 We’ll get to that particular joy in a moment.
First, you should know where this pizza came from. It came out of my home oven. It was made by a total amateur. And it is not a pizza for everyone. This pizza is what we call a Danger Pie. The reason we call it that is because it has too many toppings. Those toppings include the following:
That's why a pizza like this is against the rules. Sometimes, a pizza like this becomes unwieldy. Sometimes, a pizza like this turns into a pile of crap inside calzone. Therein lies the danger. And therein also lies the joy. Not ending up with a calzone requires practice, patience, skill and understanding. It also requires a knowledge of the person you’re serving it to. My wife really enjoys this pizza. My brother would hate it. He hates shrimp. He hates mushrooms. He probably hates cilantro. (We’ve never discussed cilantro. But it’s a safe bet that cilantro falls outside his narrow spectrum for desirable foods.) Who made this pizza? Your relentless scribe, of course. I made it for you. Why would I do that? Because, after years of dabbling in pizza, and refining my pizza during lockdown, I’ve come to a realization… Pizza is a good metaphor for advertising. A good advertisement creates desire. A good advertisement makes someone happy. A good advertisement cannot appeal to everyone. A good advertisement is a synergy of mundane components that come together to create an effect greater than the sum of its parts. And, without practice, you end up serving a pile of crap inside a half-baked calzone. A good pizza is poetry. And so is a good advertisement. Either one can bring joy. And on occasion, it will make someone weep. Here’s the other thing: anyone can do it. It takes practice. It takes patience. It takes skill. It takes understanding. That’s all. Simple ingredients assembled properly. It can be a foundation of flour, salt, yeast and water. Or a foundation of focus, purpose, intent and words. Each of us has the power to make a pizza. Each of us has the power to create an ad. It just starts with the desire, a little practice and paying attention to the rules. (And knowing how to break them, of course.) SIDEBAR: Do you want pizza power? The most common question about my pizza is, “Do you make your own dough?” Like it’s some kind of magic trick. It’s not. It’s just flour, salt, yeast and water. Would you like the recipe for an Ad Guy’s Pizza Dough? Reply to this missive with the two-word phrase, “Dough recipe.” I’ll send it to you. Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City
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"Logic is not as powerful as intuition." Here at Slow Burn Marketing, we love good advertising. Classic advertising. Advertising that enters the zeitgeist. Advertising that goes down in history. Advertising that sells, but does more than be salesy. That kind of advertising often defies logic and is born of intuition. Some of the most potent advertising it's been our pleasure to create has defied logic and generated huge ROI--sometimes in the face of powerful people saying it would fail because it wasn't logical. ROI is the bets revenge. [Insert winky emoji here.] "There are three responses to a piece of design: Yes, No and Wow! Wow is the one to aim for."  Last week, the world lost an advertising and marketing great. Milton Glaser, the legendary graphic designer, died of stroke and renal failure on his 91st birthday. Mr. Glaser's most enduring work is probably the "I Love NY" graphic. He admitted that even he was surprised at its durability over the decades. He had sketched it in a taxi cab and given it to the State of New York as a gift the survives to this day.  One of Mr. Glaser's more "Wow" pieces would be the famous 1966 poster for Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits. Six million copies of that poster were distributed. It sells as a collectible for hundreds of dollars. And to hear Mr. Glaser himself discuss it decades later, he can be critical of his own work.  Less famous but arguably more "Wow" is Glaser's poster for The School of Visual Arts. It was designed to coincide with the United Nations World Summit on Poverty in 2005. It shows an image of a black hand bearing fingers the colors of the five races. Advertising Age said that the poster "expresses the need for empathy and a change of consciousness to deal with the overwhelming problem of political and social indifference to poverty."
