Address of Mike Hughes, ECD, The Martin Agency

ADCENTER GRADUATION
May 20, 2006
Mike Hughes
President / Executive Creative Director : The Martin Agency

My history with this great school goes back a long way. In fact, it goes back to the years before its founding. The school, the faculty, the administration, the board and, especially the students, have all been in my heart for a long, long time—and you have a big place there. But that's not why I'm here with you today. The invitation from Rick Boyko came in a roundabout way.

It started with an invitation early in the first semester from Mark Fenske to speak to his class. Then Rick and Mark talked about it and said maybe I should speak to the entire student body. Then Rick thought he'd kill two birds with one stone and invite me to speak at the graduation.

I'm always honored when asked to speak at the school because it means I've actually fooled someone into thinking I know something about advertising.

But Mark didn't want me to discuss advertising. He wanted me to talk about what I've learned as a result of having lung cancer. I'm one of those extremely rare people who have survived with lung cancer for a long time—11 years in my case. Within five years of their diagnosis, 99.9% of lung cancer patients are either dead or cured. I'm neither. Depending on how you look at it, I'm either very lucky or very unlikely.

I've had major surgery, major radiation treatments—and I'm now on my third round of
chemotherapy.

We all know Mark Fenske's sense of drama. He told me he wanted me to talk very candidly about my post-diagnosis life. His words were "open a vein in front of the students."

Yikes.

Well, that made me kind of queasy. So I promise not to open any veins today. But my experience may help me answer a question we hear from students all the time. It's a question most of us don't usually answer very well.

The question is this:
'HOW DO I BALANCE MY PERSONAL LIFE AND MY WORK LIFE?'

Again, Yikes!

I must confess that everyone I know who has made a difference in an industry has given it a big chunk of his or her life. I think it could be argued that the huge majority of successful people in industry have all failed at this balance thing.

Well, when I got my diagnosis of lung cancer and was told there was an 85% chance I'd be dead within 5 years, I needed to make some choices about personal and business things.

My wife and I aren't wealthy, but I could have retired. But I surprised myself.

I decided I wanted to spend major time doing major things with my family—but I also wanted to go back to work. We have a wonderfully successful company, but we've never gotten to the level I want us to reach. I wanted to go back to work and see if I could help take us there.

And I've never had a better time in my life. Don't get me wrong. I'm not some new age guy who's finally learned how to smell the roses. And I'm not in denial. I know my condition. I know my prognosis. And so I'm just doing the things I want to do—with my wonderful, beautiful wife, with my fabulous son and daughter-in-law and with the people who work at the same company I do.

I still work a stupid number of hours. Way more than 40 or 50 a week. But I have this gift that makes it all worthwhile. I do work I love with people I love. I think that's a gift. But here's what I want you to help me figure out today. Is that really a gift—or is it something you can develop? Because it's what we all want for you—work you love with people you love.

All of you will soon be going out into the workplace. You'll join organizations that are, like all organizations, imperfect. You'll see the dysfunctions up close. You'll suffer from the organization's failures. You'll live its frustrations.

Of course, you can't just accept imperfections, dysfunctions, failures and frustrations. You have to work—constantly, diligently —to right what's wrong. You will have successes and you will have failures. This work will never end.

And here's the big question: Will you find joy in this frustrating, never-ending circumstance—or will you be one of the bitchers and moaners who are constantly unhappy?

You will find joy—if you can learn to find joy in the work itself. The joy can't just come from success at the end of the day—it must come from the work itself. Not just from reaching the peak, but from making the long, hard climb.

For me, it's very simple. I find joy in making progress. I'm miserable when I'm standing still or moving backwards. And the only way I know how to make progress is to throw myself into the work.

In my case, the work might be moving my agency to a higher level. It might be developing a campaign for a client. It might be developing a better strategy or a better headline. Better yet, it might be developing a better strategist or a better copywriter.

Those jobs are, for me, hard and frustrating. There are reminders every hour of the frailty of other human beings and the abundance of my own personal weaknesses. I don't think I have a natural talent for those things: I have to work at it.

But in that work, I find joy.

So let's return to the original question: How do I balance my personal life and my work life?

Now for me, it's easy to see. The question is wrong. It's immaterial. It reduces a big question to a silly scale: how many hours for this, how many hours for that?

