… not how insightful the strategic thinking was.

… not how expensive the production was.

… not how attractive the models were.

… not how famous the voiceover was.

… not how terrific the product was.

… not how funny the commercial was.

… not how long it took the art director to kern the type.

… not how graceful the copywriter’s sentences were.

… not how targeted the media buy was.

The one attribute all great ads share is the audience didn’t see them coming.

So they didn’t get out of the way.

They stood sat or laid there with open eyes & open hearts & unguarded souls.

And took the full shot.

Everything else–the insightful thinking, the humor, the deft sentence, the beautiful type.

All good.

But useless if the audience sees it coming.

Have you noticed how rarely wisdom is acquired by its owner from the words of others?

How it is gotten almost exclusively by the repeated bearing of the consequences of its absence?

Don’t tell people what to do.

They don’t listen.

Instead.

Write them a story.

Maybe the story of where they are.

How they got there.

What’s on the other side of the wall.

Who they are underneath.

They won’t listen to you telling them what to do.

But they’ll listen to your story.

And if your story is true.

It will be a map to them.

All good stories are maps.

And if they have a map, maybe they’ll look at it when the consequences start to pile up.

ps Right now you’re thinking sheesh, that’s so gauzy, so indistinct; advertising can’t be made like that. To which I can only reply: Take a look at what may be the best TV commercial ever made and tell me that isn’t exactly what they did. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA

Normal does us no good.

We have got normal coming out of our ears.

We are drowning, sinking, falling to the bottom of the pit of normal.

Are you prepared to be radical?

We’ll buy that.

Heck.

I’ll take a large glass, cup, box, shipping container, railroad freight car full of radical right here without asking the price.

Because normal is what got us to where we are.

If you’re making ads.

Don’t even think of offering us a more clever way of looking at normal.

It can’t help.

Forget clever, sneaky, hidden, sudden, false.

Forget everything normal.

Give us radical.

Nothing else is worth the effort of moving our eyes over to look at it.

If you want to get better as an admaker it’s  got to happen inside you.

There is nothing that needs to be or can be added to you.

Or do you not know that everything important in the world is invisible?

What’s inside you.

That’s the real life.

Advertising?

You don’t need anyone to teach you that crap.

Look at it up there on the TV yelling at you to buy a new Ford for a hundred and forty-four dollars down.

Who couldn’t do that?

Advertising?

Sing it with me: “I wish I was an Oscar Meyer wiener. That is what I’d truly like to be-e-e.”

What class could teach you to do that?

You can already talk, you can already sing, you can already stand in front of a camera and point.

What else is there?

Advertising?

We’ve been watching it every day since we were born.

What’s there to learn that people don’t already know?

It ain’t a mystery.

So, why teach at Brandcenter?

For one reason: Good advertising.

That’s the whole tamale.

We don’t teach advertising, we teach good advertising.

Advertising is the shrill, stupid, clumsy, lame communications that fill up our TV screens and magazines and websites, yelling at us what we already know we don’t want to know.

99.5% of advertising is advertising.

Good advertising is the exact spiritual opposite of advertising.

To do good advertising requires work and vision and knowledge and touch and wisdom and luck and all the other stuff that we’re not born with but which must be developed.

You don’t need those things to make advertising.

But you need them all and in subtle relation to each other in order to make good advertising.

In an ad agency everybody wants to tell creatives what to do.

Planners want what they want.

The creative director wants what he wants plus a spin;  an indescribable spin–“I’ll know it when you do it”.

The brand manager wants sales to go up and a leather chair.

There’s a VP from the NY office who just came from a brand meeting in London where they want something with a squirrel in it.

And the 3 different folks from the client have 3 different ways of saying what they think their boss thinks he may want.

Don’t do it.

Don’t give anyone what they ask for.

Because not only is it a pain in the rear it doesn’t work.

Don’t try to do it, don’t fake doing it, don’t secretly do it while doing something else.

Do what’s right.

Steer not by anything anyone says but go by your lights directly at what you know is right.

Here’s why:

The client is going to judge you by the work.

Not by whether you did what he said or not.

He may hoot and holler about the conversation right then but the next week it won’t matter.

However.

If the work sucks.

He won’t care that it was his fault for telling you what to do and how to do it.

He won’t even acknowledge that he did.

He’ll just lean back in the leather chair the brand manager covets and say about your agency “their work sucks” and fire you.

Get a hobby.

Dive deep into something.

The more that is in your heart the more you can pull out of it.

When you nurture passion for a subject you also grow the desire in yourself to learn deeply of other subjects.

Collecting stamps or flying model airplanes or fly fishing or furniture-making doesn’t just increase your knowledge of those subjects. It grows your desire for  the heart-swell that comes from having deep knowledge and interest.

Never do what you’re told.

When someone can describe what they want you to do that work is already dead.

Don’t do it.

Breathe your breath into a new thing.

It will be better than the dead work you’ve been asked for.

And only a wholly bad agency will fire you for doing better work than they asked you to do.

If you do bad work, don’t worry about it.

Everyone does bad work.

But resist the temptation to share it.

I know we live in the age of Share Everything.

Resist.

Even a fool is considered wise if he doesn’t open his mouth.