Although lunch with Warren Buffett (a Buffett buffet, if you will) will set you back over $2Million, we’d be delighted to arrange a lunch with any of the Brooklyn Brothers for a mere $100,000. Alright, call it $10,000.

Once again it is Cannes time. The time the advertising industry indulges its solipsistic streak and pretends it is as culturally significant as the cinema.

Of course, everyone there will, without exception, say that it really is frivolous, the awards are meaningless (unless you win one) and insinuate that they are attending purely in an ironic way. Yet still they go.

I often wonder if the waste management and remediation industry behaves in a similar fashion. It is, after all, worth almost exactly the same as advertising to the economy – around $150 billion - so it is has similar impact on the population. A greater one if you consider the impact of them not doing their jobs and a copywriter not writing a direct mail pack.

Then again, they are probably more interested in actually shifting shit than rewarding it.

Soon to be heard at sales conventions, marketing conferences and corporate pep rallies near you. Accompanied, naturally, by pictures of executives on video-conferences: foreign executives in far-flung territories; smiling, satisfied customers; families enjoying (your product here) and, more than likely, Hell’s Angels holding babies.

Today marks a special day at the Brooklyn Brothers. Not just because it’s the 703rd anniversary of the election of Pope Clement V – though you’d be right to think that is worthy of celebration in itself. But because today George Bryant, Jackie Stevenson, Jay Fretwell and David Watson launch The Brooklyn Brothers, London. It will be the first time we’ve added defining punctuation to our name and an office to our mini-global empire.

With this momentous step we are now fully equipped to take on the giant networks at their own game. Martin Sorrell – you will kick sand in our face at the Agency Big Wig Summer BBQ no more. Watch out Bruce Crawford of Omnicom: we now have a mere 724 fewer offices than you. And are you listening Vincente Bollore of Havas? Because we’ve just doubled our size, have you?

We’re about to launch the world’s first disorganized religion. We haven’t got a name yet and we’re looking at a shortlist of deities to worship. We’ll almost certainly get back to you at some point in the not-too-distant future with our decision. We had our first meet scheduled for July 7th but someone forgot to book the church and/or temple. We’ll more than likely get back to you with a confirmed in due course. In the meantime, you’re all going to our version of hell. Probably.

Being big isn’t nearly as important as it used to be. Even the new corporate giants are comparatively tiny compared to their forebears. IBM, with a market cap of $170bn, employs over 350,000 people. Google, with a similar market cap, employs just 19,000.

Big is plodding. Big runs at the speed of its slowest employees. Big is hard to maneuver. The economies of scale that big used to command are supplanted by the need for nimbleness and the ability to constantly re-adapt and re-focus. The way forward for the economy is based on millions of small businesses built to do specific tasks, not on a few big business that promises to do them all.

One can see a parallel in the production of technology itself. In the early 90s, software began to be built with a method called object oriented programming. Developers created individual modules that served a particular purpose – like, say a calculation function. These modules could then be joined to others to create a program: a new app was really just a bunch of pre-existing objects.

We already see businesses operating in this way: Google allows companies to port their map function to a plethora of devices. PayPal offers an easy way to introduce e-commerce to your site. Even on a Facebook page consumers can add functionality by introducing weather forecasts or show times. And outsourcing has been standard practice in the manufacturing industry for years.

This also provides a much-needed financial model for online businesses, too. After all, even though entrepreneurs are unable to charge consumers anything for their online services, someone, somewhere has to make money on something. In the object-oriented economy, new companies can be built by paying for and bundling the services created by a multitude of small existing ones.

Small is not only beautiful, it’s profitable. Big is neither.

In the past advertising agencies made brands. They took what a company made and transformed it into what a consumer desired. There was a necessary element of invention and fiction about a brand: Betty Crocker, Pepperidge Farm. These days, what consumers demand most is an authentic experience. They want the truth about the products they choose and there are limitless ways for them to discover it.

Today a brand is the collaboration of a company and its consumers. It belongs to both in equal parts. The more you can do to foster that collaboration, the more successful you’ll be.

There is such a thing as a bad idea.
Some ideas are too stupid.
Quality does count.
Quantity does not.
No matter how much you expect your brainstorm to turn into a brain hurricane, you’re more likely to end up with a gentle breeze and the occasional shower.

The trouble with death is it’s been done so many times before.

A typo means you didn’t use extra power on your computer to run the spellcheck. A typo means you didn’t pore over every sentence wasting electricity. A typo means you didn’t print your document out more than once. A typo means you didn’t waste any of the earth’s precious resources to reach a meaningless level of grammatical perfection. Embrace the typo. Typos are grene.