Because balance isn't what we seek in life.

Joy is what we seek in life. Messy, unbalanced, unpredictable joy.

And in my life—and maybe in yours—joy comes from doing the work, from making progress.

The opportunity to do that hard work is given to me every day. I just have to show up and the problems and challenges are stacked up on my desk — and they're all urgent. I have to dive in.

Now for the big irony: I go home at the end of the day, and I don't have work laid out for me. My wonderful, beautiful wife has taken care of just about everything. And I have the opportunity to delay the things I want to do in my personal life.

That's the mistake. Delaying the things you want to do in your personal life. Setting it aside so you can devote yourself – your time, your energy -- to your work.

Make sure you build the joy into your personal life, too. Make it as compelling as your work. In Viva Las Vegas, that great educator Elvis Presley wishes there were more than 24 hours in the day. That's how we embrace life.

More than any of the other students graduating across America today, you've been trained to

develop strategies and ideas. Use those talents and skills not just for advertising, but for your own life. Figure out how to love the big parts of your life and the people who live in those big parts with you.

You are surrounded today by people who love you. All of us wish for you a life full of work you love and people you love.

Viva the Las Vegas life.

One final thing. You have all been trained to develop ideas. I never got to go to a school like this, so I've learned, instead, to steal ideas. My partner John Adams spoke at the first Adcenter graduation 8 years ago. A lot of what I'm about to say, I've stolen from John. Here's a paraphrase of what he said:

The Adcenter is not like other advertising schools. As a result of that, you are stronger, more focused, better prepared, tougher than the graduates of most advertising schools. You’re an elite group. Consider this a school for advertising’s special forces. Consider yourselves Green Berets.

Now think what that means in the world. You can argue that the institution with the greatest influence on our culture today is not the federal government, not the church, but the corporation.

And while that may be debatable, what is not debatable is that the 300 billion dollars that is spent to project the voice of the corporation makes it a very powerful voice.

And it must become a better voice. So I’m going to ask you—the Green Berets—to save advertising from banality, self absorption and uselessness.

Save it also from mere usefulness. Instill it instead with power. Save it from mere cleverness. Instill it with deep intelligence. Save it from the mere call to action. Instill it with a call to lift ourselves up. This is a job for the Green Berets.

By the way, you’re outnumbered. There are legions of people who don’t share our view. For them the art of persuasion is just another science. It's fad and fashion masquerading as real ideas. For them it is impossible to underestimate the intelligence of the consumer. For them it’s just not worth that much trouble. For them advertising is spelled with a lower case “a” and is practiced with lower case talent. They are legions.

But you’ve been trained for this. You’re a Green Beret.

There's an interesting fact about the Green Berets. Each of them, like each of you, is trained in a specialty. But all of them are trained in the same second specialty. They’re all trained as medics. They’re all trained to take care of each other.

I hope you will find ways to take care of each other in the years ahead. To stay in touch and support each other. To remind each other of your goodness and the amazing capacity that is inside you.

Rick has been kind enough to indulge me in something I’d like to do.

As you receive your diploma today, I would be honored if you would accept from me a green beret as a token and a symbol. I don’t suggest you wear this on your first day at work—you won't need the Monica Lewinsky jokes. Just keep it on a shelf or in a drawer. As a reminder of who you are — and how much we all believe in you.

Remember, you are good people. You deserve the good things that will happen to you, and you have what you need to overcome the bad things that will happen to you.

One more last thing. I'm a lifelong non-smoker. I have lung cancer. I can't waste an opportunity to ask you one personal favor for me. If you do smoke, try one more time to quit. For me.

Congratulations. We love you. And thank you.

Creativity: An e mail from Alex Bogusky

Subject: Creativity
Date: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 5:44 AM
From: Alex Bogusky
To: All Agency

In the second paragraph of the Creativity magazine article begins, "Right now the agency (Crispin Porter + Bogusky) is probably the hottest in the United States."

It is amazing for me to read those words being written about us. In a lot of ways it is the culmination of a dream that seemed silly to everyone I know except my wife. She really did see it happening all those years ago and has never been surprised by our successes.

Even when I wanted her to be surprised. But dreams need to last a lifetime and we're not dead yet. Some of you just arrived and I imagine you are hoping that you haven't gotten here right after all the excitement either. So we need some new lofty goals. I have a few that always get my blood going.

