Bad Advice 3/4/22
/If a friend asks you to speak with their kid about going into a field you used to work in, ignore the request. Chances are, the field you remember is nothing like the field is today. So your advice tends to be outmoded or worse, irrelevant. Yesterday businesses were more local. Today they are global. They are digital. And they involve algorithms. Hell, not only don’t I know what an algorithm is, I don’t even know how to spell algorithm, I had to rely on spell check. As we’ve written before, both John and I spent our careers in advertising. You used to get an assignment to do one of three things: create a print ad, a radio commercial, or a tv commercial. You tried to be funny, because it made the commercial more memorable. To make up an example, let’s say you were doing an ad for JCrew shirts and they were on sale. You had to come up with a clever headline like “We’re giving you the shirts off our backs.” Okay, maybe that wasn’t so clever, but you get the drift. You hoped someone would see the ad and remember it the next time they passed a JCrew store. That was advertising then. Nowadays you might go into JCrew and buy a v-neck t-shirt. The cashier offers you 25% off if you sign up for the JCrew credit card. You agree. Now they know you and what you like. And you’ll get a text message like, “Hey Arnie, ya know that v-neck t-shirt, size large in blue that you bought last month? Well we’ve got ‘em in all colors of the rainbow for 50% off.” No need to be clever anymore because they already know what you like, so the message just has to be some form of, “Here it is, for less.” That’s what advertising has become. No longer broadcasting, but narrowcasting, one-to-one. And a lot of the jobs in advertising now involve how to discover the most cost-efficient ways to reach your consumer. Who needs a Super Bowl ad for $5 million when you can get a Facebook impression for $10.95? And that was the basis for our comic, Ad Biz, Part 1. In fact I had to call my son-in-law and a good friend’s son just to find out what the hell they did in advertising. I still don’t understand and neither did John, so he promptly took their words (which they intentionally dumbed-down for us), and dumbed them down even further. Got it? Don’t feel bad, neither did we.
And then it was on to Dishwasher, Part 2. In last week’s blog I wrote about how tough it was to find the proper repair person. The “Bad Advice” title of this blog refers to the advice all your well-meaning friends give you to call this person or that one, and when you call, it turns out they don’t do what you need them to do at all. Until you finally get to the one, which in this case, John did. Only to find out that the guy was on vacation for two weeks in Key West. Sounds a lot better than sitting in your dining room thinking up new ideas for comics. But on the other hand, I’d much rather think about new ideas for comics than try to repair dishwashers, which I know even less about than modern advertising. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a sink full of dishes to wash.
Have a great weekend.
Andy and John