Or are the Dunkin Donuts ad and Hertz tagline great examples of how perfunctory our industry can be at times?

In a recent ad, Dunkin Donuts mock Starbucks for their use of the Fratalian language whereas at the Double D you can order your ‘latte’ in good old American. Last time we looked the word latte was Italian and meant milk. In another example of brilliant agency insight, Hertz ask us to remember that “We’re Hertz and they’re not”. Well, no kidding.

We are the Brooklyn Brothers. And DDB is not.

My old friend Rory Sutherland’s column in the UK edition of the Spectator this week made for startling reading. Only the fact that I was in bed prevented some serious bruising.

It seems Rory, who only married his delightful wife because Mrs. Thatcher was already taken, has become a socialist. In his fortnightly column on technology he argued, quite rightly, that the power of the community is now more powerful than the corporation and, among other things, that hyperlinks destroy hierarchy. He concluded his piece by encouraging wikiers (sic) of the world to unite.

If that’s not communist talk I don’t know what is.

Marx always argued that socialism would come not to agrarian cultures first but to developed and industrialized nations because it was the only possible answer to the eventual crisis in capitalism. You can’t really blame Marx for the fact that so many nut jobs decided to inflict a totalitarian version of his theories on peasant societies before he could be proven right.

The defining tenet of socialism, that the means of production, distribution and exchange should be owned by the community as a whole, is probably the best description of the internet one can write.

Who owns the internet? We all do. Who holds the power? We all do. No hierarchy. No class. No borders.

Not Thatcher or Reagan or even Adam Smith seem so prescient as old Karl. Perhaps the only person it wouldn’t come as a shock to was Lincoln. After all, he talked about a government of the people by the people for the people in 1863. A mere 15 years after Karl published the Communist Manifesto.

It is clear to anyone with a conscience that untrammeled capitalism invariably breeds greed and corruption. It’s equally evident to anyone with a brain that putting a few fanatics in charge generally leads to misery and poverty.

The internet is the synthesis of a corrupt capitalist system and a dictatorship of the proletariat. It makes capitalists honest and destroys oligarchy.

Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis. Pure Marxist dialectic.

Welcome, Comrade Rory.

What famous brother uses the Gotham typeface, pale blue, royal blue, white type and believes in changing the status quo? Not just your friendly neighborhood Brooklyn Brother anymore. It seems Obama has adopted not just our attitude but also our house font and our house colors. We’re happy to help in anyway we can Mr. President Elect. Just remember the brothers when you’re in the White House.

The Brooklyn Brothers are pleased to announce the launch of Fat Pig Chocolate, an organic milk chocolate bar. We created Fat Pig because we like doing the worst things possible to our bodies in the best possible way, and we couldn’t find an organic milk chocolate bar that was worthy enough to be stuffed in our fat faces.

We spent about a year doing taste test after taste test (a dirty job but someone has to…) and finally found the right combination of creaminess, taste and texture. You’ll shortly be able to order some at fatpigchocolate.com and hopefully find it in a few gourmet stores in and around NYC.

Dig in, pig out.

Just in case anyone would like to bid $41.5 billion for the Brooklyn Brothers, we can assure you your offer will not be rejected.

An industry full of smart people doing stupid things.

Today we are bored. Very, very bored.

The Brooklyn Brothers are pleased to launch what we believe to be the world’s first carbon-neutral commercial campaign. For those of you unaware of what that means (i.e. you’re an American), it means that any carbon emissions resulting from our production are balanced by an investment in a carbon-offsetting program. And that means the campaign’s carbon footprint is non-existent.

For those of you still in the dark, carbon is one of the leading contributors to global warming - a fact not disputed by many if any scientists. To be fair, some respected scientists still disagree that climate change is a result of human activity; however we believe it can’t do any harm not to do any more harm.

We’d like to thank our client Versus (check TV Guide for local listing) for agreeing to participate in the program and ERM for helping us calculate the amount of carbon we needed to offset for this production. The software tool ERM developed takes into account all aspects of production from travel to power generators to lighting to film processing and we will continue to use it to offset emissions from all future productions as well our own emissions.

As more and more consumers define themselves by the brands they choose, we believe it’s become increasingly important for marketers to consider their impact socially, politically and environmentally. Ourselves included.

If anyone is still reading and they’d like to use our tool we will make it freely available.

The greatest benefit of the internet isn’t the dynamic way it changes the way we live and do business. The real benefit is no-one need be wrong again. Ever. At the end of that long tail isn’t only a dwindling and marginal audience, there’s someone who thinks you’re right on the money. No matter how asinine, trivial or radical your views.