Being "hot" as they put it in the Creativity article feels pretty fickle. And how "hot" something got usually is a pretty poor indicator of how much impact it had on the world. Case in point: The Razor scooter. I don't want to be a Razor scooter. I want to change the world. At least a few little bits of it.
I want people to say "then cp+b came along and changed things and now nobody does it that old way anymore."

I want to be the agency that ruined it for every other agency in the world.
I want old fashioned agencies to look at us and see their own demise because they know they won't be able to do what we do.
I want to continue to evolve and morph into what all the smart people we hire want us to become.
I want to be a great place for clients to keep their brands and I want to be an even greater place to work.
I want to become known as the best place to work in south florida.
I want us all to look for more ways to help out in our community.
I want to run our company the way every 12 year old dreams of running a company because 12 year olds are right.
I want to be the agency that ruined it for every other agency in the world.

We make our clients famous by any means at our disposal. We need to be what ad agencies will become.

When Steve Breen from Molson spoke today you could see how excited he was about our bizarre and fresh way of looking at brand building. And Molson hasn't even begun to tap into that yet. They're still just using us as a typical agency and all he can think about is what we will build that twists his product and his marketing and his PR into one big Molson famous makin' machine.

Here's the tricky part. I want us to do all this while keeping the qualities that make us decent folks to hang out with.

I want us to remain humble. Past success is no measure of what we will do so best to be humble. After all it's just advertising anyhow.

I want us to hold onto our ability to accomplish a lot with a lot less than most agencies. The huge amounts of money that we are put in charge with should always be looked at in terms of what it can accomplish outside of what we are doing with it. $100,000 might seem like less money than you might want to produce a national tv spot but remember you can build a freaking house with it. Always keep perspective on the money you are allocating.

And finally, I want us to keep having fun and being good to one another. Because otherwise, why bother with all the rest.

A good friend of mine wrote me recently because he was frustrated with the advertising business and frustrated by so many of the people he works for and with. He wrote. "It astounds me how people are afraid of so many things but mediocrity never seems to be one of them."

I'm afraid to be mediocre. I'm afraid to stop getting better. I hope you are, too. Because to the rest of the world that looks like courage. Just look at Creativity magazine.

Love,
Alex

Be Polite, Nod Your Head,and Keep Out of My Way: Neil French

First, I have to admit that in the days when I was in the sort of job where I might have had daily contact with these creatures, I never did. In fact it struck me, only recently, I’ve led a charmed life, clientwise.

As a junior account executive, I was always exposed to the Big Scary Boss (presumably because everyone else lost bowel-control in his presence). I always got along with these blokes like toast and marmalade. A few joshing remarks, a racing-tip or two, a glance at the ads, and away you go. I could never understand the fact that anyone could come creeping back into the office with ‘unsold’ ads—or “The client loves the campaign, except for the headline and the copy, and he’s not sure about the picture. And of course, you already know that the logo’s ludicrously small. Great meeting, though!”

The answer, I now realize, is that they’d been shown to a “junior client.”

In fact, the word used to be “submitted” to the client. If ever there was a word designed specifically for the purpose of getting work rejected, that must be it. Beaten before you start.

There’s a Confucian saying that “he who asks humbly teaches how to refuse.” Well, “submitting” ads for approval is demanding refusal plus a damn good hiding, in my view.

And while we’re meandering down this side-road, why do agencies bang on about “serving” their clients? (Account people are in “client service” in most set-ups.) Servants are useful but not essential, can be changed at will, and treated with condescension or brutality, according to whim. They are not the folk one turns to for advice, or help in adversity. And you take care to pay them as little as possible. Is it any wonder that so many agencies not only lose money, but are roundly despised?

Next time you see the agency credentials PowerPoint, strike out every “serve” you see, and substitute “advise.” You’ll be amazed at the difference it makes to your own self-worth, for a start.

And junior clients? (Oh, yes, I remember what I’m supposed to be talking about.) Here’s a thought. They are hired by clients because the agency has junior “account-service” people. To maintain a proper hierarchy, you see. If agencies didn’t have any junior suits, clients wouldn’t have to employ people to sit opposite them. If advertising were seen as what it is—a vast expense upon which the very future of a brand depends—it would demand the attention of the guy whose head is ultimately on the line. Cut out all the middle-men, and better decisions would be made, quicker and everyone would benefit. Too revolutionary? Probably. But agencies only have themselves to blame for the parlous state of the business.