In the same article, Glaser said, "For all of us in the communication business, the thought that another generation would look back at us and say, 'How could they have been so indifferent and callous to human suffering?' drove me to respond." Is it any surprise that another of one Glaser's personal favorite quotes is, "Tell the truth." "You can only work for people who you like." We've all experienced trying to work for people we don't like. When I was working as a Creative Director in radio, there were times when a client was just unlikeable. Those clients rarely enjoyed the fruits of good work or good results. And sometimes, a client just has to be fired. The faithful reader to the Weekly Screed knows that Honey Parker and I made a significant change in our own business the day we decided that we would only ever work for people with whom we'd look forward to having dinner. We get to do good work for people we like. It's better than paying the bills. It's fun. And you sleep well. "We are all born with genius. It's like our fairy godmother. But what happens in life is that we stop listening to our inner voices, and we no longer have access to this extraordinary ability to create poetry." We all live and work in an enormous sandbox--and often don't know what to do with it. Creativity is normal. It is also hammered out of people by The System. Whatever it is you do, you've seen it in your line of work. You probably aren't a victim of it yourself. If you were, you probably wouldn't be reading this. But you've seen it around you. Honey Parker and I have spoken to huge audiences about branding for small business. Our work is so obviously the result of play. We play on the stage. We make people laugh. We show how brand changes businesses and lives. And afterwards, someone from the audience will come to us and say, "That was great! But really, branding's not for my business, is it." [Face palm.] Hunt down that inner voice and let 'er rip. "We were excited by the very idea that we could use anything in the visual history of humankind as influence..." When Milton Glaser started working professionally in the 1950s, he had been soaking up art influences from across Europe. When he returned to New York and began working for The Man, there was nothing about him that fit in a pigeonhole. Anything visual was an influence and informed his work as he saw fit. As the New York Times said in his obituary last week, "Mr. Glaser brought wit, whimsy, narrative and skilled drawing to commercial art." Forget the "commercial art" part of that thought. Hone in on the wit. The whimsy. The narrative. The skill. Those things are in short supply. You're either in advertising or using advertising. Or both. You're allowed to access wit, whimsy, narrative and skill, whether your own or that you borrow from others. Feel free to bang the drum for them a little more. Feel free to use them when following Mr. Glaser's directive to "Tell the truth." And while you're at it, you might enjoy banging the drum for intuition and how we're all African. And if you're drinking your morning coffee right now, join us in a toast to the late, great, modest Milton Glaser. His legacy represents marketing at its best--transcending offer and call to action to raise the bar for art and humanity, wit and whimsy. If you'd like to see more of Mr. Glaser's portfolio, click here Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City  I DID NOT WRITE THIS
The following two paragraphs, that is. Rather, they are the words of a man much smarter than I. You may know of him. You've read his words. You've heard his voice. You've seen his films. He is an iconoclast. A dissident. A heretic. Some consider him intolerant and boorish, possibly even irresponsible. It doesn't matter. What matters is that his words will force you to think, they may be polarizing, and they may even make you hate what you do for a living. Ready? Here it comes... WE ARE NOT SALESMEN, WE ARE CRAFTSMEN... ...of what may be the most powerful art form on earth. Art is (this is the shortest definition I know) something that reinterprets for people the life that they're leading. Art allows you to re-experience what you know about life. We crave art because we are unable to fully enjoy or understand what happens to us while it's happening because we're in the middle of it. But advertising is everywhere. Also, because advertising deals with the minutiae of everyday life, any art that comes out of it is going to be particularly relevant and powerful. Part of the reason painting doesn't have much power over our lives today is because the subjects have become esoteric. I can look at a Rauschenberg and say, "Well, that's interesting, and I do get a feeling from it, but I'm not sure how it relates to me." But with advertising, you know what it's about--it may be about something that affected you that very day. I AM COGNIZANT THAT MORE PEOPLE CONSIDER ADS TO BE GARBAGE THAN ART. But I believe that a case could be made that no other art engages people around the world as deeply as advertising does. If you consider how little of what's inside us is actually touched by politics and compare that to how much of our day-to-day actions are informed by the new attitudes, different style choices, and exposure to other people's thinking we glean from advertising, I believe it would not be silliness to say that advertising may have more to do with the German citizens bringing down the Berlin Wall than any diplomats did. SO, WHADDA YA THINK? Yes, this is your relentless scribe again. Is that iconoclastic and bordering on pretentious? It comes from a man whose name you may or may not know. Mark Fenske is an advertising copywriter, college professor, director, VO performer and all around pain in the ass (at least by the barometers if certain advertising professionals). It's possible Mr. Fenske revels in all that. His rant is part of a longer screed that appeared in Viewpoint magazine--no publication date indicated. Regardless of the date, the interview speaks to ambitions and pretensions that could make one dislike Mr. Fenske intensely. WHICH IS A GOOD THING People with a punk attitude are periodically necessary for the rest of us to give ourselves a reality check. One of the reasons I went looking for this magazine interview is that The Fabulous Honey Parker