Think the holocaust never happened? No problem. Believe global warming to be a myth? So do lots of folk. Think orange is the best color in the world? Then there’s friends waiting for you at http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/ORANGE.

And where there’s a sagacious nod of the head, there’s validation and confirmation. No need to re-evaluate or revise your opinion – someone, somewhere agrees with you.

Of course, an audience that believes “I’m right and you’re wrong” has long been the raison d’etre of most religions, almost all wars and many a pub brawl but today a confederacy of dunces is so much easier to find. Post it and they will come.

So as an antidote to the choruses of approval, The Brooklyn Brothers would like to announce the Campaign for Ambivalence and Ambiguity. (At least, we think that’s what we’d like to do.) We promise to confront conviction and debag belief armed only with doubt, misgiving and debate. We’ll agree to disagree with anyone. For if there’s one thing we’re certain of it’s uncertainty.

And we know someone, somewhere agrees with us.

Brand managers are faced with a choice that only Hobson would appreciate: they can either spend more in all media to re-aggregate their mass audience or they can slide down the long tail of dwindling market-share.

There is one alternative though and that’s making the consumer your media. Yes, it’s old fashioned word-of-mouth but with a socially-networked-wiki-twist.

Today the circle of your consumers’ friends is not limited to their neighbors or colleagues. Potentially you could tap into an audience that ranges from hundreds to hundreds of thousands as your consumers digitally-network their way across the planet.

It isn’t actually that hard to do either.

You can engage your consumers with entertaining content. You can reward them for recommendations or for loyalty (that’s called putting your media money where your customer retention budget is). You can let them into your development so they feel part of process. You can treat them well, like answering their questions when they have them. You can solve a problem if they have one swiftly and politely. You could even make your product or service really useful and make sure it doesn’t break down.

In fact, if you start treating your customers as though they are the brightest stars in your organization, you might not need a media budget at all. Then again, if you want to continue to foist boring advertising and poorly designed products on the public, you’d better get the check book out.

YouTube is quite clearly the way forward for TV.

The promise of programming when you want it is delivered far better than with Tivo. Plus, its growing audience is much more used to downloading their entertainment on their computers than getting it OnDemand. Its ratings system could also be far more exact than what Nielsen currently offers.

As for viewing figures, the top rated ‘shows’ already attract bigger audiences than virtually all the cable networks put together.

But by far its greatest asset is YouTube is not Time Warner. (Just like Kodak’s greatest obstacle is that it is not Flickr.)

Currently, the only thing holding YouTube back is that it seems to play only one show: America’s Funniest Home Videos and even ABC has spotted that’s no longer ready for prime time. When YouTube starts commissioning its own shows with greater narrative content (or receiving them for free from it’s own system of mini-production companies) we will all be able to switch off our TV sets permanently.

A few years ago, a copywriter starting out in advertising was given but one charge; to come up with the big idea. “What’s the big idea?” the creative director would ask as he pushed a couple of papery layouts around with his foot.

Everyone’s favorite self-promoting adman of that era, Donny Deutsch, still calls his CNBC program The Big Idea. But the days when an agency and client could foist their big idea onto the public have long since past. We are no longer the arbiters of size, the consumer is. The consumer will decide whether you have a big idea or not – by ignoring it or by passing it around. They will decide whether your advertising idea is worthy of repeat viewing - not your media buy. They will decide whether the product is any good, not by buying it once, but by reading web reviews from other consumers. Burger King’s Subservient Chicken wasn’t a big idea until 14 million visitors decided it was.

So where does that leave an industry who is used to tying the size of its ideas to the size of the media budget? An industry that is fueled by big ideas and even bigger egos? Getting a decreasing amount of attention, money and responsibility from their clients.

In his book, the Long Tail, Chris Anderson argues that the internet creates a mass of small markets. And small markets demand not one big idea that means little to many, but many ideas that are relevant to a few.

Most clients intuitively understand the changing environment. You see it in the infinite array of niches now available. Did you ever think there’d be a market for reduced-fat fresh garden herb, hand cut and hand-cooked potato chips? When you stop caring about the size of your ideas you also find the time to have a lot more of them: and having a lot of ideas is key to building a brand these days. Media selection becomes irrelevant because you create ideas for all media. Forget being media-neutral, be media-comprehensive.