And to a large extent, you can’t blame those junior clients: as talentless twerps whose only job is to fill a space, they get kicked by everyone above them. And in the absence of an office cat, the agency juniors are the only group left for them to take out their spite and self-loathing on. No top client ever sees the result of these depredations, because by the time he sees the work, it has been castrated and buggered until it’s exhausted and useless. So he blames the agency, and tells the junior client to “sort it out.” And so the spiral plunges.

The frightening thing is that agencies stand for it. It has become a way of life. Instead of pushing the young blighters aside like an irritating bead curtain, and demanding to see the man in charge, agencies just whimper a bit, and reverse, groveling, into their hovels. Like Baldrick (do you get Blackadder on TV over there?), they’ll do anything for a turnip, and are pathetically grateful for a mere smack around the head.

Looking at my own distant career (in the form of punching up my Web site; not a decision lightly made!), I realized that not one ad there had been approved—or even seen prior to production—by a junior client. That’s not to say I’ve never had work rejected. I have. Rarely, it must be said, and only by The Top Banana. And when all’s said and done, it’s his money.

And I’ve rarely had to resort to violence, either. I’ve only once decked a client; he wasn’t that junior, and anyway, his boss was present. It was, I recall fondly, in the tea-lounge of the Shangri-La Hotel. The crashing of glass-topped tables, and the tinkle-crunch of delicate china, and the depth-charge sploodge of exploding teapots remains one of my most treasured memories.

The result? Well, the client was, shall we say, a very large one. Originally in the soap-racket. Now in almost everything (including, appropriately, tea). The horrified account-director was convinced we’d just lost a multi-million-buck business. We didn’t. The remaining, dry, unbruised and more important client chuckled a hell of a lot, bought the campaign, and a month later, fired the tea-soaked chap. We never found out whether the campaign worked. It died in research. But that’s a whole different kettle of worms. So listen: Big, rich, powerful men don’t get that way by being stupid. They get there by working harder than everyone else, by being totally single-minded, and by taking risks. Great campaigns are single-minded and risky. Figure it out. So. My advice for junior clients? Be polite, nod your head, and keep out of my way.

Thank you, and goodnight.

On success. An address by Subroto Bagh

Address by Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting to the Class of 2006 at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore on defining success. July 2nd 2004

I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep – so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father. My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government – he reiterated to us that it was not ‘his jeep’ but the government’s jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep – we could sit in it only when it was stationary. That was our early childhood lesson in governance – a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father’s office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix ‘dada’ whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed – I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, ‘Raju Uncle’ – very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as ‘my driver’. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe.

TO ME, THE LESSON WAS SIGNIFICANT – YOU TREAT SMALL PEOPLE WITH MORE RESPECT THAN HOW YOU TREAT BIG PEOPLE. IT IS MORE IMPORTANT TO RESPECT YOUR SUBORDINATES THAN YOUR SUPERIORS.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother’s chulha – an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman’s ‘muffosil’ edition – delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson.

He used to say, “YOU SHOULD LEAVE YOUR NEWSPAPER AND YOUR TOILET, THE WAY YOU EXPECT TO FIND IT”. THAT LESSON WAS ABOUT SHOWING CONSIDERATION TO OTHERS. BUSINESS BEGINS AND ENDS WITH THAT SIMPLE PRECEPT.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios – we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios – alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, “We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses”. His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant. Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father’s transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, “I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited”.

THAT WAS MY FIRST LESSON IN SUCCESS. IT IS NOT ABOUT WHAT YOU CREATE FOR YOURSELF, IT IS WHAT YOU LEAVE BEHIND THAT DEFINES SUCCESS.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper – end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.

Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term “Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan” and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University’s water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination. Imagination is everything.

IF WE CAN IMAGINE A FUTURE, WE CAN CREATE IT, IF WE CAN CREATE THAT FUTURE, OTHERS WILL LIVE IN IT. THAT IS THE ESSENCE OF SUCCESS.

Over the next few years, my mother’s eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, “Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair”. I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, “No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed”. Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes.