and I spent time with family last week. Honey's niece, who is now in college and possesses the ambition to be a poet, is at the point in life where she eschews commercial art as somehow impure and unclean. She is uninterested in marketing, as it is apparently "Not creative enough." (She is also probably uninterested in paying her bills, a mindset that will eventually turn her supertanker of antipathy for commercial pursuit on something resembling a dime.) I understand this mindset to some degree. Honey does not, as she apparently knew in the womb that she wanted to be an advertising art director. (She later became a copywriter because the hours are better.) But all this to say, I do not begrudge the young woman her artistic pretension. But the idea that marketing "is not creative enough" is an interesting challenge to Fenske's allegation that advertising "may be the most powerful art form on earth." NO, NONE OF US CREATING ADVERTISING WILL END UP IN THE LOUVRE But when we do our job at its best, we will touch people. We will indeed help them to better put their lives in perspective and effect change. Yes, commerce will be at the core of the effort. But how much historically great art was created on behalf of a commercial relationship with a patron--often a church? Yes, this will sound sacrilegious to a number of my devout readers--but understand that I'm not talking about your church. I'm talking about long-ago churches that commissioned artists of the time to create masterpieces depicting the divine nature of the relationship between God and everybody. (And just incidentally, the way of thinking about that relationship was much different pre-Renaissance than it is today.) Great art was arguably a sales tool to help bring the unsaved into the fold and become supporting members of the church. The word used to describe the relationship between the church and artist is "patronage." That word derives from the Latin patronus, meaning one who gives benefits to his clients. Hmm. Clients. WERE THE MOTIVES PURE AND THE INSPIRATION DIVINE? I leave that up to you, dear reader. Probably depends on your particular church. But it's hard to argue that the art was not intended, on some level, as a persuasive tool. A promise of something better than mere earthly existence. Art has long been a vehicle of persuasion. And to fast forward to 20th century history, the idea that the Berlin Wall was brought down in response to free-market western advertising isn't so crazy. Eastern Bloc teens and adults had long coveted the products, fashion and music of the free west. (Back during Glasnost, a friend of mine knew a Russian who was making a killing by loading up shipping containers in the U.S. with second-hand blue jeans and sending them off to the USSR.) Yes, the cynics among us will argue that advertising often represents a crass commercialization of artistic sensibilities in pursuit of filthy lucre. So be it. WATCH A NIKE TV COMMERCIAL AND SAY THAT IT ISN'T ART There is so much extraordinary, evocative art that parades as advertising under the Nike banner. In fact, Mark Fenske has been responsible for some of it. He has both written and directed it. In this space, I've previously told of the crass, written-to-strategy, hard-core direct-response ads for a replacement window company that were always outperformed 4:1 by a spot I'd written--a commercial that went with the mere idea of art and art galleries connected to replacement windows that represented an aesthetic ideal. Recently, in the context of a project Slow Burn is doing for a client connected to the NFL, I was told that a piece of copy I'd written made an important person fall in love with her city all over again. Did I think that what I was writing was art? Not as I was writing it, by any stretch. But, as the man said, "Art allows you to re-experience what you know about life." And I'm glad that someone who knows the city found the words moving--exactly because I wrote the piece hoping to be evocative and to make the reader care and feel good about a truly special and unique place. So, yes: despite my lack of artistic pretense (which is probably a good thing), it may have been art. Possibly even because the effort possessed no pretense whatsoever. LITTLE, EMOTIONALLY EVOCATIVE EFFORTS CAN CRYSTALLIZE REALITY They can make the reader or viewer or listener feel moved. The crystallization of reality is something that art aims to do. Doing it with images is the aim of film and photography and painting. Doing it with lyrics and melody is the aim of music. Doing it with words is the aim of poetry. And if any of these media do it with the aim of persuading you to buy a product or service or a candidate, they are doing so under the banner of advertising. "The mountain sees through you to the small, frightened child within, but it doesn't laugh, it smiles, it holds its 2,003-acre arms wide open, and it says come, I take you as you are." QUESTION: POETRY OR ADVERTISING? ANSWER: YES. It's also from a 1995 print ad for Aspen Snowmass written by Mark Fenske. The copy is set amidst artistic images of jagged, snow-covered peaks and peaceful, snow-drifted aspen groves. It's arguably some of the most engaging and creative ski-resort advertising ever. Certainly more evocative than, "More skiable terrain than any other resort in the country," which is a) a flat-footed bullet point and b) a cold, uninspiring feature without benefit reserved for someone who can't figure out anything more engaging to say about their resort. And yes, in his punditry, I do believe Fenske can move from being an iconoclast to gadfly. We all have our moments. I may be having one now. But Fenske is still an iconoclast and quite possibly a genius. Not to mention one hell of a VO performer. All this to say, heed the man's advice. Regardless of your role, whether you're a business owner or a marketing professional, you are working in one of the most powerful art forms on earth. Don't be afraid to make the most of it instead of the least of it. |
AuthorBlaine Parker is prone to ranting about any and all things related to brand. In many ways, he is a professional curmudgeon. While there is no known vaccine for this, the condition is also not contagious. Unless you choose it to be so. Archives
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