Small is practical as well as beautiful. A small idea doesn’t need as large a budget as a big idea. Which means your idea is under less scrutiny from the lawyers, accountants and naysayers. You don’t need to perfect a small idea. If 80% is good enough for a Microsoft, it’s certainly good enough for an ad. You don’t need to focus group a small idea: you can afford to test it in the real world. If it works, you’ll have achieved something spectacular at a fraction of the cost. And if it doesn’t, you won’t have blown the GDP of a small African nation on a single initiative - and no-one will be any the wiser.

Producing a lot of small ideas has only been possible because of two key changes in the last few years. The fragmentation of media and the technology revolution in production.

Most agencies and clients bemoan media fragmentation - they see dwindling audiences as a threat. And it’s definitely of concern if you believe in the world of the big idea – a big idea needs a big audience. But think small - as VW once asked us to do - and you can take advantage of the startling price decreases that have taken place over the last years. A spot on some cable TV networks these days will set you back a whopping $25. Still too rich for you? Then you can upload to youtube for nothing. The cost of production has come down just as dramatically. These days, a short film will cost you what used to be spent on the craft service table.

James Collins, in the book Built to Last: Succesful Habits of Visionary Companies, talks about the tyranny of ‘or’ and embracing the genius of ‘and’. The combination of media fragmentation and decreases in production costs allows us to try out different things. Why choose between ideas when you can choose all of them?

The big idea, today, is small ideas.

1. Toasted Marshmallow, Stand, 24 East 12th Street.
2. Dulce de Leche, Mary’s Dairy, 171 West 4th Street.
3. Hudson Valley Vanilla, Ronnybrook Farm, Chelsea Market.
4. Black & White Malt, Shake Shack, Madison Square Park.
5. Mocha Mudslide, BLT burger, 470 6th Avenue.

According to a recent survey commissioned by our colleagues over at the Brooklyn Brothers Polling Group, it is predicted that every copywriter and art director will be a commercial director by 2009. This trend continues with everyone in advertising becoming a commercial director by the year 2011 and is followed by everyone in the world touting their hilarious reel of never-aired spots by the year 2018. The report also predicts the profound sense of irony everyone will experience when they realize that there is no-one left in advertising to write any scripts.

Within minutes of the massacre at Virginia Tech the massacre at Virginia Tech had a logo, courtesy of CNN. You could tell it was a logo because it had a different typeface to all the other news – a distressed version of American typewriter if I’m not mistaken - and half of the words were contained in a bright red box. As if we needed to be reminded the color of this awful tragedy.

Except now it wasn’t just a tragedy, it was a promotion for the network. One can only imagine the process. While the rest of the country was in shock and the families of the victims were being given the worst news imaginable, the graphic designers of CNN were debating kerning and pantone references.

When news outlets feel the need to dress-up the news, it’s no longer news, it’s marketing.

For some time Verizon Wireless has been the isolationist amongst the cellular carriers; stubbornly refusing to cooperate with the outside world. Their phones are like aristocratic members of the old British Empire: they stop working the moment they cross the border.

Now I notice on Verizon’s website, tucked away in the virtual equivalent of attic-space, their Global Phone – a phone you can use when you’re in America and when you’re in Foreignerland. One can only imagine the conversation in the boardroom.

“Sir, you’ll never guess what I saw while I was on vacation.”
“What’s that Norblatt?”
“Well, wherever I went, the foreigners were using cell phones. Kind of like ours. And it got me to thinking; what if you could use one of our phones in this place too?”
“Why would anyone want to do that, Norblatt?”
“Well, suppose some of our customers wanted to travel abroad, you know on business or something like that.”
“And why would they want to do that?”
“I’m not sure. But it’s kinda like when I had this idea and I wanted to call you sir. But I couldn’t.”
“And why’s that Norblatt?”
“Well I use Verizon Wireless Sir.”

On the Verizon map of the world there be no dragons in far flung places anymore. There be cellular service. Congratulations.

Delivering big audiences will always be key for anyone wanting to make money from advertisers. If you can prove you can reach more people for less money, simple economics are invariably going to be in your favour. But as the mass audience disintegrates in time (tivo) and space (cyber), broadcasters are going to need to find many more Superbowls and Academy Award shows to deliver the big ratings.

These are the two events on the calender that are altered fundamentally if not watched live.

Of course, you can record the big game or the Oscars, but it’s not the same. (Even if you have managed to hide yourself in a communications black hole between the live broadcast and the time you get to it.) We may be on our own couches and in our own living rooms but there’s a common experience knowing that other people are doing just the same thing at just the same time. And of course when it’s live there’s always a possibility of the unexpected (like Grossman not throwing an interception).