TO ME, SUCCESS IS ABOUT THE SENSE OF INDEPENDENCE; IT IS ABOUT NOT SEEING THE WORLD BUT SEEING THE LIGHT.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life’s own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life’s calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places – I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him – he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, “Why have you not gone home yet?” Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self.

THERE I LEARNT THAT THERE IS NO LIMIT TO HOW CONCERNED YOU CAN BE FOR ANOTHER HUMAN BEING AND WHAT IS THE LIMIT OF INCLUSION YOU CAN CREATE. MY FATHER DIED THE NEXT DAY.

He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts – the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant’s world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking.

SUCCESS IS NOT ABOUT THE ABILITY TO CREATE A DEFINITIVE DOGMATIC END STATE; IT IS ABOUT THE UNFOLDING OF THOUGHT PROCESSES, OF DIALOGUE AND CONTINUUM.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, “Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world.” Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity – was telling me to go and kiss the world!

SUCCESS TO ME IS ABOUT VISION. IT IS THE ABILITY TO RISE ABOVE THE IMMEDIACY OF PAIN. IT IS ABOUT IMAGINATION. IT IS ABOUT SENSITIVITY TO SMALL PEOPLE. IT IS ABOUT BUILDING INCLUSION. IT IS ABOUT CONNECTEDNESS TO A LARGER WORLD EXISTENCE. IT IS ABOUT PERSONAL TENACITY. IT IS ABOUT GIVING BACK MORE TO LIFE THAN YOU TAKE OUT OF IT. IT IS ABOUT CREATING EXTRA-ORDINARY SUCCESS WITH ORDINARY LIVES.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world.

The seven cliches of advertising. A note by Eric Proulx

Out of ideas? Try one of these.
By Erik Proulx, December 2003

See if this scenario sounds familiar: You have a great idea. You sell it to the client. Maybe it even gets produced. Then, five minutes after your sweat and blood starts running in the local rag, you see the exact same idea you were so proud of in an old ad annual. At that moment you come to realize that you, like the vast, expansive majority of creative people, are unoriginal. But it's not just your concept that's been done before. It's every concept. Every ad for every client is derivative of some other ad from some other campaign. In total, there are only seven ideas that were, at one time or another, original. Any idea you come up with is one of seven existing, interchangeable campaigns that have already been thought of.

1. I'm not looking at you, I'm looking at ________.
A Maxim-esque woman walks into a bar. The dork behind the beer bottle thinks she's looking at him. Turns out (drum roll, please), she's looking at his (name of beer here). Oh, there are variations on the theme. Different ways to yuk up the fact that she's not really looking at him, including what might be identified as subcategory 1.1, called "I'm so absorbed by (product x) that I don't notice interesting/bizarre/catastrophic/injurious event that's happening to/right in front of me." But it all starts and ends with the same premise. Scary thing is, this idea has legs.

So many, in fact, that it extends into entirely different products. Such as, "I'm not looking at the guy with the bees all over him, I'm looking at the VW Beetle." Or, "I'm not looking at my legs on fire, I'm looking at my rug." It's the most overused concept today and deserves to be No. 1 on this list. And what's so perplexing is that it somehow manages to get by judge after judge in competition after competition. Go ahead, pick up your favorite awards show annual over the last three years. It's comical.

2. There's a better way to ________.
This concept is particularly devious because it hides behind the guise of so many other concepts. Such as, "What would life be without (product here)?" Or, "How are you going to (do the thing that the product does)?" As far back as I can trace, I believe Conseco was the Adam and Eve of this direction with, "How do you plan on paying for retirement?" Brilliant. Laugh-out-loud funny. And worthy of consideration for your own client.

3. The lengths I'll go to for a glimpse of ________.
Remember the Mercedes print ad with all the skid marks in front of a parked SLK? It was so simple and striking. In 1997. But now there are rubbernecking ads all over television. Currently, you can see one for Porsche, where a guy and his sleeping wife are traveling on the highway in their RV when a new Porsche SUV pulls up behind them. The man gets out of the driver's seat while the RV is still doing 60, just so he can get a better look. Think of how far you could go with this concept if you found a way to do it for something other than the automotive category. Isn't there an industrial solvent that it could be applied to?

How about pants?

