatch for my virtual persona.

"And look!" cried a WeeMee exec. "You can try on Bratz gear and paint your face in the colors of your flag!"

No kidding.

Anyway, I burned a good three hours hanging out at the WeeWorld Cocktail party - and not just because it had little fried chicken tenders on potato chips. It's a good party when you keep slipping off to a corner to pen the epiphanies you're sponging up in conversation, hopelessly convinced that you are the voice of the Next Great Conference Bash Epic.

My frenzied scrawl faithfully records the following literary deal-breakers:

Advertising - as function of addiction. Addiction reflects personal values.

Attractiveness of American Dream - NOT opportunity but low cost of failure. Ability to erase history, start anew. What are we BETRAYING?

Resilience of the "baseball legend" (e.g. American Dream) will transcend superficiality of steroids.

Yeeeeeah.

With all that profundity left to stew, I bid adieu to my cohorts - including the whole WeeMee team, which I'm just in love with; a sales exec at Brickfish; and a man who claims to have spawned an infamous podcast called It's "Much Worse than We Thought" - and hit the Subway to return to my shoebox hostel quarters.

What Does it Take to Define 'Just Do It'?

The answer: Five execs, a poetic moderator, and two hours.

I'm sitting at a panel called Want to start an AD Agency?!. To my right sits a dude whose name I shall not mention. He expresses sincere, almost meddling interest in the GelaSkin on my MacBook. So I ask why he's here and he says, "Technically I represent BBDO, but really I am here for my own self-interest."

Tell it like it is, yo. "Lots of self-interest stewing around," I say vaguely.

The BBDO guy agrees. "I'm guessing that's why everybody's here," he observes.

This is a covert little world.

Onto the session (streamed on AEF.com*, for your reference). It's an atmosphere in which you expect the moderator - in this case, Jerry Shereshewsky of grandparents.com - to cite Leo Burnett's "When to Take My Name Off the Door." And he actually does.

"My name is Jerry and I've been an ad-aholic for 38 years," Shereshewsky begins. (Laughter.) "There is no business more amazing than this." Way to start a conversation - deprecation followed by zeal. I'm on an emotional roller coaster, man.

He notes how personal the business is, calls companies "families," and channels visions of your burgeoning agency sitting around you on the floor of your living room. You know, like Josephine Baker's rainbow tribe.

How The Execs Got Where They Are

"I was 26 years old..." begins the first panelist, Richard Kirshenbaum of kirshenbaum bond + partners. He recounts the tale of a younger, more naive Richard, comfy-cozy at JWT, preparing to leap into the Great Beyond.

One day he nailed the Kenneth Cole account and produced a great print. The head of JWT said, "Why can't you produce ads like that?"

"I did," Kirshenbaum said, then he quit.

Zan Ng of Admerasia describes his dire American beginning: No money, no English skills. He started out a commercial photographer with little technical understanding. Every morning he woke up and said, "What's the next thing I want to do?"

Now, imagine the sound of string chords as Asian landscapes flit by. This moment represents how, on the backburner, Ng witnessed opportunities bloom for the Asian-American population - not just in terms of hireability, but in terms of their attractiveness as a target market. This could only culminate in one result.

"Nobody was going to hire me - no education, no experience - so I started my own agency," he said simply.

Linda Kaplan Thaler of The Kaplan Thaler Group hails, like Kirshenbaum, from JWT. She took the jump for independence, earned Herbal Essences (the orgasmic-tastic "Yes! Yes!" campaign was her work), and actually commented to the client that "only an orgasm could save this brand."

Michael Gray of G&G Advertising said he was hanging out with David Kennedy of W+K, expressing righteous indignation about the portrayal of Indian-American products in advertising, when David (of course) asked, "So what do you want to do?"

"Change this," Gray decided. So he pursued the creation of an Indian-American ad agency.

Misc. Observations

The room is infested with pipe dreams and romanticized war tales. It's like Ad Land or Mad Men in the flesh. And I think somebody spat out "Just do it!" at least six times.

To fully grasp the inescapability of Nike's marketing-savvy, an audience member mentioned he wants to bring his London-based firm JDI to New York. "[The firm's name] stands for 'Just do it'," he added happily.

The only thing used more than "Just do it" is the word "passion."

On Financing

Thaler admits that early on, clients would book shoots and not pay. When they pitched AFLAC - which thought using a duck to sell insurance was horribly tasteless - her agency shelled out $35,000 to support the research (funded by Clairol, which "finally paid their bill," Thaler quips).

"It was really scary in the beginning," admits the exec.

Kirshenbaum admits it took 10 years to get "competent" help in billing. He wrote his first invoice and said it was "like magic" when it was sent out and money came back.

Ng describes dealing with creditors. "There's no perfect picture. When you do well," put money away, he says.

Aside from that there are lots of sad stories about bootstrapping and more talk about passion which leads to "winning more accounts" - you are left to do the math.

On Hiring the "Right" People

Gray: "I had the only one-story building in Albuquerque with a revolving door." He realized in the first handful of years that you can't just have a dream; you had to share the dream with your team and keep them informed. (Helps with the passion, I guess.)

Thaler says the little things count. She also notes, "A village stops being a village after about 200 people." She bemoans not knowing everybody by name anymore at her agency, but adds that a resilient business has to keep standing without you.

Kirshenbaum**, referring to the personalities of hirees: "I'll take 'smart and mean' or 'dumb and nice' but I won't take 'dumb and mean.'" He also observes that there aren't enough personalities in the business anymore.

McGarry: "In this land of magic, the people you surround yourself with - advisors, banks, talent - is the holding. You could be at the top of the world but go right out of business." This guy needs to write a book. He says similarly Earl Nightengalish stuff like this all afternoon.

Some time later he adds, "Environment is really critical in the world of creativity."

Don't I know it. That's why I do all my work from a yacht, baby.

The Takeaway

Ogilvy got into the agency game at the age of 38. The people at this panel are proof that anybody can be Ogilvy, or Leo Burnett, or half of Saatchi & Saatchi.

I'll try derailing the cliche train in my head (there's one in particular that comes to mind) with a frank appeal. Got a dream? Got big ideas?

Want to start an AD Agency?!

Just leap. To consider: the uglier the situation looks, the better your romantic war story will be when you're a raging exec.

I'll conclude with a flashback to the audience member with the agency called JDI. "How should I start [building a brand in New York]?" he asked the panelists.

(Long pause, awkward hesitation, furtive giggling.)

Ng finally takes the torch: "Don't rent space," he says. "The rent will kill you."

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* Worth the listen.
** Korshenbaum makes me laugh. He's like David Spade, except with flair.