It may be a couple years ago now, but Janet Jackson’s boob, mistake or otherwise, probably did more for the Superbowl brand than any particular game could. It did more for broadcast TV than a host of American Idol hits. It said here is something you cannot record, or download or watch later on utube. It said here is something that you have to experience live to get the maximum amount of shock/surprise/delight.

It’s a pity neither of Prince’s exotic dancers revealed their own purple ones.

Here’s one to anger every red-blooded, blue-state, flag-waving American: America’s premise is all wrong. She proudly boasts life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but why the pursuit? Why not simply happiness? You get the right to life and liberty but you only get to chase happiness.

One could argue that liberty and life are rights and happiness is a state of mind. But who says? In a lot of countries liberty is not a right. Neither is life. Nor does everyone have a right to life and liberty in this country. In Texas, your right to life is forfeited with the regularity of a stripper dropping her knickers (a metaphorical image which makes at least the author happy). No wonder the inhabitants of Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela and many others believe themselves to be happier than residents of the United States. They consider themselves happy while Americans are in hot pursuit of it.

The phrase, borrowed from Dr. Johnson, implies the pursuit is perpetual and that means never reaching it. We should realize that sometimes the journey is the destination.

He watercourse no mingle,
Dwell with the earth,
Angel of Canaan
Go on the rise
No whereupon do Mohammad
Spelvin Deluxe: Ball: Turtle
You ejaculate within minutes of penetration.

Hot on the heels of OJ Simpson’s recent cashing in on a book and a Fox show, the Brooklyn Brothers are interested in selling the story of that other unsolved crime of a previous century: Namely IF the Brooklyn Brothers were Jack the Ripper. Fortunately, up until this moment few people have accused our small 21st century New York agency of killing five prostitutes in Victorian, England - probably why we’ve remained at liberty for so long - however, in exchange for a bag full of cash, we’d be delighted to explain how we would have done it IF indeed we were the Jack the Ripper. Which we’re not. No siree.

The decline and fall of the Roman empire, according to Gibbons, was down to a loss of civic virtue and the growing influence of Christianity. In short, the Romans had become soft and flabby; and their reward was no longer in conquest but in heaven.

Some time back, when its attention was on its lawsuits and not on its business, Microsoft also became soft and flabby. By the time it settled its various battles, Gates’ narrow focus on ‘a computer on every desk’ became fuzzy. First, everything on the internet had to have a Microsoft version. Then every device needed to run Microsoft software: PDAs, Phones, Game consoles, and now music.

Zunes seems like the counterpunch of an aging heavyweight boxer who swings giant roundhouse blows that seldom connect. The company itself is still dangerous. It can still knock you out. But most people can nimbly avoid getting struck.

Microsoft is the George Foreman of technology (though not as likeable) and unless it re-invents itself (what about a Microsoft grill?), its decline will be assured as Mike Tyson’s. Perhaps Microsoft’s only consolation is that eventually the iPod will also suffer a similar fate. After all, after the Romans came the Vikings; you only to have to look at Sweden’s current sphere of influence to see how well they fared.

Will Keith Olbermann offer greater insight into the human condition than Salinger - who has not published since 1965? Does Lou Dobbs discuss weightier issues than Arthur Rimbaud - whose entire literary output was squeezed into four thin volumes?

Fortunately, quantity of opinion is no guide to quality of thinking.

But in an age when everybody and anybody (Bill O’Reilly) can publish or broadcast, where every industry and its subset has its own battery of columnists, commentators and experts, how do we separate the wheat from the chafing?

In the internet-fueled-democracy the sine qua non is that self-determination is invariably better than someone else deciding for us. But what qualifications do we have to judge what is important other than our own prejudices and preconceptions? Unless we’re an expert electrician, few of us attempt to rewire the house. What makes us think we are better editors than a professional with a global remit and historical perspective?

The irony of writing this in a blog, by the way, is not lost on the author. Though with this particular blogger there is no equivocation: your time here would be far better spent reading Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell.

The trouble with theoretical science is it’s getting quasi-religious. Ironically, but perhaps not coincidentally, this is happening just as religion, in its efforts to gain acceptance in the classroom, increasingly disguises itself as quasi-scientific.

The problem is not with the religious. They are happy to live without tangible evidence - that’s the gap called faith you leap over when you’re headed into the arms of God. But scientists should know better.

Yet all over the known universe scientists are busy hypothesizing.

Quantum physicists posit theories of parallel universes without one iota of proof that the strings that they are supposed to be made of even exist. Astronomers base universal laws on dark matter without ever spotting a molecule of it. Even Stephen Hawking, in an effort to regain the ascendancy in black hole theory, poses solutions rather than proves them.