4. __________s that look like vaginas.
This concept is one of the more recent crazes. I'm not exactly sure where it began or what it accomplishes, but it's always a photograph of some seemingly innocuous item, shot to resemble a vagina. Why? Beats me. But I'm sure it has something to do with how sex sells or some such credo. At least it's not "______s that look like buttholes."

5. Maybe we're a little too ________.
Here's how it's done. Take the product benefit. Say, a dish detergent that cleans dishes really sparkly. Then, exaggerate the bejeezus out of that benefit. Maybe the dishes get so sparkly that they cause retinal incineration upon eye contact. The voiceover or headline then comes in and
remarks, "Maybe we make dishes a little too sparkly." It may not always be worded exactly that way, but the formula is usually pretty much the same. After all, what is "Fast. It's corporate policy," for GT bikes other than "Maybe we make bikes a little too fast" by another name?

6. Imagine __________.
I have to hand it to Cliff Freeman on this one. The work they did for Budget was genius. A team of executives gathers together for a brainstorming session on how to make the driving experience more enjoyable. Somebody blurts out, "Aromatherapy candles." Cut to what the team imagines would happen if they actually put candles in their cars. Everyone in the car is asleep, including the driver. Car crashes through a barrier and across several lanes of traffic. Cut back to team saying, "We don't need aromatherapy candles." Hilarious. Made me wish I'd done it. Apparently, it made about a dozen other teams wish they'd done it, too. Because now the daydreaming shtick is popping up in ads for everything from Time Warner Cable (man imagines what would happen if he had to wait for the cable guy) to Expedia.com (woman imagines what would happen if they stayed at an exotic room with mosquito netting) to SBC (woman remembering what happened when she changed gardeners) to Budweiser (man imagining what
it would be like to be a big-league catcher for a day) and even to another car rental client, Avis (imagine what would happen if Avis didn't try harder).

7. Sex products causing broken furniture/architecture.
The next time your agency gives you an assignment for a dildo, one common execution is to show a cracked wall, a broken floor or some other damaged piece of furniture or bedroom accessory. What better way to demonstrate wild sex than with architectural destruction?

Lastly, this article. I'm sure somebody somewhere has written about this very topic before. If so, I apologize. I've never read it and I was not inspired by it. But I'm sure to run across it in the
next five minutes.


Erik Proulx is a copywriter at Cleveland agency Brokaw.

The fear of failure. A note by Mark Fenske

A student in the Film Storytelling class couldn't bring him or herself to do an assignment. He or she came to my office to tell me this. In my warm, caring and gentle way I said, "Tough. Do it anyway."

Being of a sturdy upright nature the person went away to work on his or her project. I was left wondering, though, what could make a person who came to school to learn to do this not want to do it? What follows is the best reason I thought of and so I wrote it to the person who came to see me. Coz felt I should share it with the rest of you 1st years, feeling some of you may benefit from what little perception it may contain. (The teachers talk together about you guys more than you probably know--however, I didn't and wouldn't let anyone know the name of the he or she who came to see me).

A lot of people are held back from working by fear of failure. They're so afraid to make something that's no good that they don't make anything. But that may be exactly what you need to learn about making ads. There's a lot of failure in creating advertising. There's a lot of looking foolish. It's simply part of the process. You learn to do it. After a while you don't even notice it, it happens so much and is such an integral part of the process.

There's something terrifically good about the right to fail. It means you can try anything. Since there's going to be plenty of failure anyway no matter what you do, try something that's worth the trouble. Instead of sticking so close to what you see others doing, make something that could only occur to you. Something you couldn't describe to someone else without them looking at you funny.

Perhaps you've been trained by life to avoid the feeling you get when you try things like that. It's similar to the feeling you get when you think to yourself, heck, I should just kiss that girl. Most of the time we don't follow through. Some of us are such dorks we wait three more days then ask the girl if we can kiss her, and in that moment damn ourselves as not being men of action.

Doing ads is like this. Don't ask, kiss. The beauty is, here at school and work we don't get slapped. Sure you might feel stupid if we all laugh. But what the hell. Get used to it. We used to laugh mercilessly at the ideas Dan Wieden used to throw out. And you haven't lived till you've heard Rich Silverstein laugh at my stuff. He's kind of short and I think it gives him a greater glee when he gets to laugh at a big guy's stuff. It's nothing. It's paper, not person.

