Bat Boy, an obituary

Prophesize the ruin of the blessed Wall Street Journal under Rupert Murdoch, if you want. I write this obituary to mark the passing of a cult-rated standard of true brand-genius: Weekly World News, “The World's Only Reliable Newspaper,” will depart the sphere of dead-tree media with its 27 August issue. Saggy circulation (the tabloid’s, not mine) has killed my career-dream of writing truly ridiculous bullshit for its own sake.

For 28 years, this absurd little chronicle has delivered Nothing But the Truth on the world’s fattest alien babies, wicked deeds of dead celebrities, and Saddam Hussein’s secret heartbreak. But the discovery and continuing exploits of a particular animal-human amalgam gave this grocery store tabloid its most brilliant headlines and best-selling covers. And when WWN editor Dick Kulpa hit us with the chiropteran child named Bat Boy, a pop-idol of a different face entered our shared consciousness.

Bat Boy Bites Santa Claus! Bat Boy Leads Cops on Three State Chase! Bat Boy Endorses Gore! (And after graduating from a small liberal arts college in upstate New York,) Bat Boy Announces Run for California Governorship!

America’s Favorite Hybrid was everywhere. In an acclaimed off-Broadway musical. On stage in London’s West End. In a weekly cartoon detailing the life and times of the fanged grotesque after he resigned from the office of President of the United States (I’m not touching this one!). And, my fav-o, on the big screen in Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys.

“Elusive and reclusive, where he will pop up next is anybody's guess.” Don’t worry, American Media tells us, you can still read all about Bat Boy on-line! He Lives!

But those hours in the grocery store queue just won't be the same.

The Torment of Perfection

More on the subject of creativity, its value and its mystery — which, when it comes to copywriting, could be no mystery at all. Clarity is the game, according to British copywriter Bill Hilton. The assignment is to communicate, and that takes discipline, rigor and practice.

On the other hand, as Hilton's excellent insight reveals, there's a paradox in suggesting that clarity in writing is purely mechanical:

"Copywriting – all writing, in fact – is the only skill that gets harder the better at it you become. Forget recognition and paying work. The day you’ve become a writer is the day you find yourself staring at a ten-word sentence for over an hour, fretting about whether it’s as precise and elegant as it could be."

So clarity does more than simply communicate. At best, it brings beauty to light.

It is the primary means by which William Carlos Williams astonishes in this example I love, Pastoral (1917), after the jump:

The little sparrows
hop ingenuously
about the pavement
quarreling
with sharp voices
over those things
that interest them.
But we who are wiseer
shut ourselves in
on either hand
and no one knows
whether we think good
or evil.

                Meanwhile,
the old man who goes about
gathering dog-lime
walks in the gutter
without looking up
and his tread
is more majestic than
that of the Episcopal minister
approaching the pulpit
of a Sunday.
            These things
astonish me beyond words.

It's All A Mystery

"I don't know where the sun beams end and the star
Lights begin it's all a mystery."

Thank you, Flaming Lips, for reminding me that the magic in life, and yes, in this business, is something a lot of us may never understand.

Couple days ago I was listening to "Fight Test," the opening track from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and this lyric just blew me away. Go back and read it -- or buy the album -- and think about it.

So this post is dedicated to my friends here, here, here and here who spend a lot of their time somewhere between sun beams and starlight.

Despite all the process, spread sheets, time lines and meetings, we can't always know where the magic comes from, we can't always control it. Which is why it's so precious.

Just as beautiful, by the way, is the second half of the chorus:

"And I don't know how a man decides what right for his
Own life - it's all a mystery."

Do you agree?

Scent of a Man

You can almost smell it through the screen. This one's for Em Smith, my copywritin' colleague who recently introduced me to Bruce Campbell (am I the last to discover this guy?). For Old Spice, I smell a comeback. [via American Copywriter]

Coming into manhood at a hyper-feminist school that squeezed every ounce of testosterone from its male undergrads, I get a self-actualization from this spot that feels like reclaiming my voice. See? What real man has to reclaim his voice? Wildflowers and shame, my brethren. Four years of it.

Coming into the world under the tutelage of the side-by-side [via Schenk], I get the salty taste of payback.

BTW: Whoever came up with the name "Old Spice" deserves a medal.

State of the Union, State of the Brand

As the president rushes to perfect his State of the Union speech, it's worth remembering that the entire planet will be either tuning in or TiVoing. 

But Mr. Bush will need more than great talk to undo to his walk of the last four years — not as a matter of policy or punditry, but because one subtext of tonight's address will be the state of America's image across the globe.