Of course, it’s axiomatic that science needs its dreamers but without the necessary proof all science is fiction.

What scientists seem to have forgotten is it is entirely reasonable not to know everything. Although “We Don’t Know Yet” would probably not be a NY Times bestseller or a PBS special, it is far more verifiable than most current theories. Nor should we be ashamed of our ignorance. We’ve only really been thinking objectively since the Enlightenment – a little under 300 years. Einstein’s answer to whether God exists - “I cannot prove he doesn’t” - is not only an eloquent response but a human one – it reminds us of the limitations of our knowledge.

In the end, a world full of ambiguity is a far more interesting place to live than one where we know all the answers.

The Brooklyn Brothers categorically deny the testing of any nuclear weapons this week. We remain committed to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty of 1968. Our nuclear program, and the attending vast stocks of enriched uranium, is intended solely for the generation of energy designed to loosen ConEd’s stranglehold on the city’s power supply. Last week’s ejection of several United Nations inspectors from our offices was an issue of Brooklyn Brothers security and not a sign of a change in the intent of our nuclear program.

Clearly, the Iraq invasion and subsequent civil war needs reassessing, though perhaps not as you’d think. First, you’ve got to understand what Bush has actually done.

In a move reflecting fashionable corporate-think, the President applied today’s business thinking to the battlefield. Finding the cost of the war on terror too high to pay at home, he did what any executive of a company would do. He outsourced it.

He spent time looking for a suitable partner from among the axis of evil. North Korea? Been there, got the shrapnel. Iran? Too crazy and too many allies. Iraq? Perfect – a country with no powerful friends and lots of oil. And like Nike, IBM and Walmart before him, the President has also discovered the benefits of subcontracting to someplace else.

Instead of terrorists making targets of people here, they now target American soldiers over there - guys who are paid to be shot at. And instead of American civilians dying in their thousands, it’s i-Raqis. But heck, it’s not just the labor in these developing countries that’s cheaper: their lives are, too.

Moreover, like any good executive he’s kept the real money in American firms. The contractors who contract nothing but fees, the rebuilders who build nothing but profits.

However, the real issue lies not in Iraq but in what Bush has created as a bi-product of his outsourced war.

Just as American industry has built an efficient workforce out of a bunch of unskilled laborers that now competes directly with ours, Bush has made a ruthless army out of what used to be a bunch of amateur bombers. When they start competing directly with us, you might want to outsource yourself a long way from here.

One of the greatest marketing ideas in the last six years is online banking. It is the financial world’s iTunes. Not only does it make sure you visit your bank’s website more than once a week, it’s free to use, improves your life and spares you the expense and nuisance of stamps. And once you’ve loaded your various account numbers are you really ever going to take the time to switch banks and do that all over again?

As brand loyalty schemes it is one of the all time greats. Plus, it’s more cost efficient for bankers, too. Everybody wins. It is an application that takes on the traditional role of advertising - brand awareness, increasing traffic, customer retention – and delivers them and more; it actually makes itself useful.

Are banners really the smartest way to use the interactive powers of the web? Or would it perhaps be more useful to put our developer hats on when it comes to creating online ‘ads’.

The questions we should ask ourselves at the outset of a marketing brief is how can we create utility within our advertising? How can communication serve the needs of the consumer? We preach customer service to our clients but we rarely think about it when we come to create their ads.

When an ad is an app you offer something more than just an image of your brand. After all, the slickest – and stickiest – thing about Apple’s music revolution is not the iPod but the iTunes app.

When I started in advertising a long, long lunch ago the 30 second spot was still a relatively novel idea. We’d tried all kinds of lengths within the body of a program but eventually settled on 30 seconds. It seemed long enough to tell a story, short enough not to annoy the viewer too much.

So when I hear of its demise it’s like hearing of the passing of an old friend. (That happens quite a bit when you get to my age.)

Still, you have to move with the times, I guess.

Occurs to me, though, that when you look at the history of how most folks like to be entertained, it has always been a fairly passive experience. From court jesters telling jokes to storytellers round a campfire, we listen or stare fairly submissively, with perhaps only the occasional interactive moment in the form of a rotten tomato.

When you realize that most live events, theater for instance, remain one way performances - from stage to audience - it’s obvious that not everyone wants to be a participant. Some people just like to watch. Especially if the entertainment is actually entertaining.

As it is with life, so it is with the web. Even as TV, print, you name it, merge onto one device – or one protocol - we may still want to come home after a few too many martinis and simply veg out in front of that device.