{In fact, it's because failure in front of people is so much a part of the daily routine that there's so much swaggering and intimidation and boorish behavior in advertising creative departments. Insecurity oozes out of every pore in your body, yet you’ve got to keep going and show your work. Most people deal with this by fronting. Acting cool. As if doing the hard job of creating something out of nothing was no sweat. It is, though. But when enough people start acting like it isn't it puts a pressure on those to whom fronting doesn't come naturally--the best people, I think--that makes them feel they're not all they should be if they can't do their work easily with a devil-may-care grin. Dig? It's a trick. One some of you may even now be picking up.

A lot of planners also try to skip the looking foolish part. What happens later though is those planners don't understand how to make ads or what makes a great ad great. What we're trying to do here at AdCenter is help you become the kind of planners who are participants in making great ads, not impediments to the process or bystanders watching but not doing, like many--no, strike that--like most planners are these days.}

Do what you can. There isn't a right or wrong answer. There isn't a level that all work must be at. You are where you are. Wherever you get to is enough.

We're after movement here. If it's a grade you're worrying about, the one thing I can tell you for sure is that doing work that comes from inside, from your instinct, is the only sure way to get an A, and doing work that doesn't come from instinct is the only sure way (besides slugging me in the gut) to get a C.

PS: Did you see this quote I sent around to my 2nd year Campaigns class by any chance?

"To learn that we have said or done a foolish thing, that is nothing. We must learn that we are nothing but fools, a far broader and more important lesson."

It was written by a great French essayist you've probably read quoted before. He had a genuine insight into both education and art, I think. You know that speech I gave last term about all art being happy accidents? I think that's what is at the heart of putting the truth of this quote into action. Nothing we do as humans, no art we create or work we do, is evidence of us being good people. We luck into everything we do. Michelangelo being able to capture the curve of the buttocks of David isn't proof of anything more than a guy with a chisel got it right. But he got it right the same way anybody else gets it right--rarely, and with great exertion, and with loads of failure. Imagine how many half-chipped up rocks got hauled away from Mich's studio in the day.

I wish I could put down as succinctly as Montaigne, the frog I just quoted, what this is all about. But we're dealing with real time and real life here, not just words on a page.
If this is another of my rambles, and it learns you nothing, well, then that's my failure. Big deal. I've failed a bunch. Bound to do it again soon.

Try this:
Do something simple. Do something simple that comes from instinct. Something that touches that I should kiss her button. It's not a big deal at all what you make. But, it's a big deal for you that you do something. Doing changes everything. Dig?

Giving grades

I struggle with giving grades. I put a lot of effort and time into it. It inflicts pain on me to have to give grades. I don't like the objective view of a subjective business they require. What small part of them I believe is helpful is when they give someone a new view of themselves. When a student gets a C who was expecting an A there's usually some education that happens inside the student's head that bears fruit in their work the next term. When someone gets an A who thought they were getting a B an equal amount of energy is generally also released that finds a similar result through different means.

However, there are times when mistakes are made in grading. When a crucial piece of work is overlooked or an important contribution wrongly attributed or an unearned bad impression made that lingers in the mind. If you have received a grade you feel isn't right and it matters to you, I urge you to overcome your desire to stick pins in a voodoo doll of my sorry ass and come see me. I'm easier to talk to than I appear, especially about grades. I will tell you the story of the teacher who taught me what a grade is and we'll talk about your work and we'll see what happens. I don't keep a list of who argues a grade with me. I do award style points though, in everything. Don't you?

I wanted to give everyone an A. In both classes you all deserved it. I've not seen people work harder at difficult tasks. If I give everyone an A, however, I am giving a false reward to those who need to know their work wasn't at the highest level of the class. Further, it erodes the value of the truth told by an A to those whose work was the best in the class.

I am unwilling to cheat anyone out of what little contribution I can make to your education and so I did the best I could. There's another matter at play here. Hard work, while important, isn't trump in advertising. Magic is both the wild card and the indispensable ingredient. Seeing it, recognizing it, doing it, helping it along, that's what high level success is about. Please believe me when I tell you I wish hard work could mean in an art form what it does in accounting or the weight room or trash collection. It doesn't. Oh heck, I've overexplained already.

You've got to find what you love. A speech by Steve Jobs

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

"You've got to find what you love.", Jobs says. This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5?deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky ?I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me? I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything? all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

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