According to Forbes on-line columnists Marc Babej & Tim Pollack, the state of America's image is not strong. Not by a mile. As if you don't already know this? Read on, cowboy.

Fortunately, in their January edition of Unsolicited Advice, the pair offers several concrete steps to makeover America's brand — drawn from some deep truths about our "product" that appeal to Babej's/Pollack's target audience: Europeans.

Turn your nose up at Europe if you must. Just remember that, as collection of 500 million people in 27 democracies, Europe is a major "constituent" of the American "brand." And right now, Mr. Bush is to this brand what Floyd Landis is to professional cycling.

Like it or not, mainstream European media and public opinion have pegged Bush & Co. as a bible-thumping Texas cabal that doesn't miss an opportunity to make a bad impression on the rest of the world. Intellectually, people might parse a distinction between the administration and the American people... but in practice, views of the Bush administration have colored the popular view of America as a whole.

In other words, Bush is the central touch point in the American brand. If you need help seeing the US as a brand, I give you a post I wrote a while back on the Anholt-GMI Nation Brands Index, which ranks the brand appeal of 36 developed countries.  This year's survey pegs the US as the 9th strongest — up two places from the previous year.

And in first place? The UK — our most important but soon-to-be former ally in Iraq.

To the extent that the State of the Union address is a vehicle to project an image — presumably to positive effect — don't expect much to change the morning after. And not just because Babej and Pollack are cynical. It's because we've gone about "building" our brand all wrong.

Just days after the Unsolicited Advice column posted, Washington Post associate editor Robert Kaiser excoriated America's approach to getting its ideas across. In a terrific analysis that should be instructive for anyone in communications, Kaiser blasted the hubris that comes with, well, forgetting that our audience comes first.

How did [the mess in Iraq] happen...? After all, we're Americans -- practical, common-sense people who know how to get things done. Or so we'd like to think. In truth, we are ethnocentric to a fault, certain of our own superiority, convinced that others see us as we do, blithely indifferent to cultural, religious, political and historical realities far different from our own. These failings -- more than any tactical or strategic errors -- help explain the U.S. catastrophes in Vietnam and Iraq. [my bold]

As for rescuing our brand, tonight's address will fail for the same reason Kaiser says our policy does. In comparing the myopia of Bush's Iraq policy to that of the Vietnam era, Kaiser illuminates a mistaken attitude a lot of people in business/communications share with the Commander in Chief:

"[Some] Yankee ingenuity -- pulling this lever, pushing that button -- can make things turn out the way we want them to. There you see the peculiar strain of hubris that led the United States astray four years ago in Iraq, and four decades ago in Vietnam."

It doesn't matter what level the administration tries to pull tonight, anymore than parading Landis on the talk show circuit might help our view of professional athletes.

Can America's brand make a comeback, even while we're still in Iraq? According to Babej & Pollack yes. The prescription. Get the government out. Get you and me in. (Especially if we're from a blue state. Which disqualifies me. Oh well.)

"Conventional marketing recipes won't do the trick," write Babej and Pollack. "European views of the U.S. didn't turn south because of a bad logo or tagline. A slick new slogan won't repair things.The best strategy is to turn one of our biggest disadvantages--our deep internal divisions--into an asset."

Divided on that one? Just read the column. Then consider this: sometimes even the worst spokespeople can rehabilitate their brand. Just ask Pee-Wee, Mr. President.

The Bittersweet Paradox

Sometimes violence is healthy: only through a great crash of opposing ideas can you break free from  creative shackles. As in kill your darlings.

Such is the wisdom and rocket fuel of paradoxes; it's a little reminder I just disccovered at Creative Think, a blog by author Roger von Oech. von Oech's post delivers a list of cool paradoxes — ironies? — that are both brilliant and refreshing.

They also remind us that the best creative work is fundamentally a matter of taking familiar things and reorganizing them in unfamiliar combinations.

Check them out and add one to his list.

PS: The logo here belongs to a cool Berkely, CA, design/marketing shop called — what else? — Paradox. This logo is so memorable, it was the first thing I thought of when I read von Oech's post. That's what you call good design, my peeps....

A Simplicity of Desire

George Will, who is still a great writer even if he hates those who write for Hollywood or Madison Avenue, placed a beautiful bookend on the post-Thanksgiving shopping blitz yesterday.

In his Sunday editorial for the Washington Post, The Decade of Buying Happily, Will recalls the origins of unbridled American consumerism in the 1950s — which of course led to both the careers of Madison Avenue writers and post-Thanksgiving shopping blitzes.