That’s not to say that the internet doesn’t create new ways to interact: clearly it does. But within the area of entertainment that’s less participatory, there will undoubtedly be room for commercial messages that are traditional in form if not in media.

The maximum time we can ask of any viewer to spend with those newfangled commercial messages? Why about 30 seconds, I’d guess.

Yours, quaffing a gibson,
Buddy Mackeson
Chairman Emeritus (Fictional),
The Brooklyn Brothers

What do Rachael Ray, YouTube and Deal or no Deal have in common? They celebrate the mediocre.

In Rachel Ray, the Food Network has forsaken chefs like Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali who strive for authenticity, for someone who is as easily digestible as her food. She is Kraft Crumbles to their Pecorino Romano.

In YouTube we have the ultimate amateur night. Everyone and anyone is the director. Film, America’s greatest contribution to the history of art, is reduced to shaky camera accidents, jackass stunts and lip-synching fools.

And in Deal or No Deal we have a game show whose sole spectacle is someone opening a briefcase. What’s next? A game derived from a PowerPoint presentation? Spreadsheet Millionaire?

As Robert Hughes argues, it’s OK to be an elitist if what you’re demanding is the best of everything. And we do demand the best from our athletes, our technology, our scientists, even our military. Yet when it comes to art we are fed from Ray’s garbage bowl.

When you look at the earth geologically rather than ecologically you realize that we don’t have to save the planet. The planet is more than capable of saving itself.

The planet has been both a fireball and a snowball and it was still able to foster and nurture life. It can be hit by massive meteorites that wipe out virtually all species yet still rebound. It can erupt, shift, boil, bubble and shake itself to its core and still remain intact.

No, the earth is a resilient place. It’s been around for 14 billion years and will continue to exist whether we destroy the environment that keeps us vertical (and able to pontificate on blogs) or not.

One could argue that it is a little arrogant even to think we will have the slightest effect on the history – or the future - of our planet. After all, we have been here but minutes compared to the dinosaur. And the entire Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian and Carboniferous periods came a long time before us, and they still ended in the Permian extinction.

Now, we may well be the first species to play such a large role in its own demise (not to mention the part we played in killing off thousands of others) but the earth and life will prevail. Just perhaps not ours.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t do everything we can to preserve our existence. We should. We should change our light bulbs to fluorescents. We should run cleaner cars. We should find ways to consume less.

But we should also remember why we’re doing it. This is a selfish act of self-preservation and no less noble for it. In fact, it is a Darwinian necessity to act. That is inarguable and cannot be refuted by right wing politicians or industry polluters. Arguing that we’re doing it to ‘save the earth’ is dissembling.

We’re not destroying the earth. We’re merely destroying ourselves. The earth could give a crap.

Buddy Mackeson has had an extraordinary and illustrious career in advertising so we were delighted when he accepted the honorary but important position of Chairman Emeritus (Fictional) at the Brooklyn Brothers. He is our consigliore, our lighthouse and wise counsel. For those of you who have never met Buddy, and there can only be a very few of you if you’ve ever wandered the corridors of the industry’s largest agencies, you will undoubtedly know his work.

Buddy was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York (and is the inspiration for us naming ourselves the Brooklyn Brothers). His break in advertising came in 1955 when he joined what was known, before the acronymization of Madison Avenue, as Doyle Dane Bernbach. Acknowledging that working directly for Bill Bernbach was the best training a man could get, Buddy has always maintained that his learning curve has pointed downward ever since.

Yet Buddy is not without his own skills and talents. Rising to lead Bernbach’s formidable account service team in 1960 there is a story, that he refuses to confirm or deny, that Buddy was the inspiration for the original VW ad. The story goes that when Bernbach turned to him in a creative meeting and requested his opinion. Buddy replied “I like the work. But if I gotta be honest, Bill, I think it’s small.”

And long before the famous lunar module ad, Bernbach was often heard in meetings muttering after his head of account management “He’s ugly but he gets you there.”

It was this talent for execution that caught David Ogilvy’s eye and in 1963 Big Red managed to lure Buddy away. Once again, Buddy had a hand in creating ad lore. When returning Ogilvy’s Rolls Royce to him Buddy mentioned “that it sure was a bootiful car but that focking clock drove me focking crazy. Even when I gunned the engine that’s all I could focking hear.”

The direction for Hathaway Shirts was also changed forever by Buddy when he appeared at a client meeting sporting both a brand new Hathaway shirt and an eye patch after a hunting accident.

Ogilvy himself was unwittingly the catalyst for Buddy’s next big move.

In an effort to keep his legendary lieutenant Ogilvy sent Buddy on a fact-finding trip to Puerto Rico and it was here Buddy met with Rosser Reeves who was looking for a big-hitter to head the Marlboro account.

Reeves had originally intended the Marlboro Cowboy to be a kind of forerunner to the Village People. Images of an Indian, a leatherman and a cop were due to follow the cowboy but in a mix-up with the media buyer, the cowboy image stayed up far longer than anyone intended. “A campaign that runs for forty focking years based on an order that I fucked up. But what did get me? Focking fired.” says Buddy now.

The mistake did indeed lead to his dismissal but rather than return to his native New York, Buddy continued his journey west. “It was the 70s and to be honest I don’t remember all that much that happened. Except for meeting Guy and Jay. Boy those guys could party but we got some shit done too, you know?”

The Guy and the Jay were, of course, Jay Chiat and Guy Day. And the ‘shit’ he refers to is Nike and Apple. And while the 1984 ad has as many authors as a Hollywood screenplay, those who were there at the time attribute much of the original thinking for the ad to the brief penned by Buddy, although his original line “the computer for the rest of yous” was eventually amended by copywriter Steve Hayden.

“All Steve did was drop the and y and the o” says Buddy.

Buddy remains an influence on advertising to this day not only at the Brooklyn Brothers but to many of the industry’s leading lights. Chuck Porter calls him ‘Pappy Mack’ and legend has it that beneath that chicken suit is none other than Buddy himself - “Sometimes you gotta get your hands dirty, knowwhatimean?” John Hegarty still asks Buddy to cast his eye over a layout. And even Lee Clow bows down to the man that taught him to think different.

We are proud to have his imaginary eye watch over us. And though he may not do as many meetings as he used to, he’s still up for a martini or two at lunch.

gb 10/25/06

The Brooklyn Brothers are pleased to announce the appointment of Buddy Mackerson as Chairman Emeritus (Fictional). Buddy recently retired after a long list of ficticious posts at some of the great agencies of the last 40 years, including Ogilvy, DDB, Chiat Day, Goodby and most recently Crispin Porter. We are very pleased that he has agreed to return from his imaginary home in Florida to bring his entirely fabricated wisdom to our small creative collective.

The United States is history. Or will be very shortly. It’s economic and military muscle might not atrophy but its constituent parts, namely its constituents, will disassemble.

If you know anything of Western Europe, you’ll know it’s long been dogged by the nationalistic tendencies of ever-decreasing communities – from ETA to Plaid Cymru. And the sum of what used to be the Eastern bloc is being reduced to tinier and tinier parts.

But America won’t fragment into nationalities - most people here came to escape that - it will fragment into nations of interests. The irony is that this is being fueled by the very network that was created to unite us.

The web was supposed to bring about greater understanding and connectivity – a place where we can all hold digital hands and sing an almighty Kumbaya. Actually, more and more, the web, like a good Playtex bra, divides and separates.

This blog for instance will only ever reach a few hundred people who either know me, or have an interest in small obscure ad agencies, or people with absolutely too much time on their hands.

And if you travel down the long tail of commerce you find 12 people listening to the Groundhogs. Those 12 people would never have found each other through any other medium and a minority interest is rekindled, legitimized and glorified. All well and good. Except a shared interest is not common ground if it is populated by so few.

We don’t need to be reminded of the days of mass audiences and water cooler chatter to realize we are all on different paths these days. Even when our paths do cross, a conversation about a web site or a youtube clip is cut short when the colleague you’re talking to says “oh I saw that months ago”.

All technology dehumanizes us because, by its very nature, it allows us to transact without human interaction. A second life is no life.

Nor, increasingly, does the web allow a proliferation of thought. The idea of filters and bots is to reduce the amount of information we see. And we happily limit it to our own set of pre-conceived notions and check-box philosophies. Sometimes it’s not even our choice. Google is happy to limit access to China’s citizens to gain access to her market.

The internet extends our reach but reinforces our prejudices. Before, if we were challenged by the people in our community we might have to redress and rethink to remain part of it. Now we simply go online and find a group of people who agree with us.

No-one changes their mind anymore. John Stewart preaches to the already converted. Fox News is for right-wing republicans and always will be.

In this world there are no enemies, only buddy lists. But a world without enemies is a colorless one.

One only has to recall Orson Welles speech in The Third Man to realize that the death of intellectual and emotional confrontation is the death of imagination.

‘In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

By socializing in smaller and smaller circles of consensus we are diminished. And it’s not just the media that becomes fragmented but society itself.

Eventually, there is only one i in iNation.

gb 10/24/06