"What Thanksgiving is to gluttony, the three days after it are to consumerism -- the main event. So, with Americans launching the Christmas season by storming the stores, let us recall when consumption had an exuberance remembered now only by those who experienced the 1950s."

WIll invokes author Bill Bryson's recollections of that time in his new book, "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid." Although it's often quaint to indulge in nostalgia for that era — one that included segregated bathrooms and McCarthyism — Will simply points out in the piece that the excesses of today began with the innocence of yesterday. There's beautiful stuff here, including this gem from Will's introductory quote of Bryson:

"There was...a wonderful simplicity of desire. It was the last time that people would be thrilled to own a toaster or waffle iron."

Yes, that "simplicity" was often naivité in disguise, as in the case of shoe store x-ray machines and sleeping pill ads. But just as often, it had the purity of fresh, sparkling wonder. I mean, come on — cars with fins!? Saran wrap!?! Tell me you wouldn't be blown away if you were there, too.

Do we still have that wonder, or did it vanish in the maw of Black Friday?

Real Men Drive Minivans

The August issue of Esquire Magazine gives us an entertaining reminder of the eternal war between reason and passion with this crazy chronicle of a night of urban camping in a Honda Odyssey entitled "A Van Down By the River." For author Ezra Dyer, reason is the passion. And reason wins the day (and night and next morning).

"From pickups to sports cars to SUVs, people buy cars based on their emotions. They buy vehicles they don't necessarily need.... But no one buys a minivan based on emotion. Minivans are a cold, calculated purchase borne of necessity. At some point, the mini¬van driver has stared reality in the face and concluded that the kids simply can't be towed in a trailer behind the Corvette. Many other would-be minivan drivers... instead buy SUVs that are less suited to their needs—but have the inarguable advantage of not being minivans. And yet, even with zero style cred, minivans sell."

For the record, my Odyssey-driving neighbor produced the article as an exhibit in his defense of his advocacy — yes, advocacy — for his minivan. This, from a guy who actually swore never to buy a minivan in his marriage vows.

Funny how, when you think about it, for him and Dyer, the rational reasons to buy a minivan have become the emotional fulfillment/satisfaction others seek in a Hummer or Porche Boxter. How good does it feel to make a smart purchase?

In this case, it feels manly. So maybe the new macho is measured by the size of your brain. Which, as you know, is proportionate to the size of your seating capacity. 

UPDATE: I owe it to my reasonably passionate neighbor to acknowledge that he and this article helped pursuade me to the dark side...my wife and I are planning to pull the trigger on an Odyssey this fall.

Makes Sense — But to Whom?

File under "Just Because You Say So Doesn't Make It So."

I'm sure Vernon Brown as Mayor makes sense to Vernon Brown. But I have no idea why it should make sense to me.

Why does it make sense? To whom? How am I supposed to know? Faith? I'm confused. Which of course is another way of saying "it doesn't make sense."

Kudos to Brown for getting out in front of the gaggle of other candidates for Sioux Falls mayor. But for all its khaki/ mini-van confidence, the line "It Makes Sense" is conspicuously presumptuous —  an odd waste of the benefit of getting out first. Worst of all, the ad doesn't even give us a website to back up the claim, nor does Google — at least not on the first two pages of search results (anything after is a communications graveyard).

Anyone in marketing and communications ought to know that it's never enough to expect buy-in to a claim just because. Imagine if we said: "Toyota. It Makes Sense." Or, "Kraft. It Makes Sense." Would that get your vote?

DIY ROI

Do It Yourself rocks. And it's a tractor beam pulling in marketers more powerfully than ever — including a hoot of a campaign from Ford, featuring the undergroundish exploits of Norski band "Hurra Torpedo."

The DIY culture has come a long way from that PBS painter guy to Home Depot, via reality TV like Survivor/The Apprentice, via Google by way of the blogosphere — and now to some of the funniest, most memorable entertainment and advertising.

You should already have "Lazy Sunday" bookmarked, but just in case: here it is. Newsweek recently called the fake rap video one of the funniest moments in SNL history. Downloads of that one are well into the millions.

But another great piece of evidence of the power of DIY in marketing communications comes from Bud Light. It's so funny it's even got a beer snob like me thinking and talking about the swill: Ted Ferguson, Bud Light Daredevil.

Here's how we used a little DIY design to sell. Item: it's working. But then, the product is pretty good too.

The Bud Light thing raises question then: if DIY design/strategy gets people talking, does